by James Millar
The beginning of Vysotsky’s professional life coincided with the appearance of guitar poetry, which in its turn was enabled by the availability of the portable tape recorder in the USSR. Vysot-sky’s songs could therefore be recorded free of
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Singer-actor Vladimir Vysotsky performing one of his popular ballads. © TASS/SOVFOTO. REPRINTED WITH PERMISSION official controls, and the results duplicated. The popularity of these homemade tapes, and the semilegal appearances Vysotsky made in clubs and other institutions, brought him to the attention of the authorities. He was subjected to harrassment because, in official eyes, the content and especially the style of his songs, saturated with robust humor, were unacceptable even within the relatively permissive boundaries of Socialist Realism in its later phases. Vysotsky was regularly censured by various official bodies, but, shielded by his unprecedented popularity, he was never subjected to serious reprisals.
Vysotsky was a prodigious creator of lyrics, consistent with his extravagant, extravert personality. His songs fall broadly into two successive chronological phases and two generic categories. In the earlier phase, he created hundreds of songs in which the author speaks through a persona. They include songs about military life, which formed the most officially acceptable segment of the repertoire and were in many cases created for theatre productions or films. Then there were songs about sport (running, soccer, weightlifting, even chess). There was also a series of love songs, which portray relationships in either a disenchanted, even cynical manner, or else idealize the female. The
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most dubious songs from the official point of view concern criminals; they are violent in their actions and crude and direct in their thoughts. The second, and on the whole later, segment of Vysotsky’s repertoire consists of songs in which the author speaks from an explicitly autobiographical stance. These songs express mounting frustration and despair; they were driven by Vysotsky’s addictive personality and the ravages it inflicted on his physical and mental stability.
While there was constant disagreement during his lifetime about whether Vysotsky was a mere entertainer or merited serious consideration as a poet, his work illustrated the arbitrariness of this distinction. The literary establishment regarded him as an embarrassment, often out of envy and resentment for his genuine popularity, and connived with their political masters in denying Vysotsky access to the public media. His spectacular marriage, his third, to the French film star Marina Vlady was another source of friction. Vysotsky made a few records in the USSR, most of them bowdlerized, but he was never allowed to publish a book. This attitude changed only after his death, especially with the onset of glasnost; a small collection of lyrics appeared in 1982, and since then there has been a torrent of publication and discussion.
Vysotsky’s songs imply a crude but coherent system of values whose core is masculinist individualism. The consequences may be tragic for him, but he still rises to the test. The appeal of this hero, to men and women alike throughout the social spectrum of Soviet Russia, made Vysotsky an idol who was felt to speak for the people more genuinely than any other contemporary; there is no more telling case of the discontinuity between popular acclaim and official recognition in the Brezhnev period. See also: DISSIDENT MOVEMENT; MUSIC; OKUDZHAVA, BULAT SHALOVICH
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Beumers, Birgit. (1997). Yury Liubimov at the Taganka Theatre, 1964-1994. Amsterdam: Harwood Academic. Shkolnikova, Mariya. (1996-2002). Vladimir Vysotsky: The Official Site. «http://www.kulichki.com/vv/eng» Smith, Gerald Stanton. (1984). Songs to Seven Strings: Russian Guitar Poetry and Soviet “Mass Song.” Bloom-ington: Indiana University Press.
GERALD SMITH
ENCYCLOPEDIA OF RUSSIAN HISTORY
WAGES, SOVIET
Wages in the Soviet Union were supposed to conform to Marx’s notion of the lower stage of communist society in which workers would be paid according to their contributions to the social product and on the basis of equal rewards for equal work. Factors taken into account in the assignment of wage levels typically included the arduousness and dangerousness of work, skill levels or necessary qualifications, and the degree of responsibility. Occupations in which women predominated, such as teaching, medicine, infant care, cleaning, and clerical and sales work, invariably were graded below male-dominated occupations.
In early 1918 Lenin advocated the use of piecework as opposed to time-based wages as an appropriate system to stimulate labor discipline and productivity. He also grudgingly acknowledged the necessity of paying specialists (e.g., managers and engineers) more than ordinary workers. Although these policies were opposed by the Left Communist faction and many rank-and-file Bolsheviks, they were incorporated into the wage scales constructed by respective trade unions. During the years of war communism, labor was in effect an obligatory service to the embattled state, which in turn assumed the responsibility to provide work and at least a caloric minimum in the form of employee rations. Payment in kind was ubiquitous, and no sooner did workers receive their wage than they repaired to the black market to barter it for other goods.
The semblance of a normal monetary system of wages, based on contractual agreements between trade unions and corresponding trusts, developed under the New Economic Policy, and wages rose steadily. By 1927 nominal wages were estimated to be about 11 percent above the 1913 average, and this did not include the socialized wage consisting of free medical care, social insurance, and other welfare provisions. Whereas the First Five-Year Plan envisioned a further increase in nominal wages of 44 percent and real wages of nearly 68 percent- in fact, the standard of living of wage earners plummeted. It is estimated that by 1932 real wages were at about 50 percent of their 1928 level. Moreover, shortages in cooperative stores drove workers to rely on the private market, where prices of agricultural produce were approximately eight times higher than in 1928. The prevailing labor shortage caused employers to resort to various sleights of hand to attract and retain workers. They included paying workers at grades higher than
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WANDERERS, THE
those outlined in wage handbooks, granting special bonuses that amounted to permanent additions to their basic pay, paying for fictitious piece work and defective output, and manipulating the use of the progressive bonus system for overfulfillment of production quotas. Despite their technical illegality, these practices became permanent features of Soviet economic life.
In 1931 the state introduced a wage-scale reform under the banner of combating petty bourgeois egalitarianism that widened differentials between lower and higher wage-tariff categories. Simultaneously it expanded the use of progressive piece-rates that would rise with the increase of individual workers’ actual output. This approach remained in force until the late 1950s when a new wage reform was gradually phased in. It entailed increases in basic wages and production quotas, the reduction in the number of wage scales and the simplification of rates within each scale, the elimination of progressive piece-rates, and a modest shift of pieceworkers to time-based wages. The major objective of the reforms-to create a stable and predictable system of incentives-appears to have failed largely because of the uncertainties and irregularities of supplies and managerial collusion with workers in compensating for them. Hence the Brezhnev-era aphorism, “They pretend to pay us, and we pretend to work.” See also: ECONOMIC GROWTH, SOVIET; MONETARY OVERHANG; WAR COMMUNISM
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Filtzer, Donald. (1986). Soviet Workers and Stalinist Industrialization: The Formation of Modern Soviet Production Relations, 1928-1941. Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe. Filtzer, Donald. (1992). Soviet Workers and De-Staliniza-tion: The Consolidation of the Modern System of Soviet Production Relations, 1953-1964. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.
LEWIS H. SIEGELBAUM
WANDERERS, THE See GOLDEN AGE OF RUSSIAN LITERATURE; NATIONALISM IN THE ARTS.
WAR COMMUNISM
The Bolshevik Party seized power in Russia
in October 1917. Historians use the term war commu1658 nism for the economic system of Soviet Russia during the civil war that followed this revolution. This term, not used at the time, was first applied when the civil war had already drawn to a close. In the spring of 1921, advocating a shift toward a more liberalized internal market, Lenin described the system as “that peculiar war communism, forced on us by extreme want, ruin and war.” He went on to define its core as the centralized system of confiscating all of the peasants’ food surpluses, and more, in order to feed the urban workers and the soldiers of the Red Army. He meant that war communism was a temporary phenomenon-not real communism-just a necessary evil required by wartime circumstances. He intended thereby to distance himself from it and inaugurate a more relaxed regime later known as the New Economic Policy (NEP).
A few years later, however, Stalin adopted policies that resembled war communism in several features, including specifically the confiscation of peasant food surpluses. Consequently many historians now reject Lenin’s claim that war communism was an unintended consequence of special circumstances, and argue that the Bolsheviks always intended to build a society based on centralization and force.
It took more than six months for a full-scale civil war to break out after the October 1917 revolution. The Bolsheviks did not try immediately to centralize the economy. They negotiated for a separate peace with Germany to take Russia out of World War I. They brought representatives of the non-Bolshevik left into a coalition government. While they legislated to nationalize the landed estates of the aristocracy, they sought a coexistence of capitalist and commercial private property with state regulation and workers’ rights of inspection.
The results, however, threatened the Bolsheviks with a loss of control on each front. The peace treaty signed with Germany in March 1918 provoked military intervention by Russia’s former allies. Its humiliating terms drove the Bolsheviks’ coalition partners toward the monarchist counterrevolution. Under the treaty, Russia lost the Ukraine; this cut the food available to Russia’s nonfarm population. The wartime system of food distribution that the Bolsheviks had inherited from the imperial government was ineffective: While the urban population was entitled to receive a food ration at low fixed prices, at the same prices the peasants would not sell food to the government for distribution. As the situation worsened, many groups of
ENCYCLOPEDIA OF RUSSIAN HISTORY
WAR COMMUNISM
workers blamed the factory owners, expelled them, and declared the factories to be state property. In the countryside, instead of government takeover of the great estates, the peasants divided the land among themselves.
As of 1918 the Bolsheviks began to travel a path of extreme political and economic centralization. They nationalized the banks in January. In April they enacted state monopolies in foreign trade as well as internal trade in foodstuffs. In June they brought the commanding heights of industry into the public sector. This path ended in a one-party state underpinned by a secret police and a demonetized command economy with virtually all industry nationalized and farm food surpluses liable to violent seizure. The Bolsheviks traveled willingly, justifying their actions in the name of socialism. They blamed their difficulties on a minority of speculators and counterrevolutionaries with whom there could be no compromise. This intensified the polarization between Reds and Whites that ended in civil war.
Food shortages drove this process along. Shortages were felt first by the towns and the army, because peasants fed themselves before selling food to others. Shortages arose primarily from the wartime disruption of trade, the loss of the Ukraine, and the government’s attempts to hold down food prices. The Bolsheviks overestimated peasant food stocks; this meant that when they failed to raise food they blamed the peasants for withholding it. They specifically blamed a minority of richer peasants, the so-called kulaks, for speculating in food by withholding it intentionally so as to raise its price. Between April and June of 1918 they slid from banning private trade in foodstuffs to a campaign to seize kulak food stocks and then to confiscate their land as well. Since rural food stocks were smaller and more scattered than the government believed, such measures tended to victimize many ordinary peasants without improving supplies.
Under war communism between the summer of 1918 and the spring of 1921, goods were distributed by administrative rationing or barter; with more than 20 percent monthly inflation, prices rose in total by many thousand times, and the money stock lost most of its real value. The government seized food from the peasantry, but, as there was not enough to meet workers’ needs, black markets developed where urban residents bartered their products and property with peasants for additional food. Industry was nationalized far more widely than the commanding heights listed in the June
ENCYCLOPEDIA OF RUSSIAN HISTORY
1918 decree. By November 1920 public ownership extended to many artisan establishments with one or two workers. Public-sector management was centralized under a command system of administrative quotas and allocations.
War communism was not an economic success. Food procurements rose at first, but industrial production and employment, harvests, and living standards fell continuously. The fact that the Bolsheviks emerged victorious from the civil war owed more to their enemies’ moral and material weaknesses than to their own strengths. Despite this, they did not abandon war communism immediately when the war came to an end. By the spring of 1920, fighting continued only in Poland and the Caucasus. Still, war communism was upheld. While Lenin defended the system of food procurement against its critics, other Bolsheviks advocated extending control over peasant farming through sowing plans and over industrial workers through militarization of labor.
Such dreaming was rudely interrupted in early 1921 by an anti-Bolshevik mutiny in the Kronstadt naval base and a wave of peasant discontent concentrated in the Tambov province. It was not the end of the civil war, but the threat of another, that brought war communism to an end. This does not prove that the Bolsheviks had always intended to introduce something like war communism; however, it shows that Lenin was disingenuous to suggest that war communism was only a product of circumstances. In the case of war communism, the Bolsheviks willingly made virtues out of apparently necessary evils, then took them much further than necessary. Moreover, one product of civil war circumstances was never abandoned: the one-party state underpinned by a secret police. See also: CIVIL WAR OF 1917-1922; LENIN, VLADIMIR ILICH; NEW ECONOMIC POLICY; OCTOBER REVOLUTION; STALIN, JOSEF VISSARIONOVICH
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Boettke, Peter J. (1990). The Political Economy of Soviet Socialism: The Formative Years, 1918-1928. Boston: Kluwer Academic. Carr, Edward Hallett. (1952). The Bolshevik Revolution, 1917-1923, vol. 2. London: Macmillan. Davies, Robert W. (1989). “Economic and Social Policy in the USSR, 1917-41.” In The Cambridge Economic History of Europe, vol. 8: The Industrial Economies: The Development of Economic and Social Policies, eds. Peter Mathias and Sidney Pollard. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.
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WAR ECONOMY
Lih, Lars T. (1990). Bread and Authority in Russia, 1914-1921. Berkeley: University of California Press. Malle, Silvana. (1985). The Economic Organization of War Communism, 1918-1921. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Nove, Alec. (1992). An Economic History of the USSR, 1917-1991, 3rd ed. Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin Books. Zaleski, Eugene. (1962). Planning for Economic Growth in the Soviet Union, 1918-1932. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.
MARK HARRISON
WAR ECONOMY
The German invasion of June 22, 1941, was an event for which the Soviet Union had been preparing for fifteen years. Soviet war preparations were started in the mid-1920s at a time when no immediate threat of war existed. Stalin and other Bolshevik leaders were preoccupied by the fate of the Russian Empire in World War I. Although Russia entered that war with a substantial food surplus, its economy was destabilized by the mobilization of industry; this deprived the countryside of manufactured
commodities, and peasant farmers ceased to sell food in exchange. As a result, the towns and military units went increasingly hungry to a point where industry and the army collapsed. Stalin intended to avoid a repetition. Forced industrialization would raise the economy’s capacity for producing weapons, while farm collectivization would prevent the peasants from retreating again into self-sufficiency. Although brutally and wastefully executed, these policies contributed significantly to Soviet resistance when Germany attacked.
At first the war went worse than envisaged in the most pessimistic prewar plans. Soviet territory was deeply invaded; the real output of the territory under Soviet control fell by one-third; and the burdens of defense increased both relatively and absolutely. By 1943 three-fifths of Soviet output was devoted to the war effort, the highest proportion observed at the time in any economy that did not subsequently collapse under the strain. A railway evacuation of factories and machinery from the zones threatened by occupation shifted the geographical center of the war economy hundreds of kilometers to the east. The production of weapons rose to a level that exceeded Germany’s throughout the war. There was little detailed planning behind this; the important decisions were made in a chaotic, uncoordinated sequence. The civilian economy was neglected and it declined rapidly. By 1942, food, fuels, and metals produced had fallen by half or more. Living standards fell on average by two-fifths while millions were severely overworked and undernourished; however, the state procurement of food from collective farms ensured that industrial workers and soldiers were less likely to starve than peasants. Still the process might have ended in another economic collapse without the stunning victory over the German army at Stalingrad at the end of 1942. This enabled a return to economic planning and a partial restoration of resources to civilian uses. Foreign (mostly American) aid, which added about 5 percent to Soviet resources in 1942 and 10 percent in 1943 and 1944, also relieved the pressure.