At this point we may venture a provisional conclusion. There was no question as yet of an imminent crisis. However, the government had to opt for a different method of planning that was not confined to fixing quantitative targets, but which would coordinate, anticipate and correct the efforts of productive units, which themselves knew what they wanted and needed to do. Gosplan and the government had been put on notice: labour supply and demand was an urgent issue. If it was ignored, or assumed to be self-regulating, as had been the case, the economy would stagnate, Gosplan or no Gosplan.
Following this analysis of problems with labour supply in 1965, we can now supplement our picture with data and analysis first from 1968 and then 1972.
On 16 September 1968, three years after the Yefimov report, the head of the labour force department in the Russian Federation’s Gosplan, Kasimovsky (who may have been attached to Yefimov’s research institute), delivered a speech to a selected audience of government experts. His main points were as follows. The extraordinary concentration of the population in towns over the last twenty years had significantly complicated labour supply problems (availability and distribution). The fastest growth had occurred in large towns; the share of the population in small towns was declining. Between 1926 and 1960, the population of towns with more than 500,000 inhabitants had multiplied by 5.9 (the figure for the Russian Federation was 4.5). In many instances, smaller towns and urban settlements that could play a vital role for the surrounding population had been destabilized by the uncontrolled pace of urbanization. Instead of becoming centres of support for the whole area, they often turned into a source of employment and demographic problems.
The number of small towns was not increasing and their population had dropped by 17 per cent in Russia (and, to a lesser extent, in the USSR as a whole). In the Russian Federal Republic, the share of the population living in towns with fewer than 10,000 inhabitants had declined from 9 to 1 per cent between 1926 and 1960, whereas towns of between 100,000 and 200,000 had increased their share of the total. The USA had experienced a different pattern: the number of small towns and their share of the urban population had remained stable; medium-sized towns (10–50,000 inhabitants) had grown; and the largest towns had experienced a population decline. The US pattern was unquestionably preferable, because exploiting a hectare of land was much cheaper in a small town. In Russia, it cost 45–47 roubles, as against 110–130 in large towns.
In the country’s twenty-eight largest towns, construction of new factories was banned. Yet in the current five-year plan, ministries, whether by obtaining exemptions or simply disregarding regulations, had set up enterprises there in order to take advantage of superior infrastructure, causing a serious labour shortage in those towns. Their population was growing fast, but the creation of new industries (and – I would add – not just industries) was outstripping it. In smaller towns, the reverse was true: enterprises were indeed being constructed, but there were still labour surpluses. This generated a set of related problems – in particular, the socially negative impact of imbalances between male and female labour.[3]
This complicated situation was analysed four years later in great detail by another labour expert. In small and medium-sized towns, worrying economic and social problems were accumulating, reflected in the use of the labour force. The imbalance between male and female employment was once again underlined.
In towns where new industries were located, the proportion of untapped labour was falling. In contrast, those that had not experienced economic development saw population outflows, to the point where some small and medium-sized towns were suffering from labour shortages. In addition, in many towns one-sided specialization led to predominantly female or predominantly male employment, resulting in imbalances between the sexes. In Russia alone, around 300 towns were experiencing more or less serious imbalances of this kind, impacting on the make-up of the population. The study referred to dealt with seventy towns in twenty large regions where this problem existed.
In towns where single-sex employment was prevalent, the other sex found itself without a job and turned to work at home or on a private plot. The impossibility of starting a family was fuelling labour mobility; a labour shortage was emerging, impacting in particular on the town’s most important economic enterprises and disrupting the distribution of professional skills and qualifications. Research indicated that in towns with high female employment, the percentage of men among the unemployed was between 27 and 57 per cent, whereas the national average was 13 per cent. Labour turnover was much greater there than elsewhere, and automatically accompanied by an exodus and shortage of labour. Many textile factories had to import female labour – mostly women as young as fifteen. Fewer and fewer female workers were of local origin: no more than 30 per cent, as against 90–100 per cent for males. But these young newcomers did not stay long, on account of the unfavourable demographic balance. This was the main reason for instability in the female labour force up to the age of twenty-nine, as evidenced by a sociological study in the large textile centre of Ivanovo-Voznesensk. Another irrationality observed in towns with predominantly female employment was that skilled workers had nothing to do except cultivate their private plot – work that required no skill. In the towns of the Vladimir region, 20–30 per cent of employees in commerce and the food industry were men, whereas the average for the Russian Federation was 15.1 per cent.
The sum total of these imbalances, particularly in the distribution of the generations and sexes, had a negative demographic impact: a low rate of natural population growth, high automatic population outflows, and a drop in overall population growth. Small towns had 125 women for every 100 men (118 for 100 for all the Russian Federation’s towns). On average, the female surplus mostly emerged from the age of forty, but in small and medium-sized towns it was already evident from fifteen onwards.
A consequence of the slowdown in demographic growth was an ageing population: twenty- to thirty-nine-year olds accounted for only 30 per cent of the population of Russian towns. As a percentage of the total population of the republic, including the countryside, they represented 33 per cent. The report also dealt with the problem of starting families and single-parent families.
According to the report’s author, the complexity of these phenomena was beyond the grasp of the republican authorities. The measures taken to rectify the situation had been found wanting. Among the obstacles cited were poor planning, a lack of incentives for ministries to locate industries in small towns, instabilities in their plans, and the weakness of their construction capacities. The government of the Russian Federation had tried to persuade the USSR Gosplan to help it eliminate these failures by a special plan for twenty-eight ‘feminized’ towns and five ‘masculinized’ ones – but to no avail. Gosplan had other priorities.[4]
As we can see, these complicated problems of labour supply and demographics attracted plenty of attention and anxiety; sociologists and a small team of social psychologists also joined in the debate. Their national and ethnic dimensions were further causes for concern.
Was the Soviet system equipped to deal with this kind of situation? It had certainly proved capable of determining priorities like the accelerated development of key economic sectors, defence (linked in numerous respects to the former), and mass education. But in each instance the specific task was fairly easy to define. What came to the fore in the 1960s were challenges of a quite different order, which required a capacity for articulating several plans. In other words, the task now was conceptualizing and managing complexity itself. Employment had become part of a social, economic, political and demographic puzzle and was regarded as such.
4
GARF, f. A-10005, op. 1, d. 249, LL. 244–53, October 1972 (report by the head of the RSFRS’s state committee on labour resources to the Russian Council of Ministers).