The regime faced problems of control and legitimacy in rural as well as urban areas. Despite the regime's attempt to extend Soviet power, Soviet authority outside major cities and towns remained weak throughout much of the 1930s. The experience of Soviet power at local levels differed considerably from that wielded by the powerful centralised political institutions of the party. As often as not, local officials felt like they were holding a besieged outpost rather than wielding power as a ruling class. Reports by local political police officers and party heads reflected their sense of isolation. Many local officials sought transfers from 'backward' rural regions to urban or more centrally located postings, and the strains of isolation drove more than a few rural authorities to suicide. Political officials worried about the small number of Communist 'actives' in their areas. They also worried about the growing number of peasant households withdrawing from collective farms and the hostile moods of kolkhozniki. Pointed disrespect for officials, both symbolic and real, resulted in violence and even murder. At times, local officials expressed open fear of confrontation with collective-farm peasants, and officials took threats against their lives as a serious possibility. Vandalism and theft of state property, including and especially rustling of animals, continued on a widespread scale. Armed and mounted bandits roamed large parts of the countryside requiring, in some instances, small-scale military campaigns to suppress them. In mixed ethnic areas, non-Russian populations frequently protected bandits and other outlaws from authorities. And, as rumours about a new constitution gathered force in 1935 and 1936, local leaders also worried about the revival of religious activity. Believing that they would be protected under new laws, lay priests and sectarians of all denominations began to proselytise again. Itinerant preachers spoke, at times to large gatherings of rural inhabitants, alternately promising to establish Christian collective farms or to bring God's judgement on the collective-farm system.
Consolidating Stalin's revolution: the victory of socialism and the retreat to conservatism
The cataclysmic social upheaval created by Stalin's modernising revolution left lasting effects, but the country experienced a relative period of stabilisation after mid-decade, and this was due largely to moderatingpolicies implemented by Stalinist leaders. Stalin signalled this turn and gave the hint of a social truce in his famous victory speech at the Seventeenth Party Congress in 1934. In this major speech, Stalin proclaimed that the victory of socialism had been won in the USSR. He declared that organised class opposition had been broken and that the country had set the foundation for a socialist economy and society. He warned of the continued threat of enemies within and without, and of the difficult historical tasks that still lay ahead. He cautioned that because of continuing dangers, the party, the police and the state needed to remain strong and vigilant against the enemies who would try to undermine the Soviet achievement. Yet the vision of the near future that Stalin then laid before the congress was one of consolidation and amelioration, even a retreat, in some respects, from the extreme policies of the First Five-Year Plan period. Leaders did, in fact, shift investment priorities in the Second Five-Year Plan in order to ease food and other shortages and to compensate for the catastrophic decline in living standards. In rural areas of the country, the regime legalised small- scale market exchange again, and a new Stalinist 'charter' allowed kolkhozniki to own some livestock and to cultivate small private plots of land for their own use. The effect of these changes was immediate and beneficial. Food became available, if not plentiful, on a regular basis. While collective and state farms continued to under-produce, the small private plots of peasants saved the country from further starvation. Private farm plots made up only about 10-12 per cent of the arable land, but accounted for nearly two-thirds of the produce sold in the country during these years. Edinolichniki, although distrusted by the regime, provided an invaluable economic niche of support for the collective-farm system and became the core of a revived artisan culture in the countryside. These private economic activities, grudgingly permitted by the regime, quickly formed the basis of a new, second economy, which became indispensable for the maintenance of the state's huge and increasingly unwieldy official economy.
Culture and morality in the service of socialism
Stalinist leaders continued to pour money into military and heavy industrial development, but the regime also turned its attention during the mid- and late 1930s to the social, cultural and moral tasks of socialist construction. Cultural history is often given second place in discussions of the 1930s, even though cultural construction was an important aspect of Stalinism. The regime made significant efforts to extend basic education and health care to the population. The Stalinist regime tried hard to control what the public read and saw, but it wanted and needed a public that was literate and educated. As a result, the plans for economic development of any region (indeed, of the whole country) always included estimates for the construction of schools, numbers of clinics, teachers, doctors, nurses and even movie houses. In Novosibirsk, the gleaming centre of the new Siberia, the huge central opera house was completed in 1934, before the new central executive building and long before expansion of party headquarters. Every factory and workers' barracks had its newspaper boards, Red Reading Corners and literacy classes, and trade union organisations as well as local soviets provided free technical and basic education for citizens of all ages.
Stalinist educational achievements were impressive. Although the regime had promoted literacy and basic education throughout the 1920s, school attendance for all children became mandatory at the beginning of the 1930s. Many adults were also encouraged to take basic literacy classes. By the end of the decade, nearly 75 per cent of the adult population could read, a remarkable achievement compared to a literacy rate of 41 per cent, according to the 1926 census. Among children aged twelve to nineteen, literacy rates, according to the 1937 census, had reached 90 per cent. Some of the most significant advances occurred in rural and non-Russian areas and among women. Soviet authorities regarded education as a primary weapon in the struggle against what they considered backwardness, especially against traditional influences of religion and indigenous ethnic culture. The regime targeted women, especially, as a traditionally oppressed social group, but also because they were considered essential to the socialist education of children. As a result, the regime put significant effort into spreading educational opportunities in rural and non- Russian areas and among women. By the late 1930s literacy rates among all women in Russia reached over 80 per cent.[15]
The Stalinist regime lavished large amounts of money on art, literary production, film and other forms of entertainment. Art became, under Stalin, a form of social mobilisation, a means to bind the populace to the regime, and as Stalin extended state power into what had been private sectors of the economy, so too the Stalinist regime extended state control into the sphere of art and culture and into all aspects of public and private life. Indeed, in Stalin's socialist revolution, there was to be no distinction between public and private. 'The private life is dead', insisted Pasternak's character Strelnikov, in the novel Doctor Zhivago, and this phrase epitomised how life was to be lived in the new socialist motherland. Under Stalin, all art, culture and morality was to be put in the service of building socialism. Artists were to act as 'engineers of the soul', in Stalin's famous phrase. Their job was to construct the socialist individual, just as structural engineers were responsible for constructing buildings, roads, hydroelectric dams and steel mills.