Setting personalities to one side for a moment, let us turn our attention to an issue we touched on when evoking the situation in the Far Eastern party organization. The time has come to broaden our canvas and plunge into the social realities of the 1930s. The state and its ‘psyche’ continued to confront phenomena that were highly characteristic of these tumultuous years. These formed the matrix of what has been called a ‘systemic paranoia’ (a theme that will be explored later). The 1930s were years of unprecedented social flux, caused by tempos of development that the planners themselves did not believe in and by ‘collectivization’ of the peasantry. This experiment in ‘social engineering’ was launched with unparalleled violence whose consequences had not been considered, leaving the country short of food just as it was embarking on an equally unprecedented industrial great leap forward. The decision to collectivize formed part of an ideology that endowed industry with mythical powers: industrialize agriculture and Russia’s rural past would vanish, but food supplies would still be plentiful, as if offloaded from containers. This was to overlook a ‘detail’: the peasantry itself. While the task had to be carried out by peasants, it was directed against them. What followed was not so much the industrialization of agriculture as its nationalization by the state – an aspect of Stalinism we have already encountered.
To sketch the ‘social panorama’ of the USSR in the 1930s and its transformation, we must begin with the population statistics. But simply reciting the figures provided by two censuses – 147 million on 17 December 1926 and 170.6 million on 17 January 1939 – will not do. These significant totals were arrived at rather mechanically and gloss over the dramatic population shifts and losses that occurred in these years. The leadership ordered a census in 1937, but when it yielded a figure below expectations – 162 million – the statisticians were accused of distorting an allegedly much more radiant reality. Their ranks were decimated and a new census was ordered. Its result was virtually dictated in advance. Even so, it was quite an achievement on the part of the surviving statisticians to report a figure of 167,305,749 Soviets – neither more nor less. When this census was re-examined in 1992, experts agreed on a somewhat higher total of 168,870,700 inhabitants, arrived at by minor statistical corrections and additions. According to them, the figure published originally was not distorted, but involved a discrepancy that was perfectly acceptable in census-taking.1 Given that the leadership had much to hide in order to escape responsibility for the population losses occasioned by ‘de-kulakization’ (raskulachivanie), the 1932–3 famine and the wave of purges, it is remarkable that the demographers of the time somehow managed to persuade the Kremlin that too flagrant a falsification would have been more compromising than the truth.
The next set of figures concerns the strategically crucial categories of the available labour force. In 1928, the approximate totals for the non-agricultural labour force amounted to 9.8 million workers and 3.9 million employees, representing some 17.6 per cent of the national total (12.4 per cent for workers, 5.2 per cent for employees). That year, industry employed 3,593,000 workers and 498,000 employees – the engineers and technicians grouped together under the category of ITR (where the R stands for rabotniki, or ‘workers’, as opposed to rabochie, which refers to manual labourers).
The picture changed dramatically towards 1939–40. By then, workers and employees constituted a mass of between 31 and 33 million people, of whom more than 21 million were workers and 11–12 million employees. Together they now represented over half the national labour force. The percentage of employees had risen from 5.2 per cent to 16 per cent of the total. In the key sector of industry, the number of workers had leapt from 3.5 to 11 million and that of employees from around 400,000 to 2 million, while a similar pattern was evident in transport, construction and communications.
Such profound structural shifts brought onto the social stage categories which yielded a labour force substantially different from that of the previous period, and whose emergence prefigured unavoidable changes in class relations and the power structure. To this must be added the massive appearance (or reappearance) of women in the world of work. This point is worth emphasizing, because their participation in production went far beyond their traditional concentration in the textile industry and services. In 1913 women represented 24.5 per cent of the labour force in large-scale industry, mostly in the textile branch. In 1928 the number of women in the ‘workers-employees’ category amounted to 2,795,000, but reached 13,190,000 in 1940, or 39 per cent of the average annual labour force (43 per cent in industry). They were equally present en masse in heavy industry and mining, and their role in industrialization had become decisive.
But this significant development, which seemingly represented progress, was marred by phenomena that rendered this emancipation an ambiguous affair. New positions in the industrial sector; preponderance in medicine, primary and secondary schools; equal access to education; a growing presence in scientific research laboratories – these were certainly advances. But women had little access to positions of administrative power, including in the hospitals and schools where they constituted a majority of employees; and were totally absent from positions of political responsibility (apart from some posts where they had a token presence). The disparity was obvious. Moreover, many jobs in heavy industry and other branches required physical labour often performed without any mechanical aid. Inappropriate for women, such jobs had deleterious effects on birth rates and increased the number of abortions. This situation was further aggravated by the fact that nothing was done to alleviate the burden of the daily household chores women faced with. The price they paid for entering an expanding labour market was very heavy. The patriarchal tradition still deeply ingrained in society likewise permeated the Soviet establishment, whose conservatism was actually on the increase.
The statistical data presented here for the period beginning 1928–9 are often taken from estimates that are much ‘softer’ than the results of the 1926 census. But since the aim is to give readers a sense of the intensity of the transformation, rather than to offer statistical precision, we have preferred (here and subsequently) to draw statistics from various sources and several authors, even if they do not always coincide.2
The term sluzhashchie (employees) was very broadly used to refer to anyone who was not a worker or peasant. The range of categories it covered rendered it rather ineffective, except when applied to office employees. The totals for ‘employees’ included a category of strategic importance for the country’s development: namely, ‘specialists’, or those who had completed their studies in a higher technical institute or specialist secondary establishment. In 1928 this group numbered 521,000 (233,000 with higher education, 288,000 with specialist secondary education). By 1 January 1941 their number had reached 2.4 million (approximately 4 per cent of wage-earners) and represented 23 per cent of the total for ‘employees’; 909,000 had graduated from higher education and 1,492,000 from secondary. Industry employed 310,400 of these – mainly engineers and technicians. Their numbers had quintupled in twelve years. We possess a breakdown of this category of ‘specialists’, done at the end of 1940. It offers data for the technical, medical, economic and legal professions and, with less precision, for teachers, librarians and other cultural professions.
In the statistics we are using, the category of ‘specialists’ stops there: it does not include scientists, artists or writers. If we add the latter, we can very approximately quantify an additional category used by Soviet statistics (and propaganda): the ‘intelligentsia’. It often overlaps with that of ‘specialists’, but not completely. If we add to the figure for people employed in the cultural sphere, as supplied by other tables or sources for 1 January 1941, the category of specialists, we arrive at a figure of 2,539,314.3 Some official sources claimed almost 5 million, with the aim of making the ‘cultural revolution’ proclaimed by the leadership in these years more credible. To the same end, official documents used a different category, which was broader and vaguer: that of ‘people primarily employed in intellectual work’. This category was quite illegitimately identified with the ‘intelligentsia’, making it possible to manipulate the image the government wished to present of the country’s cultural development. As early as 1937, Molotov announced a huge figure for the number of such ‘intellectuals’. The same fluid category probably underlay the imprudent claims subsequently made by Soviet researchers, who declared (as they were obliged to) that ‘by the beginning of the 1940s, the problem of a popular intelligentsia was resolved’. But some of these researchers knew perfectly well that those who had acquired a degree from an institute of higher education accounted for only a percentage of those engaged in ‘primarily intellectual work’. Most of the latter were actually praktiki – that is to say, people who had learnt their profession on the job or during intensive training courses, and who had no professional education, even when their jobs demanded specialist knowledge.4 At the beginning of 1941, inadequate training was particularly widespread among those classified as ‘engineers’ in industry. For every 1,000 workers there were 110 engineers and technicians. But only 19.7 per cent of them had a higher education qualification and 23 per cent a secondary school qualification; 67 per cent were praktiki who had probably never completed the secondary school curriculum. And the picture is similar for other professional groups, all of them swept up into a process of quantitative growth that outstripped the country’s ability to train them properly.
The accelerated pace of industrialization was the inevitable cause of such shortcomings, as well as of the economic and socio-cultural costs that form part of the panorama we are going to describe. If industrial workers around 1929 had on average no more than 3.5 years of primary schooling behind them, rising to 4.2 years by the end of 1939, those engaged in ‘primarily intellectual work’ – simply put, office employees – hardly fared better, especially when the category of ‘specialists’ is deducted from their number. Of ‘employees’, representing 16.6 per cent of the working population, only 3.3 per cent can be counted as ‘specialists’, a majority of whom had only an incomplete secondary education. This did not prevent some writers in the post-Stalin era including them under the rubric of the ‘intelligentsia’.
General data on the educational levels of the active population in the towns and countryside in 1939 help to clarify the problem. For every 1,000 workers, the statistics indicate that 242 had benefited from tertiary or secondary education in the towns and 63 in the countryside. If we separate out higher education, the figure for towns is 32 and for the countryside 3. For secondary education, the figures are 210 and 60 respectively. But this is the crucial point: the statistics for ‘secondary’ education actually include two categories – ‘complete’ and ‘incomplete’ – and it is reasonable to suppose that the majority of individuals concerned did not in fact complete their secondary education.5
The emergence of new groups with a good intellectual education, and the rise in the number of those who might legitimately be included in this prestigious category,6 are undeniable. Nevertheless, we cannot ignore the extent to which the regime inflated the figures. This manipulation (which probably also involved self-deception) sought to embellish the much less edifying reality: the generally low educational level of workers, employees, and even many of those who held responsible positions. We must keep this in mind, because the low cultural level of the whole society formed the social backdrop to Stalinism. The top leadership was sufficiently well-informed to seek to conceal and embellish this frustrating situation.
But these inflated figures – an intelligentsia numbering 5 million – also reveal a fundamental characteristic of the Soviet experience and especially the Stalinist period: its ‘extensive’ character, or propensity to prioritize the quantitative. The 1939 census estimated the number of people employed in ‘primarily intellectual work’ at 13,821,452. A breakdown by educational level in each sector of employment does lead to a figure of close on 5 million (4,970,536, to be precise). But it includes anyone with a general education, however minimal. Moreover, most of them occupied posts requiring a specialist – even higher – education, which they did not possess. Accordingly, they were simply praktiki – a huge category in these years, which remained a strong presence after the war. We even encounter it in the period following Stalin’s death, though by then it was beginning to disappear.
What transpires from this is that the mass of ‘blue-collar’ employees who, as we have seen, mushroomed in the years between the two censuses, contained whole layers of poorly educated and trained people (including sales staff, cashiers, telegraphers), who were nevertheless better paid – sometimes substantially so – than workers. In 1940 the average monthly wage of an industrial worker stood at 30.7 roubles, while that of an office employee was 53.5. This average includes engineers and technicians (ITR). But even when they are excluded, an office worker fared better than a worker.7 We therefore have the following picture: a situation where even limited skills or some basic literacy and numeracy were at a premium, against the backdrop of a much larger labour force with only basic schooling doing manual work and an even larger rural population, which was much less literate than urban workers. But even in the ‘primarily intellectual’ category, education rarely went beyond what could be acquired in seven years of schooling.
The benefits enjoyed by office employees (even though they were sneered at in official propaganda) and the exaggerated figures for members of the ‘intelligentsia’ attest to the obvious: the country’s low starting point. And the generally low level of education was no social equalizer, especially in the bureaucratic agencies. Social differentiation shot up there, and people were acutely aware of it. For when living standards are low, the quantitatively small advantages obtained by some cause a keener sense of injustice among the worst-off and a feeling of solidarity among the beneficiaries, as well as hostility to those who do not enjoy them. And this stands to reason: in conditions of penury, a spare loaf of bread can be a matter of life or death.
The expanding social stratum referred to as ‘employees’ (neither workers nor peasants) was far from being or remaining socially homogeneous. In fact, it covered an ever more disparate social reality, including the category of ‘specialists’, but also an increasingly differentiated hierarchy of officials of every rank in all spheres of life. They were the recipients of most of the privileges and possessed a good deal of power. In everyday life, this growing differentiation among the ruling strata would sooner or later find its expression in official and unofficial language – notably because the powerful but spontaneous trend of ‘differentiation’ became in the mid-1920s, but especially from the early 1930s, a deliberate policy of motivation and social control.
As the 1930s unfolded, social and ideological divisions kept widening, strengthened by this strategy, which is best encapsulated by the term ‘status revolution’. It consisted in distributing perks and privileges to the layer of ‘employees’, with a particular bias towards the ‘intelligentsia’ and the rukovoditeli (‘office-holders’) – categories that overlapped, but were concealed for ideological reasons. This policy was deemed indispensable for normalizing the social climate and imparting stability to the regime. None of those selected for preferential treatment had an easy time of it in these years. Their relations with the top leadership were, to say the least, bumpy. Whenever official policy and ideology suffered setbacks, the higher and lower strata of officialdom served as scapegoats and were sacrificed to popular indignation. This was easy to do, given the gulf between ordinary citizens and these privileged officials, especially when they were in positions of political or economic responsibility. Thus, ‘privileges’, much coveted by those seeking to climb the social ladder, were also a dangerous trap in the political conditions of the period.
Having dealt with the general categories of ‘employees’, ‘specialists’ and ‘intelligentsia’, let us now turn to a sketch of the rukovoditeli – the managers or office-holders.
In Soviet statistical classifications, those holding responsible office – the rukovoditeli – were also called rukovodiashchie rabotniki, sometimes otvet-politrabotniki, and later simply otvet-rabotniki. To be included in this category, one had to be at the head of a structural unit, with at least some subordinates, in an administrative agency of the state, the party, a trade union, or some other official organization. According to the 1926 census there were about 364,816 such managers in firms, on construction sites, in administrative agencies and their departments. In the 1939 census the category numbered 445,244, to which were added 757,010 people occupying lower but still quite powerful positions in enterprises of every kind: there were 231,000 factory directors and other higher ranks in industry; 165,191 people in charge of workshops and other, less important units; and 278,784 chairmen and deputy-chairmen of kolkhozy (sovkhoz administrators were already included under the rubric of ‘firms’). This yields a total of 2,010,275 (924,009 of them in the countryside). Finally, at the summit of the party and state at Union, republican and district levels, we find some 67,670 individuals heading institutions in urban areas and 4,968 doing so in rural areas: a total of 72,638 nachal’niki (‘top bosses’) for the whole country. It was around them, and under their orders, that the rukovoditeli we have just mentioned worked; and the latter were themselves supported by lower-ranking officials, not to mention technical and service personnel (transport, repairs, cleaning).
At this stage we must return to the broad category of the ‘intelligentsia’ in order to bring out various important components of it – i.e. influential writers, scientists, architects, inventors, economists, and other experts whom the military–industrial complex (among others) had urgent need of. This stratum became socially and politically close to those we have just described as high-ranking bosses, and formed an elite with them – or, more precisely, one of the key components of the country’s elite.
The categories of rukovoditeli and ‘intelligentsia’ are important, because they make it possible to identify layers that are now influential, capable of articulating their own interests, exercising pressure, and often getting what they want. The advent of social groups with the ability to acquire powerful positions and defend their interests was something Stalin observed with keen interest and a degree of vigilance. His concern was precisely to prevent the emergence of such potentially ‘negative phenomena’.
The changes in the socio-professional landscape which, as we have seen, included an expansion in the number of workers and the intellectual, administrative and technical strata, were evident throughout the economy, including – though to a lesser degree – in agriculture. Industry, construction and transport, as well as education and research, were inextricably bound up with the country’s urbanization. And industrialization was itself a powerful factor in urbanization, as was the proliferation of educational, research, public health and administrative institutions.
Urbanization was also the vehicle for a much broader process, signalling a crucial phase in Russia’s history: the disappearance of one kind of society (our subject here) and the emergence of another, quite different one. The changing ratios between urban and rural populations take us to the heart of the matter. The brief period under discussion simply set the stage for a rapid, decisive turn, whose initial manifestations in the 1930s were a disparate set of phenomena inherent in a transitional phase, dominated by clashes between intermingling social strata and cultures. Things would only take shape in the longer term, even if this ‘long term’ was not long in coming. The 1930s, meanwhile, were years of an initial, profoundly destabilizing impetus, whose repercussions were felt throughout the system.
The numbers and relative weight of the rural versus the urban population were almost constantly subjects of heated discussion among statisticians, demographers and politicians. According to results of the 1926 population census, city inhabitants reached the number of 26,314,114 (17.9 per cent), while the rural population reached 120,718,801 (82.1 per cent). The noted specialist on the peasantry V. P. Danilov claimed that the percentage of the peasants was actually higher (84 per cent according to him). He argued that census takers and demographers included in the category of ‘towns’ settlements that were at that time nothing more than large villages and thus artificially increased the weight of the urban population.8 This correction affords a good introduction to one of the predominant features of the period: the ongoing urbanization occurred against the background of what were still profoundly rural realities and roots. This was something registered by many visitors, who at the end of the 1920s observed the extent to which in the cities (Moscow included) ‘country and city are still playing hide-and-seek’ (Walter Benjamin). The prevalence of rural origins in the present urban population was, in many ways, ubiquitous; and this socio- historical reality was far from having disappeared despite ‘collectivization’ and other ‘modernizing’ strategies. Exaggerated claims for the size of the ‘intelligentsia’, inflated pronouncements about the achievements of planning, the trumpeting of the advent of ‘socialism’, decreed on Stalin’s whim in the annus mirabilis of 1937 – these conveyed a need to accelerate, at least verbally, the completion of a historical stage that was still anchored in the past. But this in no way diminished the intensity and agonies of the transition: quite the reverse.
For the USSR in its pre-September 1939 borders, the January 1939 census recorded a total population of 170.5 million inhabitants, 114.4 million in the countryside (67 per cent) and 56.1 million in the towns (33 per cent). Accordingly, the urban population had doubled in twelve years, increasing by 30 million – an exceptionally rapid rate of urbanization by any standards. The annual growth rate for the urban population is eloquent testimony: 2.7 per cent from 1926 to 1929; 11.5 per cent from 1929 to 1933; and 6.5 per cent from 1933 to 1939. The average for the years between the two censuses of 1926 and 1939 was 9.4 per cent a year.9
The raw statistics are no less eloquent: between 1926 and 1929 the urban population grew by 950,000 a year; between 1929 and 1932 by 1.6 million a year; and between 1933 and 1939 by 2.34 million a year. In 1940 the urban population stood at 63.1 million inhabitants (this included 7 million in recently annexed territories). But as we have seen, this urban world was still profoundly enmeshed with the countryside and the peasantry, which remained the substantial majority of the population and served as ‘reservoir’ for the whole social structure. The main social changes in this short period can be encapsulated in an interaction of three powerful ‘transformers’: at one pole, collectivization ‘de-ruralized’ the countryside; at the other, urbanization did the same; and industrialization, another potent demiurge, operated at both poles.
As a result of this transformation, the growth of towns and the influx of peasants into them assumed gigantic proportions. In the years 1926–39, towns swelled by 29.6 million inhabitants – 18.5 million of them new arrivals; 5.3 million through natural growth (births, marriages, and so on); and 5.8 million through administrative decisions to attach larger rural settlements to the category of ‘towns’. In 1939, 62 per cent of new town dwellers thus hailed from the countryside: endogenous population growth in towns and ‘urban settlements’ accounted for only 17.8 per cent; while the remaining 19.5 per cent became town dwellers by administrative fiat – meaning that 5.8 million peasants acquired such status without having to migrate.
This whole process was not restricted to the 640 towns inherited from Tsarist Russia. Approximately 450 new towns were created in the space of thirteen years. Seventy-one towns had a population of 100–500,000 – in 1926 only twenty-eight of such size existed – while eight had in excess of 500,000 (as against three in 1926). Moreover, whereas in the period 1897–1926 the fastest-growing towns were the largest ones (over 100,000 inhabitants), the years 1926–39 witnessed the development, under the impact of industrialization, of medium-sized towns (those of 50–100,000 inhabitants). Many urban areas were created in an ‘empty spot’ – in other words, around a new industrial building site. In 1926, 17.4 per cent of the population was urban. Thirteen years later, the percentage had leapt to 32.9 per cent.10
However, neither the figure for average annual growth, nor the overall total of 30 million new town dwellers, can convey the intensity of the turmoil entailed by such urban expansion. The 18.5 million peasants did not simply arrive and stay. This figure, already enormous, is the end result of population flows in opposite directions. On the one hand, millions of peasants tried out living in towns or, in the case of richer peasants, sought refuge from persecution there; on the other hand, masses of people abandoned – even fled – urban areas. This was a veritable human maelstrom.
As can readily be imagined, the country was scarcely prepared to deal with such mass migration. As a result of bad harvests and grain procurement crises, living standards had fallen considerably, as is indicated by the dramatic housing problem. Shelter was invariably to be found in barracks or in the corner of someone’s room. The best scenario was where a family had a room of its own in some overcrowded communal apartment. Such difficulties were not restricted to newcomers. The housing figures underscore the gravity of the crisis: workers’ barracks (often a mere roof, with no amenities) and the growing number of communal apartments (one room per family and one kitchen for four or more families) became an integral part of the Soviet urban landscape then and for years to come.
In 1928, housing was considered ‘normal’ in terms of hygiene and comfort if it possessed 6 square metres per person. But this, however modest, was just a dream – proposed as an objective in the first five-year plan and never met. In the interim, workers had to find some miserable accommodation or a corner in neighbouring villages, far from their workplace. In many industrial enterprises, the situation was actually deteriorating; apartments were falling into decay and did not meet minimal hygiene standards. On 6 January 1936, inhabitants of new urban settlements in European Russia on average had 4.4 square metres per person, compared with only 3.2 square metres in Siberia. The data for services and amenities in towns were depressing. In European Russia and Siberia, indicators for sewers, running water and central heating were extremely low. Electricity was the only exception: electric lighting was available in 92.3 per cent of houses in Russia (70 per cent in Western Siberia). In contrast, only 22.8 per cent of houses in Russia and 5 per cent in Siberia had sewers and only 43 per cent and 19 per cent, respectively, had water mains.
Such data provide a good indication of living standards in these years. They also give us an inkling of the difficulties of cohabitation in overcrowded housing, where privacy was impossible and personal and family life must have been strained to the limit. Undernourishment, poor housing, the lack of hygiene, physical and nervous exhaustion due to too little rest, not to mention the extensive participation in the labour force of women, who endured the same pressures as men (if not more) – these explain the decline in birth rates in the 1930s. In the early years of this decade, economic difficulties, famine (especially in 1932–3) and other hardships depressed population growth. Food shortages, rationing, intensive migration, ‘de-kulakization’, and constant flows in and out of the towns shattered traditional family life and relations within families.
From 1923 to 1928, the population had grown by an unprecedented 4 million a year, thanks to lower death rates and higher birth rates, especially in the countryside. In 1928, the birth rate was 42 per thousand, the mortality rate 18, and the rate of population growth 24 per cent. A quite different picture emerges between 1928 and 1940: rates of population growth fell, especially in 1930–1, and went on falling thereafter. In 1932, birth rates exceeded death rates by only 5.6 per cent. And for the first time, 1933 witnessed a negative demographic balance in the towns of European Russia. The years 1930–5 must have been especially alarming. In 1938, population growth improved in the same areas and returned to its 1929 level (20 per cent), before declining to 19.2 per cent in 1939 and 13.2 per cent in 1940 because of the threat of war and also because of the smaller number of people of marriageable age, resulting from the losses incurred in the First World War and Civil War.11
It is difficult to tell whether these statistics, drawn from Soviet sources, tell the real story. It is true that the decline in the birth rate can possibly be attributed in part to a long-term trend. But the fact that the government took drastic measures to halt and reverse the decline suggests that it possessed even more alarming figures. An improvement in living standards, although attempted, was not easy to achieve at the end of the 1930s, given the increase in arms production. Greater emphasis was placed on such draconian measures as criminalizing abortion (27 June 1936), which were largely ineffective and far from enlightened. Neither crude pro-birth policies – the image of the ‘heroic mother’ (an honorary title and medal bestowed on mothers for bearing ten children and a source of many jokes) – nor the butchery of women condemned to back-street abortions can account for the small improvement officially claimed for 1937 (at the height of the purges). It was followed by a new decline in 1939, back down to the 1935 level. By now, of course, an additional factor was at work: the mobilization of men into the army.