Bullitt, and the veteran intellectual and journalist Lincoln
Steffens was sent to Moscow to meet with Lenin to try to
understand the intentions of the Bolsheviks and how to
come to terms with them. Steffens had made his name as
an iconoclast, a muckraker journalist who had persistently
denounced the evils of capitalism in the United States. He
had been in Russia at the time of the revolution. His
presence was intended to make the mission look credible
and not too hostile. The mission returned with the outlines
of an offer from Lenin about what it would take for peace
with the newly created Soviet Union. Steffens was bowled
over by what he saw as the great potential of the Soviet
regime.
“Soviet Russia,” he recalled in his 1931 autobiography,
“was a revolutionary government with an evolutionary plan.
Their plan was not to end evils such as poverty and riches,
graft, privilege, tyranny, and war by direct action, but to
seek out and remove their causes. They had set up a
dictatorship, supported by a small, trained minority, to
make and maintain for a few generations a scientific
rearrangement of economic forces which would result in
economic democracy first and political democracy last.”
When Steffens returned from his diplomatic mission he
went to see his old friend the sculptor Jo Davidson and
found him making a portrait bust of the wealthy financier
Bernard Baruch. “So you’ve been over in Russia,” Baruch
remarked. Steffens answered, “I have been over into the
future, and it works.” He would perfect this adage into a
form that went down in history: “I’ve seen the future, and it
works.”
Right up until the early 1980s, many Westerners were still
seeing the future in the Soviet Union, and they kept on
believing that it was working. In a sense it was, or at least it
did for a time. Lenin had died in 1924, and by 1927 Joseph
Stalin had consolidated his grip on the country. He purged
his opponents and launched a drive to rapidly industrialize
the country. He did it via energizing the State Planning
Committee, Gosplan, which had been founded in 1921.
Gosplan wrote the first Five-Year Plan, which ran between
1928 and 1933. Economic growth Stalin style was simple:
develop industry by government command and obtain the
necessary resources for this by taxing agriculture at very