Leon Trotsky: The Elevation of Transport

(Speech at the VIII Soviet Congress Moscow, December 1920.)

[My own translation of the German translation in Russische Korrespondenz, Volume II, Issue 1/2, January-February 1921, pp. 43-47. Corrections by English native speakers would be extremely welcome]

Comrades! Among the many aggravating moments of Soviet life, the transport question is probably the most difficult. When we look over the very most difficult situation of our military struggle, the period when the danger, already terrifying by its uncertainty, threatened our country, we see that we could always count on a favourable outcome (and we were not mistaken in this final calculation) when the danger assumed a more concrete, mathematically pronounced form. In the autumn of last year, and especially at the onset of winter, one could predict the time of the final collapse of rail transport almost with the clock in one's hand. If the reduction of the means of railway transport had progressed in the same way and at the same speed as at the end of 1919 and the beginning of 1920, then, according to simple calculations by specialists, the paralysis of transport would have taken place in the course of 1920. The revolution, the imperialist war and the civil war had a particularly direct and violent effect on the transport system. The overview compiled by the People's Commissar for Railways for the conference shows that in the course of the war a stretch of about 54,000 versts of our railway network was more or less destroyed. Only the not too large central network with an extension of 15,000 versts was spared from destruction. In Soviet Russia, a stretch of 46,000 versts was exposed to the ravages of war. On this line, almost 3,000 bridges and a stretch of track at least of 1,000 verst length had been destroyed, 10,000 telephone and telegraph sets had been carried off and destroyed, thousands of locomotives and tens of thousands of wagons had been made unusable. These destructions, however, are really trifles in comparison with the less noticeable but more serious organic damage caused by the war, the exhaustion and overloading of the means of railway transport, by poor and imperfect replacement of the exhausted forces, by poor remounting of the tracks and the wagon fleet, and by minor renewal. The result of these conditions was about 67 per cent of defective locomotives.

The Soviet power took a series of energetic measures to deal with these conditions. The slogan was: "Everything for transport!” As a result of these measures it has emerged that, although our transport is still in a difficult situation this winter and is still far from the regeneration we would like to see, at present there can be no talk of a mortal danger to the transport system and thus to the country; indeed, improvements could be felt in other branches of our economy.

The solution of the whole question began with the locomotive question, which was to be solved by a reassembly plan involving the railway workshops and the factories of the Supreme People's Economic Council working for transport. It would be necessary to include the repair of the railway workshops in this plan and to replace once and for all the idea of ownership of a railway line with the idea of ownership of the whole railway network and all means of transport of the country as a whole. In order to bring the repair work up to the required level, it is necessary to proceed to the drawing up of an economic plan for the whole state.

You know that there are more than 100 different types of locomotives on our railways. But the greater the diversity, the more difficult is the repair, which requires that the workshops be equipped for the different types and kinds of spare parts. Repairing individual locomotives was an exceedingly difficult individual process, requiring adaptation to each type. However, since locomotives, irrespective of their diversity, are multiplied in certain rayons and on certain railways, this brought with it the craft-like character of locomotive repairs. It would be unavoidably necessary to free the workshops from the production of spare parts. After long efforts, it has been possible to qualify the locomotives according to the diversity of their types and to assign them to specific railways and workshops, and in this way to achieve an allocation of the different types to the workshops that is better suited to the current situation, according to their technical facilities and workforce.

This is the elementary, first and basic condition for achieving any success in this field. But it goes without saying that this alone means little. It is absolutely necessary to assign the production of spare parts to factories that are suitable for mass production. Furthermore, it is necessary that the factories that work for transport do work properly and in proportion to the workshops that have to carry out the repairs. In the unified plan, the factories must be connected with the workshops and must be given unified tasks to carry out, which they must distribute among themselves. A transport commission has been created, consisting of representatives of the interested subjects. This commission, after 1½ to 2 years of work, issued and published two orders: an order of the People's Commissariat for Railways (Order No. 1042) and an order or plan of the Supreme People's Economic Council concerning the model factories working for transport. Order No. 1042 brought life to the whole country. According to exact calculations, which were checked by specialists of the interested subjects, the People's Commissariat for Transport Routes draws up a plan which aims at achieving a normal state of our railway transport after 4½ years of strenuous, planned work, with appropriate activity of the factories of the Supreme People's Economic Council working for transport.

And now, after the first half of the year, we can say that the calculations of our technicians and engineers have been confirmed in the sense that the task set has been shown to correspond to the forces of the railways and has even been surpassed by them. According to data on the repair of locomotives, expressed in units in such a way that each major repair represents three units of medium repair, we obtain for January 258 units of medium repair, for February 396, for March 529, for April 633, for May 789, for June 847, for July 847, for July 1035, for August 1042 and for September 1047; then follow the late autumn and winter months, in which the tasks and correspondingly the results of the repair work diminish; we get 633 units of medium repair for October and 986 for November. From June onwards, the results achieved exceed the tasks set: in June by 7 per cent, in July by 30 per cent, in August by 31 per cent, in September by 35 per cent, in October by 33 per cent and in November by 25 per cent. In the same period, the number of workshops has increased by 25 to 28 per cent and the large and medium repairs have increased to 317 per cent, i.e. to more than four times the number in January of the previous year.

With regard to the repair of wagons, Order No. 1157 has been drawn up. Here, too, considerable results have been achieved.

The completion of wagons has increased by 757 per cent, or eight and a half times, in the period from January to October.

The basic idea of Order No. 1042 is significantly more comprehensive and we are still far from its complete realisation. The task is to support the repair work through the mass production of spare parts. It also consists in simplifying the repair work so that only the worn parts have to be replaced, so that the repair of a locomotive resembles the process that takes place when a man takes off his damaged, torn cap, puts on a new one and continues his work. But this system presupposes the normalisation of spare parts. And for this it is necessary not to have a hundred different types of locomotives, but to reduce this number as far as possible. In fact, it would be quite sufficient for our railway network if we had seven different types of locomotives. The work of our specialists shows that it is possible to manufacture locomotives which are suitable for both freight and passenger trains, which combine with the ability to pull large loads the advantage of speed. The minimum to which the number of different types of locomotives can be brought varies between three and four. It goes without saying that with such a repair process, the work must be completed many times faster. Our Order No. 1042 has set itself the task of achieving these successes.

I must dwell here with a few words on the advantages that our industry and our transport gain in solving this new task – normalisation of machine parts – through the existence of Soviet power. Our industry and transport have to pass through three stages of development. In the first, we declared the railways and the factories nationalised. What does this nationalisation mean? Basically, it is only a legal act. We declared that the old owners, namely the capitalists, are replaced by a new owner, the state. The work continues in the old way, with old materials, with old machines and with old methods. Only the owner had changed. In the area of the railways, the workers' and peasants' government took the place of the old tsarist administration or bourgeois government, which played the role of administration.

Now the second stage begins, at the beginning of which the workers' and peasants' government draws up an inventory of what it has taken over from bourgeois society. We classified, distributed and said to ourselves: now we must work according to a plan! And our Order No. 1042 represents a part of our work plan. But what does such planned work mean? There are no markets, there is no competition, but there is a plan that is worked out in the interest of our own economic life. Orders are given, but the factories still work with the old machines, lathes and working methods. We repair the hundred different types of locomotives that the past has left us. The locomotives for the railways, two-thirds of which were state property even under the Tsarist regime, were ordered from Russian and foreign private companies. Each factory produced its own types, had its technical patents and its specialities of which it was proud, and hence the extraordinarily great diversity of our locomotive fleet. Today we have destroyed the market, but yesterday's market still lives on in our means of production and machines. When we look at the technical equipment of our workshops and our locomotives in their variegation, we see nothing other than the materialised competition of yesterday, which has taken on certain forms, expresses itself in the locomotives and machines, in their variegation and diversity, which tells us of the struggle of the capitalists for the markets.

We ourselves have abolished the market, but with the help of the machines and aids that come from that market. And when our locomotives whistle at the big stations with their different voices, they remind us of the polyphony of the capitalist mode of production of which they are the children. Through this the greatest difficulties for repair work came about.

We can only fight our way through to the socialist economy, we can only begin it, when our plan will not only cover the field of exploitation, when it will not only superficially cover production, but when it will also extend to the area of the means of production. We can only reach it when socialism becomes a broom and sweeps out this whimsical motley, which is nothing but technical petty trade, a chaos which we have inherited from the old society, only when we shall call: Machines, lathes, become equal! In technical language this is called – normalisation.

Its technical merits are perfectly clear and obvious. Bourgeois society has applied them in a thoroughgoing way in the areas where it was strong, mainly in the military. Can you perhaps imagine an American, German or French regiment equipped with rifles of ten calibres? The rifles, the cartridges must be such that the soldier can close his eyes and take cartridges from another soldier's cartridge pouch that fit his rifle. But don't the technique and the transport perhaps resemble those soldiers who are armed with different rifles and are forced to look for suitable cartridges while they are in a hard-pressed situation? The planned work will begin at the moment when we approach the normalisation of our machines and the establishment of the highest uniform standard for our entire production from the bottom up. Under these circumstances, the work of our transport factories and the production of spare parts, applied generously and in a standardised form, will help us not only to carry out the reassembly work, but also to build new normalised locomotives.

This is the task set for us by Order No. 1042. We must reorganise the front through repair work in such a way that, by specifying the factories for the production of certain spare parts, the repair work will ultimately become a new way of locomotive construction. This is our great task, the solution of which opens not only a great epoch in the life of Soviet Russia, but also in the life of all mankind. And the beginning of every great task is small.

From the point of view of the reassembly engineer, it is a great achievement. And strictly speaking, normalisation is – socialism in technique.

Only through the introduction of socialism into technique, only through normalisation, only through the scientific generalisation of the country's technical forces and tools can the foundation be laid for the socialist fundamental of our country.

★

The plan of exploitation of our railways is based mainly on the question of the locomotive fleet which, as a result of Order No. 1042, is at our disposal at any moment. In addition, in the second half of 1921 we can count on 1000 new, powerful locomotives ordered abroad. They will make it possible to devote even more attention to the main repair work and to establish the necessary balance in the repairs of the locomotive fleet.

In the planned utilisation of the locomotive and wagon fleet, a significant success was undoubtedly achieved in the past period. In February, for example, 5900 wagons were loaded on the entire railway network, and in November - 12,000 wagons. However, this increase is not dependent on the expansion of the railway network. In February, for example, twelve wagons were loaded on a route of 100 versts, but in September already 23 wagons were loaded, which means an increase of 90 percent. The task set by the Supreme Transport Council was solved as follows: In April at 85 per cent, in May at 104 per cent, in June at 99 per cent, in July at 77 per cent, in August at 70 per cent, in September at 110 per cent, in October at 108 per cent and in November at 105 per cent. It has been shown that Order No. 1042, the implementation of which was envisaged in the period of four and a half years, can be completed within three and a half years.

The People's Commissar for Railways has at present set himself the following task: To improve the locomotive fleet in 1921 in accordance with Order No. 1042 and to combine with this the improvements in the field of utilisation of the locomotive and wagon fleets and still other factors, namely, to create a plan for the utilisation of the material for 1921. This is the first time, not only in Russia but in the history of transport generally, that a unified plan for the railways has been worked out. The result of this plan is that the People's Commissar for Railways can call out to all branches of the economy and to the whole country: In 1921, railway transport is capable of supplying 4,600,000,000 wagons versts, or excluding the 23 per cent of transport needed for military purposes, the country can obtain 1712 billion pud versts in the following year. In the first three months, according to the plan, 12,370 wagons, in the next six months 23,000 wagons and finally in the last three months of the year 20,000 wagons are scheduled for daily loading. At present, no more than 12,500 wagons are loaded daily on the entire network.

The situation of ship transport

Comrade Trotsky in the course of his speech goes on to the question of ship transport and speaks of the fact that despite its importance in the economic life of the country and despite the measures taken, transport by waterways is in a much worse position than that by railways. After the war, we took over only about 40-50 per cent of the fleet. In addition, water transport was to a large extent of a small-scale character and no methods have yet been created to unify and centralise the administration of water transport. The first demand of reason was to transfer the experience gained from the centralised exploitation of the railways to the field of water transport. For this reason, the unification of the former Main Administration of Waterways with the People's Commissariat for Railways was an elementary demand not only for the utilisation, but also for the entire administrative methods.

"I assume," says Comrade Trotsky at the conclusion of his speech, "that through the support of the 1500,000 railway and water transport workers, the further uplift of transport, the tasks of which are boundlessly great, is assured. The questions of electrification and industrialisation of the country require the elevation of transport. Communism will spread to a much greater extent. Even in the most advanced countries, the peasantry is largely stuck to its soil, like a mole in its cave. Communism must bring the peasantry out of its cave, the peasants must look at everything, the wealth of their own and foreign countries, and transport will become what it needs to be. It will bring in the riches for humanity and will also be at the service of the individual who wants to see the spiritual and material treasures of the whole world.

And when, therefore, snowdrifts threaten in the near winter and we have to call in the peasantry to clean the tracks, then we shall call out to the peasant, who is accustomed, to a certain extent, to look upon the railways as something alien to him: It is difficult for you, but if you clean the tracks, you give an advance on what communism will deliver to you, which will free you from the bondage of your clod of earth, make you a free man, and teach you to understand that you are not only a citizen of your community, but a ruler of your country, a ruler of the whole universe."