Soviet collectivization and rapid industrialization, 1928–1933

Soviet collectivization and rapid industrialization, 1928–1933 was a period of coercive social transformation that recast the Soviet countryside, institutions, and intelligentsia. In Slavoj Žižek’s account, it cannot be understood simply as an accidental betrayal imposed on an otherwise completed revolution: it grew from the revolution’s unresolved dynamic even as it contributed to the historical development of Stalinism.

From revolutionary emergency to social transformation

Sheila Fitzpatrick’s interpretation, as presented by Žižek, places collectivization and rapid industrialization within the inherent dynamic of the October Revolution. The revolutionary sequence did not properly end in 1921; on this account, it continued until 1937. The years from 1917 to 1921 had been difficult but politically expansive, with society as a whole living in a state of emergency. The Soviet New Economic Policy period then consolidated state power while leaving much of social life—the great majority of peasants, artisans, and intellectuals—basically intact.

The thrust that began in 1928 was different in kind. It aimed directly at transforming the composition of society: peasants were to be liquidated as a class of individual owners, while the old intelligentsia of teachers, doctors, scientists, engineers, and technicians was to be replaced by a new one. The target was not merely the economy or the state’s administrative machinery, but the social body itself.

Fitzpatrick’s comparison of Moscow makes the change legible through a returning emigrant. Someone who had left the city in 1914 and returned in 1924 would still recognize its shops, offices, theaters, and, in most cases, the people in charge. Returning in 1934, after another decade, that person would no longer recognize the city or the texture of its social life. The example underscores the scale of the shift: the years after 1929 brought a ruthless, yet sincere and enthusiastic, project to create a new state, intelligentsia, and legal system.

The revolution turned inward

Žižek frames this transformation against the failure of revolution to expand beyond the Soviet Union. Isaac Deutscher’s account describes a dynamic force that, unable to work outward and compressed within the country, turned inward to reshape Soviet society violently. Forced industrialization and collectivization became substitutes for the spread of revolution; the liquidation of the Russian kulaks took the place of overthrowing bourgeois rule abroad.

The comparison with Napoleon clarifies the change in direction. Marx had treated the Napoleonic Wars as an export of revolutionary activity after the Thermidorian settlement had quenched revolutionary agitation at home. In the Soviet case, Žižek argues, the gesture was reversed: a revolution that had conceived itself under Lenin as the first step toward a pan-European process remained confined to one country, and its energy was redirected inward. In this interpretation, the attempt to export revolution by military means belongs instead to the end of the civil war in 1920 and the Red Army’s defeat in Poland. Žižek identifies Mikhail Tukhachevsky as the figure who might be called a Bolshevik Napoleon.

Historical meaning and Stalinist outcome

This account resists two simpler explanations. Against the Trotskyist view that Stalinism was only a contingent deviation, Žižek insists on the historical necessity of the Stalinist outcome. Against the claim that the Communist project was totalitarian at its core, he asks readers to recognize the October Revolution’s distinctive emancipatory potential as well as its tragic development. The period’s violence is thus neither presented as an unrelated interruption nor treated as proof that the revolutionary project had no emancipatory dimension.

Fitzpatrick’s chronology also relocates the revolution’s Thermidor. In this reading, it occurred only when the great purges were cut short, preventing what Getty and Naumov called the complete suicide of the party, and the Party nomenklatura stabilized itself as a new class. The period from 1928 to 1933 therefore belongs to a longer process: the revolutionary impulse still drove radical remaking, while the political order that emerged from that impulse developed toward stabilization and Stalinist rule.

Revolution and the production of exclusion

The book’s wider discussion of political change also asks where revolutionary potential might appear under global capitalism. Drawing on Vilfredo Pareto’s 80/20 rule, it describes a future in which, by some estimates, 20 percent of the workforce could perform the necessary work while the remaining 80 percent became economically redundant. Scale-free networks help explain how such concentration can arise: a small number of nodes accumulate many connections, and, past a threshold, one can capture the links while leaving little room for competitors. Microsoft serves as an example of such a privileged node, since communication with other entities comes to depend on it.

This contemporary argument is not a description of Soviet collectivization, but it extends the book’s concern with the social consequences of economic transformation. Žižek identifies inhabitants of expanding slums in the new megalopolises as a possible new proletarian position. Lagos illustrates the scale: the shantytown corridor from Abidjan to Ibadan is described as containing 70 million people; about two-thirds of Lagos State’s 3,577 square kilometers could be classified as slums, while estimates of the city’s population range from an official 6 million to 10 million among most experts. Slum-dwellers, he argues, are not simply surplus people: many work informally or as self-employed entrepreneurs without adequate health or social security protection. Their growth is linked to the inclusion of developing countries in the global economy, including cheap food imports that ruin local agriculture. The comparison shifts attention from the Soviet project of remaking society to people produced as excess by capitalist development, while retaining the question of how economic structures generate political subjects.