I Became Stalin?!

Chapter 150

“Hey, baldy!”

“Yes!! Yes!!! Comrade Secretary. Did you call me?”

“How is the ‘report’ that I told you about going?”

Khurushchev jumped up like a bullet and ran to me. Ever since I slapped him with a cigarette, he flinched and startled whenever I said anything.

But I didn’t hate Khurushchev for that.

Rather, the opposite.

“Re, report, sir? We still need more time and budget…”

“Give me a briefing on the progress.”

Otherwise, I wouldn’t have entrusted him with such an important task.

I assigned Khurushchev the job of drawing up a draft of a huge system that would oversee the design of post-war social services.

The so-called ‘Khurushchev Report’. It was a plan that benchmarked the Beveridge Report, which was postponed for a decade or so due to Britain being trampled by Nazi Germany.

“Yes! We have set five goals. The targets that our Soviet society should aim for after the war are: want, ignorance, squalor, poverty, and idleness. Accordingly…”

The purpose itself was similar. Our great victorious people deserved a better life.

The British must have started from a similar idea.

That’s how it was in real history. During the World War II, the quality of life of the people deteriorated day by day. The British had to endure the German air raids while eating spam. The Soviets had to fight with all their might to stop the German advance and prevent the Ukrainian wheat fields from being taken away.

After paying all those sacrifices and finally defending their homeland, they deserved a better life. That’s why the Labour Party, which proposed ‘from the cradle to the grave’, won a landslide victory in the post-war election.

The Soviet Union was relatively more rigid, so there was no significant change during Stalin’s lifetime, but after Stalin’s death, all political leaders advocated for improving the quality of life. Even Beria, the head of the NKVD.

Of course, the specific routes could differ.

“First, I will explain the five-year plan for increasing agricultural production.”

Britain was a capitalist country, so it designed and introduced systems such as social security ‘insurance’ and national health ‘insurance’ through the Beveridge Report. This was completely incompatible with the Soviet Union, a socialist country.

Insurance was based on the principle of subscriber’s burden. You pay a certain amount from your salary and get the necessary protection. 

The state may pay some part, but anyway, social insurance was such a system.

But in the Soviet Union, although it was hard to say that it was qualitatively excellent, there was a national, free health care system. 

There were already hospitals that were funded and operated by the central government, so what was the use of health insurance?

Rather, the ‘Khurushchev Report’ dealt with other areas.

“Kolkhozes and sovkhozes will be reorganized… and a ‘capitalist’ compensation system will be partially introduced. However, the provision of infrastructure such as agricultural machinery and repair facilities will be adjusted to favor the collective farm system…”

One of them was improving agricultural productivity through the reform of collective farms.

The world’s agriculture still had not escaped the dependence on animal power. In the countryside, they still plowed the fields with a few cows or horses, sowed seeds, and harvested, in a way similar to 2,000 years ago.

In such a situation, if you just gather people and organize collective farms and tell them to farm, the decline in motivation was obvious.

The benefits of collectivization and division of labor were only found when there was a production system and a compensation system that matched them. 

If you plow the land together, you will be lazy and reduce productivity, but if someone drives a tractor and someone sorts the crops on a conveyor belt, it is no different from a general factory.

Only when the ‘factory system’ was established, the collective farm could exert its power. The United States, which boasts the highest agricultural productivity in the modern world, also farms ‘collectively’.

They just call it corporate farming instead of collective farming.

However, it was necessary to adjust the introduction of this corporate farming so that the socialist economic system would not collapse completely. 

The economic experts under Khurushchev were reviewing that part.

“Did Comrade Pavlov have any results?”

“Yes! I was going to tell you that too. Comrade Pavlov’s experimental station succeeded in developing improved seeds based on the dwarf wheat seeds that you mentioned, sir. They reported that they could apply them from this year’s sowing.”

“Oh, really? Already?”

He must have worked hard to avoid being purged… Ahem.

Many Soviet scientists and technicians devoted themselves to developing the goals that I set because of the fear of purging.

Lately, Kalashnikov, who looked ten years older, or Korolev, who looked like he had only bones left… Anyway, thanks to their sacrifices, the Soviet science was heading for the world’s best.

“Then let’s plant them. I’ll leave the food production to you and the ‘report group’. Next…”

Grain production was closely linked to other food resources.

Modern meat production generally relied on factory farming rather than natural grazing. Unless you had nothing but grasslands like Australia or the United States.

Especially in the case of the Soviet Union, it was so cold that it was more advantageous to build barns and herd animals for body temperature and calorie preservation. 

Therefore, increasing the grain to be provided as feed was directly linked to the meat production that the people wanted.

The most shocking thing for the Soviets when they went to the United States was that the meat was cheap.

Also, it occupied a huge position in the world strategy. 

The United States released the grains produced in the fertile plains of the Midwest to low-income and underdeveloped countries around the world.

As a result? They secured millions of supporters in the world who were accustomed to the American taste.

“Housing problem! Did you do some research on that too?”

“Ye, yes, Comrade Secretary.”

“Good. Show me.”

Rebuilding the entire country and cities that had become ruins was also part of the Khurushchev Report.

Numerous western cities that were physically trampled and destroyed. It would probably take a few years to rebuild those cities.

But you couldn’t just cram people somewhere and tell them to live roughly, so you needed housing that could be built quickly.

“Yes! Here are the basic design and drawings. Take a look!”

There were also such apartments in the Soviet Union in reality. 

Prefabricated apartments developed to solve the housing problem of concentrated people by destroying the countryside and squeezing out labor to the city were devised to solve the housing problem of the Soviets quickly.

These apartment ‘parts’ that were pre-assembled in the factory were transported and fitted together on site, drastically reducing the construction time.

But that was all.

“First of all, these are the 10th floor, the metropolitan model, and the 5th floor, the small-town model, with elevators installed as instructed by the Secretary General.”

“Hmm… How big are these in square meters?”

“Yes! There are three types: 30 square meters (9 pyeong), 44 square meters (14 pyeong), and 60 square meters (18 pyeong).”

“Get rid of the smallest one, and try to come up with something bigger, like 90 square meters or more. Got it?”

“Yes, I understand, Secretary General!”

The construction cost doesn’t double just because the area doubles. Rather, it’s more fatal to waste the urban land and complicate the urban planning with substandard housing that can’t be used for a few years.

Khrushchev brought the same size of the ‘Khrushchyovka’ that he had built when he was the Secretary General in real history.

In theory, a four-person household should live in a 9-pyeong or 14-pyeong house, but the reality was harsher, and it was not uncommon to see three generations living together. Or multiple families living in an 18-pyeong apartment.

These were all factors that could cause dissatisfaction among the citizens. 

They had to endure leaky water and noisy floors in their cramped and shoddy houses, not to mention the always insufficient rations, and so on.

This place was supposed to be the paradise of the proletariat, and they had to make the residents believe in the propaganda. It had to be livable in reality.

Anyway, since they had blocked the German army well, the only places that were swept by the war (戰火) were the Baltics, Belarus, and parts of western Russia and Ukraine. It was desirable to slow down the reconstruction process and aim for quality improvement, as the scope of reconstruction was reduced.

‘To think that we can use it for 40, 50 years…’

In fact, in the Soviet states, the Khrushchyovka built in the 1960s, the Khrushchev era, survived until the 2010s.

It might be different for a place like Moscow, where they had money and space, and tore it down. It was better to spend a little more money now than to make them live in such a place for half a century.

This was also a kind of arms race.

“You did well, baldy. You did well.”

“Thank you!!! Secretary General, thank you!!!”

After Germany’s final blow, the Soviet Union needed a massive military force to protect itself from the United States and NATO.

The Soviet Union squeezed the lives of the people and invested in heavy industry to secure the military force that could fight and win against them, and mass-produced weapons that they couldn’t even use. It was not a wrong story.

If they hadn’t done that, they would have been defeated militarily and collapsed.

But the Soviet victory, at least in my opinion, was elsewhere.

“We have to show them how well we live, so that socialism becomes the envy of the world. We can’t catch up with the capitalism of the United States in terms of abundance, but… But their shadows are as dark as their light.”

“Ah… As expected, the Secretary General’s insight is…”

“Don’t pretend to understand what I said when you don’t. Inequality, racism, things like that.”

Socialism had to show that it was a system where everyone could live well together.

The United States was the best country in the world, but if you only calculated the black people in the United States, their ranking would drop. In terms of education or life expectancy, it was almost like saying, is this the superpower?

We, the Soviet Union, had to show and provide them with the utopia that they would see and hope for. Not to overthrow capitalism with military confrontation, but to bury capitalism with their own hands.

The huge military spending could be reduced by securing our allies and satellite states not only in Eastern Europe but also in Western Europe. Trying to maintain the closest relationship with the United States was also one of the strategies to reduce the military spending.

And then capitalism would sink like the Great Depression, unable to cope with the massively increased productivity, and socialism would soar by investing the productivity in improving the quality of life. At least, that was the theory.

‘We will bury you!’

As I looked at Khrushchev, who was still sweating profusely, his famous words came to mind.

We will bury you!

While socialism makes the lives of the people happy with the advanced productivity, capitalism sinks with the material that can feed the world, due to the problem of distribution and the concentration of capital. 

That was the future predicted by Marx.

When there is a good harvest, people don’t eat their fill, but plow and burn the fields to defend the price. Maybe a lot of people would sympathize with that emotionally. 

Anyway, after capitalism self-destructed and socialism paradise arrived, we would be the ones to bury you, that’s what he meant.

But Khrushchev couldn’t kill this nature and caused the Cuban missile crisis, and he self-destructed first by messing around with corn while doing things like nuclear confrontation and missile competition.

As his successor, I shouldn’t do that.