The expanding social stratum referred to as ‘employees’ (neither workers nor peasants) was far from being or remaining socially homogeneous. In fact, it covered an ever more disparate social reality, including the category of ‘specialists’, but also an increasingly differentiated hierarchy of officials of every rank in all spheres of life. They were the recipients of most of the privileges and possessed a good deal of power. In everyday life, this growing differentiation among the ruling strata would sooner or later find its expression in official and unofficial language – notably because the powerful but spontaneous trend of ‘differentiation’ became in the mid-1920s, but especially from the early 1930s, a deliberate policy of motivation and social control.
As the 1930s unfolded, social and ideological divisions kept widening, strengthened by this strategy, which is best encapsulated by the term ‘status revolution’. It consisted in distributing perks and privileges to the layer of ‘employees’, with a particular bias towards the ‘intelligentsia’ and the rukovoditeli (‘office-holders’) – categories that overlapped, but were concealed for ideological reasons. This policy was deemed indispensable for normalizing the social climate and imparting stability to the regime. None of those selected for preferential treatment had an easy time of it in these years. Their relations with the top leadership were, to say the least, bumpy. Whenever official policy and ideology suffered setbacks, the higher and lower strata of officialdom served as scapegoats and were sacrificed to popular indignation. This was easy to do, given the gulf between ordinary citizens and these privileged officials, especially when they were in positions of political or economic responsibility. Thus, ‘privileges’, much coveted by those seeking to climb the social ladder, were also a dangerous trap in the political conditions of the period.
Having dealt with the general categories of ‘employees’, ‘specialists’ and ‘intelligentsia’, let us now turn to a sketch of the rukovoditeli – the managers or office-holders.
OFFICE-HOLDERS
In Soviet statistical classifications, those holding responsible office – the rukovoditeli – were also called rukovodiashchie rabotniki, sometimes otvet-politrabotniki, and later simply otvet-rabotniki. To be included in this category, one had to be at the head of a structural unit, with at least some subordinates, in an administrative agency of the state, the party, a trade union, or some other official organization. According to the 1926 census there were about 364,816 such managers in firms, on construction sites, in administrative agencies and their departments. In the 1939 census the category numbered 445,244, to which were added 757,010 people occupying lower but still quite powerful positions in enterprises of every kind: there were 231,000 factory directors and other higher ranks in industry; 165,191 people in charge of workshops and other, less important units; and 278,784 chairmen and deputy-chairmen of kolkhozy (sovkhoz administrators were already included under the rubric of ‘firms’). This yields a total of 2,010,275 (924,009 of them in the countryside). Finally, at the summit of the party and state at Union, republican and district levels, we find some 67,670 individuals heading institutions in urban areas and 4,968 doing so in rural areas: a total of 72,638 nachal’niki (‘top bosses’) for the whole country. It was around them, and under their orders, that the rukovoditeli we have just mentioned worked; and the latter were themselves supported by lower-ranking officials, not to mention technical and service personnel (transport, repairs, cleaning).
At this stage we must return to the broad category of the ‘intelligentsia’ in order to bring out various important components of it – i.e. influential writers, scientists, architects, inventors, economists, and other experts whom the military–industrial complex (among others) had urgent need of. This stratum became socially and politically close to those we have just described as high-ranking bosses, and formed an elite with them – or, more precisely, one of the key components of the country’s elite.
The categories of rukovoditeli and ‘intelligentsia’ are important, because they make it possible to identify layers that are now influential, capable of articulating their own interests, exercising pressure, and often getting what they want. The advent of social groups with the ability to acquire powerful positions and defend their interests was something Stalin observed with keen interest and a degree of vigilance. His concern was precisely to prevent the emergence of such potentially ‘negative phenomena’.
RUNAWAY URBANIZATION: CITIES, HUTS, BARRACKS
The changes in the socio-professional landscape which, as we have seen, included an expansion in the number of workers and the intellectual, administrative and technical strata, were evident throughout the economy, including – though to a lesser degree – in agriculture. Industry, construction and transport, as well as education and research, were inextricably bound up with the country’s urbanization. And industrialization was itself a powerful factor in urbanization, as was the proliferation of educational, research, public health and administrative institutions.
Urbanization was also the vehicle for a much broader process, signalling a crucial phase in Russia’s history: the disappearance of one kind of society (our subject here) and the emergence of another, quite different one. The changing ratios between urban and rural populations take us to the heart of the matter. The brief period under discussion simply set the stage for a rapid, decisive turn, whose initial manifestations in the 1930s were a disparate set of phenomena inherent in a transitional phase, dominated by clashes between intermingling social strata and cultures. Things would only take shape in the longer term, even if this ‘long term’ was not long in coming. The 1930s, meanwhile, were years of an initial, profoundly destabilizing impetus, whose repercussions were felt throughout the system.
The numbers and relative weight of the rural versus the urban population were almost constantly subjects of heated discussion among statisticians, demographers and politicians. According to results of the 1926 population census, city inhabitants reached the number of 26,314,114 (17.9 per cent), while the rural population reached 120,718,801 (82.1 per cent). The noted specialist on the peasantry V. P. Danilov claimed that the percentage of the peasants was actually higher (84 per cent according to him). He argued that census takers and demographers included in the category of ‘towns’ settlements that were at that time nothing more than large villages and thus artificially increased the weight of the urban population.[8] This correction affords a good introduction to one of the predominant features of the period: the ongoing urbanization occurred against the background of what were still profoundly rural realities and roots. This was something registered by many visitors, who at the end of the 1920s observed the extent to which in the cities (Moscow included) ‘country and city are still playing hide-and-seek’ (Walter Benjamin). The prevalence of rural origins in the present urban population was, in many ways, ubiquitous; and this socio- historical reality was far from having disappeared despite ‘collectivization’ and other ‘modernizing’ strategies. Exaggerated claims for the size of the ‘intelligentsia’, inflated pronouncements about the achievements of planning, the trumpeting of the advent of ‘socialism’, decreed on Stalin’s whim in the annus mirabilis of 1937 – these conveyed a need to accelerate, at least verbally, the completion of a historical stage that was still anchored in the past. But this in no way diminished the intensity and agonies of the transition: quite the reverse.