The Soviet Century By Moshe Lewin - 9

Had it consisted only in breakneck industrialization, the policy launched by the new leadership under Stalin’s firm control in 1928–9 would have been unprecedented. But this huge economic effort occurred at a time when grain procurement was becoming increasingly problematic. And industrialization was perceived as being in danger unless an equally radical restructuring was undertaken in agriculture. As in the industrial sphere, this was conceived as a great leap forward, with the application of industrial methods to agriculture. Such industrialization seemed to be the quickest way of revolutionizing the agrarian economy. Once machines had replaced ploughs (the swing plough in some instances), spectacular results were bound to follow fast.

By the end of 1939, kolkhoz members ( kolkhozniki ) numbered 29 million, or 46.1 per cent of the working population. To these we must add 1,760,000 people employed in sovkhozy (state-owned agricultural factories) and similar agricultural enterprises, and the 530,000 employees of the Machine Tractor Stations (MTS). 1 But whereas in industry workers entered a pre-existing system of factories and jobs, the social and productive system in agriculture was very different. ‘Reconstructing’ it by coercive bureaucratic fiat, without seeking the producers’ consent, amounted to expropriation of a huge mass of peasants. The unanticipated consequences of this policy were to weigh upon Soviet agriculture, as well as the Soviet state, until the very end.

A leading article in an agricultural journal indicates a key syndrome. In it, comrade Krivtsov, secretary of the Matveevo-Kurgansky MTS in the Rostov oblast, was criticized for not having done adequate political work among the tractor brigades. Without such work, they would never meet with success in the harvest campaign. It turns out that tractor-drivers do not read the newspapers addressed to them, are oblivious to government decrees, and are unaware that they are entitled to double pay during the first fifteen to twenty days of harvesting, on condition that they fulfil the norms.

The journal sought to publicize the warning Central Committee Secretary Andreev had issued in his speech to the Eighteenth Party Congress, where he attacked those who believed that agriculture could get along fine by its own devices. Andreev was right: ‘nationalized’ agriculture was incapable of functioning properly without massive political intervention, which did not just mean agitprop. For him, politics included a readiness to apply strong pressure to the producers. And agriculture now had to be managed by the local government and party agencies in exactly the same way as a ministry ran its branch, issuing orders to be executed. This meant pressure by the Agriculture Commissariat at every level, often down to the individual kolkhoz or sovkhoz, as well as state and party pressure on the commissariat and, via the party, police and local administration, directly on producers.

This involved constructing detailed plans for every stage of agricultural production for each district, which were prepared or approved by the centre. As often as was necessary, a swarm of emissaries would descend like locusts on the district and its kolkhozes to oversee the seasonal work, which was regarded as a state-run campaign. Particular attention was paid to the threshing: during this crucial stage, state officials, and specially mobilized squads, were dispatched to collect the grain quota due to the state, even before any had reached the peasants. Even more perfidious was the behaviour of a pyramid of special commissions created to assess the expected crop, which often resorted to statistical manipulation to ‘decree’ the size of the future harvest in advance and tax the peasants in accordance with these inflated estimates. The accumulated pressure was a disincentive to working the land honestly and helped to weaken, even eradicate, the peasant’s natural attachment to the land and agricultural work. Peasants now tended to reserve most of their effort for their household plots. Without the latter, not only the peasants but the whole country would have been starving. Despite their ridiculously small size, these plots played a crucial role in feeding the countryside and also the towns. They were all that remained to the peasants for preserving themselves as a class and their villages as viable communities.

Years later, in the post-Stalinist period, and notwithstanding numerous improvements and reforms aimed at revitalizing agricultural production, the legacy of this voluntaristic agrarian policy was still exacting a humiliating price: while the ‘collectives’ were equipped with vast fields and fleets of tractors, and the rural population remained sizeable, the country was obliged to import grain from the USA.

The case of Soviet agriculture is an especially dramatic example of modernization running out of control. The state saddled itself with the task of managing the whole of agriculture from above. The bulk of the nation – the peasantry – now performed its productive tasks sluggishly. And even this could be obtained only under the pressure of an imposing mechanism combining control, incentives and repression. The kolkhoz system was a hybrid structure containing incompatible principles: the kolkhoz, the MTS and the private plot were forced to coexist uneasily, without ever becoming either a cooperative, a factory, or a private farm. The term ‘collective’ was wholly inappropriate.

‘Collectivization’ – about which there was nothing collective – also had a profound influence on the state system. As we have said, dictatorships come in different shapes and sizes. In the case of the USSR, the regime now had to equip itself with the vast coercive apparatus required to compel the bulk of the population to do work it had hitherto done of its own accord.

Yet whatever the fate of Soviet agriculture as a mode of production, the processes that led to the historic transformation of Russia’s social landscape were accelerated by the new farming methods. Although ongoing, the transition from the millennial rural past to a new era was now in full swing. The industrial-urban component was advancing at full tilt, while the rural component, despite stagnation and upheavals, remained a massive presence. In other words, the transition was characterized by an explosive mixture of large-scale modern technical-administrative structures and a rural society which, sociologically and culturally, still lived a traditional existence with its own horizons and rhythms.

Tsarist Russia had experienced a comparable contradiction. Intense waves of capitalist development had swept over a deeply rural country dominated by an absolutist state, bringing in their wake all sorts of imbalances and crises. In the Soviet case, however, the waves of industrialization were even more intense and, in contrast to what happened in Tsarist Russia, the activity was directly steered by a reinvigorated, determined state, prone to repression and ruled by a tight leadership group very conscious of its power. Failure to take on board the collision between a developing industrial society and the reaction – or lack of reaction – of the peasantry, as well as the impact of this complex mix on the political regime, renders the course of Russian and Soviet history in the twentieth century – 1917, Leninism, Stalinism, and the final downfall – unintelligible.

We must therefore reiterate that the country’s rural component, coerced by the regime into abandoning its centuries-old ways, exacted its revenge, as it were, by compelling the regime further to strengthen its already imposing administrative-repressive machinery. For without it, it would not have extracted much from its agriculture. A string of other, equally decisive consequences followed, starting with what we might call the ‘ruralization’ of the towns. The influx of peasants seeking work or fleeing the countryside made urban expansion a major problem for the regime. Flight to the cities was ipso facto a massive rural exodus. It was a precautionary measure on the part of those who felt threatened, or the outcome of the persecution suffered by those who had been forcibly displaced to remote regions. The exodus to the towns occurred at a time when the newly established kolkhoz system was too weak to perform its seasonal tasks.

Another source of flight to the towns was the thousands of tractor and combine drivers and other agricultural specialists. Having received intensive training, or even during their professional courses, they preferred to escape to an urban environment. This reflected the contradiction inherent in using material incentives to inflect behaviour: the state trained them to go and work in the fields, but they preferred to depart for the city.

Data on social flows, the chaotic population movements in and out of towns, ‘ruralized’ urbanization, the barracks culture typical of the urban mentality and way of life, the brutal treatment of labour on construction sites and in the kolkhozy: all these features, especially the last, must be modulated by taking into account another phenomenon. At a time when construction sites and workplaces needed large amounts of manpower, we find a rapid turnover of labour, to the despair of authorities and factory managers. Workers quit their factories, which even in peacetime was regarded as an act of desertion. Often young, they would disappear into their native villages with the support and connivance of the local administration. The same reasons that prompted the higher authorities to intensify coercion and repression against labour turnover and desertion led local authorities, especially in the countryside, to shelter young people who had fled their factory, or some other job which was too onerous, in order to join kolkhozy or sovkhozy. More puzzling, and less well studied, is the indulgence shown by courts and prosecutors in this regard. Concerned with local interests, or simply not regarding young people who refused to work somewhere against their will as criminals, prosecutors declined to pursue such cases and judges handed down lenient, non-custodial sentences.

The Stalinist state had restored the tradition of the Tsarist ancien régime , which (at least until the abolition of serfdom in 1861) treated the labour force as attached to its workplace ( glebae adscripti ). This was a major feature of Stalinism – with one proviso: social actors, including administrative agencies, often diluted the severity of the dictatorial state through escape-hatches and loopholes created by objective conditions and interests. These qualifications and ‘relaxations’ of the dictatorship’s iron grip should not be overlooked. This proviso applies to Stalin’s repressive policy in its entirety in the 1930s. It is true that the ‘security plus terror’ formula was an almost intrinsic key component of the unfolding Stalinist system, justifying the critical attention it has received. We ourselves shall have much to say about the regime’s horrors, but with the same qualifications as apply to the treatment of the specific problem of manpower. The whole set of repressive and terrorist measures has too often monopolized the attention of researchers, at the expense of the broader panorama of social changes and state building. Yet the latter is indispensable if we wish to arrive at a deeper understanding of the many and varied interactions in this complex edifice. That is why we are endeavouring here to examine at least some of the elements that allow us to delve into the social processes under way in these years.

The overall climate of the period can be encapsulated in the following features: urbanization, industrialization, collectivization, purges and show trials, the spread of education, an often demagogic depreciation of culture, the mobilization of energies and people, increasing criminalization of many aspects of life, hectic creation of administrative structures, and so on. All these, and more, belong to the tumultuous 1930s. These momentous events and processes, which occurred almost simultaneously, were interrelated, and impacted upon one another, generated historical changes at a rarely equalled tempo – all in an atmosphere of great confusion, even chaos. It stands to reason that the political system cannot be understood independently of the retroactive effects of its own initiatives. In other words, the political system that launched the upheaval was in turn shaped by its outcome and emerged as a very particular kind of dictatorship.

Consequently, social history cannot be ignored when dealing with the ‘political system’ or, more specifically, the state-party complex.

The word tekuchka (which can be rendered as ‘spontaneous mobility of manpower’) adequately encapsulates the scale of the population movements in all directions, especially during the earlier years. Millions of people circulated throughout the country: they flooded to towns and major construction sites, but then sometimes abandoned them; they fled the countryside and the threat of being expropriated and deported as a ‘kulak’; they went to receive training or take a new job, which they left with equal rapidity. These different forms of tekuchka merged into a massive social flux, difficult to control, with a population constantly on the move, on roads or in trains, throughout the country.

Such was the backdrop that led to the situation being considered explosive. The introduction of the internal passport and the propiska (obligatory registration with the police in towns, in order to enjoy residence rights) was only one of the means adopted by the regime to restore order to the country. On the one hand, it resorted to the full panoply of administrative and repressive measures; on the other, it experimented with social and economic strategies.

The rudimentary planning of the urban environment was, in its initial stage, an inherent part and significant source of this social instability. Even in later years, when a degree of stability obtained, one important sociological feature persisted: in addition to partly ruralized towns, Stalin’s Russia still had 67 per cent of its population in the countryside and a sizeable chunk of its working population remained pre-industrial, notwithstanding the tractors of the MTS. Their living environment continued to be composed in the main of a small or medium-sized village, sometimes clustered with other villages, but often dispersed and isolated. Larger, more populous villages certainly existed, for the most part in some areas of the steppe or the Northern Caucasus; but they were much less numerous. Moreover, they shared common features with other villages that sharply distinguished them from large towns. The neighbourhood networks that governed the system of social relations within the community; the seasonal rhythm of economic activity; a profoundly religious culture permeated by magical beliefs – these had a powerful impact on the everyday life and behaviour of rural populations.

Creating an urban culture and adapting to it is a protracted process. In the short period we are exploring here, the transition from one way of life to another would have been a very unsettling experience even in more favourable conditions. However basic they might have been, towns – particularly the larger ones – represented an enormously complex phenomenon for people who had just arrived from villages. A single point of contrast between the two worlds says it all: whereas in large towns the number of professions exercised was approximately 45,000, the corresponding figure for the countryside was 120.

Shortage of food and accommodation, to cite only the most evident and onerous aspects of urban existence, pointed to a state of crisis that could only exacerbate the difficulties encountered by rural migrants in the urban-industrial world. In a village, everyone lived in the familiar universe of their home, their livestock and their neighbours, almost all of whom they knew personally; and such familiarity translates into a veritable psychological need. By contrast, the anonymous crowd in towns is readily seen as hostile by definition. Other features we have already mentioned made adapting yet more onerous. In addition, Soviet towns were largely inhabited by young people in these years and insecurity was prevalent (‘hooliganism’ was the name given to a phenomenon that plagued towns). But this also made it easier for young people who had arrived straight from their village to assimilate; and they rapidly abandoned the values of their elders.

For many peasants, the only way to cope with the challenges of a difficult environment lay in preserving as many village traditions as possible. This defensive behaviour revived the rural character of many towns inherited from Tsarist Russia, recreating within them a hybrid environment and way of life that remained an enduring feature of Soviet urbanization. We must therefore insist on something that should by now be obvious: when it went to war in 1941, Stalin’s Russia was not yet an important urban-industrial power, even though it was on the way to becoming one. Sociologically, but also culturally, it was in many respects an extension of its agrarian past, including in the very mould of its modernizing state.