Across the Revolutionary Divide.

Russia and the

USSR, 18611945
Theodore R. Weeks, Blackwell Publishing, 2011
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The Modernizing Decade: 1930s

The decade starting with the Five - Year Plan (1928) and ending with
the beginning of World War II (September 1939) can justifiably be termed
revolutionary. Not in a political sense: here nothing significant
changed, as Stalin had already consolidated his personal power by 1928,
but in economic and social terms. In many ways the economy of the USSR
of 1928 was not so terribly different from the Russian Empire of 1913:
most Soviet citizens lived on the countryside, industry had recovered to
1913 levels but had barely advanced beyond them; transport and
agricultural methods remained backward. To be sure, the large estates of
the landlords had been seized and divided up by the peasants in 1917,
but this had the negative consequences for the overall economy (though
not for peasants, who ate better) because there was now less grain for
export. At the beginning of this period, the USSR was fifth
among industrialized countries more or less the same rank as
in 1912 but by the eve of World War II only the USA surpassed
the Soviet Union in industrial output. While this decade was full of
impressive economic achievement, it also witnessed enormous human
suffering, with millions dislocated, working under miserable and
dangerous conditions, living crowded in tiny and unsanitary apartments,
and barely able to obtain the most basic food and clothing. Besides the
human suffering, many later historians and economists have argued that
the crash industrializing program, while impressive in the short run,
saddled the USSR with a cumbersome economic system that was unable
todevelop normally in later decades. In this way Stalinist modernization
planted the seeds of the eventual economic implosion of the USSR more
than a half century later.

For the Five - Year Plan to succeed, three factors

were crucial: sufficient labor, adequate bread for the
industrial workers, and political stability (i.e., no strikes or
protests against government policy). The cruel and brutal crash
collectivization campaign of 1929 30 and the subsequent less violent
but more thorough process leading to almost total collectivization of
agriculture by the mid - 1930s achieved all three of these goals. The
campaign of dekulakization preemptively decapitated any peasant
protest by arresting and exiling to Siberia and central Asia millions of the
most prosperous peasants (including their families). This had the
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double advantage, from the Soviet point of view, of nipping possible rural
dissent in the bud by depriving the countryside of leadership, and of
providing labor for the cities (and, in many cases, slave labor for the
Gulag). At the same time it demoralized the peasantry and deprived the
countryside of the most dynamic individuals. Later Soviet problems with
agricultural inefficiency can be traced back to the brutality of
collectivization.
From the point of view of liberal economics (or simple humanity),
dekulakization was a catastrophe, as many of those designated kulak
destroyed their
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houses and slaughtered their farm animals for one last feast rather than
cede their hard earned property to the collective farm. 30 But looking at
the matter with the icy gaze of Stalinist modernity, the kulaks needed to
be liquidated as a class in order to clear the way for modern Soviet
agriculture, which was to be characterized by large state - owned farms
cultivated by machines. In 1929 a tractor was a rare sight in the Soviet
countryside, and even in 1940 there were not enough for each collective
farm. In order to use this resource more rationally the party set up
Machine Tractor Stations (MTS) throughout the countryside. Along with
the MTS party cells were established to report on local conditions and
carry out propaganda work. The MTS, having control over crucial
machinery for plowing, sowing, and harvesting, could also be used to
reward or punish collective farms (by providing them with or depriving
them of the machinery at crucial times). The MTS operated throughout
the Stalinist period and were abolished only in 1958.
The industrialization drive took place in a heated
atmosphere of mass enthusiasm or, if one prefers, of mass
hysteria. Slogans like There is no fortress that Bolsheviks cannot storm
abounded. It is not by coincidence that enormous mass festivals were
orchestrated by the Soviet authorities at this time: the entire country was
harnessed to make good its backwardness, to catch up and
overtake western countries in a mere decade. At times enthusiasm
swept away cool rational accounting, in particular production goals were
pushed ever higher, at times to absurd levels. To take one already mentioned example, the original First Five - Year Plan called for an almost
doubling of coal production, from 35 to 68 tons. Then a later version of
the plan raised the goal by a further 50 percent (actual output at plan s
end in 1932 was 64 tons). As one branch of production enthusiastically
pushed up its goal for the plan, others needed to do so both for political
and economic reasons, to avoid lagging behind and to avoid production
bottlenecks. The rush to increase output goals was in direct contradiction
to the very purpose of central planning; that is, to oversee the entire
economy and set production goals for each individual industry
accordingly. At the same time enthusiasm fulfilled an important political

and psychological need, as well as prodding workers to expend ever greater efforts for the sake of production.

Crash industrialization brought with it unforeseen

problems. Planners had expected that unemployment
an embarrassing problem during the NEP years would
be reduced but not disappear entirely. Instead almost
immediately labor shortages developed . Factory managers
scrambled to find workers; skilled machinists and others with
factory experience could demand better wages and changed jobs
frequently; in 1930 workers in the coal and iron industry changed jobs
on average three times per year. One source of labor was the female
population: increasingly women filled jobs both in industry and
throughout the economy. Another way to deal with labor shortages was

to increase efficiency per worker.

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Here propaganda and enthusiasm was combined with material prizes
for efficient workers, as in the Stakhanovite movement, named for coal
miner Aleksei Stakhanov who in 1935 produced 14 times his daily norm.
Other workers were exhorted to follow Stakhanov s example; the most
successful not only won praise and material rewards but in some
exceptional cases were even invited to the Kremlin to meet Stalin
and other high party dignitaries. Other workers viewed Stakhanovism
as an attempt to squeeze more labor out of them for the same pay.
Stakhanovites tended not to be generally popular; some were even
murdered bytheir fellow workers.
Stakhanovism was only one among a number of measures taken by the
Soviet government to assure adequate labor supplies to the growing
factories. The traditional seven - day week was abolished in 1931
and replaced with five days of labor followed by one day of rest.
This had the double advantage of allowing plants to function without
a break (not all workers had the same sixth day off) while
abolishing Sunday (in Russian the same word as resurrection ) with its
religious connotations. But this new week was unpopular and in 1940 the
USSR returned to the traditional seven - day week. The need for skilled
labor forced up the wage differential between skilled workers and
unskilled laborers, to the disgruntlement of some communists. Stalin
himself felt it necessary to specifically denounce egalitarianism in pay,
uravnilovka , as a petit - bourgeois prejudice.
Gradually labor conditions were tightened up, favoring enterprise
over worker. Internal passports were introduced in December 1932
and withheld from collective farmers, who could now migrate to
the cities only with special permission. Also in that year workers who
failed to show up to work for a single day without reason could be
dismissed. In 1939 absenteeism was defined down to appearing more
than twenty minutes late to work and in 1940 failing to appear for work

was made a criminal offence. Given the constant and acute labor
shortages, one may doubt that factory directors often applied these strict
measures, but the mere fact of their existence gave management one
more tool against workers. In fact, though, the carrot was used more than
the stick: workers who produced more than the norm were rewarded with
special access to consumer goods, factory housing, and other perks.
Historians often use the word gigantomania when discussing the
Stalinist
modernization. Like the enthusiastic campaigns to ratchet up production
goals, gigantic projects helped convince communists, the general
populace, and the world that the USSR was truly constructing a new kind
of modernity. Among such enormous projects were the Volga White Sea
Canal (built using mainly convict labor), the hydroelectric dam at
Dneprostroi in Ukraine, which began producing electricity in 1934, and
the huge metallurgical combine at Kuznetsstroi in western Siberia. Soviet
cities were also to receive huge new buildings, foremost among them a
new Palace of Soviets in Moscow that was to have been the world s
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The impressive achievements in production hid less attractive aspects of
everyday life in the Soviet Union. While industrial workers were not
going hungry, obtaining basic foodstuffs demanded a significant
investment of time and energy. Finding basic food and clothing
meant standing in line, sometimes for hours. Clothing was dingy,
of poor quality, and expensive. One of the reasons for the huge
growth rates was the concentration of investment in heavy industry.
Housing and light industry for consumer products, on the other hand,
were starved of resources. While Soviet cities grew significantly,
with urban dwellers doubling from 26 to 52 million between 1926
and 1937. At the same time housing stock remained nearly
stagnant. Workers were typically housed in barracks and dormitories
while many had to make due by renting a corner of a room, cordoned
off by a cloth curtain. Only the luckiest or most privileged had an
apartment for themselves. During the Great Terror of the late 1930s,
one motivation to denounce one s colleagues or neighbors was simply to
obtain their apartments, a practice common enough to be satirized in
Mikhail Bulgakov s novel Master and Margarita .
In many respects everyday life in the USSR of the 1930s
resembled a Hobbesian
nightmare: poor, nasty, brutish, and short. On the other hand, as Scott
recounts in his memoirs, many Soviet citizens were willing to accept the
brutal conditions of the present day as a necessary condition for a better
future. After all, early industrialization in England or the United States had
involved a great deal of poverty and suffering, and in the USSR the
process of industrial growth was being concentrated into a much shorter
period. Stalinist festivals and other expressions of mass enthusiasm were
designed to encourage the feeling that while today everyday conditions

were admittedly inadequate, today s efforts would give birth to

tomorrow s radiant future. 39 Much later, after World War II, many
Soviet
citizens would proudly and fondly remember this difficult period as one
full of hope, joy, and accomplishment paving the way for a radically new,
just, and prosperous society.