6. The Growth of Inequality and Social Antagonisms¶
Core Argument¶
Chapter 6: The Growth of Inequality and Social Antagonisms¶
The Soviet Union’s abandonment of planned distribution and return to market relations in 1935 unleashed a dramatic growth in inequality, fundamentally reshaping the social landscape. While piecework systems promised future abundance through rising productivity, they simultaneously widened the chasm between a privileged minority and a majority living in want. The bureaucracy’s own official complaints inadvertently reveal the extremity of these contrasts: housing plans for workers were only 55.7 percent fulfilled, while new buildings for dignitaries included rooms for domestic servants. Luxury goods, limousines, and fine perfumes were produced for the elite, while basic items like bread and cotton shirts remained scarce or of poor quality for ordinary workers. Real wage data is deliberately obscured, but the “average” wage masks cruel inequality: Stakhanovists could earn twenty to thirty times more than lower-category workers, and specialist salaries sometimes equalled the pay of eighty to a hundred unskilled labourers. The Soviet Union had surpassed capitalist countries in the scope of wage inequality.
The seven-hour day was increasingly sacrificed to higher productivity, while skilled workers expended hours in a supplementary struggle for existence. Tractor men and combine operators, a notorious aristocracy, owned their own cows and pigs; in Kharkov, 96,000 workers had their own gardens. This represented a terrible robbery of human power, burdening workers and their families with medieval digging. The fundamental masses had neither cows, gardens, nor homes. Unskilled workers earned 1,200–1,500 roubles a year, a regime of destitution. The majority huddled in common dwellings worse than barracks; descriptions of bedbugs, broken chairs, leaking roofs, and disgusting privies were standard. Labour fluidity was high; in the oil industry, many drills were abandoned. At the bottom of the proletariat accumulated a layer of rejected Soviet pariahs, possessing no rights, yet used by industry. Flagrant wage differences, doubled by arbitrary privileges, introduced sharp antagonisms within the proletariat itself. The Stakhanov campaign presented the picture of a small civil war: wrecking and breaking of mechanisms became a favourite method of struggle against it. Trade unions stood on one side, workers on the other. Stalin publicly recommended that resisters get it “in the teeth.” The Stakhanov movement made clear the deep alienation between authorities and proletariat, and the bureaucracy’s application of “Divide and rule!” Forced piecework labour was mockingly called “socialist competition.”
The bureaucracy in the USSR numbered five to six million, not including teachers and students. Communist and Komsomol members within it formed a bloc of 1.5 to 2 million, constituting the backbone of state power. The former Bolshevik party had become the political organisation of the bureaucracy, not the vanguard of the proletariat. The non-party “active” and labour and peasant aristocracy approximated another five to six million. Together with families, these strata formed 20 to 25 million people, 12 to 15 percent of the population — the social base of the ruling circles. Bureaucrats used power primarily to guarantee their own well-being, creating egoism, solidarity, fear of mass discontent, and religious kowtowing to the Leader. The bureaucracy was not homogeneous: a gulf existed between local functionaries and Kremlin dignitaries, but all were bound by mutual guarantees of security with the Kremlin. Its conditions of life ranged from petty bourgeoisie to big bourgeoisie. The Left Opposition in 1927 had protested that the privileged administrative apparatus devoured a considerable part of surplus value; the trade apparatus alone consumed more than one tenth of total production. By 1936, overhead expenses had grown, not been cut. Freedom from control entailed abuse and malfeasance. The bureaucracy enjoyed almost monopolistic access to cultural and municipal amenities. Trotsky estimated that 15 to 20 percent of the population enjoyed not much less wealth than the remaining 80 to 85 percent. This distribution was more democratic than in tsarist Russia or the West, but had little in common with socialism.