Part II The Stalin Era

Part II The Stalin Era

Introduction to Part II By the end of the 1920s Stalin had emerged as leader of the Soviet Union. One of the principal reasons for his rise to power was that he seemed to offer the country a way out of a frustrating impasse. The Bolsheviks were initially convinced that socialism could not exist in a single country, and that their Revolution would trigger off the world-wide collapse of capitalism. As Trotsky put it: The world division of labour, the dependence of Soviet industry upon foreign technique, the dependence of the productive forces of the advanced countries of Europe upon Asiatic raw materials... make the construction of a socialist society in any single country impossible. 1 Even if it were economically possible the capitalist countries would not allow it to happen: Either the Russian revolution will cause a revolution in the West, he insisted, or the capitalists of all countries will strangle our revolution. 2 Yet the revolution in the West was rather slow in coming. Rabotnitsa nervously admitted that the capitalist economies had made some progress after the war-time disruptions, although it assured readers that we cannot talk about a long-term, solid stabilisation and insisted that the bourgeois world is steadily heading towards its ruin. 3 Stalin, however, was in no mood to simply wait for this to happen. He argued that they should set about establishing socialism themselves, alone, by our own efforts, without foreign help. 4 His optimism met a deep psychological need. According to E.H. Carr, it was on the slogan Socialism in One Country [that] Stalin rode to power. 5 If a single socialist island was to survive in a hostile capitalist sea, it had to became self-sufficient. It needed to develop its industrial base so that it could meet its own production needs, increase agricultural production so that it could feed its own population, and build up its 79

80 The Stalin Era defence capability so that it could withstand the threat of attack. The working class of the first socialist state also had a responsibility to provide a model for its counterparts in other countries; as Stalin put it, to march forward in such a way that the working class of the whole world, looking at us, may say: This is my vanguard, this is my shock brigade, this is my working class state... 6 In a country barely recovered from the ravages of World War I and the Civil War, what Stalin was promoting was little short of an economic miracle. He was well aware of this. We are fifty or a hundred years behind the advanced countries, he warned. We must make good this distance in ten years. Either we do it, or we shall be crushed. 7 The first Five-Year Plan was launched in October 1928, though it was only officially approved at the sixteenth Communist Party Congress held in April 1929. 8 For good measure it was now declared that it would be completed in four years rather than five. The Plan set the country on the path of intense socialist construction, which amounted to the most rapid process of industrialisation ever seen. It gave the state complete control over production and distribution, bringing to a close the private businesses of the NEP. It also resulted in a large increase in the number of workers, with women forming the bulk of new recruits to the labour force. One of the consequences of this headlong dash towards industrial development was the abandonment of the principle of equality. The Marxist dictum From each according to ability, to each according to need, was now relegated to the distant future, when the Soviet Union would achieve communism. It could not apply to a socialist society. To pay workers equal wages, regardless of the type of work they did or the effort they put in, would rob them of any incentive to improve their skills, and would encourage a high labour turnover since skilled and diligent workers would keep changing jobs in the hope of finding a factory which would appreciate their efforts. Such a situation would hardly increase productivity. Accordingly, the emphasis would be placed (in Daniels words) on individual responsibility and incentives, with rewards in proportion to effort and skill. 9 Wage scales were drawn up to take into account the difference between skilled and unskilled work, heavy and light work. 10 Under Stalin, then, inequality, rather than equality, had been turned into a socialist virtue. 11 Rapid industrialisation was one of two pillars on which Stalin s socialism was to be built. The other was the collectivisation of the peasantry. This was to take place through the amalgamation of small private farms into huge agricultural collectives, which would take two forms: state

Introduction to Part II 81 farms (sovkhozy), on which the peasants were state employees and received a salary like city workers, and collective farms (kolkhozy), run as large-scale cooperatives which paid members from their profits. 12 Industrialisation and collectivisation were supposed to be complementary processes. Large-scale farming would enable peasants to make use of the most up to date machinery and fertilisers, which were being produced in urban factories. The increase in urban production would also bring to an end the so-called scissors problem which had prevailed in the 1920s, with peasants being paid low prices for their grain but having to pay high prices for manufactured goods. Collectivisation had always been a Bolshevik plan, but Lenin had intended it to be a voluntary process, with peasants joining together in cooperatives once they had learned to understand their benefits. Some of the poorest peasants had proved amenable to the idea, since they literally had nothing to lose; they had no land, animals or machinery which would become the property of the collective farms. Wealthier peasants were not convinced, however, and by 1928 less than 3 per cent of land was farmed collectively. 13 Some leading Bolsheviks continued to argue that collectivisation should be a gradual process, proceeding, as Bukharin famously put it, at the speed of a peasant s nag. Stalin did not have the patience for this. According to Deutscher, he had become completely possessed by the idea that he could achieve a miraculous transformation of the whole of Russia by a single tour de force. 14 The perennial problem of getting peasants to produce enough grain to feed the cities had, since early in 1928, been resolved by the forcible collection of grain. A quota was set for a village as a whole, and the villagers were encouraged to force their more prosperous members to provide the bulk of the quota. However, all peasants were required to sell to the state anything deemed to be surplus to their own needs, and at extremely low prices. Collectivisation was introduced not only in an attempt to increase production, but also to facilitate requisitioning by reducing the number of grain collection points. Collectivisation supposedly began as a spontaneous movement of poor and middle-ranking peasants; all the state had to do was to help them to organise themselves. 15 In reality there was no spontaneous movement, and little prior planning. Stalin s announcement of the great turn came a month before the setting up of a commission to decide how to carry it out; before any report could appear, orders were sent out to local regions urging instant action. 16 Collectivisation took the form of an assault on the peasants, 17 carried out by ill-prepared and confused local cadres who had simply been told to lead the spontaneous

82 The Stalin Era growth of collectivisation, 18 and by the thousands of urban industrial workers sent to the countryside in a sudden extension of the patronage scheme. 19 The wealthiest peasants, the so-called kulaks, were dismissed as rural capitalists concerned only with their own profits, and hence inevitable opponents of collectivisation. Since they were dependent on the availability of a pool of impoverished landless peasants willing to work for them for a pittance, they were determined to preserve rural poverty, and would stop at nothing to destroy collectivisation. The state had to destroy them first. They were to be liquidated as a class, and their property turned over to the collective farms. Those considered the most dangerous were sent to labour camps, or to exile in the most inhospitable parts of the country. The least noxious, to borrow Nove s term, 20 were allowed to stay where they were, but were given the worst land, had all but essential equipment confiscated, and still had to provide large consignments of grain to the state as well as losing up to 70 per cent of their income in tax. Failure to meet these demands was considered anti-soviet activity, and the culprits would then be deported. The initial leniency towards them was only a delaying tactic, then. Attempts were made to steel poor and middle-ranking peasants against the fate of the kulaks by propagandising the latters fiendish attempts at sabotage. Krest yanka played an enthusiastic role in this process. Kulaks were held responsible for a catalogue of disasters which struck the new farms. On one farm, cattle have gone missing, foals have disappeared, calves have fallen ill, potatoes have not been harvested and have gone rotten, cabbages have frozen, the agricultural records have been falsified, collective farm money has been squandered, and the president and accountant of the collective farm have become drunkards. 21 On another, kulaks had mixed up seeds of different varieties and qualities so that the farm s crop would be useless. 22 They had also managed to infiltrate peasant associations, and were trying to use them to destroy collectivisation from within. 23 (In this way any protest on the part of peasant associations could be dismissed as a kulak plot.) In reality it was not just the kulaks who opposed collectivisation. Indeed, few but the poorest peasants cooperated with the movement. Many peasants preferred to destroy their property instead of having the state appropriate it. This included livestock. Around 45 per cent of the cattle and two thirds of the sheep and goats were slaughtered, bringing the production of meat and milk to an all-time low. 24 Even Stalin acknowledged that this was not a positive outcome, and that the process of collectivisation should be slowed down. In an article published

Introduction to Part II 83 in Pravda on 3 April 1930, and reproduced for Krest yanka subscribers in a free supplement, Stalin blamed over-zealous comrades for the mess. They had become dizzy with success in their battle against the kulaks, and had attempted to increase the speed of collectivisation by expropriating middle-ranking peasants as well as kulaks. Violence was essential and useful in the battle with our class enemies, but was not acceptable against our allies. 25 Determined efforts now had to be made to prevent the middle-ranking peasants feeling alienated, and to strengthen their union with poor peasants. 26 A relaxation of procurements followed this announcement, but this, as Nove explains, actually led to more chaos. The peasants now had a surplus of grain to dispose of, and there was a huge disparity between what the state would pay for it, and what they could get from the free market. Accordingly, they chose the latter. This led to countermeasures on the part of the state, which in turn contributed to the great famine of 1933. 27 All the same collectivisation continued, and by the end of 1934 the collective farms owned 90 per cent of all sown land and were responsible for 75 per cent of all rural production. 28 According to official propaganda, industrialisation and collectivisation were bringing about the continual raising of the well-being of the working class and the many millions of poor and middle-ranking peasants 29 The onset of the Depression in the capitalist countries facilitated the tone of self-congratulation and resulted in constant comparisons between the capitalist world, where crisis and unemployment are becoming ever deeper, and the socialist world the country of Soviets, an unbroken forward march. 30 The reality was rather different. Workers wages and standards of living dropped considerably during the first Five-Year Plan. 31 The rapid expansion of the cities created a housing crisis of such proportions that whole families were squeezed into corridors and corners, sharing bathrooms, kitchens, and no doubt much else with other tenants. 32 The famine of 1933 left millions dead in the countryside. As Stalin attempted to consolidate his position by ridding himself of any potential opponents, tens of thousands of innocent people were put to death or swallowed up by Stalin s labour camps. For women, Stalin s leap forward did bring an end to unemployment. The new Constitution, introduced in 1936, declared that women were guaranteed equal rights in all areas of work, government, cultural, and socio-political life ; they were able to combine paid work with motherhood by means of a system of paid maternity leave, maternity benefits, and a network of maternity homes, crèches and kindergartens. 33 On the grounds that the woman question had been solved,

84 The Stalin Era the Zhenotdel had been closed down in 1930. Yet in reality, the woman question was far from solved. Women simply had the new role of worker grafted onto their old role as housekeeper, and would come home from the factory or farm to a second shift of domestic chores. They had little help from the domestic services they had originally been promised; indeed, the 1930s witnessed a reduction in the already inadequate provision of some such services. The notion that men could take an equal share of the domestic work was still apparently unthinkable. The situation was particularly bad for women in the countryside, where child-care was virtually non existent. 34 In 1936 the situation was exacerbated by the ban on abortion, and the attempt to persuade women to produce as many children as nature decreed. We will find little hint of the problems encountered by Soviet women, or by Soviet citizens in general, in Rabotnitsa or Krest yanka. The magazines no longer provided readers with genuine information about the problems in the country, and what steps were being taken to resolve them. Nor was there any real attempt to draw readers into discussion and debate on Party policy. This was particularly the case from the mid- 1930s, when the material appearing in their pages was now written in accordance with the tenets of Socialist Realism and presented, with only occasional lapses, a thoroughly idealised image of the country. Socialist Realism had been introduced in 1934 as a blueprint for artists and writers, who were now required to be engineers of the [human] soul and play an active role in the creation of a new type of person and society. 35 Yet it governed journalism no less than fiction. As Katerina Clark has noted, at this time, as at no other... the difference between fiction and fact, between theatre and political event, between literary plot and factual reporting, all became somewhat hazy. 36 The ostensible aim of Socialist Realism was to depict reality in its revolutionary development and educate workers in the spirit of communism. 37 This transmuted into depicting life not as it was, but as it should be. Accordingly, the women s magazines informed their readers that they lived in the most free and just of all societies, and that life had never been better. Although warnings were given about the immanent possibility of war, and about internal enemies of the people plotting with the now exiled Trotsky or with foreign powers to bring the Soviet Union down, for the most part the magazines presented a glowing, golden image of Stalin s socialism. Rabotnitsa was full of photographs of happy and fulfilled women workers living with their families in resplendent new apartment blocks. Krest yanka s pages depicted fields rippling with corn, tended by healthy, ruddy-cheeked farm girls on tractors.

Introduction to Part II 85 Women were expected to perform an arduous combination of roles, but this was also presented in positive terms; their fulfilment lay precisely in the fact that their lives were now so multi-faceted. In the following chapters we will look at the ways in which the women s magazines defined female identify for their readers and presented to them the roles they were expected to perform and the personality traits they were expected to exhibit.