Whoever was responsible for Kirov’s murder, it is clear that Stalin was by now ready to change line overnight, to write the most murderous and authentically ‘Stalinist’ chapter of them all. The ‘other policy’ – the terror – was always on his mind, ready to be activated. The interlude was nothing but a requisite pause following a spasm. Whether such increases and reductions in political tension and terror also reflected Stalin’s fluctuating state of mind remains a matter for conjecture.
5
SOCIAL FLUX AND ‘SYSTEMIC PARANOIA’
THE SOCIAL FABRIC
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.
POPULATION AND LABOUR FORCE
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 ‘EMPLOYEES-SPECIALISTS-INTELLIGENTSIA’ QUID PRO QUO
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.
1
Iu. A. Pohakov and A. A. Isupov, introduction to
2
See TsSU (Central Office of Statistics),