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became available, if not plentiful, on a regular basis. While collective and

state farms continued to under-produce, the small private plots of peasants

saved the country from further starvation. Private farm plots made up only

about 10–12 per cent of the arable land, but accounted for nearly two-thirds

of the produce sold in the country during these years. Edinolichniki, although

distrusted by the regime, provided an invaluable economic niche of support

for the collective-farm system and became the core of a revived artisan culture

in the countryside. These private economic activities, grudgingly permitted

by the regime, quickly formed the basis of a new, second economy, which

became indispensable for the maintenance of the state’s huge and increasingly

unwieldy ofﬁcial economy.

Culture and morality in the service of socialism

Stalinist leaders continued to pour money into military and heavy industrial

development, but the regime also turned its attention during the mid- and late

1930s to the social, cultural and moral tasks of socialist construction. Cultural

history is often given second place in discussions of the 1930s, even though

cultural construction was an important aspect of Stalinism. The regime made

signiﬁcant efforts to extend basic education and health care to the population.

The Stalinist regime tried hard to control what the public read and saw, but

it wanted and needed a public that was literate and educated. As a result, the

plans for economic development of any region (indeed, of the whole country)

always included estimates for the construction of schools, numbers of clinics,

teachers, doctors, nurses and even movie houses. In Novosibirsk, the gleaming

centre of the new Siberia, the huge central opera house was completed in 1934,

before the new central executive building and long before expansion of party

headquarters. Every factory and workers’ barracks had its newspaper boards,

Red Reading Corners and literacy classes, and trade union organisations as

well as local soviets provided free technical and basic education for citizens of

all ages.

Stalinist educational achievements were impressive. Although the regime

had promoted literacy and basic education throughout the 1920s, school atten-

dance for all children became mandatory at the beginning of the 1930s. Many

adults were also encouraged to take basic literacy classes. By the end of the

decade, nearly 75 per cent of the adult population could read, a remarkable

achievement compared to a literacy rate of 41 per cent, according to the 1926

census. Among children aged twelve to nineteen, literacy rates, according to

the 1937 census, had reached 90 per cent. Some of the most signiﬁcant advances

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occurred in rural and non-Russian areas and among women. Soviet authori-

ties regarded education as a primary weapon in the struggle against what they

considered backwardness, especially against traditional inﬂuences of religion

and indigenous ethnic culture. The regime targeted women, especially, as a

traditionally oppressed social group, but also because they were considered

essential to the socialist education of children. As a result, the regime put

signiﬁcant effort into spreading educational opportunities in rural and non-

Russian areas and among women. By the late 1930s literacy rates among all

women in Russia reached over 80 per cent.

The Stalinist regime lavished large amounts of money on art, literary pro-

duction, ﬁlm and other forms of entertainment. Art became, under Stalin,

a form of social mobilisation, a means to bind the populace to the regime,

and as Stalin extended state power into what had been private sectors of the

economy, so too the Stalinist regime extended state control into the sphere of

art and culture and into all aspects of public and private life. Indeed, in Stalin’s

socialist revolution, there was to be no distinction between public and private.

‘The private life is dead’, insisted Pasternak’s character Strelnikov, in the novel

Doctor Zhivago, and this phrase epitomised how life was to be lived in the new

socialist motherland. Under Stalin, all art, culture and morality was to be put in

the service of building socialism. Artists were to act as ‘engineers of the soul’,

in Stalin’s famous phrase. Their job was to construct the socialist individual,

just as structural engineers were responsible for constructing buildings, roads,

hydroelectric dams and steel mills.

Socialist realism became the criterion by which all art and culture was to be

measured. The doctrine of socialist realism came, in fact, from Stalin, reﬁned

by the writer Maxim Gorky, as a way to describe life in direct, understandable

ways, but in ways that would uplift the subject towards the goals of fulﬁll-

ing socialism. Socialist realism was a dogma of art that was unapologetically

didactic. It was not necessarily a recipe for saccharine sweet or escapist depic-

tions of socialist plenty and happiness, even though much of socialist realist

art degenerated to that level. The doctrine, as applied by censors, and even by

Stalin himself, allowed for, and even demanded, the portrayal of conﬂict and

sacriﬁce, even tragedy, but always with a moral message. That message was

that the cause of building socialism was greater than the individual, that the

individual found self-realisation only by denying selﬁsh interests, by dissolving

individual will into the will of the collective, and by giving the self completely

to the cause of socialism and in the striving for socialism.

16 Zhiromskaia, Demograﬁcheskaia istoriia Rossii,pp.179–84.

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In practice, socialist realism found expression in representational and clearly

programmatic forms, whether in literature, music, painting, ﬁlm or other artis-

tic genres. And while the dogma dictated the form in general, it did not entirely

stiﬂe creativity or breed simplicity. Socialist realist art did not always take the

form of ‘boy meets tractor’. In music, for example, the composers Dmitrii

Shostakovich and Sergei Prokoﬁev abandoned the high formalist experimen-

tation of their earlier careers after serious political censure and public humilia-

tion. Both composers turned back to classical melodic and symphonic forms,

but they continued to produce great works of music. The writer Valentin

Katayev’s novel Time Forward! (Vremia vpered) – about the heroic struggles by

a young couple to overcome adversity and even sabotage on an industrial

construction site – became a much and often poorly copied model of socialist

realism in action. The movie Chapaev (1934) provided ﬁlm history as well as

Soviet audiences with grand action and heroes on a larger-than-life scale. Sergei

Eisenstein’s ﬁlm epics Aleksandr Nevskii and Ivan Groznyi (Ivan the Terrible)

are regarded as movie classics, just as Shostakovich’s music score for Aleksandr

Nevskii ranks as a musical and choral classic.

Ifsocialist realismdid not entirelystiﬂecreativity,neitherdid it precludetruly

popular forms of entertainment. American jazz music found an enthusiastic

audience in the USSR during the 1930s, as did Charlie Chaplin movies. The

country had no lack of its own schmaltzy radio ballroom crooners.P. Mikhailov

was one of the best known, though by no means the only, of the radio singers

of the late 1930s. His song ‘The Setting Sun’ was one of the most popular of

the period – a syrupy ballad about palm trees and moonlight on an exotic

Black Sea shore. Escapist musicals, Hollywood style, were also popular, but

with a revolutionary Soviet twist. The ﬁlm A Wealthy Bride (Bogataia nevesta)

(1937) portrayed the life of joy and plenty on a collective farm. It showed

often on the wide screen, replete with copious amounts of food and drink,

boisterous pranks, light romance and big choral numbers involving happy

singing peasants in fecund marketplaces and in ﬁelds redolent of grain.

The Stalinist regime enforced aesthetic norms by extending monopoly con-

trol over the organisation of all cultural production. Intrusion of the state into

the country’s cultural life went hand in glove with the extension of state power

into the economy. Culture became a front, in the militarised language of the

day, just as did the economy, in the campaign to mobilise the country to build

socialism. Thus, any artist or writer who worked professionally had to belong

to a corresponding union, which was closely regulated by the party and sub-

ject to state censorship review. Decisions about what constituted acceptable

socialist realist art could be arbitrary and depended greatly on the political and

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even personal politics of the union organisations, censorship boards and the

artists themselves. Shostakovich, for example, regularly introduced modernist

elements into his music. He covered himself and his music with a politically

acceptable title or dedication, but while the lack of exactitude in aesthetic def-

initions allowed some leeway in artistic endeavour, that vagueness could also

be dangerous. Shostakovich found himself more than once fearing for his life

as well as his artistic career under the scrutiny of Stalin’s personal displeasure.

Many artists wrote or composed ‘for the desk drawer’, realising that their

work would very likely not pass censors, or deciding simply not to take the

risk of being public cultural ﬁgures. Others abandoned creative production

and retreated into safer but related activities. The writer Boris Pasternak spent

much of the 1930s and 1940s producing his now famous series of translations

of Shakespeare into Russian.

The middle 1930s witnessed a conservative turn in Stalin’s social as well

as cultural policies. The new Soviet morality rebuffed the liberalising trends

of the 1920s and the cultural revolution of the early 1930s and heralded a

return to traditionally gendered roles. ‘Communist virtue’ for men extolled

patriarchal values of manliness and patriotism, duty and discipline, and family.

The heroine welder in Ostrovskii’s How the Steel was Tempered (Kak zakalialas’

stal’) – who could smoke, curse and shimmy down ropes from high altitudes

just as well as any man – no longer provided a role model for women. Soviet

advertising in the relative abundance of the mid- and late 1930s appealed to

women as domestic and feminine consumers, not as revolutionary equals

with men.

In the new morality, women were encouraged to provide the

moral and emotional support for their worker husbands in the building of

socialism. Ofﬁcial propaganda stressed child-bearing as the highest duty for

women under socialism. Family and education were touted as the foundation

of socialist society.

Stringent laws reinforced these values. The series of family laws passed in

1936 were the most comprehensive of these and reversed many of the progres-

sive statutes of the 1926 set of family laws. The new laws afﬁrmed the nuclear

family and made divorce more difﬁcult to obtain. Abortion became a criminal

offence once again, with severe jail penalties for both women and abortion-

ists, although women continued to have abortions, and doctors continued to

give them in large numbers. Child-support laws were strengthened, as were

17 Amy Randall, ‘The Campaign for Soviet Trade: Creating Socialist Retail Trade in the

1930s’, Ph. D. diss., Princeton University, 2000.

18 David Hoffmann,Socialist Values: The Cultural Norms ofSovietModernity, 1917–1941 (Ithaca,

N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2003).

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criminal statutes for men, primarily, failing to provide court-ordered family

support. For a brief period, police even considered the idea of placing a special

stamp in the internal passports of men who owed child support so that they

could be traced.

Nationality under Stalin

Stalinist leaders sought to reconstruct Soviet nationalities on the same broad

scale that they did society, culture and moral values. The peoples of the Soviet

Union were to be mapped, schematised and rationalised – engineered, in a

word – just as was the land, the economy and the human soul. Constructing

nationality was not unique to Stalinism or to the Soviet Union. Most European

states engaged in some form of nation-building, based on criteria of inclusion

and exclusion, but the Soviet experiment differed fundamentally from the

nation-building projects of other states. The Soviet state was not a nation-

state, such as France or Germany, but a state of nations, a conglomeration

of national political governments under a central controlling state system.

The only other state resembling this model had been the Austro-Hungarian

Empire, which had been torn asunder by the strains of the Great War. Stalin

understood – or at least he thought he understood – the explosive potential

of national identity and, while he did not openly repudiate the conciliatory

policies of the 1920s, he gave nationality issues a new politicised importance

that they had not had.

During the 1930s, Soviet ofﬁcials continued to encourage the development

of national cultures and institutions under the rubric ‘national in form, socialist

in content’. This policy, begun in the 1920s, included the rooting (korenizat-

siia) of different ethnic groups in their own republics, autonomous regions

and oblasts. In contrast to the relatively laissez-faire policies of the 1920s,

however, nationality policies of the 1930s reﬂected the same highly struc-

tured, top-down character of other Stalinist state-building projects. Rather

than allowing different ethnic groups to develop their own cultural traditions,

Soviet ofﬁcials in the 1930s aggressively organised ofﬁcially sanctioned forms of

nationality. Ethnographic studies burgeoned as scholars worked closely with

ofﬁcials to create over ﬁfty written languages for peoples who had had no

written forms of culture. Small nationalities were created and consolidated

out of various nomadic cultures, and the state assigned to them their own

territories. Alphabets were reformed and folk traditions were ofﬁcially cel-

ebrated, all within the encompassing context of the brotherhood of Soviet

peoples.

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Stalinist nationality policies had a sharp political edge to them, and not all

nationalities were encouraged equally, as had been the policy in the 1920s.

Stalin elevated Russian national culture, in particular, to pride of place and it

was celebrated as the predominant culture among all the Soviet cultures. The

ascendancy of Russian culture and Russian forms of patriotism was reinforced

during the war, and several attempts were promoted, although rejected by

Stalin, to create a speciﬁcally Russian Communist Party along the lines of other

republic party organisations. Stalin rejected this trend, fearing that a Russian

party could potentially form a rival centre of power. While he rejected an

openly assimilationist nationality policy, Stalin nonetheless permitted Russians

a dominant role in party affairs. Russian migration was encouraged into non-

Russian areas, and Russian national culture went with the new immigrants.

Russian language was instituted as the universal language of education and

state affairs. Leaders took care to foster indigenous national elites, especially

within the party structure, but most of the leading party and state positions at

the republic and oblast levels were held by ethnic Russians, usually outsiders

appointed from Moscow. Non-Russian institutions, organisations and journals

inside the Russian republic were closed or scaled back as the Russian republic

was Russiﬁed, and nationalities were territorialised in the 1930s in a way that

had not been the case earlier. Institutions promoting ethnic consciousness and

culture were conﬁned, generally, to the territories designated for particular

national groups.

As the discussion above implies, national identity gained a new prominence

in Soviet society, even as categories of social class began to wane in importance

as a means to determine one’s identity and relation to state authority. In the

early 1930s, when the state ﬁrst issued internal passports, citizens were required

to identify their national identity as well as their social-class status, yet class still

counted as the primary deﬁning criterion of inclusion and exclusion. The mass

repressions associated with collectivisation and de-kulakisation were based on

class and, initially, residence and rationing privileges associated with the new

passport system werealso based on social criteria of class and occupation. Then

came the so-called victory of socialism in 1934, the ofﬁciallyannounced defeatof

organised class opposition in the country. The announcement of this victory

did not end political repression, nor did it signal the end of class struggle,

according to Stalin. Indeed, Stalin anticipated that the struggle against the

19 Terry Martin, The Afﬁrmative Action Empire: Nations and Nationalism in the Soviet Union,

1923–1939 (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2001); R. G. Suny and Terry Martin

(eds.), A State of Nations: Empire and Nation-Making in the Age of Lenin and Stalin (Oxford:

Oxford University Press, 2001).

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enemies of Soviet socialism would intensify as the socialist state grew stronger

and anti-Soviet‘elements’ grewmore desperate, but Stalin also anticipated that

the character of the state’s struggle against its enemies would change as the

natureof resistance also changed. What, exactly, Stalin anticipated is impossible

to know, but the nature of repression and the criteria of inclusion and exclusion

underwent a marked change during the 1930s. As early as 1933, deportations of

so-called anti-Soviet elements from western border regions targeted speciﬁc

national groups of Poles, Belorussians and Ukrainians. Stalin was especially

suspicious of Ukrainian separatism, since resistance to collectivisation had

been particularly strong in that republic and in the western border areas of the

country. As the 1930s wore on, Stalin also came to mistrust certain other ethnic

groups, which he suspected of having potential loyalties outside the USSR. By

1936, most campaigns of mass repression were being carried out against groups

deﬁned by national or ethnic rather than social criteria, and while the great

mass purges of 1937–8 started against so-called kulak and other marginalised

social categories,these were quicklysuperseded by the great campaigns against

Germans, Poles, Finns and Asian populations in the Soviet Far East. During

the war, mass deportations continued, especially of ethnic groups from the

Caucasus regions, which Stalin suspected of separatist and collaborationist

tendencies, and in the years after the war, Soviet police and military units

fought against strong Ukrainian separatist movements. By the early 1950s,

nationality had almost all but replaced class as the most important criterion of

Soviet identity, at least within the pre-Second World War borders of the USSR.

Mass repression, police and the militarised state

In late July 1937, N. I. Ezhov, the head of the political police and the Com-

missariat of the Interior, issued the now infamous operational order no. 447.

That order began one of the most bizarre, tragic and inexplicable episodes

of Soviet history – the mass operations of repression of 1937 and 1938.By

decree of the Politburo, the political police were charged to begin mass shoot-

ing or imprisonment of several categories of what regime leaders considered

socially harmful elements. Leaders regarded former kulaks, bandits and recidi-

vist criminals among the most dangerous of these groups, alongside members

of anti-Soviet parties, White Guardists, returned

emigr

es, churchmen and sec-

tarians and gendarmes and former ofﬁcials of the tsarist government. By the

end of November 1938, when leaders stopped the operations, nearly 766,000

individuals had been caught up in the police sweeps. Nearly 385,000 of those

individuals had been arrested as category I enemies. Those who fell into this

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category were scheduled to be shot, while the remaining arrestees, in category

II, were to receive labour camp sentences from ﬁve to ten years.

There exists almost nothing in open archives and other sources to explain

fully the motivation behind these massive social purges, but we can at least

understand the dynamics of the purges and something of the motivation

behind them. We can compare the great social purges of the late 1930stothe

campaigns of repression that preceded and followed them, and in this way

place them within the context of a larger discussion of mass repression under

Stalin. As in the early1930s,and after several years of relative stability,theregime

turned again on peasants during the Ezhovshchina. Collective and state farmers,

as well as individual farmers (kolkhozniki, sovkhozniki, and edinolichniki), were

arrested in the tens of thousands. Yet, the mass repressions of the late 1930s

were more than a second de-kulakisation. Criminal elements, former convicts,

sectarians and a host of other marginalised populations, along with farm

workers, local Soviet ofﬁcials and freeholder peasants, became targets of the

state’s campaigns of mass repression. As noted above, the repressions of 1937

and 1938 also encompassed signiﬁcant numbers of national minorities, arrested

under analogous operational orders. If the campaigns of mass repression began

as a purge of socially suspect groups, they turned into a campaign of ethnic

cleansing against ‘enemy’ nations.

Here, then, were the elements that gave the Great Purges their particular

characteristics and virulence. The de-kulakisation, social order and national

deportation campaigns of the preceding years formed the background for

the mass repressions of the late 1930s. The mechanisms employed during the

repressions of 1937 and 1938 were similar to those used earlier to contain or

dispose of undesirable populations and, in 1937 and 1938, the police targeted

many of the same groups. Yet it was not just the threat of class war or social

disorder that generated the mass repressions of the late 1930s. The threat of war

introduced a xenophobic element into Soviet policies of repression and gave to

those policies a sense of political urgency. By 1937, leaders were convinced that

oppositionists, working with foreign agents, were actively organising socially

disaffectedpopulations into a ﬁfth-column force. Authorities worried that inva-

sion, which seemed increasingly likely in the late 1930s, would be the signal

for armed uprisings by these groups, as well as by potentially hostile national

populations. Each of these concerns – over social disorder, political opposition

and national contamination – had generated separate political responses and

20 Terry Martin, ‘The Origins of Soviet Ethnic Cleansing’, Journal of Modern History 70

(1998): 813–61.

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operational policies of repression throughout the previous years. These politi-

cal fears and operational initiatives coalesced in 1937 and 1938. The various fears

of Soviet leaders combined in a deadly way within the context of imminent

war and invasion and generated the vicious purges of those years. Ezhov, on

orders from Stalin, launched the massive purge of Soviet society in 1937–8 in

order to destroy what Stalinist leaders believed was the social base for armed

overthrow of the Soviet government.

Stalinist leaders employed the full coercive power of the state to achieve

their objectives of socialist construction. Indeed, Stalin’s use of mass repression

as a normal instrument of policy deﬁned one of the distinguishing characteris-

tics of his regime. Lenin used mass repression brutally and without hesitation

during the emergency of the civil war, yet he always regarded mass repres-

sion as an extraordinary means of revolutionary struggle. Repression was

not to be employed against party members or as a normal means of gover-

nance. Hence the original name of the Cheka, the chrezvychainaia kommissia,

the ‘Extraordinary’ Commission. During collectivisation and de-kulakisation,

Stalin engaged in mass forms of repression still in this manner – as part of a

revolutionary class war to establish Soviet power and the dictatorship of the

party. Ironically, however, the ‘victory’ of socialism in 1933 and 1934 not only

marked the end of class war; it also ended any pretence to class-speciﬁc forms

of repression. Police used administrative forms of mass repression against

an ever-widening range of social and then ethnic groups. During the mid-

1930s, especially, mass repression became the primary way authorities dealt

with social disorder, engaging in large-scale police round-ups and passport

sweeps to cleanse cities of marginalised and other supposedly anti-Soviet social

groups. By 1935, for example, police had even taken over the country’s massive

orphan problem, with near sole jurisdiction to sweep orphan and unsuper-

vised children into police-run rehabilitation camps. Leaders used mass forms

of expulsion and deportation to redistribute the Soviet population, to construct

politically acceptable national identities, to protect the country’s borders, to

colonise land and exploit resources, and to impose public order and economic

discipline on Soviet society. Stalin, in other words, turned the extraordinary

use of repression against political enemies into an ordinary instrument of state

governance. Stalin’s use of mass repression set his regime apart from its Lenin-

ist predecessor and from the selective use of repression employed by successive

Soviet regimes.

21 For this particular argument, see Shearer, ‘Social Disorder, Mass Repression, and the

NKVD’.

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The political police operated as the main instrument of repression, and one

of several coercive organs centralised under the NKVD, the Commissariat of

the Interior. The NKVD also included the infamous Gulag, or labour camp

administration, the border guard forces, the NKVD’s interior troops and the

regular or civil police, the militsiia. During the 1930s, reforms took away local

Soviet authority over the militsiia and subordinated the civil police to the

state’s centralised political police administration. This was a key part of Stalin’s

statist revolution and it had important consequences. Placing the civil police

under control of the political police led inevitably during the decade to the

merging of the two institutions and their respective functions – maintaining

social order and protecting state security. As a result, the civil police were

drawn increasingly into the business of mass repression, and the political

police became drawn more and more into the coercive repression of day-to-

day crimes and the resolution, through administrative forms of repression, of

the country’s major social problems.

The conﬂation of civil and political police functions was unintentional and

it politicised the social sphere in a way uncharacteristic of the pre- and post-

Stalin eras. It was the police, primarily through the constant campaigns of mass

repression, social categorisation and deportation, which, unwittingly, became

the primary institution within the Soviet state to deﬁne and reconstruct the

social-geographic and national-ethnic landscape of the country. Police usurped

and politicised many functions of the civil government. Still, it is inaccurate

to describe the Soviet state under Stalin simply as a police state. The political

police never attempted to gain control over the government or the party.Except

for a brief period during the Great Purges in the late 1930s, party ofﬁcials

maintained control over the police. Stalin always had ﬁnal control over the

NKVD. Moreover, Stalinist ofﬁcials always regarded the use of special police

powers as a temporary response to conditions of national crisis, even though

the methods of mass police repression became, in effect, a normal means of

governance under Stalin. The word in Russian that best describes the process

that occurred during the 1930sisvoennizatsiia, or militarisation of the state’s

institutions of social and civil order. Voennizatsiia was a word consciously

used at the time and later by Soviet leaders to describe the martial-law or

emergency-law state that Stalin built. And even though police were given

sweeping emergency powers, the civil state was never entirely abrogated.

Its institutions were, at least formally, strengthened by the 1936 constitution.

Authorities of civil state institutions – in the procuracy, the judiciary and in

local Soviet governments – continued with more or less success to assert

their authority. In fact, Ezhov began to disentangle civil and political police

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