12. The Second Five-Year Plan, A Woman’s Right to Choose

1932-37

12.1 Introduction

By the end of the First FYP, Stalin’s leadership of the party was firmly established. The bureaucracy was in control and its essential conservatism and short-sightedness could be seen in Stalin’s theoretical initiatives, especially the increasingly reactionary policies adopted towards the family. Tracking these changes is an important way of demonstrating the growing power of the bureaucracy that would rule the USSR until its implosion in 1990-91. They were part of a deliberate policy to strengthen traditional attitudes and structures within Soviet society, pushing women’s rights off the agenda, pushing women back to the family washtub, back to the family hearth, back to household slavery.[1] The family was important, because it met the bureaucracy’s need for conservative supports that extended throughout society. Increasingly, the bureaucracy would rely on the “petty-bourgeois family … the most reactionary and benighted nucleus of the class system”,[2] the antithesis of any attempt at the genuine emancipation of women which is inconceivable without the destruction of the bourgeois family unit. 

The regime re-wrote the marriage laws established by the October Revolution and trumpeted the sanctity of the family. In the years immediately following the revolution, the government’s priority was to protect children from such “stagnant traditions”. Now motherhood and obedience to one’s parents became central themes of government propaganda. A woman fulfilled her natural role by caring for her family and raising her children in the spirit of the new Soviet ideology.

A second aim was to increase the birth rate. As the 1930s progressed, millions of new families squeezed into the fast-growing industrial centres, and services fell far behind what was needed. The pressures of work, of feeding, clothing, and bringing up children fell mostly on the mother. Women resisted, and by 1939 almost two-thirds of urban families had restricted themselves to two or fewer children, a trend which, if continued, would have meant a decrease in an already-depleted population.

A third important reason for state promotion of the family was because it was the least expensive method of providing basic services for both industrial workers and peasants under conditions where available resources were scarce. It added to women’s double burden and, as a result, fulfilling the FYP entailed greater hardship for women than for their male co-workers.

12.2 Stalin Justifies Social Differentiation

The Bolsheviks had accepted that post-revolutionary society would need a professional bureaucracy, but only for a limited time. It was expected to decline in importance and fade away after the defeat of the counter-revolutionary forces. However, the isolation of the regime and the consequent formation of the bureaucracy meant the actual development of Soviet society had moved in the opposite direction: bureaucracy was increasing; material inequalities between citizens were becoming greater, not less; repression by the state, instead of dying away, was increasing by leaps and bounds; real democratic rights were withering, not growing. The regime appeared to be heading in the opposite direction to socialism. The goals of the October Revolution had been strongly egalitarian, but the reality of Soviet society was the formation of a privileged ruling layer, increased social stratification, and conflicting social interests.

After Lenin’s death, privileges for party members were increased considerably. In 1932 the partmaksimum, which placed an upper limit on party members’ salaries was removed.[3] Pravda led a press campaign against egalitarianism, condemning it as anti-socialist. Those who sought to benefit from inequality saw Stalin as the representative of their interests and flocked to join the party. It is from this time that we can say the Stalinist bureaucracy had consolidated itself and gained full control of party and state. In the same year, the Soviet authorities moved to improve the pay and conditions of engineers, managers, and ‘specialists’ generally. In 1933, Scott lists the approximate monthly pay in roubles of workers at Magnitogorsk: unskilled (trainees) – 100, skilled – 300, inexperienced engineer – 450, experienced engineer – 700, administrators from 800 to 3,000. For comparison, Masha, a school-teacher was paid 500 roubles a month, while Galya, aged nineteen, who had successfully completed a two-year course, was the local dentist, and paid about 800 roubles a month.

Social inequality was growing throughout the country with the creation of a “new privileged layer, yearning for power, thirsting for the good things in life, fearful of their positions, mortally fearing the masses and filled with hatred toward any opposition”.[4] To defend its material interests, this layer smothered protests with escalating repression. The Soviet state was becoming a mechanism for the protection of privilege while the ordinary citizen was overworked, underfed, and poorly housed. To justify the existence of a ‘socialist’ state which was so clearly repressive, Stalin introduced a number of novel, anti-Marxist concepts.

  1. Against the expectations of Marx, Engels and Lenin, Stalin declared that the class struggle does not die away but becomes sharper in the period of the transition to socialism: as its social weight declined the bourgeoisie became a bigger problem. This required increased state repression including imprisonments, exiles, executions, suspension of democratic rights, and continuous strengthening of the state’s repressive mechanisms.[5] The very basis of the 1918 Family Code, that the state would wither away under socialism, was now attacked as nihilism, and replaced by a new emphasis on the need for strong, stable, socialist laws. In reality, the degree of repression and the strength of the state reflected the bureaucracy’s fear of the working class, and of those remaining Bolsheviks who might act as revolutionary sparks in a political crisis.
  2. Stalin prettified the bureaucratic regime by redefining socialism. The successes of the First FYP and liquidating of the kulaks as a class were “the final and irrevocable victory of Socialism in the Land of the Soviets”.[6] Property ownership (e.g., nationalised industries and collectives) was deemed of overwhelming importance in defining the stage of development of the Soviet Union. Ignored were the gross social inequalities which existed in the distribution of goods and services, the low levels of productivity and grossly inferior quality of products relative to the capitalist countries, and, most importantly, the lack of any genuine Soviet democracy.
  3. In June 1936 the new Soviet Constitution declared that “from each according to his ability, to each according to his work” was a basic principle of socialism, and not, as Marx and Lenin had described it, a recognition that certain bourgeois laws would remain applicable in the transition from capitalism to socialism.[7] “From each according to his ability” was the extraction of the maximum labour by any means possible, including the whip of police intimidation. Under conditions where the state centrally regulated pay, “to each according to his work” meant the majority of the working population living in generalised want with privileges and luxuries for the tops.

    The state created a whole series of decorations including the Order of Lenin, Order of the Red Star, Hero of the Union, Artist of Merit, and Scholar of Merit. Those favoured with these decorations gained substantial material advantages: financial allowances, better housing, access to special shops, and a host of social privileges (e.g., being able to walk to the front of a restaurant queue). In parallel, in the army the hierarchy of officers was re-established, with substantial material benefits: an accelerated building programme to improve living quarters and hefty increases in salaries (up to about 50 per cent). These reforms gave a new social weight to the officers, differentiating them from the ranks and tying them to the ruling elite.

  4. Stalin transformed the concept and theory of the revolutionary party. In a series of iterations, the democratic centralist Leninist party was transformed into a mechanism whereby the General Secretary controlled all aspects of political life within the USSR. Open and frank debate (which took place even when fighting a civil war), was replaced with anti-Leninist concepts such as the majority could never be wrong, and it was right that the secret police should physically silence oppositionists. Stalin moved step by step to a position where the Secretariat was everything and the party purely subsidiary. From now on, party democracy existed only in the memories of the older Bolsheviks – and that would be enough to send them to the Gulags, or worse.
  5. Stalin introduced voluntarist concepts into the Party. He declared to the Seventeenth Party Congress (1934):

    … the strength and prestige of our Party and … [its] leaders, have grown to an unprecedented degree … it is their work that now determines everything, or nearly everything. […] the correctness of the Party’s political line has been confirmed by the experience of a number of years, and there is no longer any doubt as to the readiness of the workers and peasants to support this line, the part played by so-called objective conditions has been reduced to a minimum; whereas the part played by our organisations and their leaders has become decisive, exceptional. What does this mean? It means that from now on nine-tenths of the responsibility for the failures and defects in our work rest, not on ‘objective’ conditions, but on ourselves, and on ourselves alone.[8]

    Made on the back of a major famine for which the leaders of the party were largely responsible, this puffed-up, vainglorious, and anti-Marxist view was very bad news for the lower echelons and technical specialists. Failure was no longer any fault of the leaders, or of policy, or of objective conditions, it was due to lack of application or deliberate sabotage.

  6. A year after Hitler came to power, by which time the German Communist Party had been destroyed, Stalin, without a word of criticism of his previous ultra-left policy, announced the change to class-collaborationist Popular Frontism. The ultra-left theories and slogans that had been in use for seven years were unceremoniously dumped.

    It was argued that the world had entered a new historical period in which the main danger was fascism, the open dictatorship of the most reactionary, most imperialist elements of finance capital. This threatened not only the Soviet Union, but also the working class and peasantry, the middle classes generally, and even the “small business-man” in the capitalist countries.[9] The CI and the national CPs no longer struggled for proletarian dictatorship or socialism – now defence of ‘democracy’ (the adjective ‘bourgeois’ was omitted) was the top task. The Peoples’ Front was a new slogan but an old policy, a reworking of the theories and practices of class collaboration and coalition government as advocated by reformists since the beginning of the labour movement.

    For a proletarian party to accept the programme of the Peoples’ Front was to give up its class independence. The CC of the CP (USA) expressed this most clearly on 4 December 1936: “We can organise and rouse them [the American liberal bourgeoisie] provided we do not demand that they agree with our socialist program but unite with them on the basis of their program which we make our own”.[10]

Stalin’s theoretical ‘advances’ contaminated every area of party activity. The Woman Question is an important example. The Short Course, Stalin’s personal version of Bolshevik history, was the training manual and political education for all Soviet citizens. Every secondary school pupil, at some time or other, was supposed to take a series of lectures and pass a test showing they ‘understood’ it. We get an understanding of Stalin’s appreciation of the Woman Question by the fact that it is not mentioned. Before 1917, women are mentioned five times referring to trade union activities, during 1917 they are mentioned no fewer than six times, most referring to the initiatives taken on International Women’s Day that began the Russian Revolution. These apparently took place “at the call of the Petrograd Bolshevik Committee”, and not as actually happened – in defiance of it. In Chapter 9, there is one mention of Georgian women losing their nationality if they married a non-Georgian, then nothing until the final chapter, where the Short Course quotes the one reference in the 1936 Constitution referring specifically to women: “Women are accorded equal rights with men in all spheres of life”.[11] In 350 pages, women are mentioned fifteen times but not once in terms of their struggle against their double burden.

12.3 Women and the Second Five Year Plan

In criticising Stalinist practices used to implement the planned economy, it is important not to belittle the latter’s essential strength and successes. Starting from almost nothing, within twenty years the Soviet economy would overtake, out-match, and defeat Nazi Germany. What we criticise is the failure of the bureaucracy to achieve the full potential of the planned economy, the waste of resources, and the unnecessary and extreme suffering of the Soviet peoples in executing the FYP. The launch of the Second FYP (1933-1937) took place at a level some 30 per cent below what could have been achieved. Importantly, poor product quality and low productivity became accepted. Defective products were not scrapped, but delivered to customers because, otherwise, targets were not met. Both contributed to the demoralisation of the workforce and undermined confidence in the Soviet system.[12]

By the end of the First FYP, nearly 11 million new workers had entered the labour force, half were peasants who flooded into the towns fleeing collectivisation and hunger. In 1932 an internal passport, as used in tsarist times, was introduced for all citizens over the age of sixteen.[13] This was intended to halt the mass migration of peasants into the towns for two reasons. The first was to ensure sufficient peasants remained in the countryside to bring in the next harvest. But it was a death sentence for hundreds of thousands, especially in the Ukraine which had been designated an abundant source of grain and was required to meet Moscow’s targets, despite the failure of the harvest. The second reason was to avoid the enormous cost of housing the influx. It was cheaper and easier to provide the social services that enabled wives of workers to enter the labour force than to construct additional housing and provide services for new migrants and their families. Women as workers had the great advantage that they stabilised the labour force, being three to five times more likely to stay at their jobs than men. Studies also showed that, overall, their productivity was equal to or better than men’s, even when time lost to childbirth and children’s illnesses were taken into account![14]

The passport contained a certification of a worker’s trade and level of skill and had to be presented to get a job or urban housing. Citizens not carrying their passport were subject to a large fine or criminal prosecution. Officials used passports to identify former NEPmen, thieves, swindlers, speculators, and dispossessed kulaks. The passports also identified former oppositionists, and ‘suspect’ workers, those who had participated in a work stoppage.[15] The passport system temporarily reduced migration from country to town, but had no discernible effect on the gender composition of the peasant migrations: women comprised about 40 per cent of those who arrived in the towns, but 50 per cent of those who stayed.[16] Many of the peasant women who moved to the towns did so because of maltreatment on the collective farms, and so had a greater incentive to find a steady job and remain.

The Second FYP meant a change in emphasis from construction of dams, power plants, and factories to production, and thus a new and flexible source of labour was needed to staff the growth of modern industries such as electrical and aeronautical engineering. Official statistics show the great majority of new workers who entered the labour force in 1932 and 1933 were women, which suggests that the initiative to recruit women already living in the towns went well. Women were not only the major source of workers in the new industries, they also actively and increasingly began to fill vacancies in more traditional jobs. They became fitters, press operators, turners, and welders. These were skilled jobs from which they had been largely absent. The party made strenuous efforts to enrol women into training programmes, technical schools, institutes of higher education and universities. Between 1932 and 1936, the share of jobs held by women increased in every branch of industry. In heavy industry – railroads, mining, metallurgy, and machine production – the number of women increased from 22 to 42 per cent. But they continued to be over-represented in the ranks of the unskilled, in jobs that did not pay well. Nevertheless, in contrast to the position of women in capitalist economies, their jobs were secure and guaranteed them access to housing, education, healthcare, paid vacations, kindergartens, and their own independent pensions. While the quality of childcare provided by the state varied, it was subsidised, and it was accepted as normal, even desirable, for mothers to have paid employment outside the home and have a kindergarten provide daycare for their children. Even in their distorted bureaucratic form these ideas were far ahead of the West, where help for mothers in distress was limited to the work-house (formally abolished in the UK in 1930, but replaced in all but name by Public Assistance Institutions), considered a charitable and temporary gesture. Under a democratic soviet system the measures taken would have been hugely progressive and a major step towards achieving the economic independence of women that Marxists from Engels and Bebel, to Armand, Lenin and Trotsky had specified as essential for women’s liberation.

Unlike capitalist factories of the time, Soviet factories were required to provide a range of social services. Factory directors faced over-ambitious production targets and severe labour shortages but, nevertheless, between 1928 and 1935 the number of children in kindergartens and crèches rose from a few thousand to over a million. Provision, however, continued to be much lower than demand and social differentiation meant the children of administrators, specialists, and other privileged persons were given priority in placements. The growth in places (though interrupted by the Second World War) continued, and by 1976 there would be over 12 million children in nurseries.[17]

However, ending women’s double burden was not a consideration for the Stalinist regime, and this aim never progressed beyond seeing the provision of facilities for women in economic terms as a necessary cost on production. Even as the regime was doing its best to increase the number of women in higher education and the professions, and to encourage Soviet women to enter production and believe they should have careers, it was simultaneously strengthening the family and preparing to outlaw abortion to consolidate its social base. It was this contradiction that meant the Soviet government was never able to socialise domestic work.

On 23 June 1931, Stalin provided a blueprint of priorities for the Second FYP but this did not specifically mention women, even though female participation was critical to its success, and the plan had distinct features that impacted heavily on women. First, he made a powerful attack on “wage levelling”, declaring it to be “petty-bourgeois” and called for those doing skilled and demanding jobs to receive significantly higher wages and better benefits than those doing unskilled work. Wage differentials between unskilled and skilled workers were to be a spur to encourage workers to undertake training to better their skills, or even to move to a sector of industry the state deemed important for the success of the Second FYP. However, the process was also meant to enhance capital accumulation by channelling higher wages and benefits to fewer workers at the upper end of the wage scale, and reducing the wages of many more, lower paid workers – which fell disproportionately onto women. An example of this was ending enhanced payments for overtime. The total wages bill was reduced, making more resources available for capital investment.

The expansion of the workforce meant a significant proportion of workers with production experience were promoted to a supervisory role. During 1931-33, nearly 15 per cent of the urban proletariat left the workbench for some form of supervisory work. The vast majority of these were young males. With no memory or education in party democracy, their loyalty was to those who had promoted them. Their opinion was strengthened by the gradual, but unmistakable, improvement in living conditions that took place after the end of the famine.

Workers in industries key to the economy would be rewarded with higher pay rates, subsidised meals, greater access to medical, maternity, and daycare facilities, better factory shops, and other services. The sum total of these were collectively termed “the social wage”, and it was believed that the promise of a higher social wage would increase factory production. The bureaucracy again used defence of legitimate pay differentials existing within the workforce to reinforce its support amongst the more skilled and better paid workers, and to present its own privileges as a valid part of Soviet society.

The social wage is in no way to be confused with the socialisation of domestic life that was argued for by Armand, Lenin, and Trotsky. Quite the opposite. Far from being an element in a programme to liberate women, as the first step toward creating a material base for a new life for them, it became a means of increasing their double burden. For example, skill was a major factor in the distribution of the social wage, and this was disadvantageous to women, who were disproportionately concentrated in less skilled jobs. The socialisation of life was reinvented as a new form of labour discipline that fell heaviest on women. It became transformed from a revolutionary goal into a means of increasing women’s burden. This was being done in a situation where there was no Party or state organisation to voice opposition, as Zhenotdel had been liquidated in 1930, and KUTB eliminated by the end of the First FYP.

The factory shop, canteen, childcare, and housing became important weapons in the hands of managers, used to spur productivity and increase labour discipline, particularly regarding women workers. Provision of these essential services could be tied to attendance, timeliness, productivity, and good behaviour.

In an economy bereft of consumer goods, there was little to buy, and additional pay was not worth much in real terms, undermining piecework and productivity bonuses. Rations rather than wages supplied the staple foods for the workers and their families. With the factory canteen and shop the only sources of food for its workers, by the mid-1930s the ration card was a major component in tying workers to a factory and imposing labour discipline. It is reported by Fred Beal in his book Proletarian Journey, that the wives of foreign workers often led protest meetings, marches, and actions against failure to deliver the requisite goods or against reductions in food rations.

A series of complementary measures and punitive laws were introduced. The working week was lengthened from five days to six, more night shifts were introduced, and holidays reduced (particularly the long summer holiday used by workers to return to their villages to help bring in fruit and vegetable crops that, when pickled, were important in maintaining an adequate food supply in winter). In contrast, a parallel but more democratic social security system operated by the trade unions provided paid holidays, sick pay, and free medical care. This efficiently provided benefits that were “universally enjoyed” and “appreciated”.[18] The best living conditions for the population of the USSR existed in 1934-36. The state increased its investment in the provision of consumer goods three-fold and the network of commercial stores was expanded with the declared aim of giving Soviet citizens greater choice. In 1935, rationing was abolished. Grocery products and dry goods could now be bought without the inconvenience of queuing, clothing became more available, and all at reasonable prices. The food situation improved. Acute shortages ended, but prices rose so that low-income groups were only marginally better off.

The bureaucracy continued to introduce means to extract additional labour. The most famous was the Stakhanovite movement. Named after a miner, Alexey Stakhanov, who allegedly mined 102 tons of coal (fourteen times his quota) in August 1935, and in the Soviet press was hailed as a model for others to follow. It was later revealed that these claims were “puffery”, the work of a team not a single individual, a means to pressure workers into greater efforts.[19] Stakhanovism became an important means for achieving intensification of labour, with the workforce in a factory ‘volunteering’ for a Stakhanovite day or a Stakhanovite week. However, the gains were often offset by:

  1. An increase in industrial accidents and decrease in quality of products;
  2. The bureaucratic supply chain failing to deliver additional supplies to the factory to match the increase in output, so production had to slow down until supplies matched demand;
  3. Overproduction in a single area that could mean the additional items simply being discarded.

The media and trade unions were instructed to pay special attention to women Stakhanovites, to arrange rallies and other public displays where exemplary women workers were fêted and held up for public approbation.[20] Factories and collective farms across the Soviet Union arranged celebratory occasions for outstanding women workers and rewarded them not only with acclaim but also bonuses and gifts. On International Women’s Day, journals and newspapers published special issues commemorating the achievements of Soviet women. In the forefront was the woman’s commitment to work for the good of the Soviet Union, but invariably such articles suggested that success in the workplace could lead to greater financial independence, prestige, and a happier home life. This was especially true in the kolkhoz – the collective farms – where for the first time, women were receiving their pay instead of it being paid to their husbands or fathers. It is no surprise therefore that in the kolkhoz, nearly 80 per cent of Stakhanovites were women, though in industry the situation was reversed primarily because women worked in unskilled jobs.

Another important strategy was piecework, which was justified on the grounds that it offered the workers themselves the means to increase their pay. Piecework was particularly hated by foreign workers, and opposition to it soon became linked with other demands, such as payment of wages on time and an end to dangerous working conditions.

12.4 The 1934 Law Against Homosexuality

It is true to say that there were two trends present in Soviet society after October 1917: a revolutionary trend that aimed to radically change the structure of society, and a temporarily dormant conservative trend, an expression of the remnants of the old society voiced by the petty-bourgeois caste of bureaucrats. The latter were often mediocre nonentities, sycophants, yes-men and women, who felt quite at home in the AUCP(B) of the early 1930s when the ‘correct line’ was no longer achieved by a genuine open debate but was passed down from above and learned by rote. This was to have a tremendous impact on the treatment of homosexuals.

Before the recriminalisation of homosexuality, the Stalinist regime, in the process of strengthening its grip on power, had been making life difficult for gay men. The fate of one prominent openly gay figure, Mikhail Kuzmin, a famous poet and author, who had welcomed the Russian Revolution and lived openly as a gay man in the years after the revolution, highlights the process. By 1928, when he gave his last public reading at the Institute of the History of Art, no advertising for the meeting was allowed, and admission was by invitation only. Despite these attempts to stifle the event, the auditorium was overflowing. The next year Kuzmin published a significant work, ‘The Trout Breaks the Ice’, a series of poems on a homosexual love affair. This was his last permitted publication. His lover, Yuri Yurkun, a deserter from the Red Army, was blackmailed by the secret police into informing on Kuzmin’s activities. By 1933, the anti-homosexual drive had picked up sufficient momentum. Over the summer, 130 men were arrested in Moscow and Leningrad in police raids. Arrests continued into 1934 in what became the initial stage of an energetic nationwide campaign against sexual promiscuity generally. As there was no law banning homosexuality, those arrested were accused of other crimes, usually ‘counter-revolutionary’ activity.

The party was planning to use the family as a factor in stabilising society, so homosexual relationships were a natural obstacle. The actual initiative for recriminalising homosexuality came from the deputy chief of the GPU, Genrikh Yagoda, in September 1933, when he wrote to Stalin arguing that a law against homosexuals was necessary for state security. He presented homosexuals as belonging to networks of counter-revolutionary spies. Stalin passed the note to Lasar Kaganovich, a close associate and Politburo member, with the message, “these scoundrels must receive exemplary punishment, and a corresponding decree must be introduced in our legislation.”[21]

Yagoda drafted a law which was agreed by the Politburo on 16 December and approved the very next day by the All-Union Central Executive Committee of the USSR. By April 1934, the draft was law across the entire Soviet Union. Making homosexuality a criminal offence, punishable with up to five years imprisonment, was a triumph for the backward traditions of old Russia, as embodied in the prejudices of the bureaucracy – and these prejudices reached right to the top in the person of Stalin himself. However, getting the law applied as firmly as Yagoda had wished proved difficult. Both in the medical world and the judiciary, more than a decade of legalised homosexuality had left its mark. Many doctors, psychiatrists, lawyers, and judges accepted as right and natural that homosexuality should be legal.

Nikolai Krylenko, People’s Commissar of Justice, made a speech to the Central Executive Committee to make it clear that all homosexuals were to be treated as class enemies and criminals. It is worth quoting a section of his speech, which gives a taste of the bureaucracy’s rampant homophobia:

In our environment, in the environment of the workers taking the point of view of normal relations between the sexes, who are building their society on healthy principles, we don’t need little gentlemen of this type. Who then for the most part are our customers in these affairs? Workers? No! Declassed rabble. [Mirthful animation in the hall, laughter] Declassed rabble, either from the dregs of society or from the remnants of the exploiting classes. [Applause] They don’t know which way to turn. [Laughter] So, they turn to … pederasty [Laughter].[22]

The reversal of previous policy on male homosexuality and repression of Soviet homosexuals was one result of a conservative bureaucracy, fearful of any divergence from accepted dogma. The terms in which the anti-homosexual drive was expressed included the supposed discovery of Nazi espionage networks infiltrating homosexual circles in Moscow, Leningrad, and other Soviet cities. These accusations were totally false and paralleled those made in the mass trials taking place in Moscow during the same period, where the accused were also charged with working for Nazi Germany.

Stalin would discover, however, that homosexuality cannot be decreed out of existence. An example of the difficulties Stalin had in overcoming concern among European Communist Party members at the reactionary turn in the Soviet Union is provided by the experience of a member of the Communist Party of Great Britain who was working in Moscow at the Moscow Daily News. Harry Whyte, a gay man living with a Russian gay partner, wrote a letter to Stalin asking him how he could justify the new law. In his letter, Whyte pointed out how the new law was cancelling all the progress that had been made in such matters after the revolution. Whyte, a loyal party member, believed that homosexuals genuinely involved in counter-revolutionary activities should be prosecuted, but could not accept that the actions of a few meant homosexuality should be illegal.

Although Stalin considered Whyte, “an idiot and a degenerate”, such protests alerted Stalin to the need for a propaganda campaign to sway public opinion. Here he called on the help of someone who was of good standing internationally, the writer, Maxim Gorky. Gorky hurriedly wrote ‘Proletarian Humanism’, an article published in both Pravda and Izvestia in May 1934. The article was rabidly homophobic, presenting homosexuality as a bourgeois disease, an expression of fascist degeneration. The slogan Gorky proposed was: “Destroy homosexuals – Fascism will disappear”.[23]

Hundreds of thousands of homosexuals ended up in Stalin’s prisons and Gulags condemned to forced labour. Paradoxically, imprisoning large numbers of men and women in camps actually increased the numbers involved in same-sex love, with the regime fearing to release Gulag inmates as they could ‘infect’ wider society with the ‘corrupting’ influence of homosexuality! Lesbians fared worse, many were declared mentally ill and sent to ‘psychiatric’ hospitals for ‘treatment’, which meant forced mind-numbing medication and shock therapy.

The reactionary recriminalisation of homosexuality by the Stalinist bureaucracy had a negative impact of historic proportions on the struggle against the oppression of lesbians and homosexuals, and served to isolate them from the labour movement for decades. This had not always been the case. The KPD prior to the rise of Hitler in 1933 was in favour of homosexual emancipation, and it would have been unimaginable to members of that party that anti-gay laws similar to those introduced by Hitler would be adopted in the Soviet Union. Soon, the Stalinist Communist International was permeated with homophobia, with homosexuals seen as degenerates. The leaders of the social democratic parties and trade unions did nothing to challenge these views, accepting bourgeois morality rather than fighting against prejudice and oppression.

12.5 Growing Conservatism – The 1936 ‘Family Law’

In societies where the family is the economic unit responsible for raising the next generation, it is observed that women are less independent and there is less tolerance of varieties of sexuality.[24] With the ongoing isolation of the revolution and the resulting material scarcity made worse by the greed of the bureaucracy, the Soviet government increasingly sought instruments to alleviate the resulting social problems. The family was an obvious choice. The attack on homosexuality had been an initial move in a reactionary policy that would reassert the family’s traditional role. If suitably bribed and cajoled, the family might also remedy the shortfall in population growth. In contrast to the 1920s, party policy promoted the strong ‘socialist’ family, stressing its importance for raising children and imbuing in them a proper sense of obedience.

The famine of 1931-1933 resulted in millions of homeless children, and the new attitude of the authorities could be seen in the press where those fleeing famine were portrayed as culprits not victims. Incrementally, the state enacted measures that moved away from collective upbringing of children. Cost effectiveness arguments supported the new ideological considerations. The family cared for children more cheaply than the state. It was expensive to care for a child in a state institution, whereas it was cheaper to provide state aid to foster parents and to provide hostel accommodation and family assistance enabling single mothers to retain their children. The traditional family hugely benefited the government by reducing numbers in children’s homes, and of besprizorniki on the streets.

As the traditional family was increasingly promoted, the state fostered the idea that the family was a single economic unit, simultaneously pronouncing that it was a woman’s social duty to have more children while burdening them with the responsibility for caring for those children. Parents abandoning their children were subject to criminal prosecution and made to pay towards the cost if their child was placed in a state home. At the same time, the physical disciplining of children, smacking and beating – strongly discouraged in the early years of the Revolution – began to make a comeback. Soon, only when there were visible physical injuries (bruises, broken bones, or death) would the authorities act.

This turn to the family, known as the ‘Great Retreat’ from the radical positions of the previous decade, horrified many rank and file party members. However, Stalin lent his personal prestige, name, image, and relatives to the campaign for the new strong ‘socialist’ family. Photos of the ‘Father of his People’ appeared in the press looking with deep affection at his own healthy, happy offspring, while introducing, in April 1935, the death penalty for criminals over the age of twelve. Two months later parents became legally responsible for the actions of their offspring. In June 1935, Komsomol’skaya Pravda in a leading editorial headed ‘Filial Duty’ declared its approval for a vertical, hierarchical family structure. It not only turned its previous view on its head but declared it to have been “uncommunist” and “foreign”. Contrary to what it had said in the 1920s, it now argued that children in state institutions were being emotionally damaged by being deprived of their mother’s affection.[25] Bolshevik intentions to liquidate the family were now presented as a “weapon in the war against socialism”.[26]

As the bureaucracy determined that a new ‘socialist’ family would provide islands of calm in a sea of chaotic mismanagement, so the political symbolism of the family was reconfigured. The individual family was now presented as an integral part of the Soviet national ‘great family’ – quite the opposite perspective from those who drew up the 1926 Code in expectation of the withering away of the family. Stalin was presented as the stern, but loving, father, husband, and grandfather of the people, and head of the Soviet family – a conscious attempt to transform Soviet society from collective camaraderie to patriarchal family. The Stalinist regime promoted the family as both a political symbol and policy instrument, but the family it endorsed was altogether different from that promoted after the revolution because it had different objectives.

Now the history of Soviet women’s liberation was rewritten. The crucial factor was no longer the October Revolution and the measures taken under Lenin. The real starting point was Stalin’s launch of the First FYP. The October Revolution was framed as making no real changes to the day-to-day lives of most women who continued, for example, to suffer physical abuse at the hands of their husbands. It was the FYPs that took them out of the home and gave them paid employment and provided them with childcare.

There had been a sharp fall in birth rates between 1928 and 1935 from 45 live births per 1,000 people to 30, coinciding with a corresponding increase in abortions. With no other means accessible, abortion was the primary means of regulating the birth rate.[27] In 1934 the government, alarmed at falling birth rates and the failure of Soviet population figures to show the robust growth expected under socialism, tightened up existing restrictions on abortion and introduced measures designed to boost the birth rate.

In 1935, the government made three revisions to its abortion regulations:

  1. Curettage without anaesthetic was prescribed as the only lawful method;
  2. A doctor could only abort a woman’s first pregnancy if the woman insisted after the doctor had explained its dangers and described the procedure used;
  3. A doctor could not perform an abortion more than twelve weeks after conception, or within six months of a previous abortion. Though it was still permitted to perform an abortion for medical reasons (i.e., the pregnancy endangered the woman’s life).

These measures obviously had some effect. Official statistics indicate that, between 1934 and 1935, the number of reported births increased 23 per cent, while the number of abortions per 100 births decreased 18 per cent.

Possibly in an effort to turn public attention away from what were unpopular measures, the government trumpeted how it was ensuring children were not neglected through the failure of divorced men to pay alimony, that the secret police had been put in charge of finding absconders and bringing them to court, and that alimony payments were to be deducted at source. This campaign, allegedly against male irresponsibility, was extended to include too frequent and easy divorces, preparing the way to make divorce more difficult. In 1935-36 a progressive tax on divorce was introduced: 50, 150 and 300 roubles for the first, second and subsequent divorces. The law also ended ‘quickie’ divorces by requiring the personal appearance of both parties before a ZAGS. Details were published in the local press to stigmatise divorced people, especially women. State employees who divorced could not expect promotion.

During 1935, all media outlets ran articles preparing their readers for a U-turn on abortion laws. On 28 May 1935, Pravda presented abortion rights in Europe as “barbarian capitalists … depriving their women of what is most dear to them: their right to childbirth”. Now it was argued that in the 1920s abortion had been allowed only because of the material poverty of the country and desperate plight of women. Conditions had improved, living conditions were better, and the childcare provided by the state meant there was no need to deprive women of the joys of motherhood – therefore abortion was a violation of a woman’s right to choose.

The evidence strongly suggests that the substantial majority of those seeking abortions were married mothers, secure in their jobs, responding to the new opportunities opening to them in education and employment. For example, the nearly 3 million peasant women who came to the cities and entered the workforce between 1932 and 1934 had powerful motivations for limiting family size. Living in crowded apartments with both partners working long shifts, it was not surprising that they chose to limit the number of children they had.

On 26 May 1936, the draft family law, ‘On the Protection of Motherhood and Childhood’, appeared on the front page of Pravda with an appeal to begin a public discussion of the proposals in the press, in factories, and collective farms. Two days later, a second article in Pravda provided a guide for party members. It presented the proposed law as enabling the love of children and the joy of parenthood to be realised. The author attempted to explain why this new emphasis on the permanence of the family was completely at odds with earlier ideas that the family would wither away. It appears it was enemies of the people who had introduced “the foul and poisonous idea of liquidating the family and disrupting marriage”.[28] When Krylenko, former Commissar of Justice, was arrested, one of the many charges against him was that he had advocated the withering away of the family under socialism.

Given the secretive manner in which this government made its policy decisions, the announcement of a public discussion was a surprise. However, the great and open debate that preceded the 1926 Code, from October 1925 to November 1926 was, of course, impossible under the new regime. It was also quite clear the party tops did not want an open discussion that genuinely involved the urban and peasant masses because that would not have given them the result they wanted. The proposed code was to be disseminated, meetings arranged, discussions to take place and reports submitted, all within one month.

The draft law dealt with four main topics: abortion, divorce, child support, and rewards for mothers of many children. The most contentious was the proposal to take away a women’s right to choose. This was the hot topic as was discussed in factory meetings, in canteens, on trains, and in queues. Public opinion was heavily opposed. A foreign visitor reported that when “free discussion” of the issue took place, women party members “in particular came forward and vigorously condemned the proposed law”.[29] The official debate in the press, magazines, and on the radio ignored the question of a woman’s rights and concentrated on motherhood being a “great and honourable duty”, a social act and civic obligation, an act of patriotism, and not a “private affair”.[30]

This was the period following the Kirov assassination, when the press was full of stories about unearthing opposition cells, and counter-revolutionary terrorism. What is very significant is that the strength of opinion amongst women – especially young women – was so strong that party papers were forced to publish a limited number of letters and articles against the ban. These letters explained that only when the country had adequate daycare and laundries should abortion be made illegal. However, such views were invariably submerged in a wave of articles and letters which extolled the happiness of large families, the joys of motherhood, and the horrors of abortion. Trud’s reports of factory meetings that discussed the draft presented the discussions as heavily focused on the abortion issue, with few supporting the draft bill and most opposed. But such reports were always accompanied by editorials that took a firm anti-abortion stance.

These reports featured a glaring absence from the many professional women who had embraced a concept of women’s emancipation which did not define them as wives and mothers, and who had every intention of choosing when (and if) to give birth. Such women had been visible and vocal in the 1920s, often in connection with Zhenotdel. Women’s entry into higher education and the professions meant women occupied some 10 per cent of senior administrative posts, about the same as in the 1920s. But in the 1930s, subject to increasingly patriarchal attitudes, they now had a much lower public presence.

When the decree on abortion became law on 27 June, it was substantially the same as the draft, meaning that the evident public unease, especially among women, about a total prohibition on abortion was disregarded. The new law produced a noticeable increase in the urban birth rate from under twenty-five per thousand in 1935 to almost thirty-one per thousand in 1940.[31]

The law stated:

In view of the proven harm of abortions … The performance of abortions shall be allowed exclusively in those cases when the continuation of pregnancy endangers the life or threatens serious injury to the health of the pregnant woman and equally when a serious disease of the parents can be inherited, and only under hospital or maternity home conditions.[32]

The sanction for a physician who violated the regulations was imprisonment for one to two years. Someone without proper medical qualifications who performed an abortion, and persons “forcing” women to have abortions, could be imprisoned for three years. The women themselves were to be shamed by being “exposed to public contempt”, usually at their workplace, and fined for repeat offences. The pressures on party members, even Lenin’s wife, can be seen by Krupskaya’s preface to the pamphlet, The New Law and Mother and Child, where she defended the abortion, arguing that they were the logical culmination of a consistent policy pursued since 1920 to do away with the reasons to have an abortion.[33] One result was, as could be expected, a substantial increase in the number of illegal abortions, accompanied by a sharp upturn in abortion-related morbidity and mortality.

The ‘shortfall’ in the birth rate was confirmed in the 6 January 1937 Soviet Census. The population of the Soviet Union was much less than expected. The Census results were classified, its authors jailed and shot.[34] From now on the Soviet media hailed pregnancy as a wondrous event, going so far as to claim women who had frequent pregnancies were rewarded with good health and looked young, while those who had abortions endangered their health and looked old beyond their years. Now, not only those awarded an ‘Order’ could walk to the head of a queue, pregnant women and nursing mothers were also given preferential treatment.

In Magnitogorsk many, possibly most, of the high-tech jobs requiring concentration, dexterity and consistency were generally done by women in their twenties. These were the mill and crane operators, controlling 10,000 horsepower (7 Megawatt) electric motors, working in control booths “as clean as the operating room in a good hospital”.[35] Scott makes the point that after the 1936 anti-abortion law was passed, maternity leave became a serious factor affecting steel production.[36]

The child support paid by a divorced father was formalised: one third of his salary for one child, 50 per cent for two and 60 per cent for three or more. Non-payment was punishable by up to two years in prison. However, for most workers their wages could not support two families, and cases were often resolved by the father’s new family adopting the children of the old. Soviet criminologists estimated that half of infanticides were fathers killing their children to avoid paying child support. This could not be admitted so these murders were classed as due to mental disorders, not social conditions.

Mothers were to receive increased child allowance, doubled from five to ten roubles per month per child, pregnancy leave increased to four months, no loss of pay for nursing mothers, on the birth of a seventh child the mother was to receive cash payments of 2,000 roubles a year – a substantial amount – for five years, with additional payments for each additional child up to the eleventh. Such measures were, understandably, hailed by communists and progressives throughout the capitalist world as exemplary, and welcomed as the benefits of a soviet regime for women.

The press conveyed the notion that, led by the Communist Party under the wise guidance of Joseph Stalin, Soviet mothers across the USSR found their lives easier than ever before because of the care and support accorded them by the regime. The media propagated the image of Stalin as the benevolent father at the head of a national family in which women would achieve the greatest personal fulfilment by raising children, interspersed with periods on the production line. This pronatalism was a mockery of the actual conditions of the great majority of Soviet women who had to endure an immense burden when caring for their children while working long hours and living in appalling conditions. Financial hardship and overwork had no place in the official portrayal of motherhood, which promoted that it was not just a woman’s biological destiny but also the epitome of her personal happiness.

Men were included in the campaign, urged to help with childcare and housework, to accept that marriage was an equal partnership between men and women. This was accompanied by an extensive campaign by women to thank Stalin that peaked on International Women’s Day, and to underscore the relationship he was addressed using the familiar “ty” rather than the formal “vy”. Women thanked Stalin for the “extraordinary improvement in their cultural and material position”.[37] The aim was to project Stalin as the champion of women’s rights and guarantor of their new positions. However, this was all very ambiguous since it was not grounded in the reality of Soviet life, undermined by the bureaucratic promotion of the family and motherhood.

Parents were given greater responsibility for their children, liable to fines up to 200 roubles for juvenile hooliganism or mischief and even sent to prison alongside their children. The state decreed if parents failed to supervise their children adequately, it had the right to remove the children and place them in a children’s home at parental expense. Family responsibility was extended so that if a father died or disappeared and the mother had insufficient means of support, minor children had the right to obtain maintenance from financially secure grandparents or older siblings.[38]

The 1936 Family Law was the defining moment that formalised the qualitative change in policy towards the family. The Marxist perspective of the state assuming responsibility for eliminating the drudgery of family life was abandoned. The commitment to individual freedom and the withering away of the family was replaced with a policy based on repression and the strengthening of the family unit. In The Revolution Betrayed, Trotsky described the changes of 1936 as a “sexual thermidor”, and that the October Revolution had, to the best of its ability, fulfilled its obligations to women and made “an heroic effort to destroy the so-called family hearth”.[39] But the laws of the mid-thirties prohibiting abortion, impeding divorce, and punishing parents marked “the triumphal rehabilitation of the family … it is hard to measure with the eye the scope of this retreat”.[40] Trotsky also challenged the party’s stereotype of “the joys of motherhood”, arguing that it would be truer to say that in the conditions existing in the Soviet Union, childbirth was more likely to be a threat. He concluded: “The Thermidorean legislation is beating a retreat to bourgeois models, covering its retreat with false speeches about the sacredness of the ‘new’ family”.[41]

In Trotsky’s view, the legislation of 1936 amounted to legislation against women. For him, the rehabilitation of the bourgeois model of the family was one more indicator of the material and cultural bankruptcy of Stalin and the bureaucracy, and a dangerous step towards reimposing capitalism:

The possible roads to the restoration of the bourgeois system are revealed with particular clarity in the question of the family. Since the bureaucracy, as a consequence both of the low material and cultural level of the country and of the throttling of the initiative of the masses, has not succeeded in fulfilling the tasks of social maintenance and upbringing, it has begun to re-establish and glorify the petty-bourgeois family, including its narrow private economy – that fostering soil of all species of social idiocy. But the family raises with particular sharpness the question of the right of inheritance. The bureaucracy itself, which endeavours to base itself politically upon the conservative family, feels its own domination to be defective and incomplete, for it is not in a position to bequeath its material privileges to its successors. The question of the right of inheritance leads, however, to the question of the further extension of the bounds of private property. This is one of the possible channels of the restoration of capitalism. In all fields of social life, the bureaucracy imperils everything that is progressive in the Soviet system. Instead of the guardian of ‘socialist property,’ it becomes its gravedigger.[42]

The bureaucracy declared the Woman Question “solved” under conditions that blatantly pointed to the opposite. Specifically, women were no longer to have control of their own bodies, the bourgeois family was revived and re-named the “socialist” family, and women’s double burden no longer considered of any real significance. The image of women presented in the official press was in harmony with the rehabilitation of the family. The Soviet woman was supposed to exhibit certain “natural” traits and behavioural patterns suitable for domesticity and childcare, while being an exemplary worker and fully participating in the political arena.

In the 1920s one of the main revolutionary goals, that of equality, was to be realised in both the public and private spheres. Personal relations were to be built upon equal partnerships of women and men, something that would be a bulwark against domestic violence. But the restitution of traditional family values strengthened lingering reactionary male attitudes. As the Soviet Union headed for collapse Rabotnitsa and Krest’ianka (Peasant Woman) were printing an increasing number of letters from female readers reporting abuse at the hands of their husbands, with women who attempted to assert their rights within the home increasingly subject to beatings by angry men.[43]

12.6 Cosmetics and Fashion Trends

A major objective immediately post-revolution was the emancipation of women, to show women had a life in addition to being a mother. This was pursued by attempting to provide the resources necessary to allow women to lead that life, without removing the concept or worth of motherhood. How this happened can be tracked through Soviet history in, for example, fashion and advertising posters. Because the Bolsheviks considered women to be the most oppressed element of pre-revolutionary society, female figures in posters, art, and cinema were meant to contrast the new with the old. The images representing Soviet women emphasised the equality, hopes, and expectations of working women. But with the new orientation towards the ‘socialist’ family, female characters in party propaganda began to draw on pre-Bolshevik gender roles to legitimise the sacrifice of women’s needs to the industrialisation of the country, integrating the roles of mother, wife, and housekeeper with working in a factory or collective farm. Influential mediums used to introduce this new perspective were fashion and cosmetics.

In 1921, the Soviet government nationalised the private companies to establish TeZhe as the state manufacturer of soaps and cosmetics. TeZhe was important in establishing a new standard of popular hygiene. Its sales and activities were intended to support Soviet political and socio-cultural initiatives and it initially focused on mass production of basic soap. “Hygiene – to the masses!” was a popular slogan carried into homes with every soap bar, its packaging designed to convince Soviet citizens to take “correct and rational care of their bodies”. Sold below cost price and referred to as “people’s soap”, basic soaps were widely available and affordable at one kopek per bar.

TeZhe established salons and shops to sell its products and teach hygiene fundamentals such as the need to wash regularly and to brush one’s teeth. The target was the general population, but in practice women responded much better than men. TeZhe’s activities included an extensive programme of school visits to provide mandatory talks on hygiene, often supplemented by the sales of “hygiene packs” of tooth powder and highly scented soap.

TeZhe’s advertising was an integral part of state propaganda, with the same overall goal of modernising attitudes and being culturally uplifting by educating the public on hygiene, convincing them that they needed to be physically clean, transforming them into “civilised Soviet citizens”. The public images used to represent Soviet women underwent important changes meant to symbolise the transformation from backwardness to modernity. The models used in advertising were invariably women, the most popular being a female aviator wearing a leather jacket or a woman worker in an assertive pose, both sporting a red scarf – images of women whose strength and vitality would ensure the success of the new society and women’s place in it. Featuring women workers in the advertisements was also meant to suggest that access to the advertised goods was available to those who contributed productively to society.

Officially, women were praised as embodying the virtues and achievements of the Soviet Union. Women were, of course, expected to show their gratitude to Stalin, the father figure, but this served primarily to legitimise the regime – her liberation symbolising Soviet progress. However, such propaganda also provided women with a yardstick against which to measure the reality of their lives.[44] There was thus a constant tension between public slogans and private lives which would grow and eventually develop into an unbridgeable chasm – an important factor in undermining public support for the bureaucracy.

In 1932, Polina Zhemchuzhina, the wife of the then Chair of the Council of People’s Commissars, Vyacheslav Molotov (later Foreign Minister), was appointed to manage TeZhe. She quickly set a new tone for the industry making women the target for TeZhe’s products.[45] TeZhe’s advertising now emphasised women’s responsibilities as wife and mother, to organise her household while presenting a “pleasant appearance”.[46] Zhemchuzhina belonged to Stalin’s inner circle and had acted as hostess at state parties held in the Kremlin. The secret police kept very close watch on anyone who was close to Stalin and reported to him Zhemchuzhina’s encounters with her many lovers. In yet one more example of his vindictiveness, Stalin had these reports circulated to the Politburo members, of whom Molotov was one.

In a speech on 1 December 1935, Stalin coined the phrase: “Life has become better, comrades; life has become more cheerful.”[47] He was marking a change in orientation that had begun with ending the bread ration at the beginning of 1935. This was presented to the workers as the end of hunger and the advent of plenty. But, like so much in a bureaucratic society, the bounty lessened the nearer the workforce. In practice, de-rationing bread meant an increase in its price, with the promised compensatory pay rises often less than expected and arriving late. Stalin’s slogan was a propaganda exercise meant for the nomenklatura.[48] For these people, it meant a move toward a new tolerance of top people enjoying the fruits of their labour.[49]

Despite resource limitations, the Soviet cosmetics industry grew significantly during the Second FYP. Its manufacturing focus shifted from the provision of basic soaps to include creams, makeup, and perfumes. By 1935, TeZhe produced fifty-five colognes and fifty-two perfumes, the top-of-the-range Red Moscow was judged the equal of Chanel No. 5, launched about the same time. The new products were meant to reflect the new reality of the lives of the nomenklatura, so they tended to be sold in luxurious shops concentrated in capital cities. From the mid-1930s, TeZhe advertising presented new female role models, the wives of party functionaries and intelligentsia, educated and well-versed in etiquette and culture. These images were more feminised, accentuating female forms with scarves used as a fashion accessory, not a political statement.[50]

The new attitude was featured in an article ‘Once Again on Beauty and Culture’ in Rabotnitsa, presenting beauty as both a right and a duty:

… a woman should always take care of herself, her face and body, her nails and skin, and her attire. It doesn’t take much time… In the past, burdened by childcare, hard labour, and poverty, women could not care for themselves. But in our country a woman has an opportunity to care for her face, body, and costume. Design ateliers create new beautiful dresses. Factories produce new colourful fabrics. Trusts enrich shops with goods for body care. An equal participant in the building of a new beautiful life, a Soviet woman can and should use everything that culture has to offer. A Soviet woman must be fresh, healthy, and beautiful.[51]

In 1937, Rabotnitsa, with apparent approval, described how women workers from the subway-building organisation Metrostroi rushed to put on makeup and change into evening clothes at the end of the working day. The new official recognition of femininity promoted an attractive style of dressing, confirming the traditional role of women. Being pretty was not an option – once again, it was a duty. Firm gender boundaries were being reinstated, returning to traditional patterns of womanhood – a public display of the victory of the bureaucracy and an additional burden on women.

The Soviet government’s stress on the importance of the nuclear family, with its significant emphasis on being mother and wife, strongly influenced fashion designers. Fashion was reassessed and transformed with a new tolerance of elements of a bourgeois lifestyle.[52] The new dress styles – the public face of the change – received much attention. “Moscow is dressing well”, was the headline of an article in Trud, 4 May 1934, reflecting that party tops were doing their bit to popularise the image of the well-dressed bureaucrat by wearing fashionable suits rather than the plain styles preferred in the 1920s. That this was an officially approved project was confirmed by the photographs appearing on the front pages of newspapers, showing nattily dressed Politburo members. The wives of CC members invited to Kremlin banquets by Zhemchuzhina received instructions that they should appear “looking like women” and dress accordingly.[53] Amongst the nomenklatura, silk stockings costing more than the month’s pay for factory women were all the vogue. Clothing that previously would have earned a rebuke for “bourgeois degeneracy” was now quite acceptable, even desirable.

The typical image of a female party member of the early Soviet period was a Nadezhda Krupskaya or Konkordiia Samoilova – plain and stern, principled and selfless. By the mid-1930s these had been largely replaced by more ‘cheerful’ and less militant women, with permanent waves, fur-collared coats, and stylish hats. This altered imagery, feminised without being too overtly sexualised, was in keeping with a new emphasis amongst the nomenklatura on grooming and external appearance.[54]

Women in advertisements were now depicted not only as female workers but also as young, scantily-dressed women playing sports. Stalinism accentuated the female form and introduced a more traditional, pre-revolutionary version of the feminine look. The new orientation was part of a shift toward the new consumerism, with greater tolerance of people openly enjoying themselves.[55] The new approach to goods, clothes, and fashion tolerated by the new, younger layer of the nomenklatura who were eager to show off their enhanced social position on the basis of “if you’ve got it, flaunt it”. All kinds of leisure activities were encouraged: carnivals, fêtes, visits to trade exhibitions in the major cities displaying goods (such as contraceptives) not available to the ordinary citizen, with dancing to jazz bands especially popular. The nomenklatura was provided with a uniform and were immediately recognisable by their neat dark blue suits.

For the nomenklatura, the new world offered a range of privileges. Those who could afford it could join the revival of Moscow restaurant life, could patronise the Metropole Hotel, where “live starlets swam in a pool right in the centre of the restaurant hall”.[56] The prices in the restaurants patronised by the ‘new elite’ were well out of reach of ordinary citizens, but the nomenklatura could charge their own entertainment to the state in various ways, primarily entertaining foreign dignitaries. They also enjoyed a range of other perks, such as holidays, housing, dachas (country homes with tennis courts and swimming pools), exclusive vacation resorts, and sanatoria to which they travelled by rail in separate, ‘soft’ coaches with upholstered seats, rather than the planks on which ordinary Soviet citizens sat. Accommodation was also provided, which to Western eyes were modest, but having one’s own toilet was a great luxury in the eyes of the average Soviet citizen who didn’t. Nomenklatura children attended special summer holiday camps, differentiated by the rank of their parents. The costs of these perks were met by enterprises under the banner of ‘administrative expenses’. For the masses, film (‘talkies’) was the new medium, closely followed by football, which thrived in new modern stadiums built with funds from trade unions, the army, and the secret police. The latter funded Moscow Dynamo which, to this day, is referred to by supporters of other clubs as “garbage” – slang for “police”.

Access to food, and possibly clothing, more than anything else defined social position. During the worst periods of scarcity, the regime had made special arrangements to feed its own. But now other beneficiaries were given access. Engineers were among the first group to receive special privileges, understandably, given their essential contribution to the industrialisation drive. They were soon to be followed by writers, composers, architects, painters, actors, singers, and other members of the creative intelligentsia. Food privileges took many forms. Starting in the late 1920s, senior party and government officials received special rations. The system was rigidly differentiated. Take the example of a married couple, senior party officials of different ranks who would receive quite different food packages in different ways. One, a senior official in the Comintern, had a food package delivered twice a month – butter, cheese, sweets, and canned goods. There were also special holiday parcels, with caviar, smoked and cured fish, chocolate, cheese, and butter. The others on a lower rung of the Moscow party hierarchy had to collect their smaller package and pay for it.[57]

There were separate networks of closed stores for the most senior staff in industry, the military, the secret police, and party officials, spread across the Soviet Union. These stores stocked, in addition to basic foods, luxuries such as sausages, eggs, shoes, soap, and even dried fruit and perfumes. Access was by rank – the higher the rank needed for entry the lower the prices of the goods. For those at the very top, you simply took what you wanted and paid nothing.

These strictly hierarchical layers of privilege were intended to drown any lingering moral principles about social equality, of treating material benefits as secondary to social and intellectual values, to kill any lingering “ultra-left” or “petty-bourgeois” commitment to egalitarianism or achieving socialism.

The perks and privileges of the nomenklatura had been closely hidden from public view and generally they remained in the shadows, largely unreported. The intelligentsia and artists, however, took centre-stage and their profligate lifestyles were reported widely in the press with every sense of approval. Of course, there were numerous party officials whose lifestyles were so scandalous as to draw public attention to themselves. Fitzpatrick lists the activities of one G. P. Savenko, director of a coke-chemical plant who employed an entourage of “his own people” at top rates and paid them enormous bonuses. Savenko also spent huge sums on lavish banquets, in sharp contrast to the miserly amount made available for workers’ housing, and other “worthy causes”.[58] Savenko was doing what his fellow bureaucrats everywhere were doing, but too blatantly and paid the price by being denounced as an “enemy of the people”. Great play was made in the press over such individuals, who were the target of many articles in Pravda, other official organs, and local newspapers. The behaviour described was characteristic, as most readers surely knew, of a good many party officials.

The growth of privilege brought an accompanying change in the self-perception of the privileged. A psychology of social exclusivity developed that endorsed and justified the privileges received, and the separation of the privileged from the masses of workers and peasants. One such perk that particularly annoyed factory workers was the hierarchical divisions in factory canteens. One dining room for top management, a second for middle management and the Stakhanovites, and a third for rank and file workers. In the first two dining rooms the quantity, though possibly not the quality, of the food was considerably better, even double helpings. The more the rank and file workers protested, the more disdainful and fearful became the attitude towards the lower strata. In this, incidentally, we see confirmation of Trotsky’s analysis that one aim of the bureaucracy in fostering the Stakhanovite movement was the creation of a new labour and kolkhoz aristocracy to strengthen its social base.[59]

Many who had participated in the October Revolution, who had fought in the civil war in defence of the Soviet regime, despite misgivings, despite the hardships suffered by themselves and their families, could continue to support the regime by pointing to the rapid progress being made towards an industrial society. In the new cities, the mud huts and wooden shanties of 1931 had given way by 1938 to sturdy, multi-storey, concrete apartment blocks with an electricity supply that could, mostly, be relied on. Open sewage pits were things of the past. Muddy tracks were replaced by well-lit, paved streets. There were public libraries, theatres, cinemas, ballroom dancing, football pitches, medical facilities, colleges, and schools. To the masses these were seen as proof of genuine progress towards a socialist society. Progress was being made despite the presence of the bureaucracy, but there was a growing social divergence that would, in time, destroy the economic basis of the Soviet Union.

Endnotes

[1] See L. Trotsky, Writings of Leon Trotsky 1937-38, Pathfinder Press, 1975.

[2] Ibid, p. 129.

[3] See J. Stalin, ‘New Tasks in Economic Construction’.

[4] V. Rogovin, 1937: Stalin’s Year of Terror, Mehring Books, 1998, p. 141.

[5] J. Stalin, ‘The Results of the First Five-Year Plan’.

[6] J. Degras, The Communist International 1919-1943, Routledge, 1971, p. 359.

[7] J. Stalin, ‘Constitution (Fundamental Law) of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics’. Marxists Internet Archive. Available at: https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/stalin/works/1936/12/05.htm (accessed 2 February 2023).

[8] J. Stalin, ‘Report to the Seventeenth Party Congress on the Work of the Central Committee of the CPSU(B.)’, 1934, CW , Vol. 13, p. 374.

[9] See G. Dimitroff, ‘The Fascist Offensive, and Unity of the Working Class against Fascism’.

[10] Quoted in J. Burnham, The People’s Front: The New Betrayal, 1937. Available at: https://www.marxists.org/history/etol/writers/burnham/1937/xx/popfront.htm (accessed 2 February 2023).

[11] J. Stalin, History of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (Bolsheviks). Available at: https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/stalin/works/1939/x01/ch12.htm (accessed 2 February 2023).

[12] See A. Smith, I Was a Soviet Worker.

[13] See J. Wright, The Crisis in the Soviet Union.

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

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

[16] See ibid.

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

[18] J. Scott, Beyond the Urals, Indiana University Press, 1942, p. 84.

[19] Komsomolskaya Pravda, October 1988.

[20] See C. Chatterjee, Soviet Heroines and Public Identity, 1930-1939.

[21] F. Weston, ‘From Emancipation to Criminalisation: Stalinist Persecution of Homosexuals from 1934’, In Defence of Marxism, 2018. Available at: https://www.marxist.com/from-emancipation-to-criminalisation-stalinist-persecution-of-homosexuals-from-1934.htm (accessed 2 February 2023).

[22] Quoted ibid.

[23] Ibid.

[24] See K. Ghodsee, Why Women have Better Sex Under Socialism and Other Arguments for Economic Independence.

[25] See G. Lapidus, Women in Soviet Society, University of California Press, 1978.

[26] Quoted ibid, p. 112.

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

[28] Quoted in G. Lapidus, Women in Soviet Society, University of California Press, 1978, p. 112.

[29] A. Weissberg, The Accused, Simon & Schuster, 1952, p. 521.

[30] See C. Chatterjee, Soviet Heroines and Public Identity, 1930-1939.

[31] See S. Fitzpatrick, Everyday Stalinism: Soviet Russia in the 1930s.

[32] Quoted in L. Kaminsky, ‘Utopian Visions of Family Life in the Stalin-Era Soviet Union’, Central European History, Vol. 44, 2011, pp. 63-91.

[33] See N. Krupskaya, Preface to The New Law on Mother and Child.

[34] See L. Kaminsky, ‘Utopian Visions of Family Life in the Stalin-Era Soviet Union’.

[35] J. Scott, Beyond the Urals, Indiana University Press, 1942, pp. 143-4.

[36] See ibid.

[37] See C. Chatterjee, Soviet Heroines and Public Identity, 1930-1939.

[38] See M. Savage, ‘The Law on Abortion in the USSR’.

[39] L. Trotsky, The Revolution Betrayed, Wellred Books, 2015, p. 103.

[40] Ibid, p. 108.

[41] Ibid, pp. 112-3.

[42] L. Trotsky, Writings of Leon Trotsky 1935-36, Pathfinder Press, 1975, p. 357.

[43] See M. Murayev, ‘Family Violence in Soviet Russia’.

[44] See C. Chatterjee, Soviet Heroines and Public Identity, 1930-1939.

[45] See O. Kravets, and O. Sandıkçı, ‘Marketing for Socialism: Soviet Cosmetics in the 1930s’.

[46] See S. Reid, ‘All Stalin’s Women: Gender and Power in Soviet Art of the 1930s’.

[47] J. Stalin, ‘Speech at a Conference of Combine-Harvest Operators’, 1935. Available at: https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/stalin/works/1935/12/01.htm (accessed 2 February 2023).

[48] The system whereby influential posts in government and industry were filled by party appointees.

[49] See S. Fitzpatrick, Everyday Stalinism.

[50] See O. Kravets, and O. Sandıkçı, ‘Marketing for Socialism: Soviet Cosmetics in the 1930s’, Business History Review, 87(3), 2013, pp. 461-87.

[51] Quoted ibid.

[52] See V. Dunham, In Stalin’s Time: Middle Class Values in Soviet Fiction.

[53] See S. Fitzpatrick, Everyday Stalinism.

[54] See ibid.

[55] See A. Baimamadova, ‘USSR, Degenderization, Femininity and Fashion in 1920-1940s’.

[56] S. Fitzpatrick, Everyday Stalinism, Oxford University Press, 2000, p. 90.

[57] See ibid.

[58] See ibid, p. 196.

[59] See L. Trotsky, Writings of Leon Trotsky 1937-38.