We must therefore reiterate that the country’s rural component, coerced by the regime into abandoning its centuries-old ways, exacted its revenge, as it were, by compelling the regime further to strengthen its already imposing administrative-repressive machinery. For without it, it would not have extracted much from its agriculture. A string of other, equally decisive consequences followed, starting with what we might call the ‘ruralization’ of the towns. The influx of peasants seeking work or fleeing the countryside made urban expansion a major problem for the regime. Flight to the cities was ipso facto a massive rural exodus. It was a precautionary measure on the part of those who felt threatened, or the outcome of the persecution suffered by those who had been forcibly displaced to remote regions. The exodus to the towns occurred at a time when the newly established kolkhoz system was too weak to perform its seasonal tasks.
Another source of flight to the towns was the thousands of tractor and combine drivers and other agricultural specialists. Having received intensive training, or even during their professional courses, they preferred to escape to an urban environment. This reflected the contradiction inherent in using material incentives to inflect behaviour: the state trained them to go and work in the fields, but they preferred to depart for the city.
Data on social flows, the chaotic population movements in and out of towns, ‘ruralized’ urbanization, the barracks culture typical of the urban mentality and way of life, the brutal treatment of labour on construction sites and in the kolkhozy: all these features, especially the last, must be modulated by taking into account another phenomenon. At a time when construction sites and workplaces needed large amounts of manpower, we find a rapid turnover of labour, to the despair of authorities and factory managers. Workers quit their factories, which even in peacetime was regarded as an act of desertion. Often young, they would disappear into their native villages with the support and connivance of the local administration. The same reasons that prompted the higher authorities to intensify coercion and repression against labour turnover and desertion led local authorities, especially in the countryside, to shelter young people who had fled their factory, or some other job which was too onerous, in order to join kolkhozy or sovkhozy. More puzzling, and less well studied, is the indulgence shown by courts and prosecutors in this regard. Concerned with local interests, or simply not regarding young people who refused to work somewhere against their will as criminals, prosecutors declined to pursue such cases and judges handed down lenient, non-custodial sentences.
The Stalinist state had restored the tradition of the Tsarist ancien régime, which (at least until the abolition of serfdom in 1861) treated the labour force as attached to its workplace (glebae adscripti). This was a major feature of Stalinism – with one proviso: social actors, including administrative agencies, often diluted the severity of the dictatorial state through escape-hatches and loopholes created by objective conditions and interests. These qualifications and ‘relaxations’ of the dictatorship’s iron grip should not be overlooked. This proviso applies to Stalin’s repressive policy in its entirety in the 1930s. It is true that the ‘security plus terror’ formula was an almost intrinsic key component of the unfolding Stalinist system, justifying the critical attention it has received. We ourselves shall have much to say about the regime’s horrors, but with the same qualifications as apply to the treatment of the specific problem of manpower. The whole set of repressive and terrorist measures has too often monopolized the attention of researchers, at the expense of the broader panorama of social changes and state building. Yet the latter is indispensable if we wish to arrive at a deeper understanding of the many and varied interactions in this complex edifice. That is why we are endeavouring here to examine at least some of the elements that allow us to delve into the social processes under way in these years.
The overall climate of the period can be encapsulated in the following features: urbanization, industrialization, collectivization, purges and show trials, the spread of education, an often demagogic depreciation of culture, the mobilization of energies and people, increasing criminalization of many aspects of life, hectic creation of administrative structures, and so on. All these, and more, belong to the tumultuous 1930s. These momentous events and processes, which occurred almost simultaneously, were interrelated, and impacted upon one another, generated historical changes at a rarely equalled tempo – all in an atmosphere of great confusion, even chaos. It stands to reason that the political system cannot be understood independently of the retroactive effects of its own initiatives. In other words, the political system that launched the upheaval was in turn shaped by its outcome and emerged as a very particular kind of dictatorship.
Consequently, social history cannot be ignored when dealing with the ‘political system’ or, more specifically, the state-party complex.
The word tekuchka (which can be rendered as ‘spontaneous mobility of manpower’) adequately encapsulates the scale of the population movements in all directions, especially during the earlier years. Millions of people circulated throughout the country: they flooded to towns and major construction sites, but then sometimes abandoned them; they fled the countryside and the threat of being expropriated and deported as a ‘kulak’; they went to receive training or take a new job, which they left with equal rapidity. These different forms of tekuchka merged into a massive social flux, difficult to control, with a population constantly on the move, on roads or in trains, throughout the country.
Such was the backdrop that led to the situation being considered explosive. The introduction of the internal passport and the propiska (obligatory registration with the police in towns, in order to enjoy residence rights) was only one of the means adopted by the regime to restore order to the country. On the one hand, it resorted to the full panoply of administrative and repressive measures; on the other, it experimented with social and economic strategies.
The rudimentary planning of the urban environment was, in its initial stage, an inherent part and significant source of this social instability. Even in later years, when a degree of stability obtained, one important sociological feature persisted: in addition to partly ruralized towns, Stalin’s Russia still had 67 per cent of its population in the countryside and a sizeable chunk of its working population remained pre-industrial, notwithstanding the tractors of the MTS. Their living environment continued to be composed in the main of a small or medium-sized village, sometimes clustered with other villages, but often dispersed and isolated. Larger, more populous villages certainly existed, for the most part in some areas of the steppe or the Northern Caucasus; but they were much less numerous. Moreover, they shared common features with other villages that sharply distinguished them from large towns. The neighbourhood networks that governed the system of social relations within the community; the seasonal rhythm of economic activity; a profoundly religious culture permeated by magical beliefs – these had a powerful impact on the everyday life and behaviour of rural populations.