A Concise History of Russia (Cambridge Concise Histories)

19 Building Utopia

Starting in 1929, the Soviet leadership began to transform the society of the USSR, to build an industrialized modern state, but not a capitalist state. The new society was to realize the old dream of socialism, a place without private property where the state ran and managed production of goods and services for the benefit of everyone. This was the idea. The reality that emerged after more than a decade of upheaval served as the framework of the Soviet Union until its demise two generations later.

The basic outlines were in place at the end of 1927 with the first five-year plan and the course toward collectivization of agriculture. The plan was to last from the beginning of 1928 to the end of 1932, and called for a twenty percent annual increase in industrial production, a rate of growth that was unheard of at the time. Such a growth rate implied a huge increase in urban population, and that required much more food than the country produced with its backward peasant agriculture. To complicate matters, grain exports were the Soviet Union’s main source of hard currency to buy the new industrial equipment abroad that was essential for rapid industrialization. The solution was to be the collectivization of agriculture, which would increase per acre yield and free millions of hands to work in the new industry. The original plan for the pace of collectivization was moderate, with about a fifth of peasant households to be collectivized by the end of 1932.

The first thing that went wrong was the crisis in grain procurements early in 1928. The response of Stalin and the leadership was to return to grain requisitioning such as they had practiced in the Civil War. In 1929 the food supply situation was so serious that local authorities began to introduce rationing, soon established throughout the country. The crisis also stimulated Stalin and his supporters toward faster industrialization, for they felt that it showed that the kulak was getting stronger and could eventually make socialism impossible. The solution was to change the first five-year plan in 1929, with vastly increased production targets for state industries and huge construction schemes. These were the decisions that led to the opposition of Bukharin and the “rights,” so that the plan was also political. To fulfill the targets and discredit the “rights,” Stalin also had to make the speeded up plans work at whatever cost. The result of the speedups was that the plan ceased to work: managers in the targeted areas took supplies and workers wherever they could get them at whatever cost, wrecking the balances in the plan. The quality of production suffered as the physical output target consumed all attention. As food supplies decreased, the factories began to find their own sources, making semi-legal deals with farms to supply the factory dining rooms, which quickly became the main sources of food for their workers.

The plan called not just for more production but also for a total modernization of the key industrial sectors. The Soviet engineers and planners wanted to follow American industrial models such as Henry Ford’s River Rouge auto plant, which relied on a moving production line rather than on many highly skilled workmen as was the case in Europe. To the Soviets, with millions of unskilled workers, this seemed to be the solution and the great Soviet tractor (and tank) factories were set up on these lines. The tractor factories were crucial to the collectivization plan, but for them as for everything else the country needed far more iron and steel for machines. Throughout the world this was the great age of metal and machines, and if the USSR was to have them, it would have to build huge new complexes. A giant dam on the Dniepr River was built to provide electricity for Ukrainian industry. In the Urals a great industrial base began to grow with whole new cities like Magnitogorsk built from scratch in order to mine iron ore. These were what were called “shock construction” sites, and resources were pulled from everywhere to supply them. The party mobilized youth to work there – the youth lived in tents and mud huts – as a grand campaign to continue the work of the revolution. The press plastered their achievements all over the country, and the most successful “shock workers” saw their pictures in Pravda and on billboards.

The first five-year plan was to be the great turning point in the building of socialism, the decisive break with the past, and Stalin and his allies saw it as a class war. The organs of the state and party under the Georgian Bolshevik Sergo Ordzhonikidze turned their fire first on industrial management, enlisting former Trotskyists to ferret out alleged bureaucratism. Workers and local party committees were encouraged to inform on their bosses, accusing them of incompetence, or even worse, “wrecking.” Anyone responsible for a factory where production flagged or accidents were frequent could be accused of consciously trying to stop the building of socialism by sabotage. Local activists and the GPU (Main Political Administration, successor to the Cheka) also went after Communist managers with enthusiasm, but anyone from the old order was a particular target. During these years the GPU staged show trials of “enemies,” engineers and managers from the pre-revolutionary elites, Menshevik economists, agrarian experts who had supported the SRs or liberals before 1917, and other “former people.” The attack on the old intelligentsia went far beyond the economic sphere: historians and literary scholars, even some natural scientists were arrested and tried. In the non-Russian republics the authorities went after the local intelligentsia as well, accusing them of links with foreign states and various separatist schemes. Most of the managers and engineers were accused of “wrecking”; that is, intentionally causing accidents and slowing down production, usually on the orders of émigré organizations and foreign intelligence agencies. By 1930 these methods had discredited much of the existing administrative units, and Stalin placed Ordzhonikidze in charge of the Supreme Economic Council, where he brought his staff, many former Trotskyists among them, to manage the speedup of the plan.

The ever-increasing plan targets and the chaos that resulted from collectivization meant that millions of people were displaced, roaming the country from one construction site to another. Housing became an acute problem, especially in Moscow and other big or new cities. Most of the urban population came to live in communal apartments, usually older apartments cut up into several rooms with a common kitchen and bathrooms. Whole families lived in one room or two small rooms. In many places workers lived in barracks or “temporary” housing. Initially the plan had called for rapid expansion of at least basic consumer goods, but the increasing targets for heavy industry gutted the production of textiles and other basic commodities. To make things worse, the series of war scares in the late 1920s encouraged massive investment in the military industry until 1934, and this investment reached levels not seen again until the eve of World War II. The standard of living of the population began to fall precipitously. In a few places strikes even broke out over the shortages of food supplies. The managers in the crucial industries could not maintain their workforces without radical measures, and they went beyond supplying food in the factory cafeterias to building apartment houses and schools, tram lines, and clinics for their workers. A whole new type of hierarchy appeared in Soviet society, which put not just the party elite but also entire factories and industries above the rest. Workers in priority industries like the auto and tractor factories or the defense complex managed to get through these years with at least the basic needs of life supplied, while at textile factories or other light industries, many of them with predominantly female work forces, the workers had too little food even to work a full day.

City life meant intense privation, even for the youthful enthusiasts at shock construction sites. These hardships were nothing compared to the disasters of collectivization. At the beginning the party was not even clear what the new collective farm was to look like: was it to be some sort of association of peasant households for common planting and harvesting, or was it to be a total commune with farmers living in communal housing and eating together, as well as farming all the land together? And how fast was it to proceed, and how? In any case, it was in the autumn of 1929 when Stalin decided to go for as much collectivization as he could get. To prepare the ground the leadership decided on the “liquidation of the kulaks as a class” and the GPU set out to round up and deport the kulaks. Several thousand were executed, but nearly two million were deported to the north, the Urals and Siberia, where they were put in “special settlements” to cut timber or sometimes to work in the mines or on construction. They arrived in remote areas where they had to build their own houses, often in the dead of winter without any facilities, medical care, or established food supplies. Thousands escaped and thousands died, until in 1931 the GPU took over the special settlements, the first large group to come under the auspices of the GULAG. For the time being, the special settlers vastly outnumbered the prisoners in actual concentration camps.

With the kulaks out of the way, collectivization went on at top speed. Under intense pressure from rural party officials as well as emissaries sent from the cities, the peasants were convinced to abandon their strips of land and combine them, in theory at least, into one huge farm to be worked together. To make matters worse, the authorities in some areas tried to push the peasants not just into collective farms but even into communes, the super-collectivized units with communal living and eating arrangements. By early 1930, almost half of the peasants had agreed to join a collective, but they also slaughtered their livestock, not wanting to waste them in the new order. There was as yet no equipment to work the farms beyond the old plows and horses, whose numbers were rapidly decreasing. Opposition was rife, with thousands of “incidents,” ranging from real rebellions to minor objections blown up into anti-Soviet demonstrations by the GPU. Early in 1930 Stalin realized that he had to pull back. The economic results of forcing the peasants into collective farms were becoming serious, and he published an article in Pravda under the title, “Dizzy with Success.” Local party members were getting too enthusiastic, he wrote, and were pursuing target numbers for their own sake, not paying enough attention to local circumstances and the mood of the peasantry. After the article, the number of collective farms fell rapidly and the communes were abandoned, but the process did not stop, it only paused and then resumed at a slower pace. In the meantime, disaster struck.

As collectivization continued, with all the disruptions that it caused, the weather played a cruel trick. In 1931 and 1932 bad weather struck – cold in some areas and drought in others – in the Ukraine and southern Russia, the main grain producing areas. By the summer of 1932 this meant famine that spanned a wide belt running from the Polish border into Siberia. The authorities reacted slowly, keeping up their collections of grains at the amount fixed in better years. Only toward the end of the year did they begin to ease off, but it was already too late, and famine had spread taking with it some five to seven million peasants throughout the southern regions of the USSR, about half of these in the Ukraine. The casualties of the famine, not the kulaks, turned out to be the principal victims of collectivization. The drought hit the peasants when the numbers of livestock had fallen, on average, by half and they had no reserves of grain; all of this was the result of the chaos of collectivization and the relentless collection of grain for the cities. The famine disturbed the authorities, but they did very little about it. Stalin did not take any extraordinary methods against the famine, which crushed opposition to collectivization. Not until better weather in 1933 produced a better harvest did the famine come to an end.

By the middle of the 1930s the basic outlines of the Soviet collective farm, the kolhoz, were in place, for the notion of setting up communes had been abandoned. The Russian village had always been a community, with houses clustered in the village surrounded by the fields. What was new was that the fields were now under the control of the kolhoz (actual property rights were still vested in the state). The kolhoz had a chairman and a governing board that set the farming tasks, which the peasants carried out together, plowing and sowing, harvesting and taking care of the livestock. For their work on the farm the peasants received payment, not in money but in the form of part of the harvest calculated by a system known as “labor-days.” The bulk of the harvest went to the state at a fixed price, one that favored the state and the cities over the kolhoz.

The kolhoz rarely owned its own machinery. As the new tractor factories came on line, the tractors went to a new institution, the Machine-Tractor Station, some eight thousand of them by the end of the decade. These were state operations, and they rented out the tractors and other machinery with the drivers and workers, providing the essential equipment for the kolhoz as well as assuring state control over the collective farms. If the machinery put the state into farming directly, the market did not disappear entirely in the countryside. Unlike the cities, where all retail trade was in state hands by the early 1930s, the peasantry was explicitly granted the right to farm small private plots alongside their houses. They used them primarily for vegetables and smaller livestock and took the produce to the peasant markets that reappeared in all Soviet cities. Though the private plots were only about four percent of the kolhoz land, they produced forty percent of vegetables and potatoes and over sixty-six percent of the meat coming from the collective farms. Their products were sold at prices much above those fixed in the stories and factory cafeterias, but at least they were available.

From 1933 to about 1936 the tension and upheaval in Soviet society lessened considerably. The rightists in the party had capitulated and publicly recanted their errors as had the Trotskyists, and Bukharin became the editor of Izvestiia. In 1932 the government abolished the Supreme Economic Council, replacing it with a series of People’s Commissariats for different branches of industry. The most important was the People’s Commissariat of Heavy Industry, headed by Ordzhonikidze. It seemed that a more rational style of economic management had triumphed, for Ordzhonikidze took with him to the new organization many of the former Left Oppositionists and even many “bourgeois specialists” like those whom he had harassed in 1926–1929. New methods of increasing productivity in the work force emerged. In 1935 the Donbass miner Aleksei Stakhanov managed to produce fourteen times his norm of coal and was proclaimed a national hero. Other workers tried to imitate the simple reorganization of work methods that he used to achieve the goal, and were rewarded as Stakhanovites. Work gangs and shops within factories announced “socialist competition” contests to over fulfill the plan, earning brief fame as well as more concrete benefits. In themselves these campaigns, heavily sponsored by the party, achieved little, but labor productivity managed to grow anyway. The extreme shortages of food and consumer goods began to abate and in 1935 the rationing of food and other consumer goods ended. Nevertheless, many basic commodities would be periodically or permanently in deficit. Elaborate systems of informal supply among the population formed to deal with these shortages, ranging from crude black market operations (strictly illegal and widely punished) to relatively harmless exchanges of goods among families and friends. The population was learning to cope. Unemployment had disappeared, to be replaced with a permanent labor shortage, though real wages were well below those of the late 1920s for the great majority of workers.

In these somewhat brighter years, the seeds of destruction were already sown. On December 1, 1934, an assassin killed the leader of the party in Leningrad, Sergei Kirov. The authorities proclaimed the murder to be the work of unrepentant Trotskyists, though the most likely theory is that it was the result of Kirov’s romantic entanglements. In public the uproar died down quickly, but in the ensuing months the NKVD (in place of the GPU from 1934) began to search for enemy agents, particularly among the former oppositionists working in Soviet institutions. By 1936 they were ready to bring Zinoviev and Kamenev together with other old Bolsheviks, mostly former oppositionists, to trial. The charges were the murder of Kirov, a conspiracy to kill Stalin, and treasonous arrangements with fascist agents. The defendants all “confessed” in a carefully staged public trial and were mostly sentenced to death. In January of 1937, another trial followed, and this time the main defendants were Karl Radek, a journalist and Comintern official, and Georgii Piatakov. Both were former Trotskyists, and Piatakov had in recent years been the right-hand man of Ordzhonikidze in the People’s Commissariat of Heavy Industry. Ordzhonikidze seems to have been the only one in the leadership to resist the coming terror – at least as it applied to the institutions he headed at the time. On February 17, after a long conversation with Stalin, Ordzhnokidze committed suicide. His death was announced as the result of sudden illness, and he received a grandiose state funeral.

In late February 1937, the Central Committee of the Party met in plenary session, its agenda being to discuss the new constitution about to be promulgated for the country. The new constitution replaced the formal institutions formed in the Civil War with ones that looked more like those of a normal state, though it had no impact on the actual relations of power, dominated as they were by the party. A rather dull meeting seemed to be in prospect. Early in the proceedings Molotov and other confidants of Stalin arose to add to the deliberations the need to “unmask the Trotskyist agents of fascism” whom they asserted to be hiding in large numbers in the party and state apparatus. By the end of the meeting the unmasking of traitors had become the main task proclaimed by the Central Committee. In the ensuing months the NKVD, under its new head Nikolai Ezhov, began to arrest tens of thousands of people as enemies of the people. In May the NKVD ordered the arrest of nearly the whole of the high command of the Red Army. Marshal Tukhachevsky and seven others, almost all Red Army heroes of the Civil War, were accused of treason and confessions were extracted by torture. They were tried in secret, and quickly executed. Some forty thousand officers perished or went to prison in the wake of the Tukhachevsky trial. At the ranks of brigade commander and above nearly ninety percent were executed, altogether some eight hundred men. The terror was not confined to such elite groups, for other and larger classes of victims accompanied them to the camps and the firing squads. In July the Politburo issued order 00447 (the 00 signified top secret) providing each regional unit of the NKVD with a quota for arrests and executions. The total for the country in this order alone was to be seventy-two thousand. The victims were to be, in principle, all known former kulaks, White officers, Mensheviks or SRs, and a multitude of lesser and vaguer categories. Each office of the NKVD began frantically to search through its card files for anyone ever arrested or under suspicion in any of the relevant categories. Regional NKVD units wrote to Moscow begging to be allowed to over fulfill the plan for executions and arrests. Their requests were granted, and similar orders followed. These orders at least targeted (mostly) real potential enemies of the Soviet order.

Stalin also struck at the party apparatus with the NKVD, again by torture extracting confessions from party members that they were wreckers and Japanese or German spies. To enforce the terror, Stalin sent trusted deputies, Kaganovich, Georgii Malenkov, and others, to republican and provincial capitals to “unmask” the enemies in the party hierarchy and order their arrest. Ezhov presented Stalin with long lists of enemies and wreckers, some forty-four thousand in all, and Stalin personally checked off the names, presenting them to Molotov and others in his inner circle for confirmation. Molotov and Stalin even added comments in the margins of the list: “Give the dog a dog’s death,” or “Hit them and hit them.” Most of the members of the central party leadership, including the Central Committee of the Party, People’s Commissars, and other high government officials perished. The same occurred at the republican level, and even reached down to provincial and city party and government circles. Thus most of the party apparatus perished. The names of the dead and imprisoned simply disappeared from public documents, and they were erased along with Trotsky from the history books.

The last of the show trials took place in March 1938, and featured the former rightists, Bukharin, Rykov, and others, as well as Ezhov’s predecessor as head of the NKVD, Genrikh Yagoda. The usual confessions and violent denunciations from the prosecutor, Andrei Vyshinskii (himself an ex-Menshevik), were the highlights. This lurid spectacle was the last of the show trials, and though it and its predecessors attracted world attention, it served mainly as a background to the real killing. In the course of 1937–38, the NKVD executed some three quarters of a million people, including the bulk of the military and political elite, all former oppositionists from within the party, but the majority of the victims, however, were people in all walks of life who fit into the prescribed categories of enemies such as former nobles or Mensheviks. To top all this off, the NKVD also decided to deport the entire population of the so-called “western national minorities”: the Poles, Latvians, Germans, Finns, and others who lived near the western boundary of the USSR. Hundreds of thousands perished in transit. When the NKVD ran out of people in the assigned categories, they rounded up common criminals, executed them, and listed them as political. In the two years, the total who were executed or died of privations in transit came out to a million people. Finally, the blood came to an end. Through 1938 Stalin gave increasingly frequent signals that “excesses” had been committed, putting the blame on the NKVD, and Ezhov himself was soon executed. By 1939, the wave had passed. A semblance of peace descended on a terrorized society.

After the end of the terror, the subject passed entirely from Soviet public discourse. Stalin soon ordered the composition and extensive publication of the Short Course of the History of Communist Party and ordered all members of the party to study it thoroughly. It became a compendium of the official line, and offered a wholly falsified history of Bolshevism and the 1917 revolution, with Trotsky and other leaders omitted except to vilify them for their opposition in the 1920s and their alleged later roles as spies and traitors. Its centerpiece was a simplified sketch of Marxism authored by Stalin himself though not publicly acknowledged as such. The book offered no explanation of the events of 1937–38 other than to describe the results of the show trials. The actual terror never received any public explanation then or later in Stalin’s lifetime. Though the specific charges at the show trials and in secret arrests normally had been manufactured, Stalin, Molotov, and the others around them seem to have seriously thought that they were fighting and destroying real and dangerous enemies. Such, at least, is the language of their surviving private correspondence with one another. Their public statements in 1937 asserted that the successful building of socialism only “sharpened the class struggle,” which seems to have meant that Stalin’s policies, especially collectivization, produced more and more doubters, whom Stalin and his circle interpreted as conscious enemies suborned by foreign intelligence services. In addition they feared that such internal enemies might try to strike when the inevitable war in Europe broke out and involved the Soviet Union. The mentality of Soviet leaders, and particularly the NKVD, encouraged such conclusions. NKVD officials during collectivization regularly interpreted objections by the peasants to minor aspects of the new order as conscious political opposition to the Soviet system. In their minds and in Stalin’s, if someone disagreed with some details of the plan targets for the aluminum industry, that person must be a secret opponent of the regime, and as the Short Course taught, all enemies of socialism are ultimately in league with one another.

Not everyone who was arrested was shot, and as a result, the population of the prison camps boomed. In the 1920s the prison camps had been relatively small and organized around the main camp on the Solovki Islands in the White Sea. In those years just over one hundred thousand people languished in Solovki and various other prisons, in cold, insect-infested cells, required to work cutting peat or felling trees. In 1929 Stalin and the security police decided to turn the prison system into a network of labor camps on the Solovki model, and common criminals were placed in the same camps. The great expansion came with the collectivization of agriculture, for those kulaks considered especially dangerous were sent to camps rather than to the special settlements. By 1934, when the GULAG, or the Chief Administration of Camps, under the OGPU/NKVD came into being, there were half a million prisoners. By 1939 a million-and-a-half prisoners lived in camps and “labor colonies,” which had a somewhat less strict regime. Though plenty of people died in Soviet camps, they were not death camps, but labor camps, and the GULAG took the labor component quite seriously. At first they even advertised their “successes,” such as the building of the White Sea Canal in 1931–32, touted as an example of labor successfully re-educating class enemies. From 1937, however, the camps were in principle secret. The system was a complex hierarchy, ranging from “special settlements,” where the prisoners lived in fairly normal housing or minimally livable barracks, to horrific mining settlements like Vorkuta or the Kolyma gold fields on the east coast of Siberia, reachable only by ship. Most prisoners were assigned labor in forests, cutting trees for the timber industry with primitive tools, or were assigned to mine, or work in construction. Death was the result of disease, accidents, and general privation, for the GULAG needed labor to meet its own plans. Most deaths occurred during the shipment out to the camps in 1937–38 when hundreds of thousands were shipped east and north in unheated boxcars to places where facilities for the prisoners were almost non-existent. In the Stalin years, failure to meet the plan could be fatal, so the camp commandants engaged in a complex juggling game to keep the prisoners well-enough fed and housed to be able to work while not expending too much on them. With the special settlements, some four million people lived “under the jurisdiction of the NKVD” by 1941. Of these most were not political prisoners in the usual sense. In the camps and colonies, only about twenty percent had been convicted of “counter-revolutionary actions” or other political offenses, and the rest were a mixture of common criminals and those who fell afoul of increasingly strict laws on labor discipline, hooliganism, or “theft of state property,” a particularly murky area given the realities of Soviet life. Many were imprisoned for passport violations after the introduction of internal passports in 1932. Even the “political” prisoners included many classified as political only in the super-politicized categories of Stalin and the NKVD. The camp system under Stalin was primarily a system of convict labor into which political prisoners were added.

At the end of the 1930s the Soviet Union was even more a land of paradox than before. State centralization had continued to increase. The defeat of the Right Opposition had put Stalin’s allies in all the key positions of state: Molotov became the chair of the Council of People’s Commissars, the head of state and government. Along with Molotov and Stalin the inner circle now consisted of Lazar Kaganovich, Sergo Ordzhonikidze, Kliment Voroshilov, Anastas Mikoyan, and, until his death Valerian Kuibyshev. While Ordzhonikidze and Kuibyshev oversaw industry, Kaganovich took care of transport and Mikoyan of the crucial area of food supplies and trade. Voroshilov was in charge of the armed forces. All of them had other duties as well, and they regularly met to discuss even minute issues of economic management as well as political questions. Around this inner group until 1937–38 was a large number of managers and party officials who had mostly come out of the Civil War and come into power under Stalin. This was the core Soviet elite at the time, and most of them did not survive the terror of 1937–38. The result of the terror was to further concentrate power in the inner circle and even more so on Stalin himself, but to also bring new men into the leadership. Foremost among them was Lavrentii Beriia, another Georgian who replaced Ezhov as head of the security police. Others of the younger men were Andrei Zhdanov, Georgii Malenkov, and Nikita Khrushchev, all of whom would play major roles in the coming war and post-war years. Zhdanov was the son of a school inspector and worked his way up through provincial party leadership to take over Leningrad’s party after the assassination of Kirov. Malenkov, also from the Urals, and with a pre-revolutionary gymnasium education, made his career in the central party apparatus in Moscow. Khrushchev, by contrast, was actually a worker in the Donbass who rose through the party ranks when Kaganovich was running the Ukrainian party in the 1920s, and then moved on to Moscow. All three had served in the Civil War. Along with these new men came a shift in the structure of power at the center, with all of the leaders taking more direct roles in managing the state, not merely supervising it from the Politburo. The centralization of power was formalized in May 1941 when Stalin replaced Molotov as Chairman of the Council of People’s Commissars. Stalin now formally and actually headed both party and state.

Figure 19. The funeral of the writer Maxim Gorky in 1936. From right to left: Genrikh Iagoda, chief of the political police, Stalin,Viacheslav Molotov, Bulgarian Communist and Comintern leader Georgii Dimitrov, (in white) Andrei Zhdanov, Lazar Kaganovich.

Alongside the centralization of power in the Politburo and then with Stalin alone a whole cult of the leader appeared, managed from the center. It was already normal in the early 1920s to display portraits of Lenin, Trotsky, and the current leadership at major celebrations like November 7 and May 1. By the end of the 1920s Stalin was the central figure in these displays and by the end of the 1930s almost the only figure. Statues of Stalin sprouted in addition to the ubiquitous statues of Lenin, and cities and institutions were named in his honor. At party meetings it was the ritual to stand when his name was mentioned and acclaim him. Stalin was not a dynamic public speaker, in part because of his pronounced Georgian accent, and he never seems to have desired the unceasing public display and admiration that Hitler and Mussolini craved and staged over and over. He rarely appeared in public and his actual personality remained private, but the standard epithets – “great leader of peoples”– were obligatory. His writings were the required textbooks of Marxism and his image and his name were everywhere and became basic components of Soviet political culture.

The centralization of power also affected the complex federal structure of the USSR. Starting in 1929–30 all-union Commissariats of Agriculture, Education, and Culture and other organs had been created that stood over the analogous republican agencies. The policies and structures of the NEP era had meant a sort of de facto alliance of the party with intellectuals in the non-Russian republics to build and in some cases create local cultures. This arrangement in many ways paralleled the role of the pre-revolutionary Russian engineers and economists in Soviet industry, and it met the same fate beginning in 1929–30. Show trials of local nationalists signaled the end of collaboration, as did the appearance of an all-union Commissariat of Culture and Education. In 1932–33 the party carried out a campaign against Ukrainian nationalism, including show trials of Ukrainian intellectuals accused of nationalism and ties with foreign powers. The Ukrainian party leaders who preferred the older policy committed suicide and others were arrested or demoted. Similar campaigns took place in other republics, all of them part of the “cultural revolution” of 1929–1932.

Even more important for the fate of the Soviet republics was the tremendous growth in centralization of the economy. Republican plans for economic development were swamped by new central authorities’ grandiose schemes for regional development based on economic, not ethnic, criteria. In the northern autonomous republics of Russia, no local authority could compete with the sheer economic power of the GULAG, even when the political arm of the NKVD was not involved. Ukrainian and Siberian economic development followed the dictates of the all-union industrial Commissariats, Gosplan, and other agencies. The result in many areas was massive economic development but also ultimate erosion of the authority of local party committees and republican governments. The republican authorities (including the Russian republic) were largely left with agricultural issues, by their nature requiring more local control. The hierarchy that emerged from industrialization was not based on the federal state structure, but on the economic structure. The hierarchy was not ethnic or political: a district or a republic with many factories under a high priority commissariat such as heavy industry or defense was favored both with investment and consumer goods. A district with light industry was not. This system favored the Ukrainian Donbass and neglected central Russian towns where the predominant industries were textile factories.

In some respects the central authorities continued to pay attention to local issues. For all the centralization, the formal federal structure remained. The 1936, “Stalin” constitution perpetuated the federal structure of the USSR, by now including twelve union republics and many autonomous republics under them. The end of the “indigenization” policy in the party came with the assault on local nationalism, but Stalin did not replace the local minorities in the party leadership with Russians. Local nationality party members came to be the majority in almost all union and autonomous republics, including the leadership groups, though Stalin continued to bring in occasional trusted outsiders at the top, like Nikita Khrushchev in the Ukraine in the wake of the 1937–38 terror. The Soviet Union’s central leadership was multi-national. Stalin himself was Georgian as was Orzdzhonikidze and the post-1938 head of the NKVD, Lavrentii Beriia. Molotov and Voroshilov were both Russian, while Kaganovich and the foreign minister in the 1930s, Maxim Litvinov, were Jewish. Mikoyan was Armenian. The campaign against local nationalism did not imply cultural Russification. Stalin and the leadership were perfectly happy for the non-Russians to speak and write native languages, as long as Moscow retained political control and Moscow ran most of the economy. In Russian-speaking Ukrainian cities the newspapers were still mostly in Ukrainian until 1939. After about 1932 the Soviet authorities began to heavily promote the celebration of non-Russian writers and artists in the central press, organizing meetings with Stalin and other leaders in Moscow to great press coverage. Pre-revolutionary Russian culture received a similar positive re-evaluation, culminating in the Pushkin anniversary celebrations of 1937. In the same years in the Ukraine new statues of the poet Taras Shevchenko appeared, to great organized festivity, and similar figures were glorified or occasionally invented in the other republics. This was not merely a cultural campaign, for it formed one of the foundations of “friendship of peoples,” the Soviet attempt to bond the various nations of the Soviet Union by downplaying conflicts of the past and emphasizing the supposedly harmonious present and future. In a predominantly centralized economy and state, the promotion of local culture alongside Russian provided a way to build a multinational society that would move toward a unified socialist state.

Soviet policy was not uniform in all the non-Russian republics in these years. In the Muslim areas Soviet leadership moved very cautiously against Islam. In Central Asia the main issue in the 1920s had been the abolition of the veil for Muslim women, an issue on which the small local intelligentsia was in general agreement. Most of the southern Islamic areas were also not yet the object of massive industrialization drives, though collectivization, when it came, was normally as harsh as in Russia and the Ukraine. The one great disaster in Central Asia was in Kazakhstan. Kazakhstan was still to a large extent nomadic in 1930 and collectivization implied “sedentarization,” that is, nomadic herders were to settle down and raise their stock in one area. This policy set off internal struggles inside the clans that combined with intense party pressure and produced a massive crisis. The nomadic Kazakhs responded by slaughtering their animals or fleeing across the border to other Soviet republics and even to China. Over a million became refugees and over a million, some twenty percent of the Kazakh population, died of hunger or disease. In the succeeding years, the Kazakh authorities managed to resettle most of the refugees in Kazakhstan, and stock-raising slowly recovered, but the demographic catastrophe’s effects lasted for decades.

Another series of paradoxes grew from the outcome of the transformation of Soviet society. Though terrorized by the events of 1937–38, the population at the end of the 1930s was much better educated, more urban, and in most ways more “modern” than in 1928. Some thirty-one percent of the population lived in urban areas, double the pre-1917 figure, and almost all of the population had at least basic literacy. Ties with older traditions disappeared. The Orthodox Church and other religions were essentially smashed by the anti-religious campaigns: only a few hundred churches remained open in the entire country, and the great majority of the clergy were dead or in camps. The traditional rhythm of the Russian year, with Shrovetide, Lent, and Easter simply evaporated without churches to support it, and the Communist festivals, November 7 and May 1 replaced them, with a secular New Year celebration in between. The huge expansion in urban population meant that millions left the world of the peasantry. People who had never seen a complex machine before now ran tram lines and built airplanes. Basic consumer goods were scarce, but movies, popular music, and the radio provided mass entertainment of a more or less modern sort. Mass education, especially in technical subjects, was a priority and tens of thousands of students received the basics of modern science, while surviving crowded, unheated dormitories and wretched and erratic food. This sort of speeded-up education allowed Stalin to fill the positions left empty by the arrests of the great terror with people from peasant and working class backgrounds but who were more or less able to do their jobs.

The five-year plans were a qualified success. The Soviet leadership regularly used deceptive statistical methods to make the results look better, but the actual results in industry were impressive enough by 1940. The USSR was now the world’s third industrial power, after the United States and Germany. The new industrial plants had modern equipment, and many of them were located in the Urals and Siberia, places of yet untapped wealth that were also far from the increasingly threatened frontier. Small villages had turned into cities, and entirely new industrial areas came into being. Some of the promises of socialism were beginning to be realized. The People’s Commissariat of Health doubled the number of doctors and medical personnel between 1932 and 1940, and vaccination and hygiene programs markedly decreased the death rates from disease. At the same time, years of famine, deprivations, and crowded and unsanitary housing provided immense obstacles to the new and mostly female medical personnel. The Communists had always promoted the equality of women, and by the 1930s the work force was almost half female. Some women began to appear even as tractor drivers on the collective farms and workers in heavy industry. Some professions, such as medicine, were rapidly becoming primarily the domain of women. The successes of women pilots and workers were the subject of huge propaganda campaigns in the media. The large gap in education between women and men virtually closed, at least in the cities. As in all cases, the reality of daily life provided major obstacles: in light industry, where most workers were women, there was never enough daycare for children. Though women were paid the same as men for the same work, the predominantly female light industries were lower in priority and hence the wages were lower and fewer, and worse consumer goods were available through the workplace. The burden of family continued to fall on women even when daycare centers and kindergartens appeared. It was women who bore the brunt of standing in lines for scarce commodities and forming informal networks to obtain them.

In the late 1930s consumer goods continued to trickle back into the stores and the lives of women as well as men eased. The weak point of the Soviet economy was and remained in agriculture. The collective farms were just barely able to supply the burgeoning cities with grain, but pre-1940 meat production never reached the levels found in the late 1920s. Meat and milk came overwhelmingly not from the kolhoz but from the private plots the state had allowed the peasants to retain after collectivization. The population continued to rely heavily on the peasant market, more expensive than state stores, and on workplace distribution centers for anything beyond the most basic foodstuffs. Nevertheless, the country was able to vastly increase military production again at the end of the 1930s, in the face of the danger of war, without completely wrecking the plan and the supply of consumer goods. This was not nearly the promised utopia, but it did provide the basis of the Soviet version of a modern society. It was just barely enough.

For Stalin’s new industrial giant of a country was about to face a threat greater than any kulaks or imaginary Japanese spies. By 1938 the heart of Europe was under the power of Adolf Hitler, who had made it clear in Mein Kampf that Germany must conquer “living space” to survive, and that Germany’s living space was to be found in the Soviet Union. In 1931, Stalin had told a conference of industrial managers that Russia “was fifty to a hundred years behind the advanced countries. Either we catch up in ten years or they crush us.” Perhaps his evaluation of the state of the Soviet economy had been too pessimistic at the time, but his prediction of the time they had at their disposal was right on the mark. They had exactly ten years.