Russia

Some issues, it turned out, were beyond the power of both theory and governmental action to control. There were some unexpected outcomes from deliberate changes, and secular developments were creating changes of their own. Members of minorities, no longer educationally disadvantaged, began to expect more in terms of privilege and status, and became impatient if opportunities were slow to open up to them. ¹⁸ From the 1960s the proportion of ethnic Russians in the total Soviet population began to decline rapidly from its high point of almost 55 per cent, and living standards showed less improvement in Russia than among other ethnicities in the periphery. ¹⁹

Khrushchev’s boast that the Soviet Union would catch up and even surpass the United States was not to be justified. Yet in the forty years that had passed since the inception of the first Five Year Plan in 1928 immense strides had been taken economically. Gross national product had expanded seven or even eight times over. This represented an average growth rate of 6 to 7 per cent a year - better than that attained during the second period of industrialization under Stolypin. Fixed investment had grown thirty times over, and as much as 30 per cent of the economy was being reinvested in the early 1960s, although productivity was less impressive. ²⁰

Agricultural production increased too, though hardly enough to justify the huge investments that had been poured into it. The acreage under the plough in Kazakhstan more than tripled between 1953 and 1958 yet yields fluctuated wildly year by year. The dairy industry and sheep-rearing there also saw impressive expansion; and the Kazakh economy as a whole, primitive at the outset, came to be well integrated into the Soviet Union’s. ²¹The output of consumer goods also grew encouragingly, but their quality was poor; and, although the cities saw the erection of vast housing estates, the housing was cramped and shoddy by Western standards. Shostakovich’s hilarious musical Cheriomushki, named after a real Moscow surburban tower-block development, is a monument both to the popular hopes invested in such projects and to the inefficiencies and corruption involved in them. It was taken off after one brief season, and not repeated.

Nevertheless, by the 1970s the population of the Soviet Union was better fed, better housed and enjoyed a higher real standard of living than it had ever done. Contentment spread, especially among the generations old enough to have experienced the privations of the Stalin period, and it extended to the nationalities. At the same time, Communism had wrought great changes in the ethnic map since tsarist days. This was partly a consequence of industrialization and urbanization. In Siberia some of the smaller ethnic groups, like the Khanty (Ostiaks) and Mansi (Voguls), had become outnumbered in their own lands by as much as five to one as ethnic Russians and others poured in to work on various projects. ²² The ethnic and linguistic configuration of many parts of the Soviet Union was altered, sometimes significantly. So it was that Russians came to form almost three-quarters of the population of Karelia, 61 per cent of Buriatia’s and around half of the populations of Yakutia and Tatary

This was the result of migrations, both forced and spontaneous. Aside from the deportations, the government directed labour through job postings and used incentives to tempt workers to places where they were needed. In particular, ethnic Russians, Ukrainians and Belorussians were encouraged to settle in sensitive strategic areas where the authorities wanted to dilute strong ethnic concentrations of native peoples. In Chechnya-Ingushetia almost a quarter of the population came to be Russian, in Circassia 40 per cent; and substantial Russian-speaking populations were also planted in the Baltic republics and in the frontier areas of Transcaucasia and southern Kazakhstan. ²³ Population growth in Russia proper slowed considerably So did that of ethnic Russians. These phenomena may have been related to settlement policies, but they were irrelevant to the policy-makers. They hoped that the population as a whole, but particularly its elites, would develop a distinctive Soviet character, reflecting similar educational standards, sharing the same values, and enjoying the same privileges. A Soviet nationality composed of Party members of all ethnicities and others who took pride in Soviet achievements was indeed being formed, and it suggested a better fate for the Soviet Empire than that of its tsarist predecessor. Yet after a time nationalist sentiments began to grow despite these policies.