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colonies, or even executed them as class enemies. In 1930 and 1931, the two
most intense years of forced collectivisation and ‘de-kulakisation’, authorities
deported 1.8 million peasants (about 400,000 households) as class enemies
who had resisted collectivisation. The great majority of these peasants were
deported to penal farms or settlements in remote areas of the country in
Siberia, northern Russia and Central Asia. Many others were dispossessed and
resettled into special farms in their home districts. By conservative estimates,
well over 2 million rural inhabitants were deported by the end of 1933, when
the regime ended the policy of forced mass collectivisation, and this does not
include the unknown but surely large number of peasants who were executed,
killed in outright fighting, or who died of harsh conditions even before they
reached their places of exile.
By 1933, the regime had driven nearly 60 per cent of peasant households
to join collective farms, although, remarkably, some 40 per cent or so of
peasant families had managed to hold out against the wave of collectivisation.
Individual peasant farms – edinolichniki – continued to exist legally, despite
harsh tax and procurement policies and severe pressure to join collective farms.
In 1930 and 1931, in fact, when the regime briefly relaxed coercive measures
of collectivisation, peasants streamed out of collectives, reducing the overall
proportion to a low of 21 per cent.
4
Only by offering lucrative tax and other
incentives could the regime begin to reverse the decline in collectivisation, and
only by allowing peasants the right to own livestock and to farm their own
plots was the regime able, finally, to persuade peasants to return to collectives
in large numbers. By 1935, collectives encompassed about 83 per cent of peasant
households, although by the end of the decade this number had declined to 63
per cent. In the most significant grain-growing areas, in Ukraine and western
Siberia, the regime ensured that collectivisation reached nearly 100 per cent.
Agricultural production was severely disrupted as a consequence of the
social war in the countryside, and the cost in livestock was also devastating.
By 1934, the number of cattle, sheep, horses and pigs in the USSR was approx-
imately half of what it had been in 1929, due in no small part to the peasant
slaughter of livestock in protest against state policies. The cost in human lives
of collectivisation was appalling, even above and beyond the wrenching costs
of the de-kulakisation campaigns. In 1932, a combination of factors – poor har-
vests, agricultural disruption caused by collectivisation and high state grain
procurement quotas – precipitated famine in areas of Ukraine, the North
Caucasus and central Russia, which left over 5 million people dead by the time
4 Viola, Peasant Rebels,p.28,
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the situation eased in late 1933 and 1934. Although the famine hit Ukraine hard,
it was not, as some historians argue, a purposefully genocidal policy against
Ukrainians.
5
Stalinist leaders certainly used the famine to break peasant resis-
tance to collectivisation, and very likely to punish the Ukrainian countryside
for having long resisted Soviet power. Still, no evidence has surfaced to suggest
that the famine was planned, and it affected broad segments of the Russian
and other non-Ukrainian populations both in Ukraine and in Russia.
Despite the excesses and costs, the Stalinists achieved their goal – a
state-controlled agrarian sector. Beginning in 1930, state grain procurements
increased dramatically, almost doubling yearly, despite the decline in harvests
during the hard years of 1932 and 1933. In fact, the Soviet government con-
tinued to export grain even during the famine, and the regime trumpeted
collectivisation as a triumph of socialist modernisation. At first glance, it was.
Collectivisation seemed to satisfy the regime’s insatiable appetite for grain,
and the state’s agencies poured out statistics to prove that collectivisation had
resulted in a large net transfer of economic and labour resources from agricul-
ture to industry. For all the propaganda, however, the results of collectivisation
were mixed. Many economic historians, and other students of Soviet history,
argue that the costs of collectivisation, even in economic terms, far exceeded
the benefits to the regime. The regime gained control over grain, but was
forced to invest far greater amounts of money and supplies in agriculture
than it got out of that sector.
6
The administrative costs alone were enormous
and remained uncalculated, as did the massive investment needed to maintain
police and party surveillance over the rural population. Productivity remained
relatively low throughout much of the 1930s, despite the regime’s goal to ‘trac-
torise’ the countryside, and many collective farms amounted to no more than
paper fronts for traditional household and village farm economies.
7
Still, in
all, collectivisation altered the rural life of the country. The regime’s harsh
measures brought Soviet power, finally, to the countryside, and it did so with
a vengeance. Party and police presence became pervasive in rural areas, as
did the institutions of Soviet authority. Moreover, along with collectivisation
came severe restrictions on peasants’ freedom of movement. Rural inhabitants
were forbidden to travel without the written permission of local authorities,
5 Robert Conquest, The Harvest of Sorrow: Soviet Collectivization and the Terror-Famine (New
York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986).
6 R. W. Davies, The Soviet Economy in Turmoil, 1929–1930 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard
University Press, 1989), p. ix.
7 Sheila Fitzpatrick, Stalin’s Peasants: Resistance and Survival in the Russian Village after Collec-
tivization (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994); V. B. Zhiromskaia, Demograficheskaia
istoriia Rossii v 1930-e gody (Moscow, 2001), p. 167.
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and collective farm workers were, by and large, excluded from receiving the
internal passports necessary to travel and to move from one location or place
of work to another. Collectivisation bound peasants once again to the land in
a way that many regarded as a second serfdom.
Peasants were not the only segment of the population affected by Stalin’s
socialist offensive against capitalist revivals. Destruction of the private farm
economy went hand in glove with a general assault on private trade and other
market remnants of NEP. The regime drove out the private trade networks, at
first through increasingly heavy taxation, and then through decrees outlawing
any private sale of goods. Police began arresting traders and middlemen – the
officially reviled NEPmen of the 1920s. Authorities closed commission resale
stores, they even banned local farm markets, and for a time even forbade the
resale of personal property between individuals. All trading and any exchange
of goods was to be done through state-approved stores, co-operatives, or
through state-controlled rationing systems.
Stalinist leaders attempted to replace market mechanisms with the elements
of a planned, socialist economy. The state’s planning agency, Gosplan, took
on the expanding burden not only of industrial investment, but of planning
for all aspects of the Soviet economy. Through its series of five-year plans,
the agency and its burgeoning number of commissions set priorities for the
country’s different economic sectors based on political priorities decided by
the party leaders. Gosplan established prices and determined production and
distribution quotas.
As with other aspects of the socialist offensive, the sudden thrust of the state
into the private economy came at a high cost. State agencies were woefully
unprepared for the task of supplanting private markets. Shortages racked the
economy in all basic commodities. Goods disappeared even from state stores
and were costly when they did appear. Hidden inflation from shortages and
deficit industrial investment devastated the value of the currency, dropping it
by more than half by the end of 1930. Rationing, which had begun as early
as 1928 for bread, broadened to include almost all staple goods. Many areas
of the country moved to barter of the few goods that existed, and families
began to use any items of metal value on the black markets that sprang up
outside the official price and rationing systems. Assessing the effects of this
informal economy, one official commented ironically that it amounted to a
social redistribution of wealth in unanticipated ways.
Such unanticipated consequences affected urban workers as well as rural
inhabitants. The value of wages plummeted and, during the early 1930s, many
state enterprises were so strapped for cash that they failed routinely to meet
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wage payments. This was due, of course, not only to money shortages, but
also to widespread corruption and graft within the rapidly expanding state
economic system. During the early 1930s, workers relied increasingly for food
and other basic necessities on the growingrationing system in their workplaces
and through trade union organisations. In order to keep a steady workforce,
factory administrations suddenly found themselves in the business of providing
housing, food and clothing shops, cafeterias, remedial education and other
services that were not part of their production tasks for the state. In effect,
they were forced to fill the vacuum left by the collapsing service and trade
economy. This kind of corporatist economy was not what state planners had
had in mind by a socialist revolution, but neither was it a capitalist economy.
8
The domestic and international contexts
Stalin’s industrial and agrarian revolution marked a radical break with the
state capitalism of the 1920s, the gradualist policies of economic development
and the social armistice that had underpinned NEP. Some of the most promi-
nent leaders in the party opposed Stalin’s plunge into social war and socialist
modernisation, yet the Stalinists, supported by significant numbers within the
party, believed that radical measures were necessary, and the grain crisis of
the late 1920s was only one of several events that convinced Stalin that the
revolution itself was in jeopardy. Domestically, the grain crisis was a signal
to Stalin and those around him of the gathering strength of anti-Bolshevik
social forces. In the mid-1920s, voting for local soviets had showed a small but
disturbing trend towards support of former Menshevik and SR candidates.
9
Bolshevik leaders were convinced that this vote reflected strong pressure from
kulaks and local private employers on poor peasants to vote anti-Bolshevik or
not to vote at all. Moreover, finance commissariat studies claimed to show an
alarming growth of private capital in the country, as opposed to only moderate
rates of growth of the state’s revenues.
These trends were disturbing enough, but they seemed to herald a grow-
ing capitalist backlash inside the Soviet Union at a time when the country
found itself increasingly isolated internationally. The virulent destruction of
the communist movement in China in 1927 and the triumph of the nationalists
8 Stephen Kotkin, Magnetic Mountain: Stalinism as a Civilization (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1995); David R. Shearer, Industry, State, and Society in Stalin’s Russia,
1926–1934 (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1996).
9 Michel Reiman, The Birth of Stalinism: The USSR on the Eve of the ‘Second Revolution’, trans.
George Saunders (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987), p. 44; Markus Wehner,
Bauernpolitik im proletarischen Staat (Cologne: Boehlau Verlag, 1998), p. 257.
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suddenly presented Soviet leaders with a major threat along their weak and
long southern borders. Moreover, the Chinese disaster occurred at the same
time that the British government broke off relations and threatened war against
the Soviet Union. The Soviet budget was already over-extended and foreign
governments, led by the British example, expressed reluctance to offer the
investment credits the Soviets needed for increased industrial development.
By the late 1920s, the Soviet Union was weak, isolated and seemed to face a
growing domestic as well as international threat. Such was the perception of
the Soviet leaders, and not only Soviet leaders. In 1927, the German ambas-
sador in Moscow cabled his superiors in Berlin to prepare a German response
in the event that the Bolshevik government should collapse.
10
In these conditions, Stalin turned inward. He became convinced that build-
ing socialism in one country was the only alternative left to the Soviet Union,
and he believed that the country needed to modernise quickly. In 1929, Stalin
delivered the famous speech in which he declared the need to make up one
hundred years of backwardness in ten, lest the country and the revolution be
crushed. He called on the party and the working class once again to renew
the revolution – to destroy the kulak class, once and for all, and to industrialise
the country for its own defence. Stalin’s revolution had begun.
Social dynamics and population movements
Policies of rapid industrialisation and forced collectivisation produced dra-
matic population and demographic shifts during the 1930s and altered both
the regional and urban–rural balance in the country. In some areas, these poli-
cies – combined with the effects of widespread famine – precipitated death
and migration on a nearly biblical scale. The forced relocation of populations,
policies of mass repression and the reconstruction of different nationalities
added to the momentous and often calamitous changes experienced by the
Soviet population under Stalin’s rule. Industrialisation alone accounted for a
significant growth in the number of urban centres and urban populations. In
the years between the 1926 and 1937 all-union censuses, the overall popula-
tion of the Soviet Union increased from 147 million to 162 million – about a 9
per cent increase – but the urban population in the country doubled during
the same period, from about 26 million to 52 million. Only 18 per cent of
that increase came from natural growth rates of the urban population, while
about two-thirds (63 per cent) resulted from in-migration to existing cities and
10 Reiman, The Birth of Stalinism,p.48.
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towns. Almost 20 per cent of the growth in urban populations resulted from
the industrial transformation of rural population centres into cities and towns.
In the Russian Republic alone, the number of population centres classified as
cities increased from 461 to 571. The number of cities with populations over
50,000 increased from 57 to 110. In the country as a whole, the number of
population centres classified as urban centres increased in the years between
1926 and 1937 from 1,240 to 2,364.
Rural areas emptied as cities filled up. In 1926, the urban population made
up 18 per cent of the overall population of the USSR, but by the late 1930s,
urban areas accounted for 30 per cent of the population. The most significant
population shifts occurred, of course, during the early 1930s, the years of rapid
industrialisation and collectivisation, and while all areas of the country were
affected, the growth in industrial urbanisation affected some areas more than
others. ThegreaterMoscow and Leningrad urban areas experienced significant
growth, their populations doubling during the late 1920s and 1930s. Areas such
as eastern and western Siberia, the Urals and the Volga coal and industrial basin
underwent rapid, almost unchecked, growth in their overall populations, and
especially in their urban populations. These were the areas of the country
that the regime targeted for intensive industrial development and mineral
and other natural resource extraction. During the 1930s, the population of
the Far Eastern administrative district soared 376 per cent. The population
of eastern Siberia expanded by 331 per cent, western Siberia by 294 per cent,
and the Urals by 263 per cent. The mining and industrial city of Kemerovo,
in western Siberia, saw a sixfold increase in its population; Cheliabinsk, not
far away, experienced a fourfold population increase, as did the rail, river
and manufacturing centre of Barnaul, south of Novosibirsk. Cities such as
Novosibirsk, Sverdlovsk (the once and future Ekaterinburg), Vladivostok and
Khabarovsk (the administrative centre of the eastern Siberian district) saw their
populations triple during the late 1920s and 1930s.
These population shifts resulted from industrialisation, but also from
the regime’s systematic policies of repression, particularly against peasants,
socially marginalised groups and certain national minorities. Major popula-
tion shifts also came about as the result of a dramatic increase in forced labour
populations, and from mass migration due to famine. During the early 1930s,
de-kulakisation depleted rural areas, especially in the western parts of the
USSR, of supposed class enemies.
11
Famine took its toll, either by killing large
11 On kulak deportations, see esp. V. N. Zemskov, Spetspereselentsy v SSSR, 1930–1 960
(Moscow, 2003).
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numbers of people or by forcing others to flee stricken areas. After 1932,
mass deportations of peasants tapered off as the regime turned its attention
to ‘cleansing’ major urban and industrial areas of socially marginalised and
economically unproductive populations. Using newly enacted residence laws,
police conducted mass sweeps of cities, industrial areas and border regions
to rid them of what were described as ‘anti-Soviet’ and ‘socially danger-
ous’ elements – criminals, wanderers, the indigent and the dispossessed, even
orphans – the social detritus of Stalin’s modernisation policies.
12
At the same
time, the regime began large-scale deportations of certain nationalities. In the
western borderlands, police singled out Polesand Germans for removal as early
as 1932 and 1933. Deportations of Finnish-related populations began in Karelia
and around Leningrad in earnest in the middle 1930s and continued up through
the Finnish war in 1940. Fearful of ‘Asian’ solidarity with the Japanese expansion
in China, Soviet authorities deported 172,000 Soviet citizens of Korean descent
from Far Eastern border areas in 1937 and 1938. During the Second World War,
Stalin ordered the removal of a number of populations supposedly sympathetic
to German occupation forces and desirous of achievingnational independence.
The most infamous of these deportations resulted in the removal of the entire
Chechen people and the Crimean Tatar population, shipped en masse to
Central Asia.
13
Most deported populations, some several million over the course of the
1930s, were resettled either in penal labour colonies or in the infamous forced
labour camps in the eastern interior areas of the USSR. Large sections of the
Urals, Siberia and Central Asia became the favoured dumping ground for
unwanted or supposedly dangerous populations, as did the northern districts
of European Russia. The turnover of camp populations varied dramatically
from year to year due to death, escape and release of prisoners, but overall the
camp populations grew steadily from about 179,000 in 1930 to half a million
by 1934. The huge influx of prisoners during the Great Purges in 1937 and 1938
swelled camp populations to 1.5 million by 1940. Similarly, the populations
of police-run prisons and colonies jumped during the 1930s, reaching 254,354
in 1935, according to official figures, and 887,635 by 1938. Slightly more than
250,000 of those held in prisons and labour colonies in 1938 were located in
12 On the campaigns for ‘social defence,’ see especially Paul Hagenloh, ‘ “Socially Harmful
Elements” ’ and the Great Terror’, in Sheila Fitzpatrick (ed.), Stalinism: New Directions
(London: Routledge, 2000), pp. 286–308; and David R. Shearer, ‘Social Disorder, Mass
Repression, and the NKVD during the 1930s’ Cahiers du Monde Russe et Sovi
´
etique 42, nos.
2,3,4 (Apr.– Dec. 2001): 505–34.
13 PavelPolian, Nepo svoei vole...Istoriia igeografiia prinuditel’nykhmigratsii v SSSR (Moscow:
O. G. I. - Memorial, 2001).
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the Urals, Central Asia and Siberia. If the number of prisoners held in labour
camps grew rapidly throughout the 1930s, the numbers of those deported as
kulaks peaked in the early 1930s and then declined steadily. As noted above,
however, most of the peasant deportations were also to the newly opened
colonial areas in the eastern part of the country. In 1932, for example, nearly
1.1 million of the 1.3 million ‘special settlers’ – the kulak spetspereselentsy –lived
in the Urals, Kazakhstan or in the agricultural regions of western Siberia.
14
The Soviet regime exploited these populations ruthlessly as a source of
extractive labour, and the Gulag and settlement colonies became, in time,
an integral part of the Soviet state’s economic planning system. This was
especially true for the colonial development of raw materials industries such
as logging and precious metal mining, but also for agriculture. As a result of
these policies, the eastern regions of the country experienced a remarkable
increase in overall population during the 1930s. So much so, that the head of
the state’s statistical agency, I. A. Kraval’, recommended to the Politburo that
the 1937 census undercount the population of Siberia so as to hide the extent
of the demographic shift to that part of the country.
Along with massive migration, both forced and unforced, Stalinist poli-
cies also created social dislocation on a massive scale, and authorities were
hard pressed to cope with the resulting social disorder. In the first half of the
1930s, especially, waves of migrants, both legal and illegal, overwhelmed local
communities and even large cities. The population of abandoned, runaway or
orphaned children rose rapidly from approximately 129,000 in 1929 to well over
half a million by 1934, and these figures counted only numbers that were offi-
cially registered in the woefully inadequate and understaffed children’s homes.
Abandoned or orphaned mostly as the result of policies of de-kulakisation
and conditions of famine, hundreds of thousands of children made their way
to cities. Having no home and no work, socially alienated because of their
background and the violence that made them homeless, the population of
abandoned, runaway or orphaned children contributed to the growing and
serious waves of petty criminality that marked city streets, marketplaces, train
stations and other public areas. Millions of other people – rough peasants and
dispossessed populations – also poured into the cities, factories and industrial
construction sites. People were fleeing collectivisation and famine, running
from penal colonies or just seeking a better life. Shanty towns, slums and raw
campsites mushroomed on the outskirts of cities. Sometimes, whole villages
14 For the most comprehensive figures on camp populations and distribution, see GULAG
(Glavnoe Upravlenie Lagerei) 1918–1 960 (Moscow, 2000), esp. pp. 410–35. For kulak colony
figures, see Zemskov, Spetspereselentsy v SSSR.
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appeared at the gates of shops, negotiating directly with foremen for work,
food and shelter.
The sudden influx of migrants into cities and industrial sites strained public
services and scarce housing and food supplies, and focused all that was mod-
ern and brutally primitive about Soviet socialism during the inter-war decade.
Novosibirsk, for example, the administrative centre of western Siberia, shone
with the gleam of Soviet modernity. The district executive committee build-
ing, designed by the famous architect A. D. Kriachkov, and completed in 1933,
won honourable mention at the Paris architectural fair in 1938. The city lav-
ished funds on construction of the largest opera house east of Moscow in
1934, another architectural marvel and a palace of culture for the people. In
contrast, the city of Barnaul, an industrial pit five hours by train south of
Novosibirsk, could boast only two city buses in 1935. These served an impov-
erished population of 92,000. The city could not generate enough electricity
to illuminate street lights. Thousands of people suffered, while others died, of
intestinal infections and malaria due to a lack of clean drinking water. Much of
the city’s population lived in the squalour of makeshift shanty huts and bathed
in the industrially fouled waters of the Ob’ River. Police rarely ventured into
the burgeoning shanty towns, and public welfare programmes failed to cope.
The city had no paved sidewalks and few paved roadways.
15
The regime faced problems of control and legitimacy in rural as well as
urban areas. Despite the regime’s attempt to extend Soviet power, Soviet
authority outside major cities and towns remained weak throughout much
of the 1930s. The experience of Soviet power at local levels differed consid-
erably from that wielded by the powerful centralised political institutions of
the party. As often as not, local officials felt like they were holding a besieged
outpost rather than wielding power as a ruling class. Reports by local polit-
ical police officers and party heads reflected their sense of isolation. Many
local officials sought transfers from ‘backward’ rural regions to urban or more
centrally located postings, and the strains of isolation drove more than a few
rural authorities to suicide. Political officialsworried about the small number of
Communist ‘actives’ in their areas. They also worried about the growing num-
ber of peasant households withdrawing from collective farms and the hostile
moods of kolkhozniki. Pointed disrespect for officials, both symbolic and real,
15 On ‘ruralisation’ of cities, see Moshe Lewin, The Making of the Soviet System: Essays in
the Social History of Interwar Russia (New York: Pantheon Books, 1985). See also David
Hoffmann, Peasant Metropolis: Social Identities in Moscow, 1929–1941 (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell
University Press, 1994). On Siberia, see David Shearer, ‘Modernity and Backwardness on
the Soviet Frontier’, in Donald Raleigh (ed.), Provincial Landscapes: Local Dimensions of
Soviet Power, 1917–1953 (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2001), pp. 194–216.
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resulted in violence and even murder. At times, local officials expressed open
fear of confrontation with collective-farm peasants, and officials took threats
against their lives as a serious possibility. Vandalism and theft of state property,
including and especially rustling of animals, continued on a widespread scale.
Armed and mounted bandits roamed large parts of the countryside requiring,
in some instances, small-scale military campaigns to suppress them. In mixed
ethnic areas, non-Russian populations frequently protected bandits and other
outlaws from authorities. And, as rumours about a new constitution gathered
force in 1935 and 1936, local leaders also worried about the revival of religious
activity. Believing that they would be protected under new laws, lay priests and
sectarians of all denominations began to proselytise again. Itinerant preachers
spoke, at times to large gatherings of rural inhabitants, alternately promising
to establish Christian collective farms or to bring God’s judgement on the
collective-farm system.
Consolidating Stalin’s revolution: the victory of
socialism and the retreat to conservatism
The cataclysmic social upheaval created by Stalin’s modernising revolution left
lasting effects, but the country experienced a relative period of stabilisation
after mid-decade, and this was due largely to moderating policies implemented
by Stalinist leaders. Stalin signalled this turn and gave the hint of a social truce
in his famous victory speech at the Seventeenth Party Congress in 1934. In this
major speech, Stalin proclaimed that the victory of socialism had been won in
the USSR. He declared that organised class opposition had been broken and
that the country had set the foundation for a socialist economy and society.
He warned of the continued threat of enemies within and without, and of
the difficult historical tasks that still lay ahead. He cautioned that because
of continuing dangers, the party, the police and the state needed to remain
strong and vigilant against the enemies who would try to undermine the Soviet
achievement. Yet the vision of the near future that Stalin then laid before the
congress was one of consolidation and amelioration, even a retreat, in some
respects, from the extreme policies of the First Five-Year Plan period. Leaders
did, in fact, shift investment priorities in the Second Five-Year Plan in order to
ease food and other shortages and to compensate for the catastrophic decline
in living standards. In rural areas of the country, the regime legalised small-
scale market exchange again, and a new Stalinist ‘charter’ allowed kolkhozniki
to own some livestock and to cultivate small private plots of land for their
own use. The effect of these changes was immediate and beneficial. Food
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