Figure 20.2 Advertisement for caviar in the Guide to the City of Moscow
‘The desire to present an ascetic, proletarian model was superseded by an image of prosperity and luxury that could be earned.’
Dizzy with hunger
There had been a bad harvest in 1936 – statistically, it was as disastrous as the harvests of 1931 and 1932. Once the collective farms had delivered their grain to the state, hardly anything remained for their own consumption and for next year’s sowing – a scenario reminiscent of the famine of 1931–2. From November and December 1936, local NKVD offices sent reports to the central office in Moscow lambasting the growing ‘food difficulties in the collective farms’.12 The shortage of cattle feed exacerbated the problem. Peasants unable to feed their animals began to slaughter them, since that was simpler than keeping them fed or selling them at rock-bottom prices. As in the period of collectivization, the wholesale slaughter of cattle took place. Once again a mood of crisis and catastrophe gripped the countryside, which also seeped into the towns and did not spare Moscow, in spite of its privileged food supply position. A thirteenyear-old schoolboy, Aleksei Sokolov, reported on how he had spent his winter holiday:
I had no time to do my homework or walk in the fresh air. I had to get up at three o’clock [in the morning] and go for bread – the twentieth or thirtieth person in line even though the bread was not delivered until nine or ten o’clock in the morning. I had to freeze on the street for five or six hours [it was in January 1937]. They didn’t deliver enough bread. You stand, freezing, and you have to go home without anything, because you weren’t able to get even a kilogram of bread. I think other students spent their breaks in the same way or even worse. Judging from this, I can say that the Soviet government has not improved the life of the peasantry at all, but made it even worse.
There was a dramatic leap in the number of complaints and letters containing critical remarks intercepted by the NKVD in the winter of 1936–7. These comments are typical of their tone: ‘Factory and office workers have protection, but peasants are suppressed.’ ‘I wish that a war would start. I would be the first to go against the Soviet government.’ ‘Tsar Nicholas was stupid, but bread was cheap and white, and you didn’t have to stand in line for it. You could have as much as you wanted.’ ‘Hitler will not only take the Soviet Union, but the whole world will be under his power – then we will begin to live. But now only the leaders have a life.’ ‘Sooner or later, Stalin will be killed. There are many people against him. Stalin starved many people to death.’ ‘The Soviet government and Stalin act like we are serfs. Just like before, when the peasant worked for landlords, now the kolkhoznik works until he drops – nobody knows for whom, but he does not get bread.’13
Once again a wave of uncontrolled migration from the countryside began; people set off without papers and camped in railway stations, or simply in the fields. Once again hunger spread; grass was mixed into the dough and people ate cats and dogs. People died, their stomachs bloated with oedema. The number of suicides rose, schools were shut. Typhus spread. Areas particularly badly affected included the territory around Yaroslavl, the Mordvinian Autonomous Republic and the Volga region. In many places the peasants organized gangs to obtain bread. Long queues formed in the towns and fighting frequently broke out. When the shops opened, they would be sold out in a trice. The grain crisis reached the towns and they could no longer be supplied. Once again the search for scapegoats began; in the summer and winter of 1937 show trials started up against ‘saboteurs’ in the countryside.14 It was only with the arrival of the record harvest in 1937 that some of the pressure eased and the leadership’s panic began to abate. In these circumstances, a movement to reintroduce a ration card system started up ‘from below’. People spent hours standing in queues in factory cafeterias and canteens, as well as in food shops and in the department stores where everyday goods were sold: stockings, needles and paper. A large proportion of people’s energies was expended on obtaining the basic necessities of life. The majority of the population was worn out to the point of utter exhaustion.
On the other hand, wherever decisions had to be taken about access to goods in chronic shortage, status carried more weight than any other consideration.15 A person’s position in the hierarchy of power determined his ability to access extremely scarce resources. Bitter, irreconcilable battles were fought over goods and services. On the one hand, there was the subsistence economy struggling for survival, with its thousands and indeed millions of transactions every day, without which the country would not have had enough to eat, while, on the other, there was the state-run administration in which you could acquire vast wealth and become an object of envy, or else be made a scapegoat for supply failures and become an object of universal hatred. Many private sector employees died during the mass terror of 1937–8 – ex-owners of restaurants, stores and small businesses, but also commercial staff who began working under the Soviet system, the managements of Narkomtorg, Tsentrosoiuz and a variety of commercial organizations. Nothing was simpler than to blame economic failures – queues, mistakes in planning and the theft of state property – on ‘Trotskyite saboteurs’. The pent-up hatred of 1937 seeped from every pore of a population driven almost crazy by the stress of everyday living.16
A hopeless struggle: a nation of speculators
At bottom, this was a hopeless struggle, and the national leadership was a hostage to its own policies. The more relentlessly it expropriated the wealthy and made off with their possessions, the more it was forced back onto the basic products of a subsistence economy that sprang into life spontaneously in the form of barter trade and flourished at a regional or local level in bazaars and black markets. Without the black market, the entire planned economy would not have survived a single day. It featured deals in kind between factories and combines, private enterprises disguised as cooperatives, individual craftsmen organized in brigades, a black economy in which it was not always clear whether it throve by diverting state property to private individuals or whether it was a system for enabling state organizations to appropriate the achievements of private entities. Underground trade flourished where the centralized economy had created gaps and shortages.
Toward the end of rationing, flea markets and second-hand markets had become imitations of department stores. Commodities ‘flew’ from socialist trade to the black market, where resale produced large profits. NKVD inspections of markets and stores testified to the extent of commodity circulation in private trade. The whole country, from professional dealers to ordinary working folks, engaged in speculation.17
The forms of speculation were as diverse and inventive as the transactions they produced. They ranged from the misuse and theft of the materials and stock belonging to state enterprises to giving false measure, from fictitious deals to the resale of goods from state department stores on the black market at grossly inflated prices. An entire nation, if it wished to survive, was compelled to make extensive use of barter and resale and thus to join the ranks of the speculators. The fact was that even Stalin was impotent in the face of the black market as an instrument of economic rationality and against black marketeers as the agents of an alternative economy.
The queue as grapevine
The queue and the black market were the principal forms not of an opposition, but of a well-hidden, never-ending movement. NKVD reports – the ones quoted here refer to the spring of 1939 – make it very clear how closely it observed and analysed the various movements and signs of life among the queuing masses. The state was forced to stand by impotently as the populace set out in search of the goods it needed for survival, especially in the towns, which were better provided for than the countryside, and above all in the privileged cities of Moscow and Leningrad. The ebb and flow of buyers and sellers was crystallized at a specific point: the queues in front of the distribution points and shops. One NKVD report, dated the night of 13 April 1939, counted precisely 43,800 people lined up outside stores, etc. Stores sold out aft
er three or four hours, but people continued to wait for them to open the next day. People from all over the country came to Moscow. As one person in the line said, ‘So many working days are wasted in line! With these working days it would have been possible to build two textile factories in Moscow.’18
The NKVD report provides a vivid summary of the experience of queuing:
The line starts to form several hours before the store closes, in the yards of the nearest houses. Someone makes a line list, and, after getting on the list, some people leave to find a place on the street or in a yard to rest. Some citizens bring big winter coats and blankets to keep warm. Some also bring kitchen chairs to sit on.
By sunrise people were standing in line, sitting on sidewalks wrapped in blankets, or sleeping on doorsteps near the store (Gorky Street). The clerks started letting people into the store before opening time, and suddenly the lines broke up. Everybody started running to the doors of the store, and people fought and got crushed.
Young people in the lines organized all sorts of games and dances on the streets, which sometimes led to hooligan pranks.
By eight o’clock in the morning there were already over 3,500 customers at the textile store (Kuznetsky Bridge). When the store opened at 8.30 there were around 4,000–4,500 people. The line, formed at eight o’clock in the morning, extended through Kuznetsky Bridge and Neglinny Lane to the end of Pushechnaya Street (at least a kilometer).
At eight o’clock in the morning a line of 1,000 people formed at a department store in the Leningrad district of Moscow, but the militia blocked the crowd in with ten trucks. Masses of people ran to the Spartak cinema square, to get between the cinema and the police trucks. There was an impossible crush and confusion and shouting. The militia appeared to be powerless to do anything, and in order not to be squashed, they climbed onto the trucks and from there called to the customers to maintain order. At opening time the line had more than 5,000 people.
At six o’clock in the morning a line formed at a department store in the Dzerzhinsky district, taking over the nearest streets, tram and bus stations. By nine o’clock there were eight thousand people in line.
Lately the narrow Stoleshnikov Lane has been transformed into something like the Yaroslavsky market.19
The NKVD report also records conversations in the queue. Most people complained that they got nothing for their money and that some of them had been queuing for four or five days to buy a coat. They document the various tricks that form part of the cultural history of queuing – for example, joining a list to ‘rent’ someone to keep your place in the queue, or hiring them by post and paying them in advance to perform this service. ‘Standing in line became an art.’20 Queues with thousands of people in them were complex social phenomena and called for a high degree of social intelligence and self-organization, especially since they had to do battle with bans, threats and intimidation. Queues of these dimensions represented an alarm signal and a warning to the powers that be and were understood as such. Such ‘buyers’ tourism’ was an integral part of Moscow in the late 1930s, together with its accompanying features: people overnighting in railway stations, doorways and back yards, together with their epidemics, filth and criminality. But even a government edict with the eloquent title ‘The war against queues for consumer goods outside the shops of Moscow’ failed to achieve its purpose. Queues could not simply be prohibited – any more than could bazaars or the black market. They developed their own intelligence-gathering system, provoking a regular cat-and-mouse game with the militia: they would dissolve when the militia turned up and reform when the danger was past. Evidently, this basic condition – the citizen as consumer in the daily struggle for survival – took precedence over ‘politics’ of every kind.
The nature of power in the 1930s is incomprehensible without taking into account this complete exhaustion of the population, which used up all its energies in coping with the problems of everyday life. The shortages of basic goods, the lack of the obvious necessities of civilization and of the routines of normality, weighed upon the life of a people just as heavily as outright repression. And, for those who already had the worst behind them, still lifes featuring champagne and caviar not only promised a better future, they also represented a down-payment in the present. As constituents of the age, shortages and poverty are just as important as hatred, envy and exhaustion. A history of 1937 must also be a history of the physical and emotional exhaustion and of the limits of what can be done to human beings by disrupting their everyday existences but stopping short of the terrorizing use of force. It is not only individuals that can ‘crack up’; societies can crack up too. And without that crack-up of an entire society there would have been no 1937.
21
Open Spaces, Dream Landscapes: Cruising on the Volga, Holidaying on the Red Riviera, Conspiracies in the Dachas
The Guide to the City of Moscow for 1937 lists not just Moscow’s leading hotels – the Metropol, the Savoy, the National and the Novomoskovskaia – but also tourist routes beyond the capital, describing cruises on the Volga and its tributaries. While the guide praises the natural beauties to be met with, the real clue to such a cruise lies elsewhere: it was said to be a journey into a new age, a new social order. The traveller would find himself on board a luxury boat surrounded by every comfort, but from this vantage point he would be able to study the transformations being wrought in the country: the giant Dzerzhinsky tractor factory in Stalingrad, the Molotov automobile plant, the glassworks in Gorky, the new threshing-machine works in Saratov, the Mikoian canned food factory in Astrakhan, the paper and pulp mill in Balakhna, and the rubber and asbestos combine in Yaroslavl. Elsewhere, on the Kama, the tourist could see the chemical works in Berezniki, the paper mill in Perm or the new grain silos in Chelny. A principal artery of the New Russia was the Volga, along whose banks new industries, new towns and a new landscape had sprung up. The ships plying back and forth between Moscow and Astrakhan were, so it was claimed, fitted out with everything necessary for a relaxing journey: spacious cabins, veranda decks, saloons, dining rooms, libraries and an excellent cuisine. ‘A voyage on the Volga is not just a pleasure, but one of the best ways in which to restore the health of nervous and exhausted people.’1 However that may be, every year there were hundreds of thousands of tourists, by no means only foreigners, who might spend two or three weeks indulging in this pleasure. On page 236 of the Guide to the City of Moscow two new routes are announced: the Stalin White Sea Canal and the Moscow–Volga Canal. Both had recently been completed – in 1932 and 1937 – by the forced labour of hundreds of thousands of labourers.
Advertisements for holiday trips are also to be found in ordinary daily newspapers and magazines. Places whose names frequently recur are the traditional spas of the Caucasus – Yessentuki, Piatigorsk, Borjomi – the Crimean resorts – Yalta, Feodosiya, Artek and Gurzuf – and the great Russian rivers.
Figure 21.1 In 1937 a special issue of USSR in Construction was dedicated to the constitution and shows proletarian tourists in front of a hotel on the Black Sea coast, illustrating the ‘right to leisure’.
‘Our Soviet tourism is a form of Cultural Revolution.’
That meant that tourism in Russia was starting up once again. Its development had begun around the turn of the twentieth century, but it had collapsed amid the war and chaos of the Revolution and the Civil War. Intourist, the organization set up especially to cater to foreign visitors, was founded in 1929. If we are to believe the advertising slogans and officialdom’s own assertions, it would seem that they were convinced that the USSR – ‘the Soviet sixth of the world’ – really would become a ‘centre of world tourism’ and that the fascination exerted by the emergence of a new kind of society would attract ‘floods of tourists’ from all corners of the world.
The USSR is a country that has everything: a vast territory, Europe’s highest mountains and a rich fauna, including animals that have died out elsewhere, as well as both sub-tropical and polar landscapes.
Above all, however, the USSR has something to be found nowhere else in the world. Here a new life is being built. Here are relations between human beings that have never been seen before; here are new forms of labour, unprecedented building activity, a cultural revival, a blossoming of new art, the emergence of a new kind of ordinary life, the birth of a new human being – that is what is exciting interest in the Soviet Union.2
But the point was not ‘a new tourism for foreigners’.3 During the First Five-Year Plan, large numbers of organizations were working systematically to develop a new kind of specifically proletarian tourism. Responsibility for tourism was entrusted to specific organizations – the trade unions and professional associations. They developed tourist specialisms: for long-stay and short-stay tourists, for mountaineers and spa guests, skiers, lovers of water sports and ramblers. Tourism was to be more than free time; it was supposed now to serve culture and leisure, further education and cultural enrichment, and, finally, physical training and fitness for military service.
The right to leisure, reinforced by Stalin’s Constitution, finds clear expression in the travel, tourism and excursions that have expanded to unprecedented levels. Thousands of workers spend their annual holidays in tourist activities of every conceivable kind. In capitalist countries tourism is usually no more than a means of entertainment. Our Soviet tourism is a form of Cultural Revolution. To learn more about nature in the Union, its economy, about the everyday life and the culture of the peoples of the USSR, about socialist industry, the making of collective farms and state farms, the new towns, the centres of the national republics, the canals and waterways – all this forms part of the tasks of Soviet tourism and elevates it to a level that cannot fail to impress.4
Moscow, 1937 Page 47