10. Collectivisation and Famine

1930-33

10.1 Introduction

Stalin chose to force collectivisation onto the peasants, a method that had nothing in common with Marxism. The turn towards complete collectivisation was sudden; there was no preparation of the party cadres or the peasants. The party tops had accused the UO of robbing the villages when it called for increased taxes on the kulaks to pay for industrialisation; now the bureaucracy itself did just that but in an extreme form. The human and economic consequences were appalling, complete collectivisation plunged the Soviet economy into a condition of ruin almost as bad as that suffered in 1921.^[1] Complete collectivisation was a measure of the desperate situation in which the bureaucracy found itself as a result of pandering to the kulaks.

10.2 Collectivisation and Peasant Women

Stalin may have had a touch of genius when dealing with the preservation of his power, but he demonstrated little to no political vision or foresight. Stalin adapted his politics to suit his allies of the moment, so the food crisis in 1927-28 was sudden, unexpected and threatened the bureaucracy’s hold on power. To protect his base, Stalin was forced to make an abrupt break with Bukharin and seek his own solution. The consummate bureaucrat, Stalin would use the crisis to further entrench himself and his faction in ways that would later be practised worldwide.

The bureaucracy believed it was taking the only rational choice, when on 5 January 1930, the CC resolved that collectivising 15 per cent of farmlands as part of the First FYP was insufficient, and the target was raised to the great majority. The party tops convinced themselves that re-organising agriculture along industrial lines would increase productivity, and supply the grain needed for export and to feed the towns. The meeting also agreed to the extreme and ultra-left policy of liquidating the kulaks as a class. Having previously pandered to the kulaks, Stalin now argued that “this class must be smashed in open battle … Without this, talk about ousting the kulaks as a class is empty prattle”.^[2]

The violent lurch to forced collectivisation of the peasantry had begun. This was the same CC meeting that decided to close Zhenotdel. The new policy was extreme because to the bureaucracy, despite the continuous warnings of the UO, the crisis was unexpected. To maintain food supplies the regime moved fast and, drawing on the experience of War Communism, armed detachments were sent into the countryside to seize grain stocks and smash the opposition of the kulaks.

Collectivisation was the correct course of action, provided it was carried out at a tempo corresponding to the material resources available and agreed by the peasants themselves. Without trained and experienced managers, backed by a minimum level of technology, such as a sufficient number of tractors, huge collective farms made little sense. The bureaucracy, however, drove the peasants onto collective farms using armed detachments with requisition agents searching everywhere for hidden grain; the opposite of the persuasion proposed by Marx, Engels, and Lenin. There were innumerable episodes of violence and brutality. Police reports paint a picture of a vast, disorganised campaign of confiscations, arrests, beatings and deportations of hundreds of thousands of peasants and their families, not only kulaks but anyone who opposed the strong-arm methods being used.

Collectivisation held the promise of destroying the patriarchal household as the primary unit of production, and could have offered a radical restructuring of rural life that would have freed women from centuries of oppression. Many party members, Zhenotdel delegates and others, cheered the promise of mechanisation and wages paid to the individual rather than the mir, believing that a material basis was about to be created for the liberation of peasant women. Collectivisation, coupled with the First FYP, appeared to provide a real opportunity in even the most backward areas for the peasant family to begin to ‘wither away’. Such a vision had support amongst the village youth and many enthusiastically embraced the new order, joining the local Komsomol.

The party used the discontent in the towns over increased food prices to rally support for its sudden turn in policy. It mobilised 25,000 reliable cadres to move permanently into the countryside to manage collective farms and increase production. Artyukhina appealed for the party to make use of Zhenotdel’s more than three-quarters of a million activists in the campaign for grain. She argued that the meetings of peasants with these activists would be ideal for generating support for the party in the countryside. Party workers were determined to increase the grain harvest, but pressure of work, lack of democratic decision-making, and a certain casualness towards Zhenotdel, previously complained about by Artyukhina, meant the offer was not taken up.

The peasants, of course, attempted to sabotage the collective farms. They butchered their livestock for meat and hides rather than surrender them. The number of sheep fell by two-thirds, horses and pigs by half, cattle by 40 per cent. The slaughter was often done overnight to beat bureaucratic deadlines.^[3] This huge loss was never made good by the collective farms and remained a burden on Soviet agriculture up to and after privatisation in the 1990s.

The violence, chaos and upheavals caused by the arbitrary and brutal nature of forced collectivisation, and the senselessness of many of the actions taken, meant that it strengthened many of the worst aspects of peasant life, alienating peasant women instead of liberating them, with many women becoming leaders of the fight against collectivisation.^[4]

Bureaucratic control, in many ways, reinforced traditional aspects of rural life and bore down heavily on peasant women who did not gain the labour protection, pensions, sickness pay, or educational opportunities of their urban counterparts. No wonder that right across the Soviet Union, peasant women were in the forefront of opposition to collectivisation. Typical actions were to gather at a pre-arranged signal to physically prevent the shipment of grain away from their villages, to go into the fields at night, scythes and sickles in hand to harvest the grain. In some areas women would form guerrilla groups to retrieve confiscated cattle and return them to their former owners. Elsewhere, women refused to allow collectivised horses to plough the fields and broke up meetings at which party members were to explain and justify collectivisation.^[5] Many of these were dangerous activities carried out under the noses of armed guards.

Local officials reported to Moscow how ‘backward’ and ‘untamed’ peasant women were often the most vocal and best organised in the opposition to collectivisation brigades. Public protest meetings of several thousand peasant women (allegedly armed with pitchforks and axes) demanded the handing over of members of the local Soviet for popular trial for leaving requisitioned grain in the fields where it had rotted. Where these protests extended to a number of adjacent villages, and showed a sufficiently determined character, individual local officials could be arrested and even sentenced to a short prison term.^[6] Peasant women were natural leaders of opposition to collectivisation, because collectivisation impacted most severely on the personal and domestic aspects of peasant life. The collective freed women from certain chores, but it required them to take on many more. Women were moved from the seclusion of the home into the public domain, their lives underwent a much greater change than did their husbands, and many objected.

Traditionally, the day-to-day lives of peasant families, especially the women, had been pretty much isolated and, generally, Zhenotdel found that at first, women members of collective farms would not participate in its activities. However, gradually widows and those whose husbands had been away for several years, who needed help to sustain themselves and their children, turned to Zhenotdel for support and, in turn, supported its initiatives.

The party leadership realised that the level of disruption generated by forced change would seriously and adversely affect the spring sowing and the summer harvest. A temporary halt was called, and on 2 March 1930 Stalin published in Pravda his infamous article ‘Dizzy with Success’ in which he blatantly misrepresented the collectivisation that was taking place as voluntary and not forced. Hypocritically, he sought to distance himself from the latter which he blamed on the bad behaviour of overzealous blockheads.

After the summer harvest the collectivisation drive resumed, but the regime no longer insisted on establishing giant farms and concessions were made to the peasants. Now, the new collective farms were formed around the village on which it was based, peasants would receive a share of the profits from the farm, and were permitted private plots of land adjacent to the farm. By the end of 1931, over half of those peasant households which had not fled to the towns were members of a collective farm, at the end of 1936 the figure was over 90 per cent.^[7]

Women comprised 51 per cent of collective farm workers, and while official literature called on them to mobilise in support of collectivisation, it remained silent on their double burden.^[8] The ‘Woman Question’ was framed in terms of how to meet collectivisation (and industrialisation) targets. Rural women would no longer suffer double oppression if they accepted that “only collective farm life opens a wide road of new things … and leads to full emancipation …”.^[9]

10.3 Famine

The new generation of collective farms paid its quota to the state (typically, 40 per cent of the farm produce), paid the tractor units for harvesting, put aside seed for next year’s sowing and divided the remainder among the peasants according to the number of days each had worked the land. But these collective farms were not democratic, the chairperson, nominally elected, was usually a party appointee (fewer than 10 per cent were women), as were most brigade leaders, and to emphasise their seniority had noticeably better living conditions than the peasants.

Procurement targets set for 1930 had been 50 per cent higher than for 1929. Fortunately for the regime, in 1930 the weather was unusually favourable, and targets were more than met. Moscow ruled that in 1931 there be a 10 per cent increase in land area sown compared to 1930, with a 6 per cent increase in yield. The expected harvest was obtained simplistically by multiplying the planned sown area by the planned yield based on 1930 figures. The result was an expected increase of nearly 75 per cent in the grain harvested over 1929.

However, not all the extra ground had been prepared, and a spring drought and a severe infestation of locusts reduced production per hectare. Additionally, the inexperience of the newly-appointed party members managing the collectives showed itself in, for example, a mismatch in resources for reaping and threshing, leaving reaped grain in the field to become mouldy. The harvest was short of Moscow’s expectations, but the purchase of machinery necessary for industrialisation depended upon the sale of grain on the world market, and that goal had to be met even if workers and peasants went hungry.

Collectivisation was having unintended consequences. The popular response of many peasants to the upheavals, particularly divorcees and widows who had fewer material ties to the mir, was to leave the village and take advantage of the new opportunities for waged labour on one or another construction site. The process began slowly; during 1929-30 the number of peasant women taking this opportunity could be numbered in the tens of thousands. But during 1931-35 so many fled to the towns that the number of women employed in agriculture halved, making up as many as two-thirds of new employees entering industry.^[10]

In the press, as late as June, after it had become clear a disaster was on the horizon, the 1931 harvest was being boasted about as a huge increase over previous years. Then a second tragedy struck. During harvesting the heavens opened, and it poured for days on end, ruining much of the grain stacked in the fields. By August 1931, the Politburo was receiving pleas from all over the Soviet Union giving reasons why their local grain quotas should be reduced, including the collective farms being able to feed their members over winter. The Politburo replied by insisting the first obligation was to meet Moscow’s targets and fulfil the collection plan completely, anything else was “absolutely incorrect and politically mistaken”.^[11]

Collecting the state’s quota, however, was in the teeth of peasant opposition. Grain collectors were beaten up, and there was widespread theft at every stage of the collection process. By October, the grain collected was just over half that of the previous year. The Politburo sent a “verification commission” of OGPU officers into the regions to check the ‘real’ amount of grain harvested. The OGPU report alleged there had been a “malicious underestimation”, with “mass concealment” of grain from the state. Official data claimed that the grain harvest was only ten million metric tons less than the 1930 harvest.^[12] We now know that the OGPU reports reached only Stalin, Molotov, and Yakov Yakovlev (Head of People’s Commissariat of Agriculture), so the other members of the Politburo could not dispute Stalin’s views regarding sabotage, wrecking or conspiracy, or any revision to procurement targets.^[13]

A mix of mismanagement and peasant hostility meant the winter sowing in 1931 for the spring harvest of 1932 was less than that sown in 1930, and the final yield was reduced. But in October 1931, Sovnarkom demanded local managers take the unprecedented step of seizing the grain that was to be the peasants’ own food to meet state collection targets. By the 1932 spring sowing, there were severe food shortages throughout the collective farms. Hungry peasants fed the draught animals with scraps, reducing them to skin and bone, too weak to pull a plough adequately. By July it was alarmingly clear that the summer harvest would be much less than planned, and Moscow settled for about the same target as the previous year.

Harvest shortfall, increased numbers in the towns, and the need to supply grain for export, meant that it was increasingly difficult to honour the promised rations. The government made a series of cuts in 1931, and again at the start of 1932, with some foods no longer supplied as part of the ration. For these, workers and peasants had to fend for themselves. The Soviet Union was facing a major food shortage, and on 23 March 1932 the Politburo reduced the allocation of the grain ration for twenty million people classed as ‘low priority’. Despite this new allocation, grain was still urgently needed for the towns but by the end of July 1932, only half the target had been collected, and by the end of the year only two-thirds. The bureaucracy blamed the failure of the harvest and the grain shortage on kulaks and co-conspirators who stole the grain and sold it privately. To this day, official figures report the 1932 harvest as slightly better than that of 1931.

In October 1932, the Ukrainian branch of the Society of Old Bolsheviks protested at “unrealistic plans”:

… the local (Party) officials are in large part flatterers, self-seekers and cowards, afraid to lose their jobs and concealing the true situation. We Old Bolsheviks should not behave like that. Not to report that the plans are unrealistic is worse than a Right-wing deviation.^[14]

The report which punctured the official line was deemed “anti-party and impermissible”, and the Society of Old Bolsheviks was disbanded. As late as 23 February 1933, the Lower Volga regional party bureau still insisted that rumours about famine were a new kulak manoeuvre in the struggle against the seed collection and demanded that district committees should find the organisers and inspirers of these rumours and put them under arrest. Party officials, swollen with hunger but better fed than many peasants, refused to report what was happening, for fear of reprisals or out of misguided loyalty to the party.

The urban death rate rose and continued to rise until, by the summer of 1933, it was double the normal level. Some workers did return to the countryside but there was no mass exodus from the towns as in 1921 because the towns were receiving some rations whereas in many areas the peasants were starving. In Magnitogorsk, for example, in 1932 the official food allowance for workers was one meal a day in the canteen, and, according to their ration cards, an additional monthly allowance of: 30 kg of bread, 3kg of meat, 2kg of cereal grain, 1kg of sugar, 0.5kg of butter, with potatoes given when available and 15 litres of milk. In fact, during the worst of the famine the workers received no meat, no butter and little milk or cereal, they received mostly poor-quality bread and an occasional 250g of rock-like candy. The lower levels of the bureaucracy attempted to get a larger meal allowance for their own work teams by issuing them with extra meal tickets. Soon every worker had two or three tickets which meant NARPIT had to create 2,000 meals for food for 800. The quality and quantity of the canteen dinners deteriorated, and workers had to eat two or three to get an adequate meal.^[15]

Starving peasants were fleeing en masse to the towns leaving the farms severely understaffed. On 27 December 1932, internal passports were introduced, designed to prevent peasants moving to the towns, and on 22 January 1933, the infamous directive banned the movement of peasants out of the Ukraine where the famine was most severe.

With forced collectivisation and famine in the countryside, it was in the terrible years of 1931-33 that the masses sank to their lowest levels since the Civil War. Although bread remained available in the cities, the consumption of meat, dairy and butter fell by about 50 per cent. Most workers went hungry and there were many reports of workers bloated from malnutrition. There were strikes by tens of thousands of workers against cuts in rations which, in 1932, dropped to 400g of bread a day. The most important strike was in the traditional Bolshevik stronghold, the Ivanovo Industrial Region. Workers, predominantly women, stopped work on Friday 8 April when cuts were announced. The workers took over the nearby small town of Vichuga until driven out by troops. Protest strikes extended into the Lower Volga region, the Urals, Western Siberia, Ukraine, and Belorussia.^[16] Nevertheless, in the winter and spring of 1932-33 the urban population suffered much less than the rural.

One result was that thousands more Communist Party members were dispatched to energise the collective farms in time for the coming harvest. Volunteers from factories across the USSR joined the campaign to aid collectivisation, and were sent all over the Soviet Union; even a special group to Central Asia, where they formed the backbone of the tractor stations providing mechanisation at harvest time.^[17]

The 1932-33 famine was as much man-made as it was a natural disaster. In the face of both a shortfall in agricultural workers as peasants fled to the towns, and the awful weather and pest infestation, the arbitrary, brutal, and chaotic nature of forced collectivisation pushed grain procurement to unrealistic levels. It was in the best grain-growing regions in the country where mass starvation reached its most dreadful proportions; two-thirds of famine victims were in the grain-rich Ukraine. The party tops may have been convinced by their own propaganda and OGPU reports that “kulaks and anti-social elements” were stealing grain, and that the harvests were closer to target than was actually the case. But this self-deception was possible only because democracy had been choked out of the party.

The state insisted on carrying through its procurement plans, whatever the cost, and grain continued to be forcibly removed from famine-struck villages. This was presented as a legitimate battle against counter-revolution, and because the deaths from starvation were the result of government policy, the regime took no steps to alleviate the situation.

Stalin, in his 17 January 1933 speech to the Politburo, ‘On Work in the Countryside’, insisted that the gross harvest of grain in 1932 had been better than in 1931, that any shortfall in collections was primarily due to infiltration of the collective farms by anti-Soviet elements; as book-keepers, managers, storekeepers, brigade leaders, etc., who had permitted private trade in grain. The solution was for both greater and tighter party control with a purge of kulak elements from the party carried out in 1933.

In parallel with collectivisation was the chaos, heartbreak and disruption to the harvest generated by the liquidation of the kulaks as a class when nearly 400,000 kulak households were deported, many leaving aged parents and young children behind for fear of something worse. In some areas, crowds of women gathered to oppose the evictions and took kulak children into their homes.^[18] Settled in wastelands without shelter or food, tens of thousands died; others escaped, adopted fictional identities, and sought paid work wherever they could; building steel mills, chemical complexes, hydroelectric stations, mines, and railroads. Young peasants crowded into railroad stations, joining the workers moving from city to city in search of better working and housing conditions.^[19]

The human and economic consequences of Stalin’s violent and blind gamble were appalling. By 1932 the consequences of the agricultural policies of the Stalinist faction had come home to roost. The vast masses of the peasants were not dizzy with success, they were dizzy from lack of food. The death toll due to the famine over the period 1932-33 was in the order of several millions, possibly 3 per cent of the population. The available data shows that the victims of the famine by age were primarily children aged four and under, and adults aged fifty or over (rural mortality rates 41 and 31 per cent respectively). Unlike 1921, however, there was no relief organised for the starving. Instead, its existence was officially denied, and the use of the word ‘famine’ impermissible in the Soviet Union until after Nikita Khrushchev’s revelations, consisting of a four hour speech to the Twentieth Party Congress that detailed Stalin’s purges, his brutality, and abuses of power.^[20]

Better weather and tens of thousands of party members working on the collectives, meant the 1933 harvest was sufficient to end the famine, but agriculture had been reduced to such an acute state of crisis that maintaining an adequate supply of food to the cities was a serious problem. The bureaucratic system had created such mass hostility to the Soviet state that if attacked by, for example, Germany, it was in serious danger of being overthrown – the very thing that TSOC was intended to avoid. The bureaucracy was forced to retreat and moved to placate the peasantry. In January 1934, a decree was passed allowing collective farms the right to sell any surplus grain at market prices, and in January 1935 a decree formally restored private property in the countryside. Individual peasants could now have personal plots of up to half a hectare (more than an acre) alongside the collective farms and personal possession of livestock including cows, pigs, goats, and poultry. The food situation in the towns improved almost immediately – which was claimed as a victory for Stalin’s perspicacity.^[21]

The private sector accounted for at least one third of all agricultural workers from the mid-1930s until the privatisation of Russian agriculture in the 1990s. These private plots were twice as productive as the state sector and were soon producing over half of certain key products including eggs, potatoes, and milk, and almost half of the meat. It is interesting that private agriculture depended almost entirely on female labour.^[22] Despite the fanfares to the contrary, Stalinist agriculture relied upon the private sector for a wide range of products. Private agriculture remained an important prop for the bureaucracy and provided substantial material support for the peasant family which, because of its patriarchal nature, remained a continuing and major impediment to equality for peasant women.

The withdrawal of many peasants from the farms to spend their time working on family land introduced an ongoing instability into Soviet agriculture, a conflict between working one’s own land or working for the collective. Obviously, the peasants favoured their own pieces of land; seed, fertiliser and tools tended to disappear from the collective farm, farm boundaries tended to shrink, and peasant plots expand. The response of the bureaucracy oscillated between more generous returns for labour on the collective farm, to seizure of excess private produce and purges of farm managers who were considered to have been too soft and had allowed the peasants to take over too big a part of the collective farm for private cultivation. The latter measures rapidly resulted in shortages of meat, butter, and poultry in the towns, and were soon reversed.^[23] As war with Nazi Germany loomed, further concessions were made, including an inheritance law which allowed the right to farm a certain piece of land to be inherited. The basic conflict of interests between collective farming and the capitalist elements amongst the peasantry was only fully resolved by the privatisation of the collective farms, post 1991.

The clearest indication of the attitudes of the bureaucrats to the Soviet state can be seen in their declarations regarding the wave of millions of homeless orphans resulting from the famine, sweeping across the country, and swamping the government measures in place. There was a big change in official attitudes compared to the 1920s. Studies and surveys of homelessness were largely halted because how could a new army of homeless children be explained without reference to forced collectivisation, without reference to the drive to end kulaks as a class? In their place was a wealth of newspaper articles explaining the homeless were no longer victims, they were perpetrators. The laws on delinquency became stricter as the decade progressed. The educational value of punishment was discovered, more severe methods were used to clear the streets. Penal labour was now recommended for ‘hooligans’, the state sought punitive solutions to social problems. Gone were ideas that social conditions generated crime, the policeman pushed the social worker aside.^[24]

10.4 Retail Trade and Speculation

While the NEP continued, shortages were reflected in the higher prices charged by the private sector, which meant a gap between state and private prices and a thriving illegal market. In 1927-28, market prices were about a quarter more than state prices, and in 1929-30 about twice as expensive. In 1930 the speculators who provided the towns and cities with half the flour and three quarters of the vegetables needed, were subjected to an intense publicity campaign blaming them for the food shortages.^[25]

The party was determined to eliminate the speculators through a network of efficient, well-stocked, clean shops. Organised at short notice by the bureaucracy, these shops were subject to constraints that made them inherently inefficient. For example, the stores were ludicrously small, each holding only small stocks of a limited range of goods. To the bureaucratic mind, bread was essential so it seemed rational and sensible to have a small number of distribution outlets that could be administered efficiently and controlled easily. Fine, if each one had been able to cope with many customers simultaneously. The result was that wives had to queue for hours, with some working women bringing their bedding with them in order to get to work on time. The state taking greater control of sales and distribution meant a surge in women employed in this sector, but the total was never anywhere near the number of women employed in industry.^[26]

Rationed goods were distributed according to ration cards and, often, with a supplementary money payment. During the First FYP rationing was socially discriminatory, with industrial workers in the highest category, while priests, for example, were refused ration books altogether. As the conditions of urban life worsened, only state rations saved many town-dwellers from starvation – validation of the inherent strength of the planned economy. However, as state rations fell and prices rose, living standards were reduced to the point that for a family with children, where only the father worked, it must have seemed they were facing a slow death.

The hasty attempt of the state to replace a well-entrenched private sector reflected all the problems of bureaucratic management. A state monopoly of distribution and control of goods in a time of scarcity opened the doors to widespread corruption and had immense implications for social stratification. Soon corruption was everywhere, beginning with the stores being run by the shop workers in ways that benefited themselves, with goods sold from under the counter to favoured customers. The substantial difference in prices between the state and private sectors soon meant employees developed ingenious scams that allowed them to divert food and goods onto the black market and pocket the proceeds. This was to be expected in a society of shortages where Communist Party members set the tone by their pursuit of perks and privileges. Nevertheless, by outlawing private enterprise, state agencies became the main and often the only legal distributor of goods, giving the bureaucracy a new dimension of social control.

To reduce underhand practices, the sales system became unwieldy; the customers queued to order their goods which were then wrapped in front of them, the customers then queued at a separate desk to pay, and then queued at a third desk to receive their goods. But the very complexity of the system designed to stop pilfering, enabled employees to manipulate it to divert goods wholesale onto the private market. The spread of this corruption was remarkably rapid. In September 1930, Stalin wrote to Molotov instructing him to “definitely shoot two or three dozen wreckers from these apparaty, including several dozen common cashiers”.^[27]

Within weeks, the OGPU had discovered numerous organisations wrecking the food supply chain, the arrests reached as high as the Deputy Commissar of the Department of Agriculture, and extended to bacteriologists, physicists, and even historians.^[28] Increasingly, at local level individuals were blamed not only for failures to meet targets but, particularly, disasters such as fires or machine breakdowns, and even for things for which they were clearly not responsible such as shortages of food in the factory canteen. Those stealing from the state stores were imprisoned and even shot as examples, but under conditions of extreme shortage and systemic distortions, honesty at the retail counter could not create food from scarcity. While the situation did improve in the late 1930s, production and distribution of consumer goods remained a major problem in the Soviet economy until its demise.

In December 1932, the Council of People’s Commissars issued a decree that transformed the food distribution system into a mechanism for wringing greater productivity from the workforce and enforcing labour discipline. So-called ‘closed stores’ were introduced into enterprises; goods were to be distributed in the workplace via shops to which only employees or approved persons were admitted. It is estimated that 40,000 such ‘closed stores’ were introduced in 1932.^[29] Workers’ ration cards gave them access to the factory canteens, but now those ration cards limited their access to the store situated in their enterprise. Those workers quitting at a factory lost their right to use its facilities, including canteen, store, daycare facilities, and accommodation. This meant many enterprises, for the first time, had to compile and maintain an up-to-date record of who they employed, a challenging task because of their massive turnover rates. The system was incredibly complex, the ration cards listed the worker’s dependents and place of residence and had to be ratified by the local housing authority, and that could take a long time. In the enterprise itself there was often confusion on such basic questions as to who was employed and it was frequently the case that angry, hungry workers filled the corridor outside the managers’ offices desperate for their ration cards.^[30] By setting up committees of workers to oversee the system, the party presented it as workers’ control over the distribution of food.

In parallel, special ‘closed stores’ were established for elite officials and professionals, supplying them with much higher-quality goods than were normally available, often at subsidised prices. This was the beginning of a system of access to consumer goods by rank, which became a permanent feature of Soviet society and played a major role in providing party tops with their privileges. Closed distribution was officially abolished in 1935, but in practice continued until the collapse of the Soviet Union.^[31]

Christian Rakovsky pointed out that by the late 1920s the majority of party members had a very erroneous conception of the functioning and structure of a Bolshevik Party. Their education had been at the hands of the bureaucracy. Many of these new members were part of the Lenin Levy and had no idea of what the party regime had been like previously, that for Lenin an important task of party leaders was to keep the party free from the corruption of privileges, of favours, of special rights, all of which reflected the ideology and morality of the bourgeoisie.^[32]

The Stalinist bureaucracy retarded and distorted the development of the Soviet economy, but because of its planned nature and the enthusiasm of the working masses for a socialist society, the economy had, nevertheless, surged ahead. A new generation of well-qualified Soviet engineers, technicians and specialists were in place and were working with some of the most advanced equipment in the world. However, problems of a qualitative nature were becoming discernible:

1. The more complex and advanced the economy, the greater the retardation exerted by the bureaucracy. It was only a matter of time before this would become an absolute brake on economic development.
2. The bureaucracy exploited the state for personal gain, and as the state rested on nationalised property relations the bureaucracy defended those relations. However, the proportion of social production being acquired by the bureaucracy was already distorting the distribution of products and should it increase, as was inevitable, would pose the liquidation of the social conquests of the proletarian revolution.
3. The bureaucracy, by its very nature, represented the more conservative elements in society and this was being expressed in, for example, the promotion of the family and motherhood. How far would this go and what would it mean for the women of the Soviet Union?^[33]

Having succeeded in eliminating its former ally, the kulaks, the bureaucracy began to strengthen itself as the commanding caste, as a new aristocracy which, of course, came at the cost of undermining progress towards socialism.

Endnotes

[1] See L. Trotsky, The Revolution Betrayed.

[2] J. Stalin, ‘Concerning the Policy of Eliminating the Kulaks as a Class’, January 1930, CW, Vol. 12, pp. 184-9.

[3] See A. Nove, An Economic History of the USSR.

[4] See L. Viola, ‘Bab’i Bunty and Peasant Women: Protest During Collectivization’.

[5] See T. McDonald, ‘Peasant Rebellion in Stalin’s Russia’.

[6] See ibid.

[7] See T. Grant, Russia: From Revolution to Counter-Revolution.

[8] See M. Buckley, Women and Ideology in the Soviet Union,

[9] Quoted in M. Buckley, ‘The “Woman Question” in the Contemporary Soviet Union’, Monthly Review Press, 1989, p. 263.

[10] See W. Goldman, Women at the Gates

[11] R. Davies and S. Wheatcroft, The Years of Hunger: Soviet Agriculture: 1931-1933, Palgrave, 2004, p. 149.

[12] Ibid, p. 73.

[13] See E. Rees, The Nature of Stalin’s Dictatorship.

[14] R. Davies and S. Wheatcroft, The Years of Hunger: Soviet Agriculture: 1931-1933, Palgrave, 2004, p. 157.

[15] See J. Scott, Beyond the Urals.

[16] See J. Rossman, Worker Resistance Under Stalin: Class and Revolution on the Shop Floor.

[17] See J. Rossman, ‘The Teikovo Cotton Workers’ Strike of April 1932’.

[18] See A. Nove, An Economic History of the USSR.

[19] See W. Goldman, Inventing the Enemy.

[20] See R. Davies and S. Wheatcroft, The Years of Hunger: Soviet Agriculture: 1931-1933.

[21] See B. Souvarine, Stalin: A Critical Survey of Bolshevism.

[22] See G. Lapidus, Women in Soviet Society.

[23] J. Wright, ‘The Enigma of Soviet Production’.

[24] A. Ball, Abandoned Children in Soviet Russia, 1918-1930.

[25] See W. Goldman, Women at the Gates.

[26] See ibid.

[27] L. Lih, Stalin’s Letters to Molotov:1925-1936, Yale University Press, 2011, pp. 193-4.

[28] See V. Serge, Memoirs of a Revolutionary 1901-1942.

[29] See S. Fitzpatrick, Everyday Stalinism.

[30] See W. Goldman, Women at the Gates.

[31] See S. Fitzpatrick, Everyday Stalinism.

[32] See C. Rakovsky, ‘The “Professional Dangers” of Power’.

[33] See L. Trotsky, The Revolution Betrayed.