Russian History: A Very Short Introduction

One long-term problem remained from this compromise. In practice, women once again became responsible for the everyday duties of family life, which few men regarded as incumbent on themselves. Now, though, women were also expected to seek employment; for many, this was a necessity, since low rates of pay made it impossible to maintain a family on just one income. The result was that women were afflicted with a ‘double burden’, and often had to call in grandparents to help with the multiple demands on their time.

From the late 1920s onwards, millions of people were on the move, mostly from the countryside into the towns, either to get away from the kolkhozy or to find employment, often both. Since little extra housing was constructed, they had to crowd together in kommunalki (communal apartments), where a whole family might live in a single room, sharing kitchen, bathroom, and toilet with other families. The necessity to agree acceptable arrangements imposed a certain reluctant interdependence, a modified joint responsibility in subjection to the authorities (who allocated ‘dwelling space’), which in exaggerated form replicated pre-revolutionary village experience. The lack of privacy created ideal conditions for informers, who sometimes made denunciations to the authorities to get rid of unwanted neighbours. Personal relations were decisive; there was no legal or institutional defence against abuse of power.

Work in Soviet enterprises also bolstered joint responsibility. All employees became part of a work team, subject to managers and foremen who had to ensure the fulfilment of Gosplan’s targets and used collective discipline and collective rewards to achieve that. They had power not only over work practices, but often also over housing and social benefits. Everyone became part of a subordinate community, dependent on the bosses for life’s essentials, with no effective individual rights.

National policy

Communist policy towards the non-Russian nationalities was very different from that of the Tsars. Communists believed that nationalism was a powerful but transitory sentiment, which could be harnessed for revolution, but which would in due course give way to a supra-ethnic all-Soviet consciousness.

Initially, the Communists utilized national identity as a way of promoting modernization. They created a federal state, with a hierarchy of ethnically named constituent republics, in which, at least theoretically, power devolved to indigenous elites trained for the purpose – a policy known as korenizatsiia (indigenization). The party specifically set out to encourage the development of non-Russian national languages and cultures. A campaign of likbez (liquidation of illiteracy) provided elementary education in local languages.

In principle, this was an enlightened policy, but from the outset it suffered from its own contradictions. First of all, given the intermingling of peoples throughout the former Russian Empire, designating a certain territory as belonging to a particular people entailed considerable over-simplification. Those who did not belong to a titular nationality felt discriminated against: local cadres tended to favour their co-nationals in housing, education, and employment. This sometimes handicapped Russians. In the Mordvin republic on the Volga, for example, 60% of the population was Russian, but their republic was named after a non-Russian minority. In Ukraine, many Russian parents bitterly resented their offspring having to study Ukrainian, which they considered a ‘farmyard dialect’.

Besides, many Soviet practices directly undermined korenizatsiia. The party, the armed forces, and Gosplan were all tightly centralized, so that the non-Russians’ scope for self-rule was in practice extremely constricted. In any case, during the 1930s, the practical application of korenizatsiia was changed. Internal passports were introduced, in each of which ‘entry no 5’ designated an individual’s nationality. The entry could not be changed, and it gradually became a more important determinant of life chances than social origin.

Moreover, since no socialist revolutions had occurred elsewhere, commitment to world revolution now implied defending Russia at all costs: ‘Socialism in One Country’, as Stalin called it. During the 1930s, party propaganda increasingly emphasized the Russian identity of the Soviet Union as a whole. The Tsars were no longer condemned outright as exploiters of the people, since their conquests had created the great state which was now the Soviet Union. Stalin declared:

We have inherited that state . . . [and] have consolidated and strengthened it as a united and indivisible state, not in the interests of landowners and capitalists, but for the benefit of the workers, of all the peoples who make up that state.