Population movements for the years 1961–6 for the Russian Federation alone were imposing: nearly 29 million people arrived in towns while 24.2 left them, yielding a total of 53.2 million migrants. In Western Siberia the total was 6 million; in Eastern Siberia 4.5 million; and in the Far East 4.5 million.
Some worrying phenomena emerge from these figures. It transpires that few people set off for the east of the country with the intention of genuinely settling there. Streams of people returned from these regions where they were badly needed, in part because of housing shortages, and often because wages were too low. According to numerous local inquiries, 82 per cent of single people and 70 per cent of married couples left on account of often lamentable housing conditions (they were renting rooms – sometimes just the corner of a room).
This situation created a countrywide problem. Changing the direction of such population movements necessitated an improvement in the housing conditions in deprived regions. Yet despite sustained efforts, the housing problem remained critical throughout the country. In 1957, average availability of housing per inhabitant in the Russian Federation stood at 6.7 square metres; in the Far East, at 5.9; in Eastern Siberia, 6.1; in Western Siberia, 6.3; and in the Urals, 6.3. Thus, in the eastern territories of the USSR, whither the government wanted to attract labour, there was less housing, central heating and running water than the Russian average, and even than the average for central Russia, itself poorly equipped.
The Soviet leadership and elites were very preoccupied with the problem of inducing labour to migrate to the east and settle there. The problem was not that such population movements were impossible to control by police or ‘totalitarian’ methods – no one seriously envisaged any such thing. Given the new social conditions and realities, the situation seemed utterly inextricable. On the one hand, Siberia contained enormous wealth that could ensure the system’s prosperity, and the requisite labour to exploit it existed in the populated regions of the country. On the other hand, it was impossible to attract this labour to the east and induce it to settle there. People from better-off European areas of the USSR would have to be guaranteed good wages and suitable supplies, while those from poorer regions with huge labour surpluses – e.g. the central Asian republics – would not move because of profound cultural attachments to their traditional environment.
We shall come across other such seemingly insoluble imbroglios, for they were to keep on emerging at a systemic level. For now, however, we shall stick to the problems bound up with urbanization, with particular attention to the issue of labour supplies between 1953 and 1968.
In the mid-1960s and for some years thereafter, the situation still seemed amenable to solution by better coordination and implementation of plans for manpower supplies – that is to say, correcting an excess here and remedying a deficit there by tapping the available reserves in some sector and place. The country was not as yet facing the generalized, acute labour shortage that we shall discuss in Part Three.
A good interdisciplinary institution, Gosplan’s own research institute was perfectly capable of studying and forecasting complex situations and knew the planning system well. It sought to understand the present in order to prepare for the immediate future. Intellectually, its researchers were better equipped than other planners and politicians to grasp an intricate socio-economic constellation; and they announced that the clouds were gathering. In February 1965, at the request of Gosplan’s leadership, they presented a report on the whole question of labour supplies and demography. The head of the institute, Efimov, had already ruffled feathers more than once and fuelled the ardour of economic reformers. But that was in internal, unpublished texts, which were often criticized by other planners and officials. Now, in a year already marked by a heated debate, Yefimov, who was probably a Kosyginite, produced a major report on Soviet industry, presenting weighty arguments in favour of change and offering a detailed view of the mechanisms involved in the complex business of managing labour supplies.[2] Efimov tackled the problems encountered by the centre and the regions, without concealing the looming tensions; and offered various proposals – sometimes clearly formulated, sometimes merely hints – about ways to confront them. The text is empirically and analytically very rich. It contains both a good diagnosis and a warning as to the dire consequences to be expected in the absence of reforms.
Here is the picture sketched by Yefimov. To start with, he drew attention to a growing imbalance between the available labour force and its employment. During the years 1959–63, the working population had grown by 9 million, while manpower supplies had increased by only 1.7 million. In other words, the requisite workers had been obtained mainly by drawing on those working at home or on their private plots. Eighty-one per cent of the shortfall (or 7.3 million additional workers) had been covered thus. But the number of those working at home was continuing to fall and this source would soon dry up.
The national picture indicated areas experiencing labour shortages and others enjoying surpluses. In Central Asia, natural demographic growth had risen to 27–33 per cent in recent years – twice the Soviet average. From 1959 to 1963 the number of people employed in the state-owned economy, or still engaged in their studies, had grown at the rate of 2.2–4.4 per cent a year; and the percentage of workers employed outside the state sector was between 20 and 26 per cent, compared with an average 17.2 per cent for the whole Soviet Union. In most of the central Asian republics, the bulk of those who did not work in the state sector belonged to the ethnic majority. Demographic growth in Kazakhstan had been lower, but there too the percentage of people working privately was very high: 21.8 per cent. In many regions, rates of population growth and economic development were diverging.
These major disparities lay behind the poor utilization of labour resources. The central Asian republics, Armenia and Kazakhstan were continuing to accumulate surpluses, whereas the Baltic countries – especially Latvia and Estonia – posted the lowest population growth and a high employment rate, and were obliged to look elsewhere for workers. Significant natural population growth was also evident in Moldavia, Western Ukraine and the Northern Caucasus, in towns and countryside alike. At the same time, there was a considerable influx of people from Siberia into regions that already had a labour surplus.
Employment rates also varied according to the size of towns – large, medium-sized or small. The report – and this was no trifle – deplored the fact that when the regional distribution of industrial plant and output was planned, labour availability was not taken into consideration, resulting in utterly aberrant situations. (This is my gloss: the report’s author would obviously not have used such language when addressing senior officials.) Major labour-intensive industries had been located in regions where labour was scarce; while in other places where female employment could have been expanded, heavy industry with predominantly male employment had been set up.
In small towns, there were some 2.3 million people in search of a job. The real figure was probably closer to 3 million, since large enterprises tended to maintain a labour reserve. Most of those seeking jobs had minimal education and few skills; they needed professional training. In order to encourage women to seek employment, crèches would have to be created, because otherwise they would not be prepared to work outside the home. In the central Asian republics, interviews with unemployed people in small and medium-sized towns had indicated that they did not want to work away from home, even when jobs were available. Most of these were young women with children who had no education or skills.
2
RGAE, 4372, 81, 1091, LL. 1–44. On 6 February 1965, Efimov received from his deputy Korobov a report (commissioned on 26 December 1964) on ‘the main problems related to rationalizing the use of labour resources in the key regions of the USSR in 1966–70’.