For the USSR in its pre-September 1939 borders, the January 1939 census recorded a total population of 170.5 million inhabitants, 114.4 million in the countryside (67 per cent) and 56.1 million in the towns (33 per cent). Accordingly, the urban population had doubled in twelve years, increasing by 30 million – an exceptionally rapid rate of urbanization by any standards. The annual growth rate for the urban population is eloquent testimony: 2.7 per cent from 1926 to 1929; 11.5 per cent from 1929 to 1933; and 6.5 per cent from 1933 to 1939. The average for the years between the two censuses of 1926 and 1939 was 9.4 per cent a year.[9]
The raw statistics are no less eloquent: between 1926 and 1929 the urban population grew by 950,000 a year; between 1929 and 1932 by 1.6 million a year; and between 1933 and 1939 by 2.34 million a year. In 1940 the urban population stood at 63.1 million inhabitants (this included 7 million in recently annexed territories). But as we have seen, this urban world was still profoundly enmeshed with the countryside and the peasantry, which remained the substantial majority of the population and served as ‘reservoir’ for the whole social structure. The main social changes in this short period can be encapsulated in an interaction of three powerful ‘transformers’: at one pole, collectivization ‘de-ruralized’ the countryside; at the other, urbanization did the same; and industrialization, another potent demiurge, operated at both poles.
As a result of this transformation, the growth of towns and the influx of peasants into them assumed gigantic proportions. In the years 1926–39, towns swelled by 29.6 million inhabitants – 18.5 million of them new arrivals; 5.3 million through natural growth (births, marriages, and so on); and 5.8 million through administrative decisions to attach larger rural settlements to the category of ‘towns’. In 1939, 62 per cent of new town dwellers thus hailed from the countryside: endogenous population growth in towns and ‘urban settlements’ accounted for only 17.8 per cent; while the remaining 19.5 per cent became town dwellers by administrative fiat – meaning that 5.8 million peasants acquired such status without having to migrate.
This whole process was not restricted to the 640 towns inherited from Tsarist Russia. Approximately 450 new towns were created in the space of thirteen years. Seventy-one towns had a population of 100–500,000 – in 1926 only twenty-eight of such size existed – while eight had in excess of 500,000 (as against three in 1926). Moreover, whereas in the period 1897–1926 the fastest-growing towns were the largest ones (over 100,000 inhabitants), the years 1926–39 witnessed the development, under the impact of industrialization, of medium-sized towns (those of 50–100,000 inhabitants). Many urban areas were created in an ‘empty spot’ – in other words, around a new industrial building site. In 1926, 17.4 per cent of the population was urban. Thirteen years later, the percentage had leapt to 32.9 per cent.[10]
However, neither the figure for average annual growth, nor the overall total of 30 million new town dwellers, can convey the intensity of the turmoil entailed by such urban expansion. The 18.5 million peasants did not simply arrive and stay. This figure, already enormous, is the end result of population flows in opposite directions. On the one hand, millions of peasants tried out living in towns or, in the case of richer peasants, sought refuge from persecution there; on the other hand, masses of people abandoned – even fled – urban areas. This was a veritable human maelstrom.
As can readily be imagined, the country was scarcely prepared to deal with such mass migration. As a result of bad harvests and grain procurement crises, living standards had fallen considerably, as is indicated by the dramatic housing problem. Shelter was invariably to be found in barracks or in the corner of someone’s room. The best scenario was where a family had a room of its own in some overcrowded communal apartment. Such difficulties were not restricted to newcomers. The housing figures underscore the gravity of the crisis: workers’ barracks (often a mere roof, with no amenities) and the growing number of communal apartments (one room per family and one kitchen for four or more families) became an integral part of the Soviet urban landscape then and for years to come.
In 1928, housing was considered ‘normal’ in terms of hygiene and comfort if it possessed 6 square metres per person. But this, however modest, was just a dream – proposed as an objective in the first five-year plan and never met. In the interim, workers had to find some miserable accommodation or a corner in neighbouring villages, far from their workplace. In many industrial enterprises, the situation was actually deteriorating; apartments were falling into decay and did not meet minimal hygiene standards. On 6 January 1936, inhabitants of new urban settlements in European Russia on average had 4.4 square metres per person, compared with only 3.2 square metres in Siberia. The data for services and amenities in towns were depressing. In European Russia and Siberia, indicators for sewers, running water and central heating were extremely low. Electricity was the only exception: electric lighting was available in 92.3 per cent of houses in Russia (70 per cent in Western Siberia). In contrast, only 22.8 per cent of houses in Russia and 5 per cent in Siberia had sewers and only 43 per cent and 19 per cent, respectively, had water mains.
Such data provide a good indication of living standards in these years. They also give us an inkling of the difficulties of cohabitation in overcrowded housing, where privacy was impossible and personal and family life must have been strained to the limit. Undernourishment, poor housing, the lack of hygiene, physical and nervous exhaustion due to too little rest, not to mention the extensive participation in the labour force of women, who endured the same pressures as men (if not more) – these explain the decline in birth rates in the 1930s. In the early years of this decade, economic difficulties, famine (especially in 1932–3) and other hardships depressed population growth. Food shortages, rationing, intensive migration, ‘de-kulakization’, and constant flows in and out of the towns shattered traditional family life and relations within families.
From 1923 to 1928, the population had grown by an unprecedented 4 million a year, thanks to lower death rates and higher birth rates, especially in the countryside. In 1928, the birth rate was 42 per thousand, the mortality rate 18, and the rate of population growth 24 per cent. A quite different picture emerges between 1928 and 1940: rates of population growth fell, especially in 1930–1, and went on falling thereafter. In 1932, birth rates exceeded death rates by only 5.6 per cent. And for the first time, 1933 witnessed a negative demographic balance in the towns of European Russia. The years 1930–5 must have been especially alarming. In 1938, population growth improved in the same areas and returned to its 1929 level (20 per cent), before declining to 19.2 per cent in 1939 and 13.2 per cent in 1940 because of the threat of war and also because of the smaller number of people of marriageable age, resulting from the losses incurred in the First World War and Civil War.[11]
9
A. S. Moskovskii and M. A. Isupov,
10
Basile Kerblay,