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69 CHAPTER 5 American and Canadian Immigrants in the Soviet Economy IMMIGRANTS AND THE SOVIET ECONOMIC SYSTEM OF THE 1930S The difficulties that North American immigrants encountered in Soviet Karelia were just a small portion of the much wider socioeconomic processes of nationalization and centralization in the Soviet Union. During the 1930s, a new system of economic management took shape in the ussr that later would be called the administrative or command economic model. Its most characteristic features were long-term planning, implemented through Five-Year Plans, and a hierarchical structure of management. During the late 1920s and early 1930s, a bulky bureaucratic machine emerged to exercise centralized control over all levels of economic management. It comprised, from top to bottom, several levels of bureaucracy , including the central government, economic ministries (people’s commissariats), central offices of industrial management (glavks), state trusts, and, finally, individual factories.1 All economic activities in the Soviet Union were subordinated to Five-Year Plans, which determined in all spheres of industry and agriculture what to produce, at which rates, and in which amounts. The rhetoric of “fulfillment and overfulfillment” (vypolnenie i perevypolnenie) of economic plans was widely used to mobilize the Soviet population in the work of constructing socialism. In particular, a purely propagandistic slogan—“The Five-Year Plan in Four Years!”—that would accompany the lives of several generations of Soviet people became a blueprint for practical actions after Stalin’s plenary speech at the Sixteenth Congress of the vkp(b) in June 1930.2 Two and a half years later, in January 1933, Stalin officially declared that the First Five-Year Plan had actually been fulfilled during four years and three months.3 In reality, the Soviet economy during its accelerated industrialization existed in a permanent state of crisis, and its planned rates of growth in all major industries (electricity, metallurgy, coal, mineral fertilizers, tractors) failed to be achieved, though the overall increase in production was still impressive, especially with the Great Depression in the rest of the world as a background.4 At the same time, a sharp increase in investments in heavy industry led to a disproportion between its rapid growth and the development of light industry and industrial infrastructure (first of all transportation and energy), to say nothing of social infrastructure, including housing, laundries, public canteens, nurseries, sports facilities, and so on. Soviet Karelia was part of these nation-wide processes. By the turn of the 1930s, it finally lost its autonomous position within the Soviet economy, and its industries were fully integrated into the system of centralized economic management. The new place of Soviet Karelia 70| Chapter Five in the national economy brought immediate consequences for the immigration program of its Red Finnish leadership. Originally, the Karelian authorities planned to bring to Soviet Karelia as many highly qualified specialists of different occupations as possible. This was part of Edvard Gylling’s economic program to create a balanced Karelian economy, in which different industries were supposed to develop relatively evenly, without big disproportions. Now, in the new model of a planned and centralized economy, all local resources were to be strictly subordinated to Moscow in order to achieve the goal of accelerated industrialization. Driven by contemporaneous perceptions of how the effective management of resources should look, on a practical level this new economic strategy led to even more intensive exploitation of the most profitable sectors of peripheral Soviet economies. In Soviet Karelia, the key sector was the forest industry. Central economic authorities were not interested in the balanced development of the Karelian or any other regional economy that would demand large capital investments. Instead, centralized distribution of resources and consumer products was envisioned as the optimal way to deal with local imbalances. As a result, during the years of the First Five-Year Plan, no factories for either mechanical or chemical processing of timber were built in Soviet Karelia, though initially the plan suggested that five new sawmills, five pulp and paper plants, and four chemical timber-processing factories would be constructed.5 In practice, all efforts were directed toward achieving a rapid increase in the output of harvested timber, since its export to Europe could secure the inflow of foreign currency, vital for the industrialization of the Soviet economy. Thus, contrary to the economic visions of republican authorities, Moscow reduced Soviet Karelia’s role in the Soviet economy to a supplier of raw materials that were used—directly or through exports and the purchase of foreign equipment—for...

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