The peasants’ traditional strategies in this war of survival—prevarication, dissimulation, and other ‘weapons of the weak’—were of limited utility. They also resorted to more direct forms of resistance—theft of kolkhoz property, the slaughter of livestock, women’s riots, and murder of collective farm officials (including workers dispatched to the countryside as ‘Twenty-Five Thou-sanders’ to assist in the collectivization drive). All this suggests the scale of peasant desperation. As if calculated to intensify the apocalyptic mood, the authorities intensified anti-religious campaigns, including pogroms against priests and church property. Thousands of churches, synagogues, and mosques were closed or converted into meeting-halls, cinemas, cowsheds, and the like. The exact number of peasants executed, killed in skirmishes, or dead from malnutrition and overwork in the labour camps defies precise determination, but undoubtedly ran into millions.
Peasant resistance to collectivization also spawned opposition, if less dramatic, in the party itself. Some who had supported Stalin against Bukharin and the ‘Right Opposition’ began to have second thoughts in the wake of the collectivization drive. By late 1930 several prominent party members of the RSFSR and Trans-caucasian governments expressed misgivings that Stalin construed as factionalism and opposition (‘the Syrtsov–Lominadze Right-Left Bloc’). Retribution did not prevent the formation of other groups in 1932, most notably the conspiratorial circle of M. N. Riutin and the group of A. P. Smirnov, G. G. Tolmachev, and N. B. Eismont. Even loyal Stalinists such as S. V. Kosior, I. M. Vareikis, K. Ia. Bauman, and M. A. Skrypnyk began to question the growing centrism of power as well as Stalin’s pro-Russian nationality policy.
In sum, the state won only a partial victory over the peasantry. True, it did bring the peasants under its administrative control and, through the machine tractor stations, made them technologically dependent. The kulaks and the clergy, rival élites in the village, had been annihilated. But peasant resistance extracted certain concessions, such as the legalization of private plots and the exclusion of domestic animals from the collective. In the longer term, a combination of administrative incompetence, underinvestment, and peasant alienation led to extremely low levels of productivity and thus an agricultural sector that, rather than providing resources and capital investment for industrial development, became a net drain on economic growth.
A Nation on the Move
Not unlike the enclosures at the dawn of the English Industrial Revolution, collectivization ‘freed’ peasants to work and live else where. Of course, there was nothing new about peasant seasonal out-migration (otkhod), particularly from villages in the ‘landhungry’ provinces of central Russia. But during the First Five-Year Plan, the number of peasant departures increased dramatically, in 1931–2 reaching an all-time high. Between 1928 and 1932, according to a recent estimate, at least ten million peasants joined the urban work-force as wage or salary earners.
In general, departures took three forms: involuntary deportations (through dekulakization); relocation through agreements between collective farms and individual industrial enterprises (a process known euphemistically as orgnabor or ‘organized recruitment’); and voluntary independent movement officially labelled samotek or ‘drifting’. These distinctions are analytically useful but hardly capture the scale or complexity of population movement in the 1930s. There was much ‘push’ (to leave the village), but also much ‘pull’ (demand for labour at the other end). Such was the competition among recruiters that train-loads of recruits were waylaid and rerouted to other destinations. In other cases, recruits upon arrival found working or living conditions so unappealing that they soon moved on—via samotek—to places where conditions were reportedly better. As Stephen Kotkin has noted, ‘The train, that ally of the Bolshevik leadership and its bureaucrats and planners, was being used against them: construction workers were using the trains to tour the country’.
The growth of Magnitogorsk, the celebrated socialist ‘planned’ city built on the steppe behind the Urals, was spectacular: from 25 inhabitants in March 1929 to 250,000 by the autumn of 1932. But older cities swelled too. Moscow’s population increased from 2.2 million in 1929 to 3.6 million by 1936; Leningrad’s rose from 1.6 million in 1926 to 3.5 million by the end of the 1930s. Regional centres, particularly in the industrial heartland, were also inundated by newcomers. Stalino (Donetsk), a coal and steel town in the Donbas, doubled its population between 1926 and 1937, reaching 246,000 by the latter year.
This phenomenal growth in urban population did not in itself constitute urbanization, a process that normally suggests qualitative as well as quantitative change. Indeed Moshe Lewin’s neologism, ‘ruralization’—the squeezing of the village into the city and the subjection of urban spaces to rural ways—is more accurate. Railway stations became temporary shelters, clearinghouses of information, informal labour exchanges, and (illicit) bazaars. Factories took on many of the same functions, as did parks.
Housing construction could not possibly keep pace with the population increase. At Magnitogorsk and other construction sites, newcomers were ‘housed’ in tents and hastily constructed dormitories where bedspace was often assigned in shifts. To accommodate the in-migrants, in 1931 municipal authorities in Leningrad deported thousands of ‘parasites and other nonworking elements’—i.e. the pre-revolutionary nobility, the clergy, youths expelled from the student body because of their ‘old regime’ backgrounds, and those who had been purged from the Soviet apparatus. This social cleansing freed some 200,000 sq. m. of living space, mostly in the form of communal apartments where several families shared a kitchen, bathroom, and toilet. Global statistics for per capita living space in the entire USSR show a decline from a crowded 5.65 sq. m. in 1928 to an even more crowded 4.66 sq. m. by 1932.
Food too was in short supply. The shortages were due not only to disruptions caused by collectivization and increased urban demand (from the influx of peasants), but also because of the low priority given to food-processing in the First Five-Year Plan. The state imposed a ration on most foodstuffs in 1929, whereby urban residents exchanged their coupons at Workers’ Co-operative stores. They also relied on cafeterias and other communal dining facilities, government stores (where the quality—and prices—of food was higher), or, if they could afford it, the peasant markets.
In December 1932 the state introduced internal passports for urban dwellers, thereby making flight to the cities more difficult for the dispossessed and hungry in the villages. This measure, which remained in effect for decades, closely followed a decree denying ration cards to those guilty of absenteeism from work. Their combined effect was to put a temporary halt to in-migration and to trigger the deportation or ‘voluntary’ exodus of several hundred thousand people from the cities. The timing of the passport law was all-important. Harsh climate, primitive technology, and the necessity of marketing or turning over a substantial proportion of the crop had left peasant producers without a margin to build up reserves. After three years of borrowing from the previous year’s seed grain to deliver to an expanding urban population, the Red Army, and foreign consumers, there was no margin left.
The resulting famine of 1933 has been described by both Western and Russian scholars as ‘man-made’ or ‘artificial’ on the grounds that its primary cause was the excessively high procurement quotas set by the state. Some note the disproportionate effect on Ukrainian peasants and claim that the famine was deliberate and genocidal. But recent analyses of the data on the 1932 harvest have shown that, contrary to the official yield of 69.9 million metric tons (which approximated the grain harvests for preceding and successive years), the real output was well below 50 million tons. If so, the famine was precipitated by an absolute shortage of grain. That the rural population (not only in Ukraine) suffered disproportionately and that this deprivation was due to a political decision are not in question: procurements displaced famine from the city to the village. Altogether, it is estimated that the famine took 2.9 million lives in Ukraine and 4.2 mil
lion throughout the USSR in 1933.
Cultural Revolution
In addition to industrialization and agricultural transformation, the 1930s witnessed a third revolution—in culture. This ‘cultural revolution’ signified not only the overturning of previously existing scientific standards and aesthetic values, but full-scale assaults against their bearers—the technical and cultural intelligentsia—and their replacement by workers from the bench as well as (often self-designated) representatives of the proletariat. In retrospect, the cultural revolution underscores the instability and provisionality of the modus vivendi between the intelligentsia (the sole collective survivor among the prerevolutionary élites) and the Communist Party. Lenin’s conception of cultural revolution—essentially, raising the masses to the level of the bourgeoisie by enlisting the aid of ‘bourgeois specialists’—was pursued more or less faithfully by his lieutenants who came from relatively cultured backgrounds, relied on the expertise of such specialists, and rewarded them accordingly. But to many party militants, such dependence merely perpetuated the cultural dominance of a group that displayed haughtiness and condescension towards the masses (and, not incidentally, party members) and dubious loyalty to the ideals of communism.
Tensions exploded in the spring of 1928 when fifty-three mining engineers were charged with wrecking and sabotage of mining installations in the Shakhty district of the North Caucasus. What set off the explosion was not so much the trial itself, as the ‘lessons’ that Stalin drew from the affair. In contrast to other high-ranking officials, who warned of the economically disruptive consequences of igniting mass resentment against specialists and therefore sought to play down the case, Stalin invoked ‘class vigilance’, warned that ‘Shakhtyites are now ensconced in every branch of our industry’, and demanded extensive purges not only of industrial administration, but throughout the Soviet, trade-union, and party apparatuses, educational institutions, and central economic organs.
The purges were essentially of two kinds, each extensive and feeding off the other. ‘Social purging’ (i.e. the exclusion of individuals from privileged backgrounds from institutions of higher education) was most pronounced in 1928–9. Usually carried out by Komsomol and local party committees, this type of purge was often spontaneous, irritated authorities in the affected commissariats, and ultimately provoked resolutions of condemnation. The second, more formal, purge was conducted by special commissions of Rabkrin (the Workers’ and Peasants’ Inspectorate) and the party’s Central Committee. With a mandate from the Sixteenth Party Conference, Rabkrin removed some 164,000 Soviet employees in the course of 1929–30. The purge in the party, which removed about 11 per cent of its members in 1929, sought primarily to expel careerists, corrupt elements, and those guilty of criminal offences, but it also took into account political criteria, such as the failure to carry out the party line in the countryside.
Purges constituted one aspect of the cultural revolution: no less important was the intensification and politicization of struggles within the professions. These conflicts generally pitted the pre-revolutionary (predominantly non-Marxist) intelligentsia against the new Soviet intelligentsia (overwhelmingly communist). What the former interpreted as a full-scale assault against culture itself, the latter saw only as its ‘proletarianization’. The former expected intellectuals to set an example for the masses or to take them under their wing; the latter advocated subordination to and learning from the masses. This reversal of valorization prematurely terminated many careers and led to the temporary abolition of secondary-school education. Not for nothing did the Marx–Engels metaphor of ‘withering away’ of school and law appeal to cultural revolutionaries.
Perhaps the best-documented struggle of the cultural revolution was in literature. Thus, writers and critics affiliated with the Russian Association of Proletarian Writers (with the Russian acronym RAPP) fought bitterly against their Marxist rivals in the ‘Literary Front’ (Litfront). And both stridently attacked the political aloofness of ‘fellow travellers’, as well as the decadent individualism of the literary avant-garde. The former Komsomol activist, L. L. Averbakh, helped RAPP to establish, if only briefly, ‘proletarian hegemony’ (typified by its cult of the ‘little man’) over literature. Time Forward!, Valentin Kataev’s novel of 1932 about a record-breaking shift at Magnitogorsk, represented its apotheosis. But what has been called a ‘wave of reaction’ against this ethos of the First Five-Year Plan was apparent even before the end of the Plan. ‘It was as if’, writes Katerina Clark, ‘everyone had tired of the “little man”, of sober reality and efficiency; they looked for something “higher”.’ This yearning corresponded to Stalin’s own impatience with the turbulence of literary politics. On 23 April 1932 a Central Committee resolution ‘On the Reformation of Literary-Artistic Organizations’ formally abolished RAPP and called for the creation of a ‘single Union of Soviet Writers with a communist fraction in it’.
The ‘proletarian episode’ in Soviet literature had its analogues in other fields such as legal theory, pedagogy, and architecture. In each case, rival claimants to the correct interpretation of Marxism battled it out, employing such terms of abuse as ‘bourgeois pseudo-science’, ‘Menshevizing idealism’, and ‘right deviation-ism’. As in literary criticism, the iconoclastic and even nihilistic tendencies of the cultural revolutionaries (E. B. Pashukanis’s ‘commodity exchange’ theory of the law; V. N. Shulgin’s notion of the ‘withering away of the school’; anti-urbanism among town planners) ran their course until the Central Committee—or, in the case of historical writing, Stalin himself—intervened to restore order if not the status quo ante.
The third dimension of the cultural revolution, which has received much attention from historians, was the rapid and systematic promotion of workers into white-collar positions, either directly from ‘the bench’ or after crash-course training programmes at institutions of higher education. As Sheila Fitzpatrick has shown, this programme of proletarian ‘advancement’ (vydvizhenie) represented ‘the positive corollary of the campaign against the “bourgeois” intelligentsia and the social purging of the bureaucracy’. In time, the beneficiaries of this process (the vydvizhentsy), formed the new Soviet intelligentsia, which was more numerous, plebeian, and (befitting an industrializing nation) technically oriented than its bourgeois predecessor. And it was also more beholden to the political leadership. Two themes thus dominate most accounts of the cultural revolution. One was its anti-intellectualism, tinged with a certain xenophobic colouring. The other was its social radicalism, rendered as ‘revolution from below’, where ‘below’ signified three distinct phenomena: the spontaneous actions of lower-level party committees and the Komsomol, the revolt of younger and previously marginal elements within the professions, and the promotion of proletarians. But one should not overlook the degree to which the cultural revolution was coded as a male pursuit and the advantage that proletarianism gave to ethnic Russians at the expense of peoples in less industrialized areas. Dissolution of both the party’s women’s department (Zhenotdel) and Jewish section (Evsektsiia) in 1930 may well have reflected these biases.
Communist Neo-Traditionalism
In 1933, after several years of almost unceasing tumult, the Soviet Union embarked on the Second Five-Year Plan. Early drafts of the Plan exhibited the same ‘great leap forward’ psychology that had characterized its predecessor. But by late 1932, when it became clear that the economy was overstrained, the key indices were scaled back. Instead of the 100 billion kilowatt-hours of electricity originally projected for 1937, the revised version (adopted by the Seventeenth Party Congress in February 1934) called for 38 billion; the target for pig iron was cut from 22 million to 14.5 million tons, and so forth. Referring to the famine, Alec Nove observes: ‘The terrible events of 1933 may have had their influence, by a kind of shock therapy’. The plan, still ambitious if scaled back, shifted the emphasis from ever-increasing inputs of labour, punctuated by occasional bouts of shock work (now deprecated as ‘storming�
��), and towards the assimilation and mastery of technology. As Stalin told a plenary session of the Central Committee in January 1933, the ‘passion for construction’ of the First Five-Year Plan had to be replaced by the passion for mastering technology. That required more vocational training, but also more labour discipline.
Few terms appeared more frequently in Bolshevik discourse in the early 1930s than ‘labour discipline’. Precisely because the industrial labour force had absorbed millions of male peasants and unskilled urban women, the demands for increasing labour discipline became ever shriller, the measures to combat violations ever harsher. Stricter control over the organization of production led to the abrogation of several First Five-Year Plan innovations: the ‘continuous work week’ (nepreryvka, a staggered schedule of four days on and one day off); the ‘functional system of management’ (a Taylorist approach that in its Soviet application encouraged parallel lines of authority and avoidance of personal responsibility); and production collectives and communes (shopfloor units that workers organized to protect themselves from the fluctuations in wages and the general disorganization of production).
The restoration of a more hierarchical approach to management entailed an expansion of the responsibilities, prestige, and privileges of managerial and technical personnel. ‘The ground should shake when the director goes around the factory,’ declared M. M. Kaganovich in a pep talk to managers, adding that ‘workers like a powerful leader’. Successful directors had to do more than shake the ground. Presiding over vast complexes with tens of thousands of workers, they learned how to wheel and deal for scarce resources, establish cosy relations with local party and NKVD officials, read the signals emanating from Moscow, and above all fulfil—or at least appear to fulfil—the quantitative targets of the plan. As a veteran journalist later recalled, ‘it was during those years that the names of metallurgical factory directors became known, not only to a narrow circle of economic officials, but broad sections of the Soviet public. For their work, for their successes, the country celebrated them as in wartime it had followed the successes of military leaders.’
Russia A History Page 40