Economic and demographic change in Soviet Union from Cambridge history of Russia, volume 3

Economic and demographic change: Russia's age of economic extremes

PETER GATRELL

The enduring fascination with Russia's twentieth-century economic history has its roots in the politics of revolution. For the Bolshevik leadership, the events of 1917-18 presaged the foundation of a more equitable, humane and modern economic and social order, one that would hold out hope to millions of oppressed and impoverished people within and beyond Russia's borders. For the Bolsheviks' opponents, the revolution was destructive andbarbaric, revers­ing a half-century of prior economic progress under the tsarist regime, for the sake of what seemed to many of them to be dubious social and economic goals. These sharply polarised opinions have, to a greater or lesser extent, coloured the way in which later generations have assessed the aspirations and the performance of the Russian economy during the twentieth century. When Stalin launched an extraordinarily ambitious programme of economic modernisation and social change upon the Soviet Union after 1928, jettisoning traditional forms of agricultural organisation and cementing a system of cen­tral economic planning, the controversy between enthusiasts and sceptics only deepened. The enthusiasts pointed to rapid economic growth and dramatic technological change during the 1930s, contrasting this with the prolonged depression in the capitalist West. Victory in the war against Nazism seemed to them to have validated the Stalinist industrial revolution. For their part, the sceptics questioned the magnitude of economic growth, drew attention to systemic deficiencies and highlighted the widespread terror and population losses. After Stalin's death, attempts at economic reform - sometimes hesitant, sometimes more purposeful - did nothing to lessen a divergence of opinion between those who saw reform as a dead end and those who regarded it as a worthwhile attempt to redesign the socialist system, in order to respond to fresh challenges from the Soviet Union's rivals, beneficiaries of the post-war

I am grateful to NickBaron, Paul Gregory, MarkHarrison and Nat Moser for their comments

on an earlier version of this chapter.

economic miracle. Finally, the disintegration of the Soviet system after 1991 enabled the sceptics to claim that the planned economy had been built on shallow foundations all along. The enthusiasts, bruised by the sudden collapse of Soviet socialism, bemoaned the high costs of 'transition'. By the end of the twentieth century, they had become the sceptics, whilst those who hith­erto pinpointed the shortcomings of the Soviet economic experiment now enthusiastically endorsed Russia's attempt to create a functioning capitalist economy

For these reasons, it is not difficult to understand why the eminent Ameri­can sovietologist and economist, Alexander Gerschenkron, wrote of Russia's twentieth century that 'it always was a political economic history'. It was bound up with a vision of an economic future that could be deliberately engineered by administrative means, in order to fashion a developed yet egal­itarian society. That vision was compelling far beyond Russia. Differences of history and culture notwithstanding, the Soviet economic project inspired politicians, economists and engineers in countries as far apart as Romania, China, Cuba and Tanzania, not to mention in those non-socialist societies where the exchange of ideas operated freely. The 'second world' of socialism enjoyed enormous prestige in the 'third world'. It affected no less the course of intellectual debate and political practice in developed parts of the globe.

The political and ideological context of economic decision-making did not remain stable throughout the twentieth century. The tsarist regime was deeply unsettled by the Revolution of 1905, to which it responded by embarking upon a major reform of property rights in the countryside. Nor did the installation of the Soviet regime bring about greater stability: on the contrary, the civil war unleashed a period of political uncertainty and economic collapse. Following the relatively stable era of the New Economic Policy (1921-8), the Stalinist 'rev­olution from above' ushered in a fresh period of turmoil. For many peasants, collectivisation had echoes of the wartime exactions that they had rejected in 1920 and carried connotations of the serfdom that had been abolished in 1861. For enterprise managers, the dictates of central planning created a climate of uncertainty rather than security; there was little refuge from arbitrary inter­vention by the party in economic affairs. The post-war era brought about a more prolonged degree of political stability, but the collapse of Soviet authority in the late 1980s engendered fresh turmoil, from which the post-Communist successor states have not been immune.

Notwithstanding this recurrent political turbulence, Russia's twentieth cen­tury displays certain continuities in the style of governance. At a macro level, economic policy was governed by a pronounced sense of the imperial, Soviet and post-Soviet mission of economic modernisation. At stake was the need to tame reckless nature, to improve (and transcend) human capabilities, to arrange population 'rationally' and above all to overcome economic back­wardness. The economic history of Russia can thus be read as a kind of Niet- zschean struggle that rationalised overt political intervention in the affairs of subordinate institutions and their agents. Tsarist officials prescribed in micro­scopic detail the conduct of corporate bodies, whether joint-stock enterprises or trade unions. The Communist Party established formal political depart­ments in economic commissariats (ministries) and in collective farms. To be sure, both regimes might periodically laud the 'heroic' and decisive individual, whether the entrepreneur (before the revolution) or the Soviet factory director who exceeded plan targets. But the imperatives of modernisation - the subju­gation of space and the transcendence of time - ascribed particular significance to the state and limited the formal autonomy of agents, whether managers, workers or farmers. These ambitions introduced a campaign style to Russia's economic history. The tsarist programme of land reform, the war on nouveaux riches during the 1920s, the Stakhanovite movement in 1935-6, Khrushchev's Virgin Lands campaign, Gorbachev's project for economic 'acceleration' - all these are characteristic of a belief that the state had a duty to intervene in order to circumvent potential obstacles to the tasks of economic modernisation.

As already implied, these imperatives had profound implications for Russia's demographic history. The emphasis upon the transformation of space imparted particular significance to population migration. At one level this meant the use of political instruments to promote the settlement of regions earmarked for economic development and expansion. At another it meant that some regions were 'cleared' of 'alien elements' and others were set aside for the incarceration and deployment of forced labour. In the tsarist and Soviet eras alike, defence considerations as well as colonising impulses were at work. As recent work has made clear, this population politics was closely bound up with the global pursuit of'modernity'.[1]

These preliminary remarks serve to suggest a framework for understanding the mixed fortunes of the Soviet economy during the twentieth century. No attempt is made here to survey all aspects of Russian economic history or to provide a full picture of economic growth and development.[2] Instead, this chapter provides a way of thinking about the economic and demographic consequences of the ambitions expressed by successive political leaders in Russia.

Great leaps forward (i): late tsarist industrialisation

The long boom in Russian industry began after 1885 and, after a brief inter­ruption in 1899-1907, finally came to an end in 1916. It rested upon a mixture of direct and indirect initiatives on the part of the state. Under Minister of Finances Sergei Witte the tsarist government embarked on a massive pro­gramme of railway-building, including the construction of the Trans-Siberian Railway, designed in part to open up markets in the Far East and Central Asia. Railway construction in turn helped kick-start the expansion of heavy industry. By its adoption of the gold standard in 1897 the government created an environment favourable to foreign investment. Russia became increasingly integrated into the international economy, through the medium of capital movements and the export trade in commodities such as grain and oil. Inter­national movements of labour were less significant, although Russia suffered a net outflow of migrants to the New World, partly because of discriminatory policies towards the empire's Jewish population.

The results were impressive: a growth rate for total income of around 5 per cent per annum during the 1890s and again after 1907, combined with technological modernisation in key industrial sectors such as iron and steel, oil and engineering. New industrial regions came into existence, including the Donbass coal basin and the oil industry of the Caucasus, although it is worth noting that tsarist industrialisation tended to consolidate pre-existing regional disparities. For example, investment in modern metalworking and textile factories in the Baltic lands took place in an environment that was already relatively highly developed in terms of educational attainment and income per head.

Russia's industrial upsurge sparked controversy at the time, and its wel­fare consequences have been debated ever since. Conservatives bemoaned the intrusion of a modern financial sector and foreign investment in Russia, and charged Witte with the neglect of agriculture. In an influential assessment Alexander Gerschenkron defended Witte's strategy, on the grounds that it enabled the Russian state to substitute for factors of production that were

for War: Soviet Production, Employment, and the Defence Burden, 1940-1945 (Cambridge:

Cambridge University Press, 1996).

missing or in short supply. Chief amongst these were skilled labour and cap­ital. By stabilising the exchange rate, imposing high tariffs and launching a propaganda offensive, the tsarist state encouraged the inflow of foreign direct investment. Advanced technology imported from Western Europe enabled Russian entrepreneurs to substitute capital for labour. Yet underpinning the strategy was a government willingness to maintain a high level of demand for the output of heavy industry, and this entailed in the view of some observers injurious taxation of the peasant population and depressed levels of household consumption. Gerschenkron believed that this was a small price to pay for economic development. Elements in this story have been challenged: thus Gerschenkron neglected regional differences in peasant welfare, understated autonomous industrial growth and discounted the impact of state-financed rearmament in asserting that the state's role diminished after 1905. However, his overall interpretative framework has proved remarkably stimulating and durable.

Industrialisation had important demographic consequences. The rate of migration to new centres of industry increased (Witte's critics decried the squalor of new settlements, and bemoaned the crime that they associated with urban overcrowding). As a result, on the eve of the First World War around 16 per cent of the population lived in urban centres. Witte deliber­ately encouraged population migration, partly because he saw colonisation as a solution to 'rural overpopulation' in Russia's central agricultural region. The tempo of economic development greatly increased the settlement of Rus­sians in far-flung corners of the empire, including Central Asia, the Caucasus, Poland and the Baltic lands. Non-Russian minorities in turn began to settle in larger numbers in Russia's expanding cities. By 1914, for example, around 15 per cent of the empire's Latvian population lived outside the Baltic region, the result of a generation of economic development and migration to Euro­pean Russia. However, few observers attributed any significance to this at the time.

These developmental imperatives continued to operate during the First World War. Around 140,000 workers, including prisoners of war, were set to work building railway lines, such as between Petrozavodsk and Murmansk. They included Kazakh rebels who were punished for having opposed con­scription in 1916. In general, however, the mainsprings of wartime migration betrayed other, non-developmental impulses. Jews, Germans and other 'alien' populations were forcibly removed from the borderlands during 1915, and resettled in European Russia (for Russia's Jews this forced migration marked the end of the infamous Pale of Settlement).

Historians have been relatively kind in their assessment of the tsarist great leap forward. The growth rates and structural change were remarkable. All the same, on the eve of the First World War the gap between Russia and more developed countries had actually widened in terms of income per capita - a consequence of Russia's rapid population increase and the size of the unre­constructed rural sector. Traditional forms of tsarist governance persisted; in particular, there was a surfeit of arbitrary intervention in economic life that probably had a corrosive effect on entrepreneurship. The post-revolutionary generation would continue to grapple with the issue of Russia's relative eco­nomic backwardness and to experiment with forms of economic administra­tion.

The radical privatisation impulse (i): pre-1917 experiments with land reform

The majority ofthepopulation in tsarist Russia continued to support itself from agriculture. Peasant farming gave cause for concern, because it was believed that traditional methods of cultivation condemned successive generations to poverty. Hence attention shifted to the prevailing forms of peasant agricul­ture. Following widespread peasant unrest in 1905 and 1906 Prime Minister Stolypin targeted the traditional land commune (obshchina), in the expecta­tion that it would be replaced by a class of 'sturdy and strong' farmers who enjoyed full title to the land. A growing number of economists and other social scientists bemoaned the restrictions that the commune was believed to impose on peasant farmers and its deleterious consequences for the growth of agricultural productivity. Particular attention focused on the custom of redistributing allotment land, which was believed to act as a disincentive to improvements in cultivation, and on the fragmentation of peasant allotments. The edict of 9 November 1906 enabled peasant heads of household to petition for communal allotment land to be transferred into their personal ownership. Where such a household had more land than would be allotted at the next redistribution, its head was entitled to purchase the excess on very favourable terms, with the help of a Peasant Land Bank. The commune was obliged to comply with any such request within one month. Furthermore, the head of a household was entitled to demand the consolidation of scattered strips. Provision was also made for the entire commune to embark on land con­solidation, provided two-thirds of its members agreed. Where a commune appeared to resist, the government was entitled to intervene on behalf of the 'separator'.

The reformers faced an uphill struggle to convert - the word is used advis­edly, since so many embarked on their task with missionary zeal - Russian peasants from subsistence farming to a capitalist ethic. Much of their analysis overlooked the fact that the land commune governed all aspects ofpeasant life, from the allocation of scattered strips of land (itself a kind of insurance against risk) and the use of communal pasture to the maintenance of rural infra­structure and the apportionment of taxation. Thus a householder's request to privatise his plot had far-reaching consequences, which the government sought to minimise by insisting that the household retained other rights of membership of the commune, such as access to meadows and pasture. Many peasants resented the claims oftheir neighbours who sought to take advantage of the new legislation, and there were stories of intimidation. Besides, subordi­nate members of the separating household begrudged the new powers vested in the hands of the paterfamilias. Nor did the reformers dissuade the majority from the view that their prospects would be greatly enhanced by a revolu­tionary redistribution of the land privately held by noble landowners. But the reform impulse amongst a new generation of Russian agronomists swept all before it, and these enthusiasts themselves did not shrink from intimidation. Much publicity attended the creation ofindependent farms (khutora), idealised and actively promoted by government Land Organisation Committees. More than one million households took advantage of consolidation between 1907 and 1915; this implies that around 8 per cent of peasant communal land underwent full reorganisation. Particular enthusiasm for enclosure was demonstrated in the southern provinces of European Russia where cereal production became increasingly commercialised.

The reforms themselves are thus of considerable interest, because they reveal a concerted willingness to impose modern patterns of land organisation as well as new kinds of behaviour upon a sceptical peasantry. These grand ambitions (like the land commune itself) persisted into the Soviet period. Yet, in economic terms, the direct results of the Stolypin land reforms were quite modest. As Esther Kingston-Mann and others have pointed out, the reformers refused to accept that the land commune was quite compatible with improved cultivation on peasant farms. In truth, of much greater consequence for the advance of Russian agriculture before the war was the growth of new markets and the improvement in the terms of trade for food producers, which enabled farmers to diversify into new products and to invest in agricultural equipment. Institutions such as co-operatives helped to sustain this activity.

Equally important in economic terms was the continued process of internal migration. The land reforms gave an added impulse to migration, primarily by cancelling the redemption payments that peasants had incurred as a result of emancipation in 1861 and by enabling poorer peasants to sell land (although they could not sell to non-peasants) and to move from depressed regions such as the lower Volga. Some sought work in the expanding urban economy of European Russia, becoming workers and (as Lenin had suggested) consumers with 'civilised habits and requirements'.[3] Others decided to explore oppor­tunities further east. The government's Siberian Committee and the Coloni­sation Department for Turkestan provided peasant migrants with maps and itineraries - a noteworthy contrast to the much more chaotic population displacement that occurred in the First World War. Between 1896 and 1915 around 4.5 million peasants settled permanently in western Siberia and Cen­tral Asia, where a thriving rural economy began to develop on the eve of war. But the government continued to impose tight restrictions on the mobility of the inorodtsy ('foreigners'), including Jews and the indigenous population of Siberia, Central Asia and the Caucasus. Freedom of settlement was not an option available to all.

The reform impulse in Russian economic history (1): New Economic Policy

The New Economic Policy (NEP) had its roots in the shift away from 'War Communism', a system that heralded imminent utopia so far as some enthu­siasts were concerned, demonstrating the kind of economic fundamental­ism that would become fashionable in the 1930s and again during the 1990s. Between 1918 and 1920 money virtually lost its function as a medium of exchange, and capitalist institutions evaporated. But the underlying economic reality showed War Communism in a disastrous light. Production collapsed (industrial output in 1921 was a mere 12 per cent of the 1913 level) and estab­lished economic links were broken, being replaced by somewhat arbitrary bureaucratic determination of priorities for the supply of inputs. This was an economy of absolute shortage. Deprivation and dictatorship went hand in hand. The collapse of workers' control during the civil war represented defeat for a more libertarian vision of Soviet socialism, and the triumph of one-man management. Workers who held on to their jobs received payment in kind, and bartered goods in order to survive. Others returned to the village. Russia suffered a demographic haemorrhage. Thanks to the 'Red Terror', the propertied elite (including many former landlords, whose estates were seized by the peasantry in 1917-18) decided to emigrate. Those who remained on Russia's war-ravaged territory were exposed to infectious disease and famine, which domestic and foreign aid organisations (such as the American Relief Administration and the Society of Friends) struggled valiantly to overcome.

In 1921 what came to be seen as the hallmarks ofWar Communism - compul­sory deliveries of produce by peasant farmers (according to assigned quotas, or prodrazverstka), the nationalisation of enterprises and the administrative allocation of goods and labour, particularly to support the war effort against the Bolsheviks' enemies - were abandoned. In their stead came greater com­mercial freedom, although NEP led neither to complete deregulation nor to the abandonment of the ultimate objective of a planned socialist economy. (In a significant indication of the new state's ambitions, Gosplan was established in 1921.) Crucial to the transition to NEP was the decision to introduce a single tax on peasants' output and to permit them to retain the residual product. It is not difficult to see this as a political accommodation that the Bolshevik Party reached with the peasantry, and that brought with it profound economic implications. Other policy decisions logically followed: the creation of a stable currency (finally completed in 1924), the stabilisation of the state budget (a factor contributing indirectly to a rising level of unemployment), the aboli­tion of restrictions on trade, and the introduction of commercial principles in enterprise transactions (khozraschet). Private traders (Nepmen) replaced the 'bagmen' who had engaged in illegal trade in grain during the civil war. By 1923 private traders accounted for more than 75 per cent of all retail trade. The Communist Party - which enjoyed a monopoly of political power - did not abandon all forms of economic intervention. In particular, it forced down industrial prices in 1924, in order to offset the consequences of the 'scissors' crisis' (Trotsky's famous expression describing the relative movement of agri­cultural and industrial prices in 1923-4) and to encourage peasants to bring grain to the market. This was consistent with the social contract between party and peasantry.

How dynamic was NEP? The question is important (and has been much debated), because it raises issues concerning the mainsprings of economic growth beyond 1928. The official Soviet view was that the potential for stim­ulating further growth within the NEP framework had been exhausted by 1928. However, Paul Gregory argues that the economy had still not recovered pre-war (1913) levels of output by that date, the implication being that part of the subsequent Stalinist economic transformation was a consequence of utilising reserve capacity. Other scholars have taken an intermediate position, arguing that Gregory overstated the prosperity of the Russian economy in 1913 and thus understated the rate of growth in 1913-28. Certainly, the Soviet economy under NEP had important achievements to its credit, for example by greatly extending the tsarist experiment with electrification and introduc­ing new products, such as oil-drilling equipment. Yet some important sectors (iron and steel, food and drink) lagged considerably. Non-Bolshevik economic specialists had to answer criticism from the political leadership that NEP was failing to address issues of technological backwardness in industry, against a backdrop of greater dynamism in the developed capitalist West.

All economy comes down in the last analysis to an economy of time.' Marx's words were quoted approvingly by Trotsky, for whom socialism meant not only the removal of capitalist exploitation but also a greater economy of time, 'that most precious raw material of culture'. Most commentators, whether tsarist or Soviet, had a more narrow conception of labour productivity, but they all agreed that Russian labour productivity had to be improved if the gap on economically more advanced countries were to be closed. That perception was shared by V I. Grinevetskii, the pre-revolutionary engineer, and by Aleksei Gastev, the Soviet populariser of 'scientific organisation of labour' (NOT, nauchnaia organizatsiia truda), whose manuals continued to find favour as late as the 1960s. By 1925 the main authority for state industry (Vesenkha, the Supreme Council of the National Economy) called for the 'rationalisation' of production, by means of improved working methods and management. The strategy was crucial to NEP, because an improvement in labour productivity made possible a lowering of costs of production, thereby enabling enterprises to realise profits, without simply forcing up prices and jeopardising the relationship with the peasantry, as happened in the scissors' crisis. But the pace of modernisation remained relatively sluggish.

To some of its chief advocates, NEP held out the prospect of greater Soviet exposure to the international economy, which had been severely curtailed between 1914 and 1920 (although in March 1920 Lenin signed a huge order for foreign railway equipment). In fact, foreign intervention during the civil war suggested that European powers had extensive economic ambitions for the Russian borderlands, such as the Caucasus. Could those interests be harnessed to the task of socialist economic construction? To be sure, trade agreements were signed and some foreign capitalists established concessions in sectors such as timber and minerals (manganese, lead and precious metals). Technical assistance was imported - the memoirs of foreign specialists provide valuable insights into the birth pangs of the Soviet economy -but the results were far less impressive than Grinevetskii had envisaged. The diminished grain marketings mentioned below hindered the recovery of foreign trade, and the trade deficit continued to increase. By 1926 the Soviet rouble had ceased to be a convertible currency. This hardly betokened a commitment to internationalisation.

Meanwhile, the early years of NEP coincided with the formation of the Soviet Union. During the period of War Communism large and resource- rich parts of the country such as Siberia, the Caucasus and Ukraine had been controlled by the Bolsheviks' opponents. The challenge now was to recon­figure the internal economic relations of the new country. The creation of national republics and autonomous regions meant, according to one dyspep­tic observer, that the national question was looked at 'through "economic eyes" - Turkestan means cotton, lemons, etc.; Kirgizia wool, cattle; Bashkiria timber, hides, cattle'.[4] That description appeared to confirm rather than to overturn existing regional specialisation. Indeed the Soviet policy of 'nativisa- tion' (korenizatsiia) did not extend to the economic sphere, at least so far as the division of labour was concerned. Programmes for 'national' development might reduce the economic role of non-indigenous groups, who sometimes portrayed themselves as victims of 'bullying' by the indigenes. Yet there were limits to the latter's leverage: in regions of labour shortage, such as Karelia, the nationalist leadership complained about Russian in-migration, but no con­stituent republic was allowed to place restrictions on population resettlement (the new word for colonisation). Capital investment and migration were to be determined by the broad strategic goals of all-Union modernisation and security. Any resulting economic 'equalisation' would be a by-product rather than a guiding principle of economic policy.

Why did NEP come to an end? Opinions have been divided between struc­turalists, for whom the system was inherently unstable, and intentionalists, who point to the consequences of policy mistakes at the end of the decade. It is clear that important issues remained unresolved under NEP. Unemploy­ment persisted to an unacceptably high extent (in industry it reached around 14 per cent in 1927); transport, education, health and defence were deprived of resources; the technological level of Soviet industry left muchto be desired; and the pattern of industrial location remained largely pre-Soviet. Yet the system was evidently capable of delivering economic growth and marked improve­ments in the quality of life. The difficulty was that these advantages seemed to count for little when set alongside the manifestations of social division and defence concerns. The system was dealt a fatal blow in 1927-8. In spring 1927 the party committed itself to more rapid industrialisation, increasing investment and credits to state enterprises, and simultaneously reducing the retail price of industrial products. The Russian countryside suffered a goods shortage, exacerbating existing problems (grain marketings had declined as a propor­tion of agricultural output, and by the mid-i920s were little more than half the pre-war level). In 1928 the authorities resolved to criminalise 'speculation', in a measure designed to put pressure on those, particularly rich 'kulaks' and Nepmen, who were believed to be hoarding grain. In essence Stalin's adoption in January 1928 of the 'Urals-Siberian method', so called because of the regions where the measures were first applied, abrogated the social contract that had been instituted with the peasantry in March i92i. Stalin did not refrain from speaking of 'tribute' in justifying the need to apply force in order to procure grain at low prices.[5]

The New Economic Policy has had a good press from many Western observers (as well as from the advocates of perestroika during the 1980s), who associate it with an era of relative political freedom and cultural experimenta­tion before the onset of Stalinism. However, the underlying rationale of NEP was at odds with the cultural intelligentsia's contempt for the profane world of commerce and the profit motive - 'romantic anti-capitalism', in Katerina Clark's words.[6] In less exalted society, too, NEP failed to register except as a framework that promoted the visibility and the prosperity of the 'money- grabbing' merchant (Nepman), the 'kulak', and the 'bourgeois specialist' - all of whom actually provided important services - without apparently doing much to improve job prospects and social welfare. The Stalinist political leadership took advantage of this disaffection, as well as with the misgivings mentioned earlier about housing, health and so forth, to launch a radically different system after 1928.

Great leaps forward (11): the Five-Year Plans and collectivisation

The adoption of the First Five-Year Plan in i928 marks the next attempt to engineer rapid economic growth by means of concerted state intervention. With its ambitious targets for capital investment, increased labour productivity and the expansion of output, the Five-Year Plan (FYP) reflected a clear redirec­tion in Soviet life. Cultural revolution affected economics no less than other forms of intellectual activity. Enthusiasts such as Strumilin, who espoused a 'teleological' commitment to economic planning, triumphed over economists such as Groman, Varzar and Kafengauz, who preferred an 'organic' approach to growth. In this atmosphere, one hallmark of which was a pronounced mil­itarisation of economic rhetoric, it took considerable courage to proclaim the need for caution. As Strumilin put it in 1929, 'specialists prefer to stand for high rates of growth rather than to sit in jail (sidet') for low ones'.

Why then did the Communist Party commit itself to a new course? Apart from the distasteful encouragement that NEP appeared to give to 'hostile' elements, the existing economic system had not 'solved' the questions of unemployment and the foreign trade deficit. A commitment to rapid indus­trial growth implied the absorption of unemployed labour, import substitution and the creation of a modern defence industry, something that a war scare in 1927 made yet more imperative. The decision to embark on industrialisa­tion meant a decision, in the words of Maurice Dobb, to forsake 'the slow rhythm of the plough for the more complex rhythm of the machine', with Gosplan conducting from Stalin's score and Stalin tolerating no dissent from the orchestral forces.

Tsarist officials sometimes referred to 'His Excellency, the Harvest' as the factor governing economic affairs in pre-revolutionary Russia. Their counter­parts in Stalin's Russia acknowledged the dictatorship of the plan. 'His Excel­lency, the Plan' lay at the core ofthe economic system. Unlike the harvest, plans took a monthly, quarterly and annual form, whilst for broad strategic purposes the FYP dominated decision-making. Plans were imposed upon state-owned enterprises by superior authorities, notably Gosplan and the economic min­istries or commissariats. Targets normally took the form of physical indicators, that is in terms of tons of steel or yards of cloth, but could also be expressed in money terms, such as of the gross value of output in 'constant prices'. Other elements of planned performance might include targets for product assort­ment, cost reduction, labour productivity and so forth. Quality considerations were secondary. Accompanying the targets were centrally allocated supplies to industrial enterprises. Preparation for this level of intervention had already taken place under NEP, when 'control figures' were formulated and published from 1925 onwards. In the FYP period this process became much more exten­sive. A large economic bureaucracy supported this hugely ambitious exercise in co-ordination, and intervened when needed to restore a degree of balance.

The consequences were profound in terms of economic behaviour. A com­plex interplay of interests between the party, the planning agencies, eco­nomic ministries, republican, regional and local authorities, and the enterprises (farms, factories, etc.) determined the formulation and the implementation of plans.[7] In principle, Soviet planners dictated the targets, but at each level subordinate agents within the system entered into complex strategies with their superiors to obtain the best possible set of instructions, in other words to negotiate a plan that was achievable. Since no superior had access to per­fect information, subordinates were able to understate and conceal productive capacity. Similarly, plan fulfilment required astute and timely action on the part of enterprises. No manager could afford to be exposed to failure to meet the tar­gets, and in these circumstances horizontal networks and contacts flourished; thus managers engaged 'pushers' (tolkachi) to obtain inputs over and above the planned allocation. Ultimately, firms and ministries came to an understand­ing that the completion of the plan mattered more than the notional budget that underpinned it; hence the phenomenon of the 'soft' budget constraint, whereby struggling enterprises could in the last resort rely upon credits or subsidies in order to survive. Farm managers likewise concealed some of their grain, rather than deliver it to the authorities, in order to boost the seed fund for the next harvest. Thus the formal system of subordination disguised the fact that the principal (the state) did not have perfect information about the behaviour ofits agents (enterprises), about which it frequently remained igno­rant. In a sense, therefore, the system was sustained less by the hierarchical character of central economic planningthan by the interaction of dictators and subordinates. It should also be remembered that from time to time the party- state 'mobilised' resources on an ad hoc basis, disrupting the targets agreed with subordinates and thereby contributing to pervasive uncertainty. Some­times, too, unforeseen external circumstances, such as war scares, wreaked havoc with the assumptions that planners had made.

The First FYP rested upon a significant planned increase in labour produc­tivity, as a means of financing the increased investment. Attempts were made to improve the productivity of Soviet workers, by means of 'shock work', by widening wage differentials, and by creating differential access to rationed goods. But the mass influx of unskilled peasant migrant labour made it diffi­cult to improve output per person. During the mid-i930s the Soviet leadership acknowledged that the productivity gap between the USSR and its capital­ist rivals remained wide. All sectors were demanding increased investment, making it imperative to look for ways of reducing costs. The most famous such initiative, the Stakhanov movement, took place during the Second FYP, at a time when the Soviet leadership had embarked on a fresh surge of capital investment. Pravda (1 January 1936) explained this in orthodox Marxist terms: 'every newly emerging social system triumphs over the old outdated mode of production because it brings about a higher productivity of labour'. But most workers responded passively at best, and managers regarded the entire campaign as a pointless distraction. The outcome of Stakhanovism was chaos. By the beginning of 1937 more modest targets for labour productivity were being contemplated. Recent work has pinpointed concerns about financial stability as a major factor; the state budget was already under great strain as a result of increased spending on defence, infrastructure and consumer subsi­dies. Campaigns, such as the Stalinist drive to boost labour productivity and to over-fulfil output targets, could not but create a climate of uncertainty for Soviet managers and factory directors as well - they suffered a mass purge in 1937 and 1938, at a time when Stalinist ideology celebrated managerial power. In general it proved much more straightforward to draft millions of additional workers to the task of social and economic construction than it was to engineer an improvement in output per person.

What then were results in economic terms? The magnitude of industrial growth in particular has provoked endless debate as well as ingenious attempts to deal with measurement problems. Much of the available statistical record took the form of data on physical output, but apart from issues of concealment and falsification these data raise difficult issues of aggregation. Decisions have to be reached about the appropriate weights to be applied. Next, there is the problem of deciding which prices to apply to the data; according to the 'Gerschenkron effect', the adoption of early year prices overstates growth in an economic system that is undergoing rapid structural transformation. Problems arise from the introduction of new types of product that substitute for old; how quality change is to be measured poses particular difficulties for the measurement of Soviet economic change. For these reasons no final judgement of the growth record is likely to be reached. However, it is now clear that official Soviet estimates greatly overstated total economic growth; Girsh Khanin has revised the official rate of increase of national income from 13.9 per cent to 3.2 per cent for the years 1928-41.

The allocation of additional output reflected the priorities given to invest­ment and to government spending, notably on defence. The total stock of capital more than doubled between 1928 and 1941; this increase was all the more remarkable, given the sharp fall in livestock herds. Defence production increased twenty-eight-fold during the 1930s (far in excess of total industrial production), imposing a heavy burden, particularly after 1936. The Stalin era witnessed Russia's emergence as a modern military power. The hallmarks were the new tank and aviation industries, supported in turn by steel, met- alworking, fuel, chemicals and rubber production. Qualitative improvements had also taken place. But difficulties remained: the defence sector was not immune from the inefficiency prevalent in the economic system as a whole, and by 1941 much of the stock of military equipment was already obsolete. Much reliance continued to be placed upon sheer manpower. The Red Army's increased demand for manpower was met largely by peasant conscription.

The world of the Russian peasantry was turned upside down by a con­certed attempt to reorganise peasant land tenure, not (as in 1906-11) to create individual enclosed farms but to realise a vision of collectivised agriculture. Those who framed the collectivisation project shared with Stolypin's survey­ors and agronomists a firm belief in the need for a more rational organisation of the land and in the inability of peasants to bring about real change on their own initiative. In 1929 the order was given to collectivise peasant farms. After a short interruption following Stalin's famous speech, 'Dizziness from success' (March 1930), the process recommenced. 'Kulaks' (demonisedas 'peas­ant barons') were dispossessed and deprived of the opportunity to enter the new farms. Nomadic groups (such as Roma, and the 'small peoples of the North') were compulsorily settled in collectives, in order to create the basis for a new 'proletariat'. Soviet official propaganda treated collectivisation as a progressive measure (Dovzhenko's film Earth (Zemlia, 1930), gave it a more subtle and aesthetic treatment). Stalin and his entourage accused peasants of 'sabotage' and of starving workers and soldiers, and expressed concern about the 'counter-revolutionary chauvinism' of Ukrainian peasants. The outcome was uncompromising state violence. Out of a total of 25 million peasant house­holds, around one million were identified as kulaks and deported, many of them to Central Asia, where they were exposed to infectious disease and a shortened life expectancy.

Land reorganisation was accompanied by a far more concerted attempt to extract grain from producers. The government overcame widespread peas­ant opposition by a combination of repression (theft of 'socialist property', including grain, became a capital offence on 7 August 1932) and reform (the legalisation of trade by peasant households in May i932 and the creation of a legal framework for the kolkhoz). In another echo of the Stolypin reforms, some peasants welcomed the new dispensation as an opportunity to get ahead. In the short term, however, the outlook was entirely bleak. The famine of 1933, following disastrous harvests in 1931 and 1932, devastated large parts of Ukraine, the Volga region and the North Caucasus. Stalin has been accused of preventing shipments of grain from reaching areas of starvation, leading some scholars to argue that collectivisation-induced famine represented a deliberate programme of'genocide'. Others are unconvinced, citing the overall decline in food production and the limited room for government manoeuvre.[8] In purely economic terms collectivisation resulted in the devastation of livestock herds (nowhere more so than in Kazakhstan) and the decline of animate power. It took a generation for the agricultural sector to recover. Only on the very eve of war did the total stock of power (animate and inanimate) finally exceed pre-collectivisation levels.

Gerschenkron famously pinpointed continuities between the 'Witte system' and Stalinism. According to this interpretation, Stalin exploited the 'advan­tages of backwardness' to press the claims of heavy industry for investment, which were secured on the basis of a sharp curtailment of overall consump­tion.[9] Certainly, for ordinary people, this turbulent economic transformation imposed severe strain. Day-to-day survival required the adoption of imagina­tive strategies: sufficient goods could be secured only by recourse to the legal and illegal markets, in order to supplement organised (planned) distribution. Workers' families traded output from domestic food production and artisanal activity. Peasants relied upon sales of produce from their private plots; their income from the kolkhoz, calculated as 'labour-day payment', was neither reli­able (it was treated as a residual claim on the farm's product) nor adequate.[10]Other than the prison-camp population, those of pensionable age were hardest hit (peasants counted as self-employed and were not entitled to a pension).

The Stalinist economic transformation promoted upward social mobility. Some peasants escaped the kolkhoz, making use of well-established village networks and institutions in order to seek a more secure future than could be obtained in the uncertain world of the collective farm. Many worked as seasonal labourers, as their parents' generation had done in pre-revolutionary times. Between 1926 and 1939 around 23 million people flocked to Soviet cities, including 2 million to the Moscow conurbation. This mass influx owed very little to organised recruitment. Indeed the government sought to restrict the movement ofpeasants, by denying them an entitlement to the internal passport that was reintroduced in 1932. But this discriminatory measure had little effect on overall geographical mobility, because peasants could enter the urban econ­omy by various means, for example as domestic servants employed by the emerging Soviet elite so bitterly denounced by Trotsky.

Notwithstanding these pressures, or perhaps because of them, Stalinist industrialisation supported a growing ethos of consumption, particularly after the abolition of rationing in 1935-6. Soviet advice literature emphasised the need to maintain standards, at least by members of the new elite, in the prepa­ration of food and the provision of one's apartment with furniture and books. In general, housing left a great deal to be desired - throughout the i930s the majority of the population had to make do with communal arrangements, in shared apartments, workers' hostels or barracks. Pervasive shortages of con­sumer goods and accommodation gave rise to a variety of practices, at all levels of Soviet society, to smooth access to goods and services by circumventing the official system of distribution. The Soviet lexicon designated these informal reciprocal practices as blat. They long outlived Stalin.

Impressive resources were devoted to education and cultural improvement. The Stalin revolution entailed the construction of schools and universities, public parks and squares, theatres, cinemas and sports arenas and department stores. Campaigns to improve school attendance and to extend adult learning opportunities resulted in significant gains in literacy. Particular importance was attached to vocational training for the new generation of engineers and man­agers. These projects were accompanied by injunctions to self-improvement, supported by advice literature that related this to the construction of a new, socialist society and a duty to one's fellow citizens. By i939 the total numbers employed in social and cultural projects, as well as health, housing and eco­nomic administration, exceeded 8 million, compared with fewer than 2 million in i926.

The demographic consequences of Stalinism were related to this profound economic transformation, and to the terror that accompanied it. Collectivi­sation prompted a mass exodus of peasants in 1931-2, and as a result the government closed the borders of Ukraine and the Kuban' in January 1933. But the state also directly engineered population displacement. Thus 'de- kulakisation' resulted in the deportation of peasants (of all nationalities) to 'special settlements'; by 1933 these housed around 1.1 million men, women and children. Other forced labour was concentrated in prisons, in labour camps, and in labour colonies. All of these - a combined population of 2.52 million in 1933, rising to 3.35 million by 1941 - provided an important source of labour for the Stalinist economy. Ostensibly, the Gulag had impressive 'achievements' to its credit. Construction of mines, roads, railways and urban transport systems (such as the Moscow metro), canals and waterways (for example, the White Sea Canal), and new industrial towns, such as Magnitogorsk and Komsomol'sk- na-Amure, depended upon the labour of dispossessed kulaks and other forced labour, celebrated by Maxim Gorky as a demonstration of the potential to rehabilitate the criminal 'element'. The NKVD also used forced labour to pro­duce non-ferrous metals and for the felling of timber. But the Gulag imposed a heavy burden, because productive workers were wrenched from the occu­pations for which they had been trained and because immense resources were tied up in monitoring the work of prisoners.

Terror also meant the forced migration of entire 'enemy' populations, beginning with Ingrian peasants who were designated as 'kulaks' and deported to Murmansk and to Central Asia in 1930. Further deportations, of Kore­ans, Germans and Poles took place before the Second World War; during the war Crimean Tatars and Chechen and Ingush civilians suffered the same fate. Deportation disrupted and even destroyed viable economic activity. The Soviet occupation of Central and Eastern Europe after 1945 brought forth fresh deportations, notably in the Baltic lands, but these were related to economic development only in so far as they 'encouraged' the incorporation ofhitherto independent states into the socialist economy. Meanwhile, post-war construc­tion in the USSR, such as the creation of the closed city of Krasnoiarsk-26, a major centre of producing weapons-grade plutonium, depended heavily upon forced labour.

The welfare consequences of the Stalinist economic transformation have proved particularly controversial where the interests of nationalities are con­cerned. During the Second FYP the Soviet leadership sought to reduce the development gap between the more advanced and less-developed parts of the Soviet Union. The main plank in this strategy was to encourage rapid growth by means of investment in production, infrastructure and education. The results were undoubtedly impressive, at least in terms of accelerating the economic development of less-developed regions such as Central Asia, where new factories, power stations and transport links were built, along with hospi­tals, schools and universities. These policies produced a nationalist backlash. In pre-war Ukraine, for example, the Soviet regime faced accusations ofhaving expanded heavy industry in the eastern region, at the expense oflight industry and agriculture in the ethnically more homogeneous western parts of Ukraine. And in Kazakhstan, the construction of the Turksib railway - achieved in part by the recruitment of native labour - was accompanied by the charge that this grand project had destroyed the 'traditional' Kazakh nomad way of life.

Great leaps forward (iii)

The Second World War left an enduring imprint on the Soviet economy. Eco­nomic reconstruction was rendered difficult by the magnitude of wartime devastation and by the shock of sudden famine in 1946-7. Recent work has demonstrated that key industrial sectors, notably coal mining, ferrous met­allurgy and construction, experienced a desperate labour shortage that was made good by prisoners (by 1953 the forced labour system incarcerated 5.5 million persons) and by semi-free workers recruited from the village.[11] These workers were bound by the draconian labour legislation introduced in i938 and 1940 that imposed rigorous controls over job mobility. These controls were not lifted until 1951, by which time managers were refusing to enforce them, lest they deprive the enterprise of scarce skilled labour.

The campaign style in Soviet economic policy was reiterated during the 1950s by Nikita Khrushchev, whose regime became synonymous with fresh ideological fervour, such as supporting the ambitious goals of building com­munism and overtaking the USA. Khrushchev denounced the spread of own­ership of dachas and attacked the private plot. None of these campaigns had any pronounced economic impact. Much more consequential was his decision to promote population migration to Siberia and Central Asia, in order to settle new farmland. Constant pressure to maintain sowings on virgin land quickly led to soil erosion. In general, however, the continued de-ruralisation of Russia continued: by 1970 only 44 per cent of households were rural, compared to 66 per cent on the eve of the Second World War. The relatively poor quality of life in villages, particularly in Russia's non-Black Earth region, encouraged rural depopulation, a process that persisted throughout the final quarter ofthe cen­tury notwithstanding formal restrictions on rural out-migration.[12] One other campaign attracted enormous international publicity: in i957 the Soviet Union launched the world's first satellite into orbit, heralding the onset of a major space programme. These campaigns went hand in hand with continued eco­nomic growth. During the 1950s, according to Khanin, Soviet national income grew at an annual average rate of 7.2 per cent, falling to 4.4 per cent in 1960-5. Further campaigns were launched by Khrushchev's successors to secure improved economic performance by means of institutional reform. In 1965 industrial ministries were empowered to use 'economic levers', such as bonus payments and retained profits, in order to stimulate enterprise performance.

This era was also associated with a renewed emphasis upon consumption. Consumption was in part a purely 'private' matter, but it was also secured by informal social networks (blat) and an extensive range of practices (such as petty pilfering and the theft of state property) that have been grouped together in the term 'second economy' and that enabled consumers to reroute goods from the state to other sectors of the economy. Officialdom frequently turned a blind eye, partly because officials themselves participated in these infor­mal transactions.[13] From one point of view, consumption in its official and unofficial variants helped to cement the legitimacy of the regime. But con­sumers' access to goods imposed constraints, in that Soviet citizens became accustomed to price subsidies. Consumers were prepared to overlook short­ages and poor-quality products provided there were no untoward increases in their price. When working-class consumers went on strike in protest against price increases in Novocherkassk in 1962, they met with brutal state repression. This exceptional episode proved the rule (and helped cost Khrushchev his job): Brezhnev's lengthy tenure of office as General Secretary rested in large part upon the use of retail price subsidies, whereby the state absorbed increases in the procurement prices paid to Soviet farmers during the late i960s and 1970s.[14] At least for a while, the state budget became the opium of the masses.

The post-Stalinist transformation also brought about Soviet exposure to the international economy. In the first instance this meant the creation of closer links with the countries that made up the 'Soviet bloc'. Here the Council for Mutual Economic Assistance (Comecon) promoted socialist economic inte­gration, meaning the transfer of engineering products from Eastern Europe in exchange for cheap energy from Russia. Meanwhile during the 1970s and early 1980s the Soviet Union extended its international profile by importing Western technology (and some consumer goods) and exporting oil during a period of rapidly rising energy prices on the world market. The great oil boom, and its availability at below-market prices, did nothing to discourage wasteful energy consumption. Policies to accelerate technological progress did not improve overall economic performance, partly because Soviet enterprises lacked the ability to assimilate foreign technology. To all intents and purposes the Soviet economy under Brezhnev suffered the same shortcomings as in the era of NEP. In both periods the Soviet Union lagged behind more dynamic economies in the capitalist West.

The reform impulse in Russian economic history (11): perestroika

Perestroika (literally, 'restructuring') was a bold attempt to address economic deceleration and to revitalise Soviet society. In the first instance, perestroika rep­resented the triumph of a generation of reform-minded social scientists, such as Abel Aganbegian and Tat'iana Zaslavskaia, who had been arguing since the 1970s that the socio-economic system was outmoded. Created at a time when factors of production, labour and capital were relatively abundant and when the general level of educational attainment amongst the population was low, they maintained that the 'administrative-command economy' discouraged the kind of energy and enterprise that the modern economy required and whose absence was reflected in the poor level of labour productivity. Long-serving officials, accustomed to interfere in the affairs of firms, were encouraged to devote their time instead to broad strategic issues. Chief amongst these was the need (in the words of Mikhail Gorbachev) for a 'renewal of socialism'.

Publicity campaigns once more accompanied economic reform initiatives. A remarkable burst of'openness' (glasnost') far exceeded anything witnessed in the Khrushchev era. The Soviet press and intelligentsia rediscovered the New Economic Policy, which was trumpeted (somewhat misleadingly) as a kind of golden age of economic freedom and dynamism.[15] Technocrats deplored widespread wastage (brak) in industry. Gorbachev denounced alcohol abuse and absenteeism. In a concerted attempt to boost economic growth, the lead­ership pinned its hopes on technological change in key sectors such as engi­neering. This policy of acceleration (uskorenie), closely associated with Prime Minister Nikolai Ryzhkov, failed to live up to expectations. Little came of an attempt to establish joint ventures with foreign firms. In 1987-8 more radical measures were introduced to reform property relations, extending from the legalisation of co-operative and private enterprise to the removal of restric­tions on state enterprise. Unfortunately, the Law on State Enterprise (May 1987) failed to have the desired impact. The revival of the doctrine of com­mercial accounting (khozraschet), first formulated in the NEP era, implied that enterprises would no longer receive support from the state but would instead respond to consumer wants. However, firms were still expected to give priority to orders placed by the state authorities. In 1990, Gorbachev appeared to endorse a still bolder but hastily put together initiative for a '500- day' transition programme, which envisaged the privatisation of around three- quarters of all state enterprises and a liberalisation of prices. Responding per­haps to public anxieties about the consequences of radical reform, Gorbachev held back from committing himself to the adoption of the programme in its

entirety. [16]

What went wrong? The budget deficit spiralled out of control, a conse­quence of reduced tax receipts and a decision to maintain huge spending on consumer subsidies, as well as social welfare and defence. In 1984, before pere- stroika, the deficit was approximately 4 per cent of GNP. By 1989 it stood at 10 per cent. Two years later it had ballooned to 20 per cent. No serious attempt was made to institute a significant reform of the price system. Gorbachev negotiated fresh foreign loans, bequeathing a mountain of debt to his succes­sors. The state kept the system afloat by printing roubles, whilst enterprises survived by granting one another vast credits. Inflation was rampant. The basic problem in late Soviet Russia, namely the failure to engineer economic and technological modernisation, continued unabated.

Perestroika unleashed a wave of dissatisfaction, from vested interests whose secure position in Soviet society was threatened, from workers who demanded improvements in food supplies and housing and from nationalists who declared that only independence could restore the fortunes of the Soviet republics. The reformers' stance appeared likely to threaten the perquisites of the Soviet elite. Yet not all Soviet bureaucrats opposed radical economic reform. Paul Gregory has distinguished between planners (apparatchiki) and entrepreneurs (khoziaistvenniki). The former were directly threatened by attempts to erode the supremacy of Gosplan, whereas the latter entertained the possibility of greater leverage within a more mixed economic system. Post-Soviet reform would subsequently demonstrate that they were well placed to take advan­tage of full-scale economic liberalisation. Workers also took to the streets to demand wage rises and greater enterprise 'autonomy'; to the extent that their demands were satisfied, costs increased and inter-enterprise debt accu­mulated. Gorbachev refused to sanction significant increases in retail prices.

As a result shortages of goods continued to mount, queues lengthened and popular disquiet intensified.

Did Soviet integration hinder economic progress in the various republics, as national activists claimed? Membership of the Soviet Union entailed sub­ordination to an increasingly sclerotic planned economy, underwritten by the authority of the Communist Party. Arguably, it was the failings of the economic system, not their incorporation in the Soviet Union per se, that disadvantaged the constituent republics. The slowdown in economic growth that became apparent from the i970s helped to encourage nationalist dissatisfaction. Some nationalists saw opportunities to profit from secession rather than from con­tinued membership of the Soviet state, regarding independence as a means of escape from Soviet (Russian) domination and exploitation. It dawned on them that tight central control and the imposition ofuniform solutions to economic problems had disastrous consequences. Dissatisfaction over the deceleration in economic growth went hand in hand with cultural complaint, which glasnost' fuelled in uncompromising fashion. The process was not confined to the non- Russian republics; Boris Yeltsin appropriated and Russified the most important all-Union institutions. Given the opportunity to secede, the nationalists took it unhesitatingly.

The radical privatisation impulse (ii): post-1991 experiments and consequences

The collapse of Communism ushered in a period of prolonged political uncer­tainty and socio-economic turmoil. Output plummeted. Investment remained weak and expectations of an influx of foreign capital went unrealised, thereby compounding the problems posed by an already obsolescent capital stock. Consumption declined. The Russian Federation found it immensely difficult to establish a secure and viable tax base. Economic relations with others in the Commonwealth of Independent States remained fragile. At the same time, this was an era of radical experimentation with capitalist economic forms. The advocates of economic transformation maintained that the costs of transition were exaggerated.

The post-Communist governments set great store by a radical privatisa­tion of enterprise. In echoes of the Stolypin land reforms, the contemporary exponents of economic transition pinned much of their hopes on privatisation and the entrepreneurial flair that it was expected to unleash. However, the results were mixed. To be sure, the private sector expanded; by i996 around two-fifths of the labour force was employed in the private sector, compared to one-tenth a decade earlier. But there were significant costs. The so-called 'voucher privatisation' scheme in 1992-4 transferred ownership of thousands of enterprises, mostly to existing management and employees. It guaranteed neither good management of those enterprises nor the prospect of attracting outside investment. The loans-for-shares scheme of 1995-7 enabled powerful oligarchs to acquire cheaply from the state through rigged auctions some of Russia's most valuable oil companies including Yukos, Sibneft and Sidanco. In addition, predatory and criminal cliques flourished, hindering the potential viability of new enterprises and limiting the possibility for engaging with new markets and embracing technical change. So far as the agricultural sector is concerned, little land was transferred into private ownership from 1991. As under Soviet socialism, Russian peasants produced fruit and vegetables on household plots. The large collective farms continued in existence, but this probably testified to inertia rather than to their viability as integrated institu­tions that once supplied a range of services to the rural population. Peasant farmers did not rush to embrace the institutions of a market economy.

Some authors, such as Anders Aslund, offer a more upbeat assessment of the post-Communist economy. They point out that official output data need to be adjusted to take account of unregistered activity. Allowance must also be made for the high degree of waste in Soviet-era GDP. Taking these factors into account, the decline in output was much less marked. More broadly, they emphasise the shortcomings of the old economic system and the magnitude of the crisis that was bequeathed to the new regime. Even privatisation, it is argued, contributed to a strengthening of democratic potential in the former Soviet Union. (One might add that the results ofprivatisation, like the Stolypin land reform, will take at least a generation to be fully realised.) Finally, if tran­sition was so disastrous, the argument runs, why was there so little resistance to radical reform?

One explanation may be the short-term recourse to mechanisms of self- help and barter. Barter reflects a loss of confidence in the domestic currency and a readiness to conceal transactions from the tax authorities. The partners involved in non-monetary transactions are predisposed to trust one another rather than to put their faith in the market and in financial institutions. The consequences of barter include disincentives to develop new methods of production or new products. The phenomenon represents a diversion of entrepreneurial talent and time, and promotes other inefficiencies, because resources are tied up in storing and offloading stocks. But, as Paul Seabright suggests, barter arrangements are not unlike krugovaia poruka ('collective obli­gation', or 'mutual responsibility') whereby peasants sustained themselves by a system of mutual dependency. Barter became widespread in Russia and Ukraine during the i990s, even though inflation was brought under control and confidence in money was restored. Enterprises engaged in barter as a means of exchange and as settlement of inter-enterprise debt. Firms lacking sufficient working capital (perhaps because the government failed to settle its obligations) paid wages in the form of their own output. As well as being an inefficient arrangement the increased recourse to barter were a symptom of wider political and economic dislocation. But equally its prevalence suggests the durability of social networks that were established prior to the 'transition'.

The rupture of inter-republican links following the collapse of the USSR posed major problems ofadjustment. Enterprises had to renegotiate contracts with suppliers or to find new sources of supply. Products were now traded at world market prices, rather than being subsidised by the Soviet state. Some of the successor states exploited opportunities to engage in international trade, specialising on the basis of natural resource endowments, such as natural gas in Turkmenistan. Political instability and military conflict in Tajikistan and Georgia, for example, helped to depress economic activity. On the other hand, the Baltic states successfully stabilised their budgets, reduced inflation rates and promoted foreign direct investment, as preparation for joining the enlarged European Union in May 2004. Within the resource-rich Russian Federation, non-Russian ethnic groups sought to redress 'wrongs' done during the Soviet period. Thus a vocal Siberian lobby, speaking on behalf of 32 million people, demanded compensation for environmental damage.

Demographically the transition was extremely painful. To be sure, the project of Soviet 'modernity' itself bequeathed a legacy of environmental degradation, declining health conditions and increasing infant mortality. But transition has thus far done little to reverse the decline. Adult male life expectancy plummeted. Many citizens, including some of the former inmates of remote Soviet prison camps, reverted to a subsistence economy. Ordinary citizens often required two or more jobs in order to compensate for meagre and/or uncertain wages. Again, mutual support networks played an important part in maintaining a basic standard of living. A more extreme response was emigration; according to official figures between 1992 and 1998 some 700,000 people left Russia to settle in countries outside the former Soviet Union. Germany was by far the most popular destination.¹⁷

Account also needs to be taken of the demographic consequences ofthe sud­den disintegration of the USSR in 1991. Around 280 million ex-Soviet citizens

17 Julie DaVanzo and Clifford Grammich, Dire Demographics: Population Trends in theRussian Federation (Santa Monica, Calif.: Rand, 2001), ch. 2.

were now scattered amongst fifteen sovereign states. More than 25 million Rus­sians lived beyond the borders of the Russian Federation (this figure is taken from the 1989 census), and it has not been difficult to portray them as vestiges of Soviet 'colonialism'.[17] Throughout the 1990s concerns were expressed about their status, entitlements and prospects. Those who made their way to Russia survived by capitalising where possible upon networks of mutual support. But the lack of housing and of state benefits has rendered their position in Russia precarious.

Conclusions and assessment

The economic history of Russia's twentieth century is full of absolutist pre­scriptions for improved economic performance. Before the revolution, the talk was of foreign investment and enterprise (under Witte), and of 'rational' land consolidation (under Stolypin). Under NEP the emphasis shifted to a combination of state control and circumscribed private enterprise, with con­tinued espousal of the doctrine of improvement for the peasant economy, primarily by means of expert intervention from outside the rural sector. Stalin preferred the twin instruments of central economic planning and terror, in orderto realise his vision of Soviet socialist modernisation. Khrushchev pinned his hopes on extracting greater efforts from workers and peasants, partly by means of incentives, but also by exhorting them to work harder and to become pioneer settlers on virgin land. The advocates ofperestroika after 1985 believed in a mixture of state control and market mechanisms, accompanied by the reform of property rights. Post-Soviet prescriptions have favoured the route of privatisation, claiming that the shortcomings of transition are the result of timidity in engaging with the challenge of economic transition. Each suc­cessive nostrum has been accompanied by a set of campaigns, to pinpoint the 'problem' (including aberrant personal behaviour) and/or to identify the 'enemy' to be confronted, unmasked and defeated.

What have been the results of these various economic visions? The Soviet economic project came to dominate the twentieth century. It is worth reflect­ing on what this means. First, for more than seven decades the experience of millions of Soviet citizens was closely bound up with a centralised sys­tem of economic administration and a lack of exposure to overseas economic stimuli. But the domination of the Soviet system did not rest wholly or even largely on the instruments of terror, even under Stalinism. The state also derived a degree of legitimacy from the promise and the reality of economic growth, technological modernisation and social progress. There were gen­uine and important gains in literacy and life expectancy from one generation to the next. In the words of a broadly hostile critic, Soviet economic policies secured 'some broad acquiescence on the part of the people'.[18] That acquies­cence rested upon Soviet-style welfare provision and opportunities for upward social mobility, which generated a sense of civic commitment and left a posi­tive legacy. On the other hand, Soviet economic modernisation also left scars on the landscape, in the form of large, dirty and obsolescent factories, decrepit farms and polluted waterways and lakes.

There is another dimension to the Soviet economic project. The USSR confronted capitalism with a rival economic system. As Eric Hobsbawm has pointed out, capitalism 'won', but it differed greatly from the system that had conquered the world during the nineteenth century. One reason for its transformation was the challenge it faced from Soviet socialism.[19] Nor should an exposure of the failings of the Soviet economic experiment blind us to the shortcomings of capitalism. To be sure, the Soviet Union left a legacy of debt, environmental degradation and struggling enterprises. But those who gloat over flaws in the system and its uneven economic performance would do well to reflect on the evidence of poverty, malnutrition, illiteracy, ill-health, environmental damage, debt burden and inequality that are the hallmarks of large parts of the globe. No amount of triumphalism from the privileged few can disguise the fact that the fortunes of so much of twentieth-century humanity have been mixed. An objective reading of the Soviet 'experiment' might conclude that the laudable ambition to realise the social and economic potential of the majority remains as relevant today as it was nearly a century ago.

Transforming peasants in the twentieth century: Dilemmas of Russian, Soviet and post-Soviet development

ESTHER KINGSTQN-MANN

Contexts for change

By the dawn of the twentieth century, most predominantly peasant societies were already colonised or otherwise subjugated by the world's industrialised modern empires. For nations not yet subjected to the full force of this pro­cess, the penalties of backwardness were increasingly manifest. In Imperial Russia and the Soviet Union, the fear that backwardness might invite foreign conquest led a succession of heads of state to target peasants as producers of the grain needed to finance ambitious, government-sponsored projects for industrialisation. However, although peasants were crucial to the success of any development scenario, both reforming and revolutionary elites tended to discount the possibility of peasant agency. Peasants typically viewed as 'raw material' rather than as co-participants in the development process were - in the words of Caroline Humphrey - 'never in possession of the master narra­tive of which they were the objects, and had no access to the sources from which it was reaching them'.¹ The following discussion is intended to situate the peasant majority of the population as both agents and victims within the history of Imperial Russia and the Soviet Union, and to locate them on the shifting terrain of the post-Soviet era.

In 1900, the peasants of Imperial Russia continued to struggle - like their parents and grandparents before them - against the constraints of a land and cli­mate largely inhospitable to productive farming. In regions where rainfall was reliable, soils were poor; more fertile areas were routinely afflicted by drought.

I am deeply indebted to the work of Moshe Lewin, Teodor Shanin and Caroline Humphrey and to the insightful readings of this essay by David Hunt, Rochelle Ruthchild and James Mann.

1 Caroline Humphrey 'Politics of Privatisation in Provincial Russia: Popular Opinions Amid the Dilemmas of the Early 1990s', Cambridge Anthropology 18,1 (1995): 46.

These drawbacks persisted regardless ofprevailing political or socio-economic systems, and despite historical efforts either to privatise or collectivise the land. As the most impoverished and least literate of the tsar's subjects, peasants bore the economic and non-economic burdens imposed by a variety of more or less importunate elites. By 1900, they constituted 80 per cent of the population; the majority were women, and a substantial proportion of them were eth­nically non-Russian. As in other predominantly peasant societies, the rural populace of the imperial, Soviet and post-Soviet eras opposed some changes - often in collective fashion, with women in the forefront - but selectively appro­priated others. In times of crisis, they deployed the symbols and rituals of their secular and religious cultures to reinforce demands for social justice and for vengeance against malign forces within and outside the household and community.

Labour, communes, households

Like many other peasantries, the rural inhabitants of Imperial Russia viewed labour as an economic necessity, as the source of legitimate rights to land use and as the basis for status claims within the household and community. In the communes to which most peasants belonged, the number of adult labourers per household frequently determined land-allotment size. In times of unrest and rebellion, peasants asserted that the gentry had 'stolen' the land from the tillers of the soil who were its rightful owners. In the Revolutions of 1905 and 1917, they demanded that land be 'returned' to the labouring peasantry. At no time did peasants acknowledge the legitimacy of claims to landowner- ship by persons who did not labour on it. In 1900, labour claims infused the operations of the peasantry's basic institutions: the commune and the peasant household.

The peasant commune (mir or obshchina) was the dominant institution in the early twentieth-century Russian countryside. The object of centuries of idealisation and demonisation by a variety of radicals, reformers and govern­ment officials, its distinguishing feature was the periodic repartition of land among member households according to family size, number of adult labour­ers per household or some other collective social principle. Within the com­mune framework, member households possessed exclusive but temporary rights to use scattered strips of land (allotments) and could freely decide how to dispose ofthe product oftheir farm labour. Neither wholly collective norpri- vate, communes were mixed economies within which individual, household and communal rights to ownership coexisted in social configurations that varied regionally and changed over time. Individual members owned their personal belongings and could bequeath them to others. Women possessed unconditional ownership rights to a 'woman's box' (the product of weaving and other gendered activities).

Within the commune, households possessed collective and hereditary rights to a house, garden plot and livestock - the latter properties constituted a key source of economic inequality between peasant households. Periodic repar­tition was relatively rare in the north and west of the empire, where most peasants held land in hereditary (podvornoe) tenure. However, it is significant that even in more privatised areas, peasants relied on the use of common lands. More like English commons-users than yeoman farmers, they collec­tively shared out and collected the obligations owed to landlords and the state, devised and enforced rules for use of common lands and provided a variety of welfare supports to their members.[20]

Although the powers that the patriarch (bol'shak) exercised over the daily life of his household were virtually absolute, when he died, household prop­erty reverted to the household group under a new head (a son, brother or sometimes a widow). In the case of household divisions, a village assembly (skhod) composed of the heads of member households and led by elected village elders generally oversaw the distribution of property. Although com­munes were plagued by corruption, nepotism and individual profit-seeking, they nevertheless obliged wealthier families to link their fate with poorer neighbours and required ambitious individuals to obtain the consent of their neighbours before introducing significant changes. At best, they provided a framework capable of satisfying both a family's desire for a holding of its own, and the desire for protection against the monopolising of resources by wealthier families/households within the community.

In many parts of the Russian Empire, the social identities of peasants were organised according to a set of hierarchies that subordinated younger peo­ple and females to the authority of the household patriarch. In addition to childcare, women were expected to cook the household's food, fetch water, sew, wash clothes, weave cloth, care for poultry and livestock, endure beat­ings and tend the family's 'private' garden plot (usad'ba). Granted a mod­icum of respect for their labour contributions and a right to the product of 'women's work' (weaving, poultry raising, etc.), women were otherwise wholly subordinated to the authority of fathers, husbands and elder sons; they gained a measure of power only after achieving the status of mother-in-law (with authority over daughters-in-law).

In 1900, most peasant households were primarily devoted to agricultural pursuits. But particularly in the northern provinces of St Petersburg, Moscow, Archangel and Nizhnii Novgorod, an increasing number sought to meet escalating tax burdens by leaving their villages to become hired labourers (otkhodniki). In workplaces far distant from their homes, peasants absorbed new ideas, customs and practices and took care to establish strategic rela­tionships grounded in networks of kin and neighbours.³ However, leaving the village rarely signified a repudiation of village ties; otkhodniki frequently 'raided the market' by sending money back to their home villages[21] (where opportunities for women expanded in the absence of the usually dominant males).[22] Peasants did not retain their 'old ways' unchanged. Instead, they infused time-honoured traditions with new combinations of indigenous and imported meanings. As Moshe Lewin has suggested, the rural populace was changing, but 'the interplay between new and old formations did not conform to theory and kept complicating the picture and baffling the thinker and the politician'.[23]

Although wealthy peasants exerted a disproportionate influence in village life, scholars continue to debate the extent to which early twentieth-century economic differences were reproduced from generation to generation as class formations or mitigated through periodic repartition. Since commune reparti­tions usually apportioned allotments according to family size or labour capac­ity, larger households were often 'richer' in land; newer and smaller households received smaller allotments.[24]

In general, rural innovation was not confined to 'privatised' farming dis­tricts. In Tobol'sk and Kazan', contemporary statisticians and economists documented commune strategies specifically crafted to reward individual innovation while limiting the growth of rural differentiation. In Tambov, com­mune peasants who fertilised their allotments either received special monetary payments at the time of repartition, a similar allotment or the right to retain their original holdings. In 1900, 127 commune villages in a single district of Moscow province introduced many-field crop rotations; by 1903,245 out of 368 villages had done so.[25] While innovation was not widespread either within or outside the commune, irreversible changes in farming practices were becom­ing manifest in the early years of the twentieth century.

Breaking the peasant commune (1): Stolypin's 'wager on the strong'

In 1905, when Russia's first twentieth-century revolution erupted, communes organised the seizure of gentry land, and commune-sponsored petitions demanding land and liberty, abolition of private property rights and 'return' of land to the tillers of the soil poured into the capital from every corner of the empire.[26] In response, the government introduced a programme to eliminate the peasant commune and replace it with a rural constituency of 'strong' and conservative private farmers. Between 1906 and 1911, Prime Minister Stolypin's reforms invited peasant households to separate from the commune and estab­lish themselves on enclosed, self-contained farms (otruby and khutora); in this process the household property formerly owned by the household was to become the private property of the bol'shak.

In the decade that followed, few of the government's hopes for privatisa­tion were realised. Many requests for separation came not from the strong, but from 'weak' families that had suffered misfortune that could cost them land in repartitions determined according to family size or labour capacity.[27]Equally significant was the depth ofpeasant opposition, and the role ofwomen. Because soldiers were traditionally less likely to fire on women, andbecausethe income and status of women were so intimately linked with the household's garden plot that had been transferred to the bol'shak, women were frequently

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visible at the forefront of anti-enclosure confrontations with the authorities.¹¹ Although the government offered 'separators' generous legal and extra-legal support, financial subsidies and preferential credit rates, peasants nevertheless returned to the commune in increasing numbers on the eve of the First World War. By 1916, violence against 'separators' had become so intense that the Stolypin reforms were suspended.

In general, privatisation did not lead 'separators' to change their farming practices. Communities that chose to eliminate periodic land repartition took care to retain not only their common lands but also the welfare supports that communes traditionally provided.[28] Overall, the Stolypin reforms failed to demonstrate that newly enclosed private farms were significantly more or less productive or profitable than communes. Ironically, the most dramatic change in the Russian countryside during this period was initiated not by the government but by commune peasants, who engaged in massive purchases of gentry holdings and appreciably levelled the economic playing field between 1906 and 1914.[29]

War and revolution, 1914-17

In 1914, world war, invasion, military disaster and a state-sponsored scorched- earth policy destabilised and displaced the populace of Russia's western provinces; by 1916, a predominantly peasant army had suffered 2.5 million casualties and internal refugees numbered 2 million. In this brutal and brutalis- ing context, Russia's second twentieth-century revolution erupted in February 1917 and quickly toppled the regime of Tsar Nicholas II. As in 1905, peasant communes took centre stage by organising land seizures and forcibly return­ing 'separators' to their former communes. From a political standpoint, the Revolution of 1917 was significant because peasants participated in it not only as soldiers but in their own right, as peasants, in the urban-led revolutionary movement to establish soviets nationwide. Inspired by traditional labour prin­ciples, the first 'Order' issued by the All-Russian Conference of Soviet Peasant Deputies in May 1917 declared: 'All peasants deserve the right to labour on the land; private ownership is abolished.' Throughout 1917, the language of peasant petitions invoked 'God-given' rights to land 'stolen' by wicked landlords and officials.

During the second half of 1917, peasant political allegiances shifted - not towards Marxism, about which they knew little-but towards a Bolshevik Party that consistently demanded the immediate transfer of land to the peasantry and withdrawal from the war. In the face of economic collapse and the devastation produced by German invasion, peasants in Ukraine, Estonia and Latvia as well as Russia began to voice support - or at least neutrality - towards a Bolshevik seizure of power.[30] However, although peasant support was crucial to Bolshevik success, it never convinced the Bolsheviks that they needed to rethink their urban-centred perspectives. While Lenin optimistically declared that in future peasants would test their petty bourgeois illusions 'in the fire of life'[31] (and presumably move towards socialism), such remarks were no substitute for a principled Marxist peasant policy.

War Communism, 1918-20

They [the Bolsheviks] didn't understand peasants very well.

(Moshe Lewin, The Making of Soviet Society)

The policy of War Communism emerged in response to a series of material disasters, each one sufficient to overwhelm and destroy a stable political order, much less a fragile hierarchy of soviets controlled at the top by a few hundred revolutionaries wholly without administrative experience. Between 1918 and 1921, the Soviet Union was invaded and dismembered by Imperial Germany, torn apart by civil war, weakened by Allied military intervention and deprived of its major grain and fuel-producing territories. The destruction of gentry privilege and the relative powerlessness of the central government provided peasants with the opportunity - for perhaps the first time in their history - to construct their lives free of the constraints traditionally imposed by various social and political elites. In what has been described as a post-October 'anti- Stolypin revolution',[32] 96 per cent of the rural population in thirty-nine out of forty-seven provinces had become commune members by 1920.¹⁷ Attempting to foster traditional labour principles and social equality (poravnenie) in the countryside, peasants were on occasion even willing to allot land to former squires as commune members on condition that the squires were themselves willing to labour on it.[33]

Unsurprisingly, peasants placed a low priority on meeting the needs of urban proletarians who provided them with little in exchange for the grain they produced. Terrified at the prospect of urban workers fleeing to the countryside in search of food, the Soviet government organised 'Committees of the Poor' (kombedy) to incite a rural class war between proletarians and kulaks, and confiscate the latter's ill-gotten gains. But since peasants were in 1918 more materially and socially equal than everbefore in their history, they chose instead to close ranks against the kombedy and rejected Soviet efforts to divide them.

While the economist Preobrazhenskii contended that War Communism embodied the highest socialist principle of taking from each according to ability and giving to each according to need, Lenin was more honest: 'we actually took from the peasants all their surpluses, and sometimes even what was not surplus but part of what was necessary to the peasant. We took it to cover the costs of the army and to maintain the workers . . . Otherwise we could not have beaten the landowners and the capitalists.'[34] By the end of 1918, the kombedy were dissolved, but the food crisis continued. Alongside the legal channels of distribution, peasants constructed a black market and devised systems of barter that rendered the formal organs of state control irrelevant to the process of exchange.

Although government statistics indicated that most peasants produced no merchandise, sold a fraction of their produce and reserved most of it for internal family consumption,²⁰ it is significant that they remained - from the Soviet standpoint - an eternally petty bourgeois element, mired in the 'idiocy of rural life'. Urban-educated party enthusiasts confidently assumed that peasants understood nothing about farming, and inundated them with exhortations and prescriptions for what, how much and even where they should sow their crops. Although the Soviet government made use of peasant communes to collect taxes, the Land Statute of i9i9 oddly categorised communes as 'individual' holders of land. Trusting only their own institutions, Lenin and his supporters constructed a network of rural soviets, and vainly encouraged peasants to join collective and state farms. To obscure the commune's dominant presence in the countryside, official documents referred to it as a rural society (sel'skoe obshchestvo); but peasants themselves generally used the word mir.

From an economic and political standpoint, the policies of War Commu­nism were disastrous. By 1920, grain production stood at 60 per cent of its pre-war level, and Soviet leaders were powerless either to constrain or to mobilise the peasantry. For their part, the peasantry's 1917 support for the Bolsheviks, subsequent action to minimise economic inequalities and support for labour rights in the countryside did not win them acceptance as a core political constituency for the Soviet Marxist leadership. It was extremely for­tunate for the latter that their enemies in the civil war were frequently even more brutal and repressive in their treatment of the peasant population.²¹

NEP, 1921-8

Peasants are satisfied with their situation... We consider this more important than any sort of statistical evidence. No one can doubt that the peasantry is the decisive factor with us. (Lenin, 1922)

By March 1921, the civil war and the US/Allied intervention were over, and forcible repression of the Kronstadt uprising was under way. The Red Army's brutal show of force against dissenters coincided with the abandonment of War Communism. In its place, a New Economic Policy (NEP) attempted to defuse peasant discontent and foster economic recovery by restoring a more freely functioning market and more flexible approaches to economic and non- economic issues. An infinitely cynical Stalin - expertly capturing the party's new and more tolerant stance towards the peasantry - derided the carelessness with which the term 'kulak' was frequently used. 'If a peasant puts on a new roof,' he joked, 'they call him a kulak.'²²

Described by Lenin as a 'retreat' in the direction of capitalism, NEP revealed in full measure the improvisatory political skills that originally propelled the Bolsheviks to victory in October 1917. Replacing forced grain requisitions with fixed taxes on individual households, the state left peasants free to trade with the remainder, and granted freedom of choice in forms of landholding. The Land Code of 1922 permitted individuals to farm the land with their own labour, and hire labour on condition that employers worked alongside employees. In a 'balancing act' typical of the NEP era, the Soviet state reverted to pre- 1905 peasant customary law by abrogating Stolypin's transfer of household

21 P. Kenez, Civil War in South Russia (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1977), pp. 8-9; 316.

22 Stalin, quoted in Atkinson, End, p. 281.

property to the bol'shak, but challenged peasant tradition by declaring women to be equal members of the household, with equal rights to participate in the commune assembly alongside males.

Hopeful that state-created rural soviets could persuade 'middle' and poorer peasants to join collective and state farms, NEP reformers celebrated the eco­nomic achievements of the so-called 'Red khutors' of Nizhnii Novgorod. At the same time, the economic successes unexpectedly manifest in commune districts briefly inspired M. I. Kalinin to hope for 'the transformation of the mir from an organisation of darkness, illiteracy and traditionalism into, as it were, a productive cooperative organisation'.²³ In the words ofK. Ia. Bauman, socialisation of the individual production process of the whole village (cultiva­tion, threshing and so on) was proceeding 'like an avalanche (sploshnoi lavinoi)'. In a single district in Moscow province, 5,204 out of 6,458 commune villages introduced new systems of crop rotation during the year 1926 alone.²⁴

In the 1920s, the agricultural picture was indeed mixed. Old-fashioned, low-technology farming continued to persist among most small producers; in 1925, one-third of the spring sowing and half of the grain harvest was still being gathered by hand.²⁵ Nevertheless, a no longer wholly backward Russian countryside restored grain production to its pre-1914 level by 1926. In 1927, the total land area sown in grain increased slightly, but adverse climatic conditions produced a harvest 6 per cent lower than the previous year's bumper crop.²⁶ Agricultural recovery was fairly steady - but given the Russian Empire's always unpredictable climatic fluctuations - as precarious as ever.

Breaking the peasant communes (ii): forced collectivisation and the liquidation of the kulaks as a class

Who will direct the development of the economy, the kulaks or the socialist

state? (M. I. Kalinin, 1929)

Although the revival ofthe economy's agricultural sector hadbeen a key Soviet priority ever since the Bolshevik seizure of power, the recovery of the agricul­tural population was met with some ambivalence. Changes that would have

23 Kalinin, quotedinHiroshi Okuda, 'The Final Stage ofthe Russian Peasant Commune: Its Improvement and the Strategy of Collectivisation', in Roger Bartlett (ed.), Land Commune and Peasant Community in Russia (New York: St Martins Press; Basingstoke: University of London, 1990), p. 257.

24 Okuda, 'Final Stage', pp. 259-62. 25 Atkinson, End, p. 259.

26 Ibid., p. 250. On subsequent revisions ofthe data, see S. G. Wheatcroft, 'The Reliability ofRussian Prewar Grain Statistics', Soviet Studies 26, 2 (1974): 157-80.

been joyfully welcomed in other developing societies - increased grain deliv­eries to urban centres, rising consumer demand and revitalised community institutions - appeared somehow ominous in the Soviet context. The spectre of a resurgent peasantry aroused fears that a primitive, consumption-hungry rural populace might dictate its own terms in the disposal of agricultural out­put.[35] If peasants possessed a significant measure of autonomy, would they proceed to reject state directives that set price levels far below what the mar­ket could provide? By the late 1920s, manifestations of peasant autonomy were becoming intolerable to a party bureaucracy and Soviet that wished to use peasants as a reservoir to supply the needs of more strategically and politically desirable social groups, and to assert the claims to unlimited power and control characteristic of'high Stalinism'.

In 1927, V M. Molotov warned against the dangerously rapid growth of kulaks, contending that as many as 5 per cent of the peasantry fell into this cat­egory.[36] However, the term 'kulak' was never legally defined, and official data failed to demonstrate that kulak numbers were increasing - the government's own figures indicated instead that the peasant 'upper strata' remained negli­gible in comparison with the 15 per cent level of the pre-1917 era. During the late 1920s, kulaks were accordingly charged with quite contradictory failings. Evidence of heavy involvement in marketing grain was taken as proof that they were capitalist enemies of socialism, but evidence that they marketed less grain - were guilty of hoarding - inspired identical accusations.[37] Images of a Janus-like peasant enemy - in one guise, a cunning and crafty investor of cap­ital (the kulak) and in another, a hopeless primitive - were deployed to justify abandonment of the New Economic Policy. Reports on commune-based inno­vation disappeared from press publications after 1929,³⁰ as Stalinists vanquished critics like Bukharin and Chaianov (as well as alleged 'communophiles' like N. N. Sukhanov and A. Suchkov).[38] A Gosplan recommendation that

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communes be considered one of the institutional variants that could facili­tate a transition to collectivisation was ignored.[39]

Claiming that the survival of socialism was at stake, the party demanded a drastic upward revision of the state's grain procurement quotas; grain alloca­tion requirements for the cities and the army were increased by 50 per cent in i930. When - unsurprisingly - state demands were not met, the shortfall was attributed to a 'kulak grain strike'.³³ However, since the state's own data suggested (and Stalin himself admitted) that current shortages were due to escalating government demands for grain,³⁴ it seems fair to say that the crisis that triggered the 'Great Turn' was more political than economic. In a series of wildly unrealistic pronouncements, party leaders allotted one and a half years for the wholesale collectivisation of the rural population.³⁵

Forced collectivisation was to replace an 'Asiatic' peasant agriculture with modern, scientific, large-scale farming.³⁶ Peasant land, livestock and tools became the property of collective or state farms. Tasks traditionally the respon­sibility ofpeasants-ploughing, sowing, weeding and harvesting-became state activities, planned and regulated accordingto a variety of'scientific' quotas and indicators. Peasants were to work a minimum number of labour days (trudodni) under the supervision of managers who ensured fulfilment of state directives. To counter peasant resistance, the Soviet state deployed the tactics of all-out war, complete with the murder of suspected kulaks, mass killings and deporta­tions to forced labour camps. The RSFSR Criminal Code was cited to justify the bombardment of peasant villages judged guilty either of 'failure to offer goods for sale on the market' or unwillingness to meet state-assigned grain quotas.

To many peasants, the government-directed onslaught of the 1930s rep­resented the coming of the anti-Christ. Proclamations 'from the Lord God' prohibiting peasants from entering collective farms mysteriously appeared in one part of Siberia; in European Russia, a peasant proclamation declared, 'God has created people to be free on the land, but the brutality of communism has put on all labourers a yoke from which the entire mir is groaning'.[40] Yet within this apocalyptic discourse of opposition lay a complex challenge to a

Soviet state that repeatedly forced peasants to choose between compliance or obliteration. For their part, Soviet leaders remained ideologically blind to the wide array ofcollectivist economic and non-economic practices characteristic ofpre-1917 peasant village life, and to the similarities between the labour prin­ciples enshrined in the collective farm statutes of the 1930s and the traditions of the pre-revolutionary village.

Peasant resistance thus represented more than the familiar conflict between collectivism and the individual. It reflected as well a refusal to accept (1) the loss of hard-won individual, household and commune-based autonomy, (2) the state's appropriation of the material basis of peasants' livelihood, and (3) the government's savage effort to annihilate everything that peasant families and communities had built up over many generations.[41] Official promises of a brilliant future were cold comfort to peasants whose lives were quite devoid of material security.

In regions distant from Moscow, forced collectivisation was not always imposed with equal brutality. In Tajikistan, new collective farms drew on tra­ditional kinship networks, while in Georgia, collectivisation frequently repli­cated traditional settlement patterns and distributions of wealth.³⁹ But in areas where change was most inflexibly imposed, many peasants not only denied to the Soviet state the fruits of their labour but attempted as well to avoid the dread designation of 'kulak' by destroying massive quantities of grain and slaughtering their livestock. In Kazakhstan, where collectivisation entailed the forcible settlement of a nomadic population, the populace responded by destroying 80 per cent of their herds.[42] By the end of the 1930s, acts of 'self- de-kulakisation' erupted from Siberia to European Russia and resulted in a 45 per cent decline in the number of livestock.[43] Although Soviet officials downplayed all evidence of peasant solidarity, collective resistance seems to have been a significant feature of rural opposition.

By all accounts, women played a leading role in the resistance to forced collectivisation; in 1930 alone, 3,712 mass disturbances (total 13,754) were almost exclusively women; in the other cases, women constituted either a majority or a significant proportion of the participants. A contemporary Soviet report noted that 'in all kulak disturbances the extraordinary activity of women is evident'.[44] As

Pravda explained it, women's 'petty bourgeois instincts' were regrettable man­ifestations of the 'individualistic female spirit'.[45] However, it is useful to recall that women were also frequently in the forefront of opposition to Stolypin's privatisation reforms. In 1930 as in 1906, they resisted appropriation of the household garden plot upon which a significant measure of their security and household status depended. Together with the men of their households, women fought to secure the survival of their families.

Peasants were unable to block the government's onslaught. However, rural resistance - above all, by women - won an extraordinary and rare concession from the Stalinist state. In 1935, a Model Collective Farm Code legitimised peasant claims to a measure of personal and household autonomy in the form of'private' household allotments of land and farm animals. These plots of land were not freehold property in the Western sense ofthe term. Households did not purchase their plots, and could neither sell nor lease them. Collectives provided seeds, farm implements and hay from the common meadow and granted pre-1917 commune-style household rights to pasture animals on com­mon land. Nevertheless, the 'private' plots introduced - on however minimal a level - a traditional peasant notion of mixed economy into the brutally dichotomised, 'all or nothing' strategies of the Soviet state. As in the days of the commune, women bore primary responsibility for labour on the 'new' private plots, cared for livestock and marketed their produce. Then and later, Soviet officials downplayed both the magnitude ofthe state's capitulation and the women's agency that triggered it. Stalin himself took care to trivialise the conflict as 'a little misunderstanding with collective farm women. This business was about cows.'⁴⁴

Although the household plots were categorised by the state as 'temporary', subsidiary (podsobnoe) property, they acquired immense significance at a time when collective farm wages were paid only after the state appropriated its share - in 1937, 15,000 collective farms paid no salaries at all to their peasant labourers. In addition, the cruel dislocations of collectivisation-exacerbatedby the dismal climatic conditions that defeated Russian and Soviet expectations in both more and less repressive times - produced millions of famine dead in Ukraine, the North Caucasus and Kazakhstan.[46] In this precarious context, private plots became a relatively secure source of material support. As peasants fled their villages at a rate of 3 million per year, the state responded by imposing an internal passport system to prevent unauthorised departures. Additional millions were deported as kulaks, as were peasants arrested for the theft of collective farm property or failure to meet minimum work norms. Sent to forced labour camps in the north and east, peasant deportees built much- needed roads and canals, and were largely responsible for the construction of new cities like Magnitogorsk.

Lacking representatives of their own or legal rights to organise in defence of their interests, peasants assiduously cared for their 'private' plots. The slow agricultural recovery that began in the second half of the 1930s was dispropor­tionately fuelled by these 'subsidiary' holdings. By 1938, 45 per cent of Soviet agriculture's total farm output was being produced on 3.9 per cent of the sown (private) land (approximately 0.49 hectares per household).[47] On this predominantly women's 'turf, women turned out to be the most productive and efficient - but by far the least acclaimed - economic actors in the Soviet countryside.[48]

The 'private' plots prospered within a radically transformed agricultural sector. By 1940, collective and state farms were cogs in the machinery of a vast, Moscow-based bureaucracy (Gosplan SSSR) whose officials decided what each republic, region, province, district and even state and collective farm should produce; farm managers were then obliged to supply agricultural products for sale to the government at Gosplan-determined prices.[49] The 'false' egalitarianism of the peasant commune gave way to the inequalities of socialism, with each person rewarded for personal contributions to the collective effort. Rural Stakhanovites like Pasha Angelina - the first woman tractor driver in the Soviet Union - were rewarded for over-fulfilment of plan quotas.⁴⁹ But since quotas were typically set at levels far beyond the capacity of the farms to fulfil, the new system accelerated the growth of a vast informal network of insider negotiations, nepotism and other forms of favouritism, and massive corruption all along the bureaucratic chain of command.

The brutal decade of the 1930s was framed by an official discourse that demonised opponents and evokedpublic fear that devious internal and external enemies were joined in a conspiracy to weaken the Soviet Union and leave it

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vulnerable to foreign attack. Evoking memories of the First World War and its devastating aftermath, Stalin justified the brutalities of the 1930s as a necessary modernising strategy. In his words:

those who fall behind get beaten. One feature of the history of old Russia was the continual beatings she suffered for falling behind . . . She was beaten because to do so was profitable and could be done with impunity. Either we perish, or we overtake and outstrip the advanced capitalist countries.⁵⁰

Stalin thus invited the public to join in targeting 'enemies of the people' who undermined the Soviet Union's heroic struggle to become so powerful that no outsider would ever again dare to invade 'with impunity'.

Stalin's gift for manipulating popular fears served him well in the years to come, when the Nazi invasion provided a nightmare confirmation of his paranoid vision of the outside world. Between 1941 and 1945, the genocidal invaders of the Soviet Union set themselves the task of exterminating twenty million, and they massively over-fulfilled their quotas.

The Second World War and its aftermath

In 1941, European Russia was overrun by Nazi forces (aided by enthusiasts from the Baltic states appropriated by the Soviets in the Nazi-Soviet pact of 1939). In areas like Ukraine, hatreds engendered by the brutalities of collectivisation overshadowed - at least initially - the Nazi threat to exterminate all Slavic populations. However, in the course of the war, the brutal Nazi treatment of 'subhuman Slavic races' convinced many opponents of forced collectivisation that genocide was far worse. Also important in engineering a public opinion shift was a Soviet defence strategy framed in surprisingly patriotic, religious and 'peasant-friendly' terms - complete with posters that featured 'Mother Russia' as an attractive middle-aged woman in a red peasant dress, with her arm raised in summoning gesture, and the caption: 'The Motherland is Calling!'⁵¹ Under the pressures of war, state planning gave way to ad hoc measures intended to meet the requirements of the front. Private plots were expanded, and the war mobilisation of adult males enabled women to enter occupa­tions from which they had previously been excluded. Many became heads of households, and some even became collective farm managers. Although few women were able to emulate Pasha Angelina's exemplary achievements in the 1930s, by 1943, they comprised 50 per cent of Soviet tractor drivers.[50] In the absence of men, and despite the long-term German occupation of the best agricultural land and worsening shortages of agricultural machinery, peasant women, children and older people were able - against all odds - to supply the cities and the army with a significant measure of their food requirements.

After the war, the extraordinary public trauma of 27 million dead was targeted by Stalin, who warned an exhausted populace that the Soviet Union was once again threatened by economic collapse, internal enemies and foreign nations intent on obliterating 'the Red menace'. Accordingly, Stalin demanded the forcible relocation of 'suspect' populations, and crackdowns on suspect economic activity. Millions of Volga Germans, Crimean Tatars and Chechens were deported to Central Asia, the Urals and Siberia, where collective and state farms were required to accept them as new members. An accelerated policy of forced collectivisation was imposed in the former Baltic states and other newly acquired territories; in Estonia alone, peasant resistance in 1949 triggered the deportation of several thousand supposed kulaks to Siberia.[51]

In the late 1940s, Stalin also targeted 'suspect' economic activity on the peasantry's private plots, and increased taxes upon their agricultural output. The peasantry's time-honoured niche at the bottom of the Soviet hierarchy left them with wages and benefits far lower than those accorded urban workers. Within the rural population itself, state farmers received a fixed wage, but col­lective farmers still received only what remained after compulsory deliveries were provided to the state. In 1947, fears of a too-quickly resurgent peasantry triggered a carefully designed currency reform that completely wiped out peasant savings. By the late 1940s, Soviet women - like America's 'Rosie the Riveter' - were displaced from their wartime positions of leadership and higher status. Although males were still in short supply, the number of women man­agers and policy makers declined after 1945, as did the number employed as tractor drivers. By 1959, only 0.7 per cent of the latter group were women.[52]

Post-Stalin: the question of reform

From the peasantry's perspective, the most notable feature of the post- Stalin era was the abandonment of mass murder and deportations as core instruments of state policy. The familiar alternation of abundant harvests and crop failure did not result in massive purge trials, executions or accusations of treason. In the i950s and i960s, official exhortations and economic 'cam­paigns', and a variety of non-lethal pressures and constraints fostered agricul­tural initiatives that relied on ever-larger economic enterprises managed by ever-larger contingents of supervisors and inspectors. In the reforms of this era, the southern-born Nikita Khrushchev played a central role. Notorious for the failure of his grandiose agricultural projects, Khrushchev was also notably responsible for initiating a fundamental reversal in the relationship between the rural sector and the rest of the economy. Under Khrushchev, the traditional Soviet view of the countryside as 'an internal colony' that supplied funds for industrial development began at last to give way. By the i960s, the rural sec­tor became - for the first time in Soviet history - the recipient of significant government investment.

It turned out to be far easier for the Soviet 'command system' to foster dra­matic, nationwide increases in income, educational levels and life expectancy than to guarantee consistent improvement in rates of agricultural productiv­ity. Between i953 and i967, the average income of the collective farm worker increased by 311 per cent in real terms.⁵⁵ In 1956, pension benefits for the aged, disabled and sick were significantly expanded, and in the i960s, the wages for collective farm workers were fixed (and made no longer dependent on the requirements of the latest Five-Year Plan). Peasants began to enjoy higher incomes from labour on collective and state farms than from their private plots. During the Khrushchev years, agricultural workers were at last restored their freedom to move from one job to another. Compulsory grain deliveries to the state were abolished, and some collective farms were permitted to set up small teams of family members and neighbours to cultivate a given number of fields. Allowed to sign contracts with state enterprises and determine their own production objectives,[53] team members also received individual wages and bonuses based upon the success of the team. Although such reforms pro­duced only mixed results, they represented an outbreak of economic flexibility within the Soviet Union's command economy.

By the 1960s, collective and state farms had become a source of important social benefits, particularly in the area of education. While in 1938, only 9.4 per cent of the rural population possessed eight years of schooling, by the 1960s the figure stood at over 55 per cent, with women frequently better educated than men. Although literacy levels for Soviet rural women far outpaced those of women in predominantly peasant societies like Turkey or India, women who became teachers, nurses, veterinarians and agronomists did not thereby gain entry into positions of leadership. They continued as well to bear primary responsibility not only for childcare and other traditional 'women's work', but also for labour on the private plots - where even by the 1960s most farming was still done by hand.[54] These tasks, in addition to the collective farm's labour requirement continued to constitute the Soviet peasant woman's 'triple burden'.

In important respects, the Khrushchev era introduced the dichotomies and contradictions that eventually contributed to the downfall of the Soviet sys­tem. Between 1953 and 1958, agricultural productivity increased by 50 per cent, with private plots continuing to significantly out-perform the collective and state farms. Exhorting the rural populace to 'double and triple' their agri­cultural output, Khrushchev launched a massive 'Virgin Lands' campaign in Kazakhstan and Siberia. This venture was fatally undermined not only by the usual climatic reversals, but also by the Soviet state's penchant for bureau­cratic national directives that ignored local conditions and local knowledge. In Kazakhstan, for example, collective and state farmers were ordered to expand the land area sown with corn regardless of whether the necessary equipment or seeds were available; tractor drivers were everywhere paid according to the size of the area they ploughed (thus encouraging them to plough as shallowly as possible).[55] In 1963, a disastrous harvest - together with the setbacks of the Cuban Missile Crisis - contributed to Khrushchev's fall from power.

The Brezhnev era: stagnation, or deepening contradiction?

Although the Brezhnev years are frequently described as an era ofstagnation, from the perspective of the rural populace, they were not. Less constrained than in the 1950s, the rural populace began to create a world that differed from the Stalinist model, recalled the values of an older peasant community and incorporated changes that not only widened village perspectives, but inspired many peasants to abandon the countryside for the city.

By the 1970s, the more horrific memories of the Second World War and the 1930s had started to recede, and a semblance of 'normality' began to re-emerge in the Soviet countryside. Despite the burden of Moscow-devised plans and quotas, observers reported that the pace of rural life in the 1970s reflected the rhythms of the crop-growing cycle - slow in winter and active during the hay­making and harvest times.[56] Like their counterparts elsewhere in the world, Soviet farmers performed a great variety of tasks at different seasons of the year, worked irregular hours and faced unpredictable weather fluctuations. Deliberations by farm assemblies (skhody) were frequently skewed by gen­der and age considerations or by patronage connections that individuals and households established with the authorities - but the latter no longer freely exercised the life and death powers of their predecessors.

Particularly in regions distant from Moscow, both the formal structures of the collective farm and the requirements imposed by central planners were significantly modified by informal relations and negotiations within the col­lective farm itself. New legislation gave collective farms the right to assign 'private' plots to member households, and village assemblies continued to honour the pre-1917 commune principles that legitimised land claims on the basis of labour and need. As in earlier years, private plots out-performed the collective and state farms, but they were less crucial to peasant survival once farm wage levels began to rise.[57]

By the 1970s and 1980s, most of the rural populace were state employees, but they bore little resemblance to their Western counterparts. Collective and state farm workers expected - and received from their enterprises - guaran­tees of education, health, shelter, old-age assistance, month-long vacations, 112 days of paid maternity leave and old-age pensions. Income differentials between city and countryside began to narrow, as did the considerable wage disparities between collective and state farms.[58] In the Soviet Union, agricul­tural 'jobs' conferred far more than a wage; they mediated as well a set of social, economic and cultural relations and obligations between individuals and a wider community.[59]

The Brezhnev era featured not only an increased reliance on material incen­tives in the form of bonuses, increased procurement prices, education/welfare benefits and improvements in diet, but also a persistent refusal either to appre­ciably diminish levels of political constraint, corruption or favouritism, or to increase opportunities for individual freedom of action. Brezhnev's massive grain purchases from abroad provided the Soviet public with a diet based on meat consumption (then considered a global indicator of rising affluence). Between i960 and 1973, foreign grain purchases increased from 42.6 million to 99.2 million tons, and domestic food consumption rose by 400 per cent.[60]The so-called 'grain deficits' of this era were in fact an indicator neither of food shortages nor of disastrous decline in agricultural production; they were instead attributable to what one post-Soviet study describes as 'excessive' con­sumption of animal feed and non-food derivatives.[61] According to reform economist Tat'iana Zaslavskaia, Brezhnev's policies were a cynical effort at 'pacification through material incentives'.[62]

During the 1970s, educational advances, greater freedom of movement and a diminishing reliance on the private plot and household as guarantees of secu­rity began to transform farming into an occupation rather than an inherited status. However, the exercise of free choice increasingly included decisions to abandon the collective farm. Rural women, eager to escape their 'triple bur­den', moved into non-agricultural occupations as nurses, clerks and teachers - and above all, as independent wage earners. Like their male counterparts - particularly of the younger generation - they left the security of village life for the equal security but higher pay and greater autonomy available in new 'agrotowns' and in the cities. While many sought greater autonomy and higher social status, the surveys conducted by Zaslavskaia in the 1970s sug­gested that physically arduous working conditions, inequitable wage rates and corrupt officials who rewarded lackeys rather than hard-working people far outweighed the desire for upward mobility as motives for departure from the countryside.[63] The highest levels of out-migration came from European agri­cultural regions of the country; the lowest were in Central Asia, Kazakhstan and the Caucasus. In 1959, 51 per cent of the population of the Soviet Union lived on the land; by 1979, the figure stood at 37 per cent.⁶⁷

In the 1970s, living standards, incomes and literacy rates rose dramatically, even as a repressive state bureaucracy fostered the creation of ever-larger collective and state farm enterprises. The Soviet state raised procurement prices for grain and livestock by 50 per cent in 1965, and awarded bonuses for deliveries that exceeded plan requirements. Productivity rates rose between 1966 and 1970 (followed by significant declines due to crop failures in 1972, i979 and i980). Yet overall, according to United Nations estimates, Soviet agriculture achieved a faster rate of growth in volume and per capita than any other major region of the world (including North America, Europe, Africa and Asia). Between 1950 and 1975, Soviet agricultural output more than

doubled.[64]

During the Brezhnev years, the tension between socio-economic improve­ments and a command system of economic and political governance contin­ued to mount. A highly literate populace no longer feared starvation, and the lives of its younger generation were not shaped by the war, invasion and attempted genocide that had so traumatised their parents and grand­parents. These generational shifts undermined a Stalinist social contract that had repeatedly promised modernisation and national security in exchange for repression and bureaucratic control. Throughout the Stalin era, a constant state of emergency was invoked to justify brutal constraints on rural and urban freedom of action; a 'crisis mentality' was subsequently reinforced by the Cold War between the United States and the USSR.[65] However, by the 1980s, a far healthier and better-educated populace had come to believe - with good reason - that no nation was likely to invade the USSR with what Stalin had called 'impunity'.

It was in this context that Mikhail Gorbachev emerged as the embodiment of the Soviet social contract and its contradictory tensions. Born on a collective farm and raised by grandparents after losing his father in the Second World War, Gorbachev began work at fourteen as an assistant to a combine harvester operator, and received a Red Banner of labour in 1948 for helping to produce a record harvest on his collective farm. Making the leap from a North Caucasus secondary school to the acquisition of a law degree at Moscow University and eventually to a position at the top of the party hierarchy, he took advan­tage of the best opportunities offered by the Soviet system. A beneficiary of Soviet guarantees of education and social welfare, Gorbachev made a name for himself as a proponent of incentive-based projects for raising agricultural productivity rates. As the Politburo member responsible for agriculture under Brezhnev during the 1980s, he spoke out in the name of others like himself for economic restructuring (perestroika) that would significantly diminish the powerful Soviet constraints upon individual freedom of action.

Perestroika and the further transformation of Russian rural life

As General Secretary ofthe party, Gorbachev emphasised the production needs of agriculture and the interests of the rural populace. Building on the rural experiments of the 1960s and 1970s, his reforms encouraged single families or co-operative groups to take land and implements out of the large-scale collec­tive farm for a given period, and use their own labour and management skills to maximise production and increase their incomes. In 1990, new legislation legitimised a variety of forms of tenure, ranging from outright ownership, possession for life, leasehold and indefinite, permanent or temporary use. Committed to socialism and to economic growth, Gorbachev's reforms pro­duced a 21 per cent increase in health, education and other welfare benefits, a 48 per cent rise in per capita income and an 8 per cent increase in productivity rates.[66] Explicitly rejecting Soviet and pre-Soviet notions of the rural populace as 'raw material' for industrial development, Gorbachev appealed for public input into economic and non-economic decision-making at every level, but especially within the agricultural and industrial workplace.

Gorbachev's appeal unleashed a storm of criticism that touched every aspect of Soviet life. Farm managers, agricultural specialists, teachers, writers, ordi­nary farmers and social scientists denounced the incidence of alcoholism, domestic abuse and disparities in health, housing, education and income between the rural populace and their urban counterparts. Playwrights por­trayed heroic collective farmers who demanded the right to 'speak the Truth' to collective farm managers,[67] while a resolution ofthe Twenty-First Congress of the Uzbek Communist Party denounced corrupt officials who overstated the amount of raw cotton produced by hundreds of thousands of tons.[68] Farm managers, workers and intellectuals targeted the 'gigantomania' that repeat­edly led policy makers to assume that an unlimited increase in inputs - in the form of supervisors, mechanisation, chemical fertiliser and the creation of ever-larger economic enterprises - automatically produced increased agricul­tural outputs.

Above all, rural critics rejected the notion - so deeply ingrained in the minds of Soviet (and pre-Soviet) policy makers - that agriculture and the rural inhabitants who made it work constituted 'the bottleneck of the country's development and the main reason for its backwardness'.⁷³ Calls for the revital- isation of farming communities coexisted with demands for market socialism, greater opportunities to pursue long-term, enlightened self-interest, to acquire land of one's own, to be rewarded according to merit and to win respect and acknowledgement for local knowledge, experience and expertise.

In the 1990s, the fall of Gorbachev, the break-up of the Soviet Union and the accession to power of Boris Yeltsin marked an accelerated turn away from the precarious, socialist/capitalist 'balancing acts' of the previous decade. In its place, 'shock therapists' launched a revolutionary effort at social engineer­ing that was to transform peasants into productive rural entrepreneurs. The first step in this process was to disentangle and sever property rights and economic activity from the reciprocal social obligations within which - from the peasantry's perspective - they had always been historically embedded. Convinced that the 'natural' desire to receive a piece of national wealth for free would serve as a powerful engine for agricultural land reform, Russia's neo-liberal reformers proposed a series of '500' and '1,000-day' schemes for the wholesale privatisation of the national economy. By 1994, the Union of Private Peasant Farmers (AKKOR) reported that there were 280,000 private farms in the Russian Federation alone.[69] However, among the former collective and state farmers (and urban dwellers with no previous farming experience) who became rural entrepreneurs, there was strikingly meagre enthusiasm for Western-style 'rugged individualism'.

In Nizhnii Novgorod, provincial governor Boris Nemtsov (later the first deputy prime minister of the Russian Republic) was hailed for his efforts to construct a fair, open and transparent exchange of land for shares,[70] but some observers raised doubts about the efficiency and productivity levels of these private farming ventures.[71] Even more troubling were reports that the suc­cesses in Nizhnii were due to extra-legal pressures from local authorities that recalled - in the words of economist Carol Leonard, 'something that is remi­niscent of the tragic collectivisation campaigns of the 1930s'.[72] But in any event, few collective farms emulated the Nizhnii model during the i990s. Frequently, collectives 'privatised' by becoming joint-stock companies led by former col­lective farm managers who attempted to obtain for their members the welfare benefits previously provided in the Soviet workplace. On occasion, collective farm members voted to become individual peasant farmers in order to guar­antee themselves secure individual ownership of lands that they continued to work and manage collectively. Although, legally, they had split up, their inten­tion was to 'stay together'.[73] In the 1990s, insider trading and asset stripping by farm managers, their cronies and friends undermined both the aims and the legitimacy of efforts to establish a rural regime based on independent and private economic activity. The most successful entrepreneurs often turned out to be former farm managers whose networks and 'social capital' gave them decided advantages in the new market economy.[74]

In 1992, the price liberalisation policies introduced by Russia's shock thera­pists produced a devastating 2,600 per cent rise in consumer goods prices. By December i996, per capita monthly income in the Russian Republic stood at 47 per cent of its 1992 level.[75] In the cities and in the countryside, ablackmarket and systems of barter began to flourish - and even to eclipse more normal mechanisms of exchange. In this precarious context, many farm workers and pensioners decided to remain on their collective farms and to rely - as in the 1930s - on their private plots and communal traditions. By the mid-1990s, over 60 per cent of Russian households were producing a significant proportion of their own food needs on private rural and urban garden plots. Some 14 million were sited in the countryside, and depended on former collectives for the material prerequisites for farming - that is, seeds, machinery and fuel.⁸¹

Under these circumstances, the rage and despair of a rural populace in decline soon overshadowed the 1980s critiques of the Soviet era. As in other societies that experienced 'structural adjustment', rural women (and children) were the most hard hit; women were particularly threatenedby 'land for shares' programmes that failed to acknowledge their special claims and - given their childcare responsibilities - their disproportionate need for the social welfare supports of the Soviet era. It is also worth noting that although women had for years borne major responsibility for the productive private plots of the Soviet era, they were not targeted as potential entrepreneurs either by local officials, by aid agencies or by the rural population itself.[76] In the words of a seventy-two-year-old woman farm worker from Voronezh province in 1995:

'what do I think about restructuring? We've been restructured about once every five years for as long as I can remember. And every time things get worse instead of better. I don't see why it should be any different this time. Restructuring usually means that things get worse.'[77]

In important respects, farm women may have represented in its most extreme form the challenge that the rural populace posed to would-be reform­ers and tormentors throughout the twentieth century. Opposed to the single- minded privatisation measures of the Stolypin era and to the incomparably more brutal and single-minded collectivism of the 1930s, they were averse in the 1990s to the 'either/or' choices presented to them by the Russian government. Although they were no longer the illiterates of the pre-Soviet era, many farm women (and men) nevertheless continued to believe that labour legitimised claims to property. Like their forebears, they were suspicious of individuals who bought land but did not use it, or misused it, or purchased land only to sell it at a higher profit, denouncing them as 'speculators' (spekulanty) rather than 'true owners'.⁸⁴

For their part, the Union of Private Landed Proprietors, understandably enraged by the destruction of harvests and burning of tractors carried out by collective farmers during the early 1990s, denounced the archaic 'traditions of egalitarianism' and the survival of the Soviet era's 'culture of envy'.[78] Frus­trated enthusiasts like Boris Nemtsov complained that 'the primary hindrance to privatisation of land in Nizhnii Novgorod province is the lack of people who want to become owners'.[79] In the newly independent Baltic state of Estonia, reformers denounced the machinations of Soviet-era 'Red barons' who reclaimed former privileges at the expense of former employees.[80] In general, advocates of privatisation attributed the problems of agriculture to the irreconcilable contradiction between collectivism and private economic initiative.

For their part, collective and state farm workers argued that when private enterprise became the only legitimate and legally protected form of farm ownership, the state subsidised private farmers, granted them preferential credit arrangements and praised them for their achievements. In contrast, the state deprived collective farmers of their former advantages and then vilified them for laziness and incompetence.[81] Former collective and state farm managers were particularly prone to argue that small-scale family farms were incapable of meeting the food needs of the Russian Republic. In general, critics of privatisation attributed the inefficiency of collective enterprises to external causes and in particular to government policies that privileged some groups at the expense of others.[82]

There is plenty ofevidence to support arguments on both sides ofthis issue. Among both defenders and enemies of privatisation, peasants differed with each other and with the government over the acceptable costs of change, the services and benefits to which citizens should legitimately be able to lay claim, and the role of the state as either a promoter of social cohesion or a catalyst for an individualistic, almost Darwinian struggle for survival.

Post-Soviet rural life: prospects and dilemmas

In the Russian Republic, agricultural production was 36 per cent lower in 1997 than in 1990. Reasserting the economic priorities of the Stalin and pre-1917 years, Yeltsin-era investment in agriculture declined from 16 per cent of the total in 1992 to 2.5 per cent in 1997. By 2000, over 90 per cent of Russian grain still came from former collective and state farms; private farms had made only a very modest impact and did not perform appreciably better than the former public sector.⁹⁰ Despite the brevity of the privatisation experiment and the rapid rates at which rural land has been bought and sold since 1991, there are few signs that privatisation has - as yet - positively affected agricultural productivity rates.[83]

Both the enduring and changing dilemmas of the post-Soviet era are evident in the case of Estonia - an outstanding success story of the 1990s. Newly priva­tised Estonian family farms have produced high agricultural yields (together with the stark economic divisions between the prosperous and the poor that recall the inter-war years of Estonian independence). Particularly troubling, however, are the late 1990s reports that both supporters and opponents of private farms believed that up to a third of the private farms in Estonia would fail due to shortages of machinery and materials, the absence of social ser­vices like health care and a scarcity of capital.[84] In the Russian Republic, among the approximately 30 million who still lived on the land and owned shares in former collective and state farms, the limited access to credit, poor infrastructure and high cost of social protections were bankrupting even the more efficient former Soviet farm enterprises. It was estimated in 1998 that only 20 per cent of the former collective farms/joint-stock companies in the Rus­sian Republic were capable of surviving within a competitive and capital-scarce

environment.⁹³

In 2003, many public opinion polls indicated that most former collective farmers - who still controlled three-quarters of Russia's arable land - were opposed to the private ownership of land. At the same time, new land laws have further undermined traditional links between labour claims and land use by permitting foreign investors to purchase landed property for capitalist agribusinesses. Such moves aroused opposition not only from labourers who still owned shares in former collective farms, but also from new private farmers who had leased collective farm fields and worked hard to improve them. Reflecting on the events of the past decade, the Agrarian Party's Iurii Savinok declared: 'Look what happened in the 90s - all Russia's industries and resources were grabbed by a few rich oligarchs . . . Does anyone doubt that the same will happen when land goes on the block? . . . Ordinary Russians will be dispossessed again.'⁹⁴

From the perspective of the rural populace at the dawn of the twenty- first century, survival and success seem more dependent on the ability of individuals and households to mobilise a broad range of political and economic resources than on a talent for generating and reinvesting private profits. In the words of new private farmer A. I. Poprov in 2003, 'Ownership is an empty symbol. What's important is who possesses the land and how he uses it.'⁹⁵

It has been suggested that a sustainable and productive Russian agriculture might well be compatible with an economic system that permits diverse farm sizes and ownership structures that range from large-scale to independent peasant farms to semi-subsistence household plots.⁹⁶ Such a proposal would be quite consistent with the history of mixed economies that peasants created whenever there were choices available to them. But the adoption of such a strategy would require reformers to abandon their dichotomised 'either/or' approach to development for one that is far more sensitive to the social impact of economic change upon the rural populace. As we have seen, economic pluralism has rarely appealed either to Russian or Soviet governments. As a policy, it remains - at least so far - starkly at odds with those currently being deployed or contemplated in the Russian Republic.

95 Weir, 'This Land', In These Times. 96 Caskie, 'Back', p. 208.

Workers and industrialisation

LEWIS H. SIEGELBAUM

'What is the contemporary factory worker in Russia', asked Mikhail Tugan- Baranovskii towards the end of the nineteenth-century, 'a peasant living on the land who makes up the deficiencies of his agricultural income by occasional factory work, or a proletarian bound closely to the factory who lives by sell­ing his labour power?'[85] Tugan-Baranovskii, among Russia's foremost political economists, seemed unsure how to answer the question. Citing earlier stud­ies showing a decline in seasonal employment among workers in Moscow province, he nevertheless had to acknowledge that 'the tie of the factory worker to the soil, although waning, is still very strong', that it was 'economi­cally necessary and therefore is tenaciously maintained'. Yet, echoing an article of faith among Russian Marxists, he confidently predicted that 'a complete severance of this tie... is inevitable, and the sooner it takes place the better'.²

What was thus on one level an empirical question that lent itself to statistical enquiry into patterns of labour mobility, employment and workers' ties to the land, on another implied more complex issues. Central to the Marxist paradigm of historical evolution, the formation of an industrial proletariat in Russia was a question that came to the fore during the 1890s because of the unprecedentedly rapid growth of factory industry, associated social dislocations and the political implications of these developments. Retrospectively, it served as the opening chapter in the revolutionary narrative that the Bolsheviks would tell about themselves and the society they were determined to transform.[86]

Fast-forwarding nearly a hundred years, we find the authors of a book about post-Soviet Russia's transition to capitalism asking: 'What about the workers?'[87] This question does not so much recapitulate Tugan-Baranovskii's as imply the reversal of the situation that precipitated it. By the mid-1990s, de- industrialisation was well under way, and industrial workers, who comprised some 50 million people, were in imminent danger of becoming redundant. The once heroic rabochie, the universal class of Marxist dreams, had become rabotiagi, working stiffs, embodiments of the failure of the Soviet experiment.

For much of the twentieth century, labour historians conventionally employed the concept of the working class as an objective description of a distinct social group with measurable characteristics and factory workers as the core element within that class. Thanks to feminist scholarship, the linguistic turn in the social sciences and humanities and the arrival of the post-industrial era, this convention gave way to an understanding that such terms as 'class', 'industrial' and even 'factory' are linguistically constructed and culturally specific, that statistics bearing on these categories are neither self-evidently reflective of the real world nor value-neutral but rather derive from the nexus of knowledge and power, and that the same can be said of determinations of core and marginal elements.

These reconceptualisations provide a fresh opportunity to revisit some of the terrain already 'covered'. Thinking through whether class is to be under­stood as a sociological aggregate, a linguistic construction, an 'imagined com­munity', or the sum total of certain cultural practices is not to bid farewell to the working class, but to enrich our sense of what a good deal of the struggles of (at least) the twentieth century were about.[88]

This is particularly so in the case of Russia where throughout much of the century 'the working class' had extraordinary political salience and workers experienced radical, often wrenching, changes in the nature and validation of the workthey performed. In this chapter workers' experiences are relatedto the social and cultural spaces they occupied. Four chronologically overlapping themes span the twentieth century. The first two comprise key elements of the Bolshevik narrative of the path to communism; the others represent com­ponents of a counter-narrative that emerged out of the party's abandonment of the model of the heroic working class and, ultimately, the dissolution of the Soviet Union. Two dimensions - the discursive and the experiential - were always in dynamic tension and often became blurred as workers both collec­tively and individually appropriated others' ideas about who they were, what they needed and how they should act to fulfil their needs. The 'contemporary factory worker' of Tugan-Baranovskii's enquiry was thus both an object of others' imaginings and a subject with agency.

Peasants into workers

The factory worker, observed the governor of Khar'kov province in his offi­cial report for 1899 (a year after the publication of Tugan-Baranovskii's book) 'is losing many of the worthy and distinctive traits that are characteristic of the villager, especially the latter's positive, undemanding, traditional world- view, so rooted in religious teachings and in the biddings of his ancestors'. This loss of 'spiritual equilibrium', he added, was providing 'a very conve­nient opening for those who wish to awaken his dissatisfaction with his own situation and with the social system, which is precisely what the enemies of the existing order have recently been attempting, unfortunately with some success'.[89]

The image ofthe undemanding, tradition-boundpeasant, amainstay among tsarist officials and conservatives more generally, had its analogue among the liberal and socialist intelligentsia of the nineteenth century. It was of the 'grey muzhik' - 'dark', superstitious, in need of being rescued from benightedness, but almost inaccessible.[90] These images persisted even while peasants in the post-emancipation decades regularly tramped off to labour markets to be hired for off-farm work, engaged in extensive commerce with townsfolk, came under and made use of the new court system, attended schools, entered the army, consumed cheaply produced popular literature and otherwise expanded their contacts with the wider world.[91] By the turn of the century there already existed a substantial ethnographic literature, much of which noted the increasing penetration of urban-originated ideas, practices and goods into the village and the dying out of old, village-based customs.[92]

Peasant labour migration assumed huge proportions in the late nineteenth century. Duringthe 1890s, an average of 6.2 million passports were issued every year by peasant communes to departing peasants (otkhodniki) in the forty- three provinces of European Russia. The heaviest out-migration was in the eight Central Industrial provinces of Iaroslavl', Moscow, Vladimir, Kostroma, Kaluga, Nizhnii Novgorod, Tula and Riazan', followed by the north and north­west, the Southern Agricultural Region and the Central Black Soil Region.[93]Agricultural workers made up the largest contingent of otkhodniki, but sub­stantial numbers sought and found work in the cities and industrial sites of the country. Some 100,000 to 150,000 immigrants arrived in Moscow every year between 1880 and 1900; in St Petersburgthe city's workingpopulationincreased by two-thirds in the 1890s, mostly on account of peasant in-migration.[94] Peas­ants also travelled to and found work in the burgeoning metallurgical and coal-mining industries of the south.[95]

The contemporary (and later Soviet) fixation on the factory and the rapid growth of its labour force obscured the fact that substantially larger num­bers of peasant migrants found employment in smaller-scale artisanal work­shops, commercial establishments, domestic service, prostitution, transporta­tion, public utilities and unskilled construction jobs.[96] Workers all, they were more evenly divided between men and women than was the case among factory workers who were overwhelmingly male.[97] But they did take up residence in the same districts of cities, partook of many of the same pas­times and, generally speaking, inhabited the same cultural world as recently arrived factory workers.

The image of the authentic proletarian - a factory worker employed year- round and totally dependent on his wage - nevertheless continued to exercise its hold over the Marxist intelligentsia, representing for them the maturity of Russian capitalism and the possibility of recruiting workers into the fledgling social democratic movement. On the basis of such criteria as literacy, sobri­ety and a secular world-view, workers could be judged as to whether they were merely part of the masses, incomplete proletarians as it were, or had attained the status of (politically) 'conscious workers'.[98] This distinction cor­responded to the trajectory of some factory workers who, shedding their peasant appearance and 'outlook', came to understand their place in society in the terms described by the literature they encountered in the revolution­ary underground circles. As proud of their skills as they were resentful of the petty tyranny of foremen and the dissolute ways of their fellow work­ers, they entered the ranks of the Russian Social Democratic Party, agitated among other workers, organised strikes and embraced the cause of proletarian revolution.[99]

They were, however, a tiny minority among workers. More commonly, and especially in the Central Industrial Region, workers effected a 'symbio­sis' between the village and the factory. Facilitated by the location of most factories on the outskirts of cities or in relatively autonomous industrial set­tlements, their retention of kinship ties and landholding gave them a 'tactical mobility' that city-dwellers and 'pure' proletarians lacked.[100] Several labour his­torians, focusing on the 1905 Revolution and its aftermath, have challenged the Bolshevik master narrative of working-class formation and the develop­ment of a corresponding class consciousness by emphasising the overlapping of parochial (e.g. craft, trade union) allegiances among artisanal workers with broader class identities, the volatility of mining and metallurgical work­ers as evidenced by their participation in both social democratic-organised strikes and anti-Semitic pogroms, and 'vanguard' workers' expression of a sense of self in the eclectic language of universal human rights and religious eschatology.[101]

At least until the early twentieth century', writes Barbara Alpern Engel, 'the working-class couple who shared a roof was a relative rarity in Russia's major cities.' Although a gradual trend towards an urban-based family life accelerated after the 1905 Revolution and the Stolypin reforms of 1906-7, cohabitation of the working-class family never became the norm in tsarist Russia. This undoubtedly was because the cost of maintaining a family on the wage paid to most male workers was prohibitive, at least in a city like St Petersburg where it amounted to roughly three times the average annual wage for the country during 1905-9.[102] Hence factory owners' provision of (notoriously crowded and insalubrious) barracks or dormitory accommodation, and the absorption by the village of the costs of reproduction, elderly care and other welfare functions. This too suggests the 'tactical mobility' of workers.

The persistence of workers' ties to the village would save many of them when, during the desperate years of civil war, they fled from the starving cities. Statistics on the industrial workforce from 1917 onwards generally tell a story of diminution. From a high-point of 3.5 million, the number of workers in 'census' industry (i.e. industrial enterprises employing more than sixteen workers) dropped to slightly over 2 million in 1918, and remained at between 1.3 and 1.5 for the remainder of the civil war.[103]

Losses were greatest in the most populous industrial centres, that is, Petro- grad, Moscow, the Donbass and the Urals. The number of industrial workers in Petrograd dropped from 406,000 in January 1917 to 123,000 by mid-1920. Workers also declined as a proportion of the city's population - from 45.9 per cent of able-bodied adults in 1917, to 34 per cent by the autumn of 1920. Between 1918 and 1920 Moscow experienced a net loss of about 690,000 people, of whom 100,000 were classified as workers. Over the same period, the num­ber of factory and mine workers in the Urals dropped from 340,000 to 155,000. Large enterprises where the Bolsheviks had concentrated their agitational and recruitment efforts suffered disproportionately, partly owing to the shutting

lewis h. siegelbaum

down of entire shops and partly due to heavy mobilisation for the Red Army and food procurement detachments.[104]

De-proletarianisation was not only demographic. Lenin could lament the 'petty-proprietor outlook' of the 'newcomers' who sought to escape the mil­itary draft or increase their rations, but this was an all too convenient excuse for the demoralisation of those workers who had not fled or been enlisted and the party's loss of support among them.[105] In any case, the party - and at least some workers - weathered this crisis, albeit just barely. The haemorrhaging of the proletarian body was staunched within a few years of the introduction of the New Economic Policy in 1921. Old blood flowed back, but as new blood poured in towards the end of the 1920s, a 'crisis of proletarian identity' could be discerned among skilled workers.[106]

Stalin's 'great turn' towards industrialisation, accompanied by the collec­tivisation of agriculture, provoked massive out-migration from the villages. Between 1928 and 1932, approximately 12 million people departed, some to swell the ranks of forced labourers in labour camps and special settlements, and others to escape starvation or, at best, unremunerated labour in the kolkhoz. Those who left voluntarily were mainly young males. Some were consigned by their collective farms for a given period to industrial enter­prises or construction sites, usually located in remote regions, under condi­tions specified in 'organised labour recruitment' (orgnabor) contracts. Others headed on their own or in groups to the cities which swelled in population but not, for the most part, in accommodation, services and infrastructure. Still others were absorbed by state farms (sovkhozy) whose employed popu­lation increased from 663,000 in August 1929 to nearly 2.7 million three years later.[107]

These migration flows were by no means one-way. Nor did migrants nec­essarily settle in their first place ofresidence. The demand for labour was such that migrants frequently shopped around, 'flitting' like 'rolling stones' from one construction site or factory to another, clogging railroad stations and other collection points, and otherwise disrupting the state's attempts to gain control over the labour market. Those attempts culminated in the introduction of compulsory internal passports for every citizen, sixteen years and older, living in towns and at construction sites or employed in transport and on state farms. The law, issued on 27 December 1932, initially targeted 'yesterday's peasants' who were 'undigested by the proletarian cauldron'. Eventually, it was used as a filtering device to remove the itinerant population and all 'people who are not involved in socially useful labour' from designated 'regime cities' (rezhimnye goroda).[108]

These measures worked, but only temporarily. During 1933, the number of new migrants who settled in cities declined to three-quarters of a million compared to 2.7 million in the previous year. Industry actually shed jobs, and what new employment opportunities existed were taken up by the other 'reserve army of labour', namely, the wives and daughters of workers already based in the towns.[109] By 1935, however, rural to urban migration was almost back to pre-passportisation levels.

The huge numbers of peasants absorbed by industry in the 1930s utterly transformed the factories where they worked and the cities in which they resided. They too were transformed, although usually not as rapidly as, or in ways that, party agitators would have liked and Soviet historians later contended.[110] The shock worker heroes and especially the outstanding Stakhanovites were represented in the Soviet media as embodying success sto­ries from which the new Soviet workers could take instruction not only about workbut about other dimensions of life.[111] But even after they had entered the 'proletarian cauldron', peasant migrants chose selectively from what was on offer by theparty and state. Like more experienced workers, they learned when it was necessary to express approval of or affirmation for decisions made else­where (to 'speak Bolshevik' in Stephen Kotkin's inimitable phrase), but also how to circumvent the limits of state provisioning.[112] They may even have

siegelbaum

learned how to 'think Soviet', but this did not preclude them engaging in practices frowned upon or proscribed by Soviet officials.

The story of peasants' transformation into workers during succeeding decades is one of massive recruitment for defence industries, construction and transport during the Great Patriotic War, followed by a renewal of the stream of voluntary departures from the collective farms which continued to deplete rural society of its younger, skilled and ambitious workforce.[113] Peasants left to further their education or learn a trade. They joined construction crews to build the high-rise apartment buildings that replaced the forests and fields on the outskirts of cities and into which they hoped to move. Whatever their intentions were and to whatever extent they were realised, these migrants did not abandon the village entirely. As late as the mid-1980s, one could see them - young and old, recently and not-so-recently arrived migrants - gathering in urban parks on Saturdays to sing, dance, play the accordion or the spoons and otherwise re-create a bit of village culture in the city.[114]

Labour discipline and productivity

'The Russian is a bad worker compared with the advanced peoples', wrote Lenin in 1918, echoing complaints that factory owners and managers had made for decades before the October Revolution.[115] International comparisons of output per worker in the main factory-based industries were very much to Russia's disadvantage in the pre-revolutionary era. Indeed, even small-scale and artisan industry within Russia often enjoyed a competitive advantage thanks to the relatively high fixed costs and overhead expenditures in metalworkfactories and employers' reliance on unskilled, often seasonal forms of labour.[116]

Lenin's sobering observation was followed by an equally categorical injunction: 'The task the Soviet government must set the people in all its scope is - learn to work.' For the next seventy odd years, the Soviet state would pursue this task, one that the bourgeoisie had performed in nineteenth- century Europe and North America. It did so by a combination of vocational

training programmes, political campaigns, legal compulsions and financial inducements. Some of the measures to which it resorted were adaptations of techniques pioneered in capitalist countries; others were of its own devising. All held out the promise of advancing the country along the path towards socialism and then communism while improving the lot of its working popu­lation.

Lenin repeatedly stressed the importance of 'nationwide accounting and control of production and the distribution of goods', advocated use of Taylorism (see below), piecework and other 'up-to-date achievements of cap­italism', and excoriated violators of labour discipline as 'responsible for the sufferings caused by the famine and unemployment'.[117] He invoked labour dis­cipline both as an 'immediate task' for combating anarchy and hunger and as 'the peg of the entire economic construction of socialism'.[118] Based on the notion that workers were now collectively the ruling class and therefore were working for themselves, labour discipline was an emblem of the new class consciousness the Bolsheviks sought to promote.

During the civil war, the state demanded that workers remain at the bench, but assumed responsibility for their 'social maintenance', providing employ­ment and at least a caloric minimum in the form of rations. With little in the way of material incentives to offer, the party appealed to workers' 'rev­olutionary conscience', and publicised examples of labour heroism such as the unpaid 'voluntary Saturdays' (subbotniki). Violators of labour discipline were punished via trade union-based comrades' disciplinary courts and other coercive mechanisms.[119]

These and other initiatives were inflected by ideology, but they also were driven by the emergency situation of civil war and economic collapse. Many were phased out after the introduction of the New Economic Policy only to return in more systematic fashion with the abandonment of NEP towards the end of the decade. In the meantime, paralleling a European-wide trend, the cult of man-the-machine took hold among Bolshevik intellectuals who mar­velled at what Henry Ford had accomplished and Frederick Winslow Taylor's 'scientific management' promised. Under the banner of 'the scientific organ­isation of labour' (nauchnaia organizatsiia truda - NOT), they preached time- consciousness, efficiency and rationalisation in not only industrial work but the army, schools and other institutions.[120] However, the technocratic impli­cations of NOT were not lost on the party, and most of the institutes and laboratories promoting it did not survive the 1930s.

For workers there were more immediate concerns such as unemployment which, despite the recovery of industry, grew throughout the 1920s. This was due to a number of factors: the demobilisation of the army which threw sev­eral million men onto the labour market, rural to urban migration, protective legislation covering the conditions of employment for women and juveniles and the cost-accounting basis (khozraschet) on which industry was compelled to operate.[121] Between 1925 and 1928, the Commissariat of Labour recorded an increase from approximately one million to 1.5 million unemployed, figures that almost certainly understated the actual numbers. White-collar workers comprised about one-third of the total, and women and youth were dispropor­tionately represented.[122] The scourge of unemployment was mitigated for at least some workers by a rudimentary system of unemployment insurance and the maintenance of ties to the land, but many resorted to selling home brew (samogon), and engaging in prostitution and thievery, petty and otherwise.[123]

Workers with jobs in industry experienced a steady increase in their wages, at least until 1927. Wage levels, based on collective agreements co-signed by respective trade unions, were considerably higher in heavy industry where the workforce was predominantly male than in textiles and other female- dominated industries. They also were some 80 per cent higher for technical and office personnel than for blue-collar workers. Overall, wage increases outpaced productivity gains, notwithstanding campaigns to reduce expenditures and rationalise production processes.[124] These campaigns and other measures to raise productivity did bring output levels within striking distance of pre-war indices. Intensified after the introduction of the seven-hour work-day in early 1928, they were accompanied by an appallingly high rate of accidents on the job - about twice that of Germany - and a good deal of conflict on the shop

floor.[125]

The party, acknowledging that a breach had opened between itself and the working class, made much of its policy of proletarian preference in access to higher education and party membership.[126] But for all its rhetoric about the proletarian dictatorship, the conditions under which Soviet industrial workers laboured and lived in the 1920s did not differ appreciably from elsewhere in Europe. This in itselfwas something of an achievement, for material conditions had been immeasurably worse at the outset of the decade. Then again, work­ing and living conditions for workers were far from fulfilling hopes engendered by the 1917 Revolution that the world - or at least their world - would be made anew. The 'big bourgeoisie' had been eliminated, but class enmity at the point of production persisted. Fanned by workers' insecurity, the ubiquity of the language of class and the contradictoriness of a policy that involved building socialism via capitalist techniques, it was manifested in strikes, 'specialist bait­ing' (spetsedstvo) and altercations with foremen and other low-level supervisors over job assignments, rate-setting and fines. Gender was also a fault-line on the shop floor, as the intrusion of women into previously male-dominated trades such as printing provoked some ugly incidents and much taunting by male workers.[127] In Central Asia, Russian workers behaved similarly towards their indigenous counterparts who were the beneficiaries of 'affirmative action' policies.[128]

Some of these tensions dissipated during the 1930s, but the force-paced industrialisation ofthe First Five-Year Plan years (1928-32) intensified them and fomented others. The utopianism of this 'socialist offensive' and its accom­panying rhetoric of class war were matched by the harshness of repression against 'bourgeois specialists' in industry, Rightists within the party, and other 'nay-sayers'. The ratcheting up of targets, shortages of all kinds, the depression of living standards and the general coarsening of daily life created tremendous stress, strain and, in some well-documented cases, strikes and other protests.[129]

Through it all, the party ceaselessly beat the drum for raising productivity. From the summer of 1929, factories and offices were put in continuous opera­tion throughout the week with workers rotating days off every four or five days. This 'continuous working week' (nepreryvka) promised several advantages: an increase in the number of working days from 300 to 360, a lessening of pressure on workers' clubs and other leisure and service facilities, a blow against reli­gion (Sunday would become a normal working day) and, perhaps above all, a rise in output of up to 20 per cent without infusions of additional working capital. It turned out, however, that the nepreryvka put enormous strain on the supply system, on equipment and on workers' conjugal and family lives. It also encouraged a lack of personal responsibility towards the tools of one's trade.[130]Two years after its introduction, the nepreryvka was quietly abolished in most industries, and work schedules reverted to the interrupted six-day week.

More long-lasting, indeed what would become a characteristic feature of Soviet socialism, was socialist competition. This was the practice of workers within an enterprise, shop or brigade setting goals for a period of time and challenging their counterparts to better their performance. Those meeting or exceeding the goals earned the title of shock workers (udarniki), with shock work (udarnichestvo) and socialist competition proceeding in tandem. Assum­ing mass proportions from 1929 onwards, these 'movements' were hailed (by V Kuibyshev) as representing 'an historical breakthrough in the psychology of the worker', and (by Stalin) as 'a fundamental revolution in the attitude of people to labour'.[131] The trade unions, purged of their leading cadres and mandated by the party to turn their 'face to production', assumed the main responsibility for popularising, organising and recording the results of this 'revolution'.

Many workers (and managers) were either indifferent to socialist compe­tition or resented it for imposing additional burdens on them. Hence their ironic reference to shock workers as 'gladiators', Americans' and 'shock worker-idiots' (chudaki-udarniki).⁵⁰ Still, notwithstanding its eventual routini- sation and the exaggeration of its results, some, particularly younger, workers responded enthusiastically to socialist competition. The opportunity to prove oneself, participate in the grandiose project ofsocialist construction, and, not incidentally, earn privileges associated with shock-worker status were only some of the reasons.⁵¹ Others were evident in the case of production collec­tives and communes that pooled wages and divided them either equally or on the basis of skill grades. They included the desire to practise self-management and cushion the effects on output and wages of irregular supply and variations in the quality of raw materials.⁵²

Production collectives and communes proliferated during 1929-31, espe­cially in the metalworks and textile industries. But party leaders were ambivalent, even hostile to them, and the party's campaigns against collec­tive piece-rates, 'depersonalisation' of responsibilities (obezlichka), and exces­sive egalitarianism (uravnilovka) in wages led to their disbandment. When, in 1935, the Stakhanovite movement ignited a new wave of socialist competition, circumstances were very different. Wage differentials had been widened sig­nificantly, nearly 70 per cent of industrial workers were paid on the basis of individual piece-rates, and of them, 30 per cent were eligible for the progressivka according to which rates would rise progressively above the level of output norms.

At no time in Soviet history did raising labour productivity assume such importance as during the heyday of the Stakhanovite movement in the mid- 1930s.⁵³ The production records set by outstanding Stakhanovites, the shower­ing of goods and other rewards on them and the results of Stakhanovite ten-day periods (dekady) and months received enormous coverage in the media. Proto­types of the New Soviet Man and Woman, Stakhanovites were represented both as living for their work and enjoying the fruits of their 'cultured' lives.⁵⁴ Yet, the objective of achieving a generalbreakthrough in productivity remained as elusive as ever. Resistance on the part of workers was certainly a factor. Fear­ing that Stakhanovites' records would be used to raise output norms (as they were in the spring of 1936), individuals engaged in acts of intimidation and

50 Ibid., pp. 260-1.

51 Hiroaki Kuromiya, Stalin's Industrial Revolution: Politics and Workers, 1928-1932 (New York and Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), pp. 115-28.

52 Lewis H. Siegelbaum, 'Production Collectives and Communes and the "Imperatives" of Soviet Industrialization, 1929-1931', Slavic Review 45 (1986): 65-84.

53 Francesco Benvenuti, Fuoco sui sabotari! Stachanovismo e organizzazione industriale in URSS 1934-1938 (Rome: Valerio Levi, 1988); Siegelbaum, Stakhanovism; Robert Maier, Die Stachanov-Bewegung, 1935-1938 (Stuttgart: Franz Steiner Verlag, 1990).

54 Siegelbaum, Stakhanovism, pp. 210-46.

assaults against Stakhanovites, simply refused to adjust to a new division of labour, and otherwise sabotaged the movement.[132]

Ironically, the Stakhanovite movement itself militated against sustained increases in productivity. Whatever benefits were derived from improvements in work organisation and technique were counteracted by the intensifica­tion of problems in the delivery of supplies, the disproportionality between different phases of the production process and the neglect of maintenance and repair. Indeed, to the extent that it raised expectations of production breakthroughs that were not fulfilled, Stakhanovism indirectly contributed to accusations against enterprise directors and their staffs of sabotage and wrecking that undermined managerial authority during the Great Purges of 1936-8. Although claims that workers were taking advantage of the situation were probably exaggerated, the drawing of millions of men into the armed forces in connection with the military build-up made cracking down on labour turnover and absenteeism imperative. Such was the intent of the series of decrees, typically characterised by historians as 'draconian', that were issued between December 1938 and June 1940. These introduced labour books con­taining information about workers' past employment, called for the dismissal and eviction from enterprise housing of workers who were repeatedly truant or late to work, criminalised these violations of labour discipline and extended the normal work-day from seven to eight hours.[133]

What on paper amounted to the militarisation of labour in reality fell con­siderably short of that thanks to massive non-compliance on the part of man­agement. Eager to retain workers almost at any cost, managers, often with the collusion of trade union committees, turned a blind eye towards truancy and lateness, extracted fictitious sick notes from physicians and issued retroactive notes for unpaid leave.⁵⁷ With the Great Patriotic War, the stakes rose in this and all other respects. Between 1940 and 1942 the Soviet industrial workforce declined from 11 million to 7.2 million. Women's share in industrial employ­ment rose from 41 per cent to 52 per cent. The work-week was extended from 48 to 54 hours, and key workers (munitions workers from December 1941 and railroad workers from April 1943) were conscripted and subject to military tribunals for the slightest infraction of labour discipline. Elsewhere, workers continued to respond to bad living and working conditions by leaving their jobs or not showing up, and an average of one million were taken to court every year of the war for these 'crimes'.[134]

Compulsion, though, only went so far even in wartime, and the diversion of resources to military production and the front made economic incentives even less available than they had been before the war. Political campaigns and moral appeals thus played a larger role. These included the expansion of the 'two-hundreder' movement that had appeared before the war but took on new meaning with the slogan, 'Work not just for yourself but also for your comrade sent to the front'. By February 1942, individual workers were being celebrated for having fulfilled two and three times their shift norms, and in the case of D. F. Bosyi, a milling machine operator at the Nizhnii Tagil armaments plant in the Urals, over fourteen times the norm. Much larger numbers of workers were involved in Komsomol front-line youth brigades, whose slogan, 'Work in the factory as soldiers fight at the front', typified the patriotic appeals of wartime socialist competition.[135]

As for productivity, the picture was mixed. In the munitions industry, output per worker more than doubled between 1940 and 1944. This was primarily due to the replacement of small batch by flow production on assembly lines, as well as deferments for skilled workers. Civilian industry, which comprised only 20.8 per cent of net national product in 1944 compared to 29.1 per cent in 1940, did not fare so well. Net output per worker dropped 11 per cent between 1940 and 1942 and barely recovered by 1944.[136] Given that average work time had increased by six hours per week, output per hour remained well below pre-war levels.

Wartime devastation followed by harvest failure and famine in 1946-7 con­signed workers to a penurious existence in the immediate post-war years. Despite the persistence of penalties which made 'wilful' job-changing a crimi­nal offence, labour turnover remained high, threatening production plans. So too did malnutrition, epidemic outbreaks of typhus, dysentery and tuberculo­sis, and shortages of basic necessities such as clothing, vegetables and soap.[137]Increasing productivity, advertised as the formula for improving workers' stan­dard of living, was thus held hostage by the very conditions it was supposed to overcome.

This vicious cycle somewhat abated after 1948. Reconstruction, which involved the extensive use of prisoner-of-war labour, was followed by nearly two decades of sustained industrial growth. During the 1950s, electric power generation and oil production increased fourfold, while natural gas production rose by a factor of eight. While the production of consumer goods lagged as usual, certain items such as refrigerators, washing machines, vacuum cleaners, sewing machines and television sets were turned out in exponentially increas­ing numbers and began to make their appearance in workers' households.[138]Significant efficiencies were achieved in steel-making, machine-building and other branches of heavy industry that received priority in supplies and other resources, upgraded their equipment and were able to recruit skilled workers and engineers. But even these privileged sectors exemplified certain phenom­ena that limited productivity gains and can be regarded as endemic to the Soviet system of production relations. They included the hoarding of work­ers and supplies by enterprises; the overconsumption of materials; the dearth of spare parts that resulted from the emphasis on producing heavier, more expensive items; disincentives against technical innovation; and the largely successful manoeuvring of workers to avoid speed-ups, de-skilling and other attempts to reduce their control over the labour process.[139]

Operating within these limits, the Khrushchev administration initiated reforms through which it sought to invigorate workers' commitment to ful­filling production goals. Infractions of labour discipline were de-criminalised in 1956 after having been in abeyance for several years. A major revision of the wage structure was instituted beginning in 1956 with coal mining and some metalworks enterprises and extending to all branches of industry by 1960. It entailed increases in base rates and production quotas, a reduction in the number of wage scales and the simplification of rates within each scale, the elimination of progressive piece-rates and a modest shift of pieceworkers to time-based wages. Finally, the education system was overhauled to combine academic learning with vocational training for all students in their last three years of secondary school.[140]

The reforms should be seen as a partial response to the emergence of a post-war generation that was more urbanised, better educated and more demanding than its predecessors. That they proved inadequate was spectacu­larly demonstrated by the tragic events in Novocherkassk in early June 1962. Provoked by a Union-wide increase in the prices of meat and butter as well as the insensitivity of the factory administration, workers at the Novocherkassk Electric Locomotive Works walked off their jobs, marched on the city centre and seized the party headquarters. Fired upon by troops, some twenty-four were killed, eighteen of whom were under the age of thirty. Mass arrests fol­lowed, and 114 persons - officially dubbed 'hooligans', 'bandits', 'extremists' and 'anti-Soviet elements', that is, anything but 'workers' - were tried, among whom seven were sentenced to death and executed.[141]

Official concern that the appeals to patriotism and self-sacrifice were no longer adequate to inspire Soviet youth facilitated the establishment of soci­ology as an academic discipline. Throughout the 1960s Soviet sociologists conducted numerous studies, using questionnaires and other methods of 'con­crete' sociological research, to chart young workers' attitudes. Several found alarmingly high levels of occupational dissatisfaction, low prestige of indus­trial work and individualistic and material considerations as the main reason for job-changing.[142] Other studies addressed the problem of the 'double-shift' for wage-earning women, which also was the subject of Natalia Baranskaia's story, 'A Week Like Any Other', that appeared in Novyi mir in 1969.[143]

Identifying these problems was not the same as solving them. In any case, by the 1970s the Brezhnev administration had effectively curbed industrial reform efforts and the bolder forays of labour sociologists, preferring instead to tout the 'scientific-technological revolution' (NTR- nauchno-tekhnicheskaia revoliut- siia) as a panacea.[144] Clothed in Soviet Marxist ideological garb, the revolution was to promote inter alia 'the formation of a new type of worker who has mas­tered scientific principles of production and can ensure that the functioning of production and its future development will be based on the achievements of science and technique'. According to a post-Brezhnev-era assessment, however, 'CPSU leaders [had] yet to devise successful means of nurturing the NTR or of enhancing ample creative rather than duplicative capabilities'.[145]It remained for Gorbachev to try to break through the 'stagnation', first by emphasising the need for the 'acceleration of productive processes', and then when that accomplished little, by adopting more radical measures.

Enterprise paternalism

Despite the centralised nature of resource appropriation and redistribution imposed under Stalin and perpetuated by his successors, the day-to-day expe­rience of workers was with enterprise administration, local party and trade union officials and fellow workers. Whatever came down from above in the way of plans, slogans, campaigns and resources, implementation ultimately depended on production relations in the workplace. Thus, rather than inter­preting workers as having entered into some sort of 'social contract' with the state, it would be more appropriate to conceive of a mutuality of dependen­cies between managers and workers structured around what has been called enterprise paternalism.

Paternalism frequently crops up in both contemporary descriptions and historians' accounts of factory relations in pre-revolutionary Russia. While some owners are said to have been 'despotic' and others 'enlightened', the notion that their relationship with workers was more than purely contractual, that it involved a moral obligation to provide for workers' educational, cultural, spiritual and medical needs, seems to have been expected of them and, in many cases, was internalised. This was famously true of the textile magnates of the Central Industrial provinces, many of whom traced their ancestry to humble, serf origins and were of Old Believer faith.[146] But Muscovite and St Petersburg printing employers as well as southern mining and metallurgical owners (who were neither Old Believers nor, in many cases, Russian) also exhibited paternalism towards their workers.[147] In this respect, they were not all that far removed from the welfare capitalism practised by American firms during the Progressive Era.

Whether inspired by personal piety, civic responsibility or more calculating motives, factory paternalism could raise expectations among workers that, when unfulfilled, provoked strikes. In these as well as less volatile instances, the image ofthe beneficent father could quickly give way to less flattering ones. In any event, even before the revolutionary thunderstorm of 1905-6, workers were beginning to develop alternative conceptions of themselves which by emphasising the dignity of the individual, fraternal ties and class affiliation (as in 'the proletarian family') excluded owners and management.[148] Subsequent legislation providing for trade unions, sick-benefit funds, and other forms of worker representation further eroded the basis on which factory paternalism rested, and, of course, the October Revolution would sweep away the entire factory-owning class.

During the civil war years, enterprises experimented with a variety of col­lective or 'collegial' forms of management, usually involving shared respon­sibility among representatives of factory committees, trade unions and eco­nomic associations. Though favoured by many within the party and the trade unions, enterprise democracy could not withstand the economic collapse and the needs of state institutions on the one hand and the dwindling number of employees on the other. Lenin, who likened the harmoniously run fac­tory to a symphony orchestra, emphasised strict accountability and 'one-man management' (edinonachalie), and it was this model that eventually prevailed.[149]

Directorships in industry were occupied throughout the 1920s by former trade union or factory committee activists of working-class origin, 'bour­geois specialists' whose social backgrounds and pre-revolutionary experience often dictated their shadowing by party officials, and party trouble-shooters. These Red Directors were cast by the party as 'commanders of production' and charged with reviving output, avoiding cost overruns and maintaining proper relations with the trade union committee, the party cell and their specialist assistants. Judging by a 1922 Pravda-sponsored contest for the best and worst directors, workers appreciated personal qualities such as simplicity, accessibility and energy. While some workers characterised a good director in paternal terms (Korshunov 'loves his workers, he takes pride in them, cares about them as if he were their own father'), others employed images of friend­ship and brotherhood.[150] As Diane Koenker concluded, the contest revealed