[2] As per otl, except they (mostly) don't end up being purged
There isn't the same kind of working class public demanding that someone pay for the failures of industrialisation. Many of the leading lights have been dimmed or put out. This means that the Specialist / Engineers purges are a "voluntary" purge, not a mass demanded purge. However, you might want to read Fitzpatrick on commissar structures and the Great purges. She indicates that the microeconomics of party advancement pretty much demanded a Great purge. Djilas' analysis mirrors.
[5] Soviet industries is more focused on light industry and consumer goods as opposed to heavy industries like steel than OTL. Without collectivization, and with more pragmatic and risk averse leadership, increasing consumer goods production to pay for grain overcomes ideological disposition towards heavy industry. Overall Soviet industrialization is also slower than OTL for reasons we will explore
You'll want to use Strauss (1941) Soviet Russia: Anatomy of a Social History
https://www.marxists.org/archive/strauss/index.htm on underproductivity in consumer goods in the Soviet Union in the 1930s. The critical pathways in fruit and canning, fibre and weaving meant that these industries sagged in productivity. They were also more open to production inhibiting industrial action by the proletariat. More so than heavy industry where the "new" proletariat that appeared miraculously from the grain producing areas were starved and beaten and then offered rapid promotion pathways forwards. In Magnitogorsk after five weeks you would be a skilled worker and have changed plants five times. In a fruit canning district using older capital goods…
[6] Note, collectivization never took place ttl, this is going to have incalculable consequences in the future. Overall living standards in the USSR are also much, much higher than otl 1930s.
Collectivisation took place here: voluntarily. In old sovkhoz and revolutionary communes. It'll still be taking place for ideological reasons where the rural proletariat agrees to whip itself, rather than having the market whip it. Enclosure will be taking place (forcibly) in fruit and fibre too. Much more than historically. Sovkhoz acreage will increase. Remember that by the time the Ural method came about, NEPmen farmers were already extinct. Urban workers were attacking medium and large peasants for the audacity of being able to feed themselves and hire half a dozen labourers. But largely to get grain surpluses. And this "height" of living standard has not yet been dealt with. Urban workers were motivated to revolutionary violence through this period due to failure to supply adequate grain. We aren't talking luxury items like vodka, clothing, fruit, meat.
And that height of living standard is concentrated in the least mechanised sector of labour productivity. The party's implicit methods of promotion demand a grand purge of the party ( a whole lot of young red "experts" want promotions ). The working class has a critical pathway level revolutionary political demand that has not been crushed or resolved. It looks to me as though Milovan Djilas' theorisation of the New Class' need for social dominance is acquiescence to the peasantry as a disorganised social force, an unstated resolution of the Urban problem (I've indicated my belief as to the probable methods of resolution until 1936-7 when consumer goods production might be adequate under a different investment allocation), that the intelligentsia and specialists and engineers have been allowed complete (more or less) political freedom (! !!!), that a larger than historical survival of NEPmen in the non-commanding heights continues (feeding red workers upset), and that the party has not eaten its own liver in public yet.
And, of course, "We are fifty or a hundred years behind the advanced countries. We must make up this gap in ten years. Either we do it or they will crush us."
And there's *still* going to be a climactic failure in the bread bins of the Soviet Union, the NEP distribution methods are inefficient in crises (but less so than the post-forced collectivisation ones), party documents indicate a willingness to ameliorate famine and orders to do so (criminal incapacity is culpability for state agents in my mind). That's comin'. I see a lot more dead in Kiev, and a lot fewer dead in villages. YAMV.
So I suspect that there have been periodic uprisings, concentrated in "old" heavy industries, or very old consumer "mass" plants. Led by "all-party" underground leftist workers who existed in the camps historically in the 1930s, "Stalinists," and local trade unionists. Most aged at least 16 in 1917, if not older. These workers uprisings have been put down effectively by central apparatus combined with political police and armed forces transported in by train. Consider the management of Petrograd's workers during Kronstadt, or the 1956 strikes put down in the Soviet Union, or 1962's Novocherkassk massacre. They don't reach the West. For a while. Some time. Andrle'll have them in his book allohistorically though, Fitzpatrick maybe. Except instead of hundreds we number in the thousands. Just get some new peasants from an NEPman enclosure or the new Orchard bought by sovkhoz. And this will keep going *and exacerbate* until the scissors close. Historical industrialisation relied on an escalator out of the hell of the kholkoz. Here hell begins at the factory gates.
yours,
Sam R.
