These population shifts resulted from industrialisation, but also from the regime's systematic policies of repression, particularly against peasants, socially marginalised groups and certain national minorities. Major population shifts also came about as the result of a dramatic increase in forced labour populations, and from mass migration due to famine. During the early 1930s, de-kulakisation depleted rural areas, especially in the western parts of the USSR, of supposed class enemies.[10] Famine took its toll, either by killing large numbers of people or by forcing others to flee stricken areas. After 1932, mass deportations of peasants tapered off as the regime turned its attention to 'cleansing' major urban and industrial areas of socially marginalised and economically unproductive populations. Using newly enacted residence laws, police conducted mass sweeps of cities, industrial areas and border regions to rid them of what were described as 'anti-Soviet' and 'socially dangerous' elements - criminals, wanderers, the indigent and the dispossessed, even orphans - the social detritus of Stalin's modernisation policies.[11] At the same time, the regime began large-scale deportations ofcertain nationalities. In the western borderlands, police singled out Poles and Germans for removal as early as 1932 and 1933. Deportations of Finnish-related populations began in Karelia and around Leningrad in earnest in the middle 1930s and continued up through the Finnish war in 1940. Fearful of'Asian' solidarity with the Japanese expansion in China, Soviet authorities deported 172,000 Soviet citizens of Korean descent from Far Eastern border areas in 1937 and 1938. During the Second World War, Stalin ordered the removal of a number ofpopulations supposedly sympathetic to German occupation forces and desirous of achieving national independence. The most infamous of these deportations resulted in the removal of the entire Chechen people and the Crimean Tatar population, shipped en masse to Central Asia.[12]
Most deported populations, some several million over the course of the 1930s, were resettled either in penal labour colonies or in the infamous forced labour camps in the eastern interior areas of the USSR. Large sections of the Urals, Siberia and Central Asia became the favoured dumping ground for unwanted or supposedly dangerous populations, as did the northern districts of European Russia. The turnover of camp populations varied dramatically from year to year due to death, escape and release of prisoners, but overall the camp populations grew steadily from about 179,000 in 1930 to half a million by 1934. The huge influx of prisoners during the Great Purges in 1937 and 1938 swelled camp populations to 1.5 million by 1940. Similarly, the populations of police-run prisons and colonies jumped during the 1930s, reaching 254,354 in 1935, according to official figures, and 887,635 by 1938. Slightly more than 250,000 of those held in prisons and labour colonies in 1938 were located in the Urals, Central Asia and Siberia. If the number of prisoners held in labour camps grew rapidly throughout the 1930s, the numbers of those deported as kulaks peaked in the early 1930s and then declined steadily. As noted above, however, most of the peasant deportations were also to the newly opened colonial areas in the eastern part of the country. In 1932, for example, nearly 1.1 million of the 1.3 million 'special settlers' - the kulak spetspereselentsy - lived in the Urals, Kazakhstan or in the agricultural regions of western Siberia.[13]
The Soviet regime exploited these populations ruthlessly as a source of extractive labour, and the Gulag and settlement colonies became, in time, an integral part of the Soviet state's economic planning system. This was especially true for the colonial development of raw materials industries such as logging and precious metal mining, but also for agriculture. As a result of these policies, the eastern regions of the country experienced a remarkable increase in overall population during the 1930s. So much so, that the head of the state's statistical agency, I. A. Kraval', recommended to the Politburo that the 1937 census undercount the population of Siberia so as to hide the extent of the demographic shift to that part of the country.
Along with massive migration, both forced and unforced, Stalinist policies also created social dislocation on a massive scale, and authorities were hard pressed to cope with the resulting social disorder. In the first half of the 1930s, especially, waves of migrants, both legal and illegal, overwhelmed local communities and even large cities. The population of abandoned, runaway or orphaned children rose rapidly from approximately 129,000 in 1929 to well over half a million by 1934, and these figures counted only numbers that were officially registered in the woefully inadequate and understaffed children's homes. Abandoned or orphaned mostly as the result of policies of de-kulakisation and conditions of famine, hundreds of thousands of children made their way to cities. Having no home and no work, socially alienated because of their background and the violence that made them homeless, the population of abandoned, runaway or orphaned children contributed to the growing and serious waves of petty criminality that marked city streets, marketplaces, train stations and other public areas. Millions of other people - rough peasants and dispossessed populations - also poured into the cities, factories and industrial construction sites. People were fleeing collectivisation and famine, running from penal colonies or just seeking a better life. Shanty towns, slums and raw campsites mushroomed on the outskirts of cities. Sometimes, whole villages appeared at the gates of shops, negotiating directly with foremen for work, food and shelter.
The sudden influx ofmigrants into cities and industrial sites strained public services and scarce housing and food supplies, and focused all that was modern and brutally primitive about Soviet socialism during the inter-war decade. Novosibirsk, for example, the administrative centre ofwestern Siberia, shone with the gleam of Soviet modernity. The district executive committee building, designed by the famous architect A. D. Kriachkov, and completed in 1933, won honourable mention at the Paris architectural fair in 1938. The city lavished funds on construction of the largest opera house east of Moscow in 1934, another architectural marvel and a palace of culture for the people. In contrast, the city of Barnaul, an industrial pit five hours by train south of Novosibirsk, could boast only two city buses in 1935. These served an impoverished population of 92,000. The city could not generate enough electricity to illuminate street lights. Thousands of people suffered, while others died, of intestinal infections and malaria due to a lack of clean drinking water. Much of the city's population lived in the squalour of makeshift shanty huts and bathed in the industrially fouled waters of the Ob' River. Police rarely ventured into the burgeoning shanty towns, and public welfare programmes failed to cope. The city had no paved sidewalks and few paved roadways.[14]
10
On kulak deportations, see esp. V N. Zemskov
11
On the campaigns for 'social defence,' see especially Paul Hagenloh,' "Socially Harmful Elements"' and the Great Terror', in Sheila Fitzpatrick (ed.),
12
PavelPolian,
13
For the most comprehensive figures on camp populations and distribution, see
14
On 'ruralisation' of cities, see Moshe Lewin,