A further consideration comes to mind in the context of a historical reflection. We have stressed that historical changes were in train in all aspects of social existence, including the very character of the regime. Were it not for such phenomena, which attest to the system’s accommodation to new realities, including in its repressive practices, we would be unable to explain how and why the regime disappeared from the historical stage without firing a shot.
A realistic approach, which does not shy away from unpalatable facts, is bound to admit that democracies which achieve the status of great powers do not always respect rights and are not always very democratic. Countries without a democratic system are not necessarily ‘guilty’ because they lack one. Democracy is not a plant that flourishes everywhere. Historical realities do not necessarily correspond to ideals or propaganda claims. The West knows perfectly well whose human rights are to be promoted and whose can be neglected or even curtailed. Ardour for democratic freedoms burns or dims according to global strategic considerations. Cold War pressures, and the whole complex put in place by the West (with the intelligence services playing a leading role) to identify the slightest crack in the other camp, were not invented by Soviet paranoia. And they did nothing to help the small groups or isolated individuals in the USSR who sought to liberalize the regime.
16
THE AVALANCHE OF URBANIZATION
The background to the changes we have sketched, particularly in the sphere of penal policy and what I have called the ‘de-Stalinization of the workplace’, was a momentous process of urbanization – the commanding factor in the history of the USSR. After the war – in stages, obviously – urbanization inevitably began to have a powerful impact on society, culture, mentalities, and even the state. An accelerated transition from a predominantly rural society to a mainly urban one involved, at halfway stage, a phase when the two types of society were basically intermingled. Frequently incompatible, they coexisted in an explosive mix and the historical distance between them remained very considerable. The Soviet Union became ‘semi-urban’ in 1960, but the Russian Federation had crossed this threshold earlier. Until 1958 there was no official definition of a ‘town’ or ‘urban settlement’ valid for the whole Soviet Union; each republic had its own. In 1958 the threshold was fixed at 12,000 inhabitants for a town and 2,000 for an ‘urban settlement’, provided at least 50 per cent of the population were not directly employed in agriculture.
So this intermediate phase could be considered a historical stage in its own right for the country and its regime. The rural population, which supplied the bulk of the new urban population, ‘ruralized’ the towns before the latter succeeded in urbanizing the rural folk. That would happen only in the post-Stalin period – and not without much friction and many ‘side effects’. Although not without government input, these processes were basically spontaneous. They oblige us temporarily to distance ourselves from the idea of a rigid party-state dominating and controlling everything, and to reveal something passed over by most studies: ‘spontaneity’ (stikhiia, a term of Greek origin). In any serious general history of the USSR, stikhiia should be a legitimate – and sometimes central – topic, although it seems unacceptable to analysts with an overly politicized view of matters.
Scarcely a smooth process, urbanization was the crucial novelty of the twentieth century in Russian history and may be reckoned to have been completed by the mid-1960s. By then, the majority of the population was composed of town dwellers in Russia, the Ukraine and the Baltic states. Some of the towns were old, but most were of recent construction. One randomly selected index is revealing about the conditions of this urbanization: in Soviet towns in the 1960s, 60 per cent of families lived in state-owned housing with communal kitchens and toilets. Indicative of low living standards, this statistic also points to excessively rapid and, we might safely add, ‘unplanned’ urbanization. Likewise largely unplanned, the consequences were many and various. Whatever the specificities of the process in the USSR, some of them are common to cases of precipitous urbanization elsewhere. We shall return to this point when we consider other data, but we can already venture that at this juncture in its history the country embarked on a novel stage: it became a new society whose interaction with the state assumed different forms. The juxtaposition of these two themes will lead us to consider parameters that proved decisive for the system’s vitality, longevity and mortality.
We have already dealt with labour mobility and an emerging ‘labour market’, which became an accepted reality. To extend the canvas to the whole society, we must signal an important manifestation of ‘spontaneity’ in action: namely, powerful migration flows, which the authorities could no longer control through the previous routine of sanctions and restrictions. In the new environment of massive population movements other strategies had to be conceived and applied. The following statistics for such population flows in 1965 can cut a long story short:[1]
All Towns in the USSR
Arrived from:
| Other towns | Countryside | Unknown | Total |
| 4,321,731 | 2,911,392 | 793,449 | 8,026,572 |
Departed to:
| Towns | Countryside | Unknown | Total |
| 4,338,699 | 1,423,710 | 652,478 | 6,414,887 |
Balance in favour of towns from:
| Towns | Countryside | Unknown | Total |
| –16,968 | 1,487,682 | 140,971 | 1,611,685 |
If these numbers do not seem particularly high, a clarification specific to the Soviet Union should be introduced: the data include only those who registered with the police. Yet many came to the towns, sometimes stayed for long stretches, and left without registering, while others settled for good without reporting to any administrative authority.