Figure 4.2 The Moscow Metro, one of the grand construction projects of the Stalin period.
Source: Bettmann/Corbis.
Tallest structure, built on the banks of the Moscow River and - not coincidentally - requiring the destruction of the enormous 30-story tall cathedral of Christ the Savior. The cathedral was in fact destroyed but the palace never built, though the nearby Moscow Metro stop retained the name “Palace of the Soviets” until 1957, a kind of metaphor for the incomplete nature of Stalinist modernization.
The enormous Palace of Soviets was to be just one among a number of skyscrapers that were to be built in the new Moscow. The proposed building fitted well with Lenin’s call for a new kind of “monumental propaganda.” Even without the palace, the face of Moscow changed hugely in the first three decades of Soviet rule. One of central Moscow’s main streets, Okhotnyi Riad, was straightened, broadened, and renamed Gorky Street after the radical writer. Tsarist names and monuments were cleared away, and squares were remodeled to serve the needs of Soviet - soon Stalinist - marches, celebrations, and festivals. Red Square in Moscow became the focal point and model for such mass spectacles, with the party leadership observing the festivities from seats atop Lenin’s Mausoleum, built next to the Kremlin Wall in the late 1920s. And of course Moscow grew enormously in the 1920s and 1930s, rapidly overtaking St Petersburg and topping four million just before World War II - almost quadrupling the 1920 figure.
Already in the 1920s there were plans to revolutionize the new socialist capital’s architecture with skyscrapers, more modern urban design of streets and squares, as well as massive complexes incorporating apartments with cultural, culinary, and recreational establishments. Newsreels showed massive “clearing away of the past” - often including priceless churches - to broaden streets and allow for new construction. For the most part, however, the emblematic Stalinist high-rise buildings in Moscow such as Moscow State University and the Hotel Ukraine date from after World War II. One major innovation in the Moscow city fabric does date from the 1930s: in 1935 the first line of the Moscow metro opened, and by 1945 several lines were in operation. Another new and welcome addition to Moscow life in the 1930s was the opening of “the park of culture and relaxation,” soon to be known as Gorky Park, near the city center. Here Muscovites could stroll, play sports, attend cultural events, and relax.33
The most famous “gigantic” project of all was the construction of the largest steel mill complex with an entirely new city around it: Magnitogorsk. Plans for the blast furnaces were modeled after those operated by US Steel in Gary, Indiana, and the city itself was to exemplify Stalinist modernity. Construction began in 1929 and a mere three years later a quarter of a million people made the city their home, including John Scott, a young American of radical views who had come to Magnitogorsk to help build socialism. Scott worked in the city as a welder for several years and wrote about his experiences in Behind the Urals, describing both the terrible working conditions and great hunger for education and eagerness for self-improvement that he witnessed among the Soviet people.
Magnitogorsk was located atop a huge deposit of iron (the city’s name refers to the “magnetic” effect this deposit had on compasses) in the southern Urals, hundreds of miles from any major urban center, and equally distant from sources of coal, crucial for the production of iron and steel. Photos from the later 1930s show well-ordered apartment buildings and parks in the aptly named “socialist city,” though we know that many other workers continued to live in poorly heated and unhygienic barracks while the bosses enjoyed exclusive cottages in their own part of town. The image of Magnitogorsk as a well-ordered, productive socialist city clashed with the reality of chaotic living conditions, an unstable labor force, frequent injuries and deaths on the job, and political repressions. For many Soviet citizens, however, the creation of this industrial city ex nihilo was a source of pride. The building of Magnitogorsk convinced many foreigners that the USSR had much to teach the West about modernizing.34
The communists’ ambitions to transform humanity went far beyond economic development, though. Not just the economy or politics, but human attitudes and identities had to be changed. Historians find it difficult, of course, to delve into the human soul, but recent analyses of personal documents such as letters and diaries does show the sincere desire for what one historian has termed “selftransformation in terms of killing the Old Man and rearing the New Man within.”35 Individuals with “tainted social backgrounds” such as the children of priests, noblemen, or merchants, attempted to refashion themselves as collective-minded, optimistic, and future-oriented new Soviet people. s6 One successful “recasting” of an individual with questionable social background was Andrei Vyshinskii, born into a Catholic family in Odessa, son of a shopkeeper, and pre-revolutionary Menshevik. Despite his tainted past, Vyshinskii rose to become the Prosecutor General of the USSR in 1935, presided over the subsequent purges, and served as Soviet foreign minister 1949-53.
The impressive achievements in production hid less attractive aspects of everyday life in the Soviet Union. While industrial workers were not going hungry, obtaining basic foodstuffs demanded a significant investment of time and energy. Finding basic food and clothing meant standing in line, sometimes for hours. Clothing was dingy, of poor quality, and expensive. One of the reasons for the huge growth rates was the concentration of investment in heavy industry. Housing and light industry for consumer products, on the other hand, were starved of resources. While Soviet cities grew significantly, with urban dwellers doubling from 26 to 52 million between 1926 and 1937. At the same time housing stock remained nearly stagnant. Workers were typically housed in barracks and dormitories while many had to make due by renting “a corner” of a room, cordoned off by a cloth curtain. Only the luckiest or most privileged had an apartment for themselves. During the “Great Terror” of the late 1930s, one motivation to denounce one’s colleagues or neighbors was simply to obtain their apartments, a practice common enough to be satirized in Mikhail Bulgakov’s novel Master and Margarita?'7
In many respects everyday life in the USSR of the 1930s resembled a Hobbesian nightmare: poor, nasty, brutish, and short. On the other hand, as Scott recounts in his memoirs, many Soviet citizens were willing to accept the brutal conditions of the present day as a necessary condition for a better future. s 8 After all, early industrialization in England or the United States had involved a great deal of poverty and suffering, and in the USSR the process of industrial growth was being concentrated into a much shorter period. Stalinist festivals and other expressions of mass enthusiasm were designed to encourage the feeling that while today everyday conditions were admittedly inadequate, today’s efforts would give birth to tomorrow’s “radiant future.”39 Much later, after World War II, many Soviet citizens would proudly and fondly remember this difficult period as one full of hope, joy, and accomplishment paving the way for a radically new, just, and prosperous society.
Slogans and enthusiasm aside, the economic achievements of the first three Five-Year Plans (1928-41) were considerable. While the 20 percent annual growth rates promised by the plans did not materialize, economists estimate that the Soviet economy did grow by an unprecedented 12-14 percent per annum. To name just a few specifics, in the production of electricity the USSR rose from fifteenth in the world to third, output of pig iron had more than doubled, production of steel had tripled. By 1940 the USSR was second only to the USA in machine-building, tractors, trucks, and overall industrial production. Of crucial importance for communist ideology, the size of the industrial working class had tripled.
There were, however, some big losers in this rush to Soviet modernity. In particular the peasants, millions of whom were dispossessed and uprooted; additional millions died in the famine of 1932-3. The cruel truth was that Stalinist modernity simply excluded the peasantry. This was done formally by not issuing collective farmers internal passports in 1932, essentially condemning them to remain on the countryside. Cities had the priority on industrial goods and even foodstuffs; collective farms had to make do with what was left. Earnings for collective farmers were dependent on the farm as a whole making a surplus. When this did not happen (as was frequent), individuals staved off hunger with crops grown on their individual plots. The low level of productivity in agriculture remained a great weakness in the Soviet economy to the very end.
Another failure of modernization is less easy to document statistically. One may term it the “fading of utopian ideals” that many have seen occurring from the late 1930s. Increasingly party membership was a matter of careerism rather than enthusiasm or ideals. Family values, once derided as “bourgeois” and reactionary, were embraced by the Soviet state, which criminalized both abortion and male homosexual acts in the mid-1930s. The Soviet press and literature increasingly portrayed women in roles subservient to men and, while still working outside the home, placing more value on motherhood and child-rearing. Officers’ ranks headed by Field Marshall (“Marshall of the Soviet Union”) were reintroduced in the 1935. Finally a recent study has intriguingly argued that the purges of the late 1930s were essentially an expression of despair over the failure to rid Soviet society of “survivals of the old regime” during nearly 20 years of communist rule. The attempted elimination by police measures of “undesirable and suspect groups” labeled “‘criminal contingents,’ ‘dangerous elements,’ ‘homeless elements,’ ‘kulak elements,’ ‘speculative elements’ [etc.]” can hardly be squared with Marxism or the stated ideals of the October Revolution.40 The turn toward violent measures to purge the USSR of these “undesirables” can be seen as a sign that the communist rulers of the USSR had begun to doubt the inherent strength and feasibility of the communist project.
Triumphs and Weaknesses of Modernization: The Acid Test of World War II
After 1945, and to this day, one oft-repeated justification of Stalinist crash industrialization in the 1930s was that without it, the Soviet Union would not have been capable of resisting the Nazi invaders in World War II. While such a broad assertion cannot be entirely verified or proven wrong by historical research, we can at least examine the assumptions upon which such an argument are based in light of existing economic and political data. On the one hand the cruelties of collectivization and the near-starvation of peasant populations certainly did not increase their desire to fight for the USSR. As we know, many peasants in the Ukraine and Belarus welcomed the Nazi soldiers, hoping for better living conditions than they had endured under Stalin. It is difficult to know for sure whether a more gradual approach to industrialization with fewer huge projects and crash programs would have allowed Soviet industry to develop sufficiently to ward off defeat, but some specialists have argued precisely that. In any case, we should not forget how close the USSR came to collapse in the autumn of 1941, in great part because of the miscalculations of Stalin and his monomaniacal refusal to believe that his ally since 1939 - Adolf Hitler - would turn on him (at least, not yet).41
Despite the economic development of the 1930s, the USSR remained per capita much less wealthy and considerably less industrialized than Nazi Germany. This meant that to fight the German war machine, the Soviet people had to suffer vastly more than the Germans. In the first year of all-out war, 1941-2, the Soviet military budget amounted to a staggering 43 percent of the entire GNP. And yet the Wehrmacht nearly succeeded in breaking through to Leningrad and Moscow in the first months of the war. Once it had recovered from the initial shock, however, the USSR had many advantages over the Nazi regime. The economic centralization and total state control over the economy that had been developed since 1928 served the war effort well: resources could be allocated to those military industries deemed most vital, and of course Soviet citizens were already accustomed to a dearth of consumer goods. The well-developed repressive apparatus (secret police, party surveillance, the encouragement of denunciations) and the lack of individual choice among citizens allowed a near-total mobilization of labor for the war. For example, almost all healthy men disappeared from the countryside, taking with them horses and machines for the war effort, forcing women to work under unimaginably difficult conditions. Food production declined in the war years, but again the repressive (and propaganda) apparatus prevented hunger from disturbing public order or morale.
As we have seen, in the 1930s special emphasis was made on developing industry in the Urals and other regions far from the western border. This strategy paid off during World War II when Magnitogorsk, for example, was able to continue and increase production for the war effort because of its location far from the front lines. Also, in 1941 Soviet engineers and plant managers proved very efficient in dismantling entire factories and evacuating them to the interior. In 1941-2, 30,000 evacuation trains with 1.5 million wagons were pressed into service, mainly in the frantic six months after the June 1941 attack. Another nearly million tons of industrial hardware was evacuated by ship. It is difficult to know exactly how much of a role these evacuated industries played in the final victory, but Soviet statistics claimed that in 1942, 47 percent of functioning industry in the east consisted of plant evacuated from Nazi-occupied areas. By the end of 1941 and especially in 1942 these plants were producing for the war effort. Already in 1942 the USSR was producing twice as many weapons as the Germans. These tanks, aircraft, rifles, artillery pieces, and ammunition would help the USSR turn the tide against the Germans in 1943.
By almost all economic indices, 1942 was the most difficult year. Using 1940 as the base year, GNP dropped by nearly one-third (from 92 to 66), agricultural output even more sharply (62 to 38), and the total value of goods sold in state retail stores plummeted to a mere third (84 to 34). At the same time the output of weaponry nearly doubled over that of 1940 (186), while light industry’s output was cut in half (48).42 Tax revenues dropped in 1942, and then picked up in subsequent war years. By 1945 the Soviet state was collecting almost 50 percent more taxes than in 1940 (a rise from 18 to 30.2 billion rubles), but GNP was still just 83 percent of 1940 figures, with agricultural production only 60 percent that of 1940. These cold figures show the success of the USSR in harnessing the entire economy to the war effort but cannot adequately show the sufferings of a population forced to work beyond exhaustion without adequate nourishment, clothing, or often even shelter. The scarcity of basic goods figures in the classic Soviet film Ballad of a Soldier, where a soldier on the front has a comrade take home to his beloved wife a precious gift: a bar of soap.
Unlike in America, the Soviet economy did not expand during the war. In 1945, production was only 92 percent of 1940 figures, with only armaments and machine building showing increases over 1940 (173 and 129 respectively). Production of coal and oil were both under 1940 figures (88, 68) though considerably improved over 1942 (43, 61). Given the international situation in the early 1940s and the planned nature of the Soviet economy, one might have expected Soviet planners to have worked out a contingency plan in case of war. In fact, no such plan existed and the transfer of industry from civilian to military uses did not always go smoothly. These difficulties were somewhat mitigated by the prewar economic buildup that had concentrated overwhelmingly on military industry and by the simple fact that Soviet industry was in any case inordinately (compared to western economies) heavy on military production. The absolute low point for production was reached in February 1942 (20-30 percent of June 1941 levels), in part because so much of the country was occupied by German troops. As evacuated industrial plant was set up and put into operation, however, production shot up.
As we know, Soviet consumers were used to very slim pickings on the retail front. But the war effort suppressed consumer production to unprecedented lows. In 1943, for example, only 10 percent of the 1940 amounts of outerwear (clothing) were produced, 14 percent of fabric, 7 percent of shoes, 8 percent of sugar. Even in 1945 these figures had hardly improved: 18 percent (of 1940) production in outerwear, 29 percent of fabric, 15 percent of shoes, 50 percent of flour, 25 percent of sugar. Ration cards were distributed according to one’s work. Thus the ration for workers in strenuous jobs received (in late 1942) 600-1,200 grams of bread daily and 2.2-4.5 kilograms of meat or fish, 600-1,000 grams of fat monthly, while office workers had to make due with 400 grams of bread (daily) and monthly rations of 1,200 grams of fish or meat and 300 grams of fat. To make matters worse, the norms for rations, aside from bread, were rarely met. Hunger was nearly universal, and to stave off actual starvation many Soviet citizens planted potatoes in cottage gardens or other free land. The government tolerated an expansion of collective farmers’ private plots (often cultivated at night because of the enormous labor demands on the farmers). The shortage of food made prices increase sharply - by war ’s end more than fivefold over1940 prices. Economists estimate that during the war, overall consumption had dropped by a third. In 1945, for instance, state cooperative stores carried less than half as much merchandise as in 1940.43
As bad as conditions were for Soviet citizens and soldiers during the war years, they would have been even worse without help from the western allies. Mere weeks after the Nazi invasion the US government began to supply lend-lease materiel to the USSR. Lend-lease took a number of forms, from aluminum and copper (essential for aircraft and other arms manufacture) to trucks to clothing to foodstuffs. The USA did not, for the most part, deliver weaponry to the USSR, but concentrated instead on raw materials, military transportation, communications equipment, and edibles. Among these goods were nearly a half-million trucks and “dzhipy” (a vehicle usually spelled “Jeep” by Americans), a million field telephones, 14 million pairs of boots, and some four million tons of foodstuffs. Millions of Russians remembered even decades later, for example, the cans of Spam that the USA had provided through lend-lease. It is unlikely that lend--ease was absolutely crucial for the Soviet war effort; the USSR would probably have won without it. Without the $11 billion of material supplied by the Americans and ?420 million from the British, however, the war would have been longer and the sufferings that much greater.44
What accounted for the better performance of the Soviet war economy compared with that of Germany? At war’s outset, the two economies were of roughly the same size, although including their occupied territories the Germans had somewhat of an edge. (Obviously per capita the Germans were much better off.) Many economists had predicted that the shaky Soviet economy would collapse entirely under the strain of war. In fact, the centralized, state-dominated nature of the Soviet economy made it easier to concentrate all resources on the war effort. State control over the collective farms meant that cities and soldiers would be better supplied with food than the collective farmers themselves. More than anything, however, the Soviet economy’s advantage was its greater efficiency, in particular its success in mass-producing weaponry of all types (including tanks and aircraft) in record time. German arms may have been more sophisticated, but in the end the brute force of mass production crushed any advantage that may have brought. To state matters baldly, the USSR defeated the Germans because they put more men into uniforms, produced more weapons, and used these effectively.
There remains the question “Did Stalinist modernization win the war?” The one-party, repressive state dominating the entire economy and society could, indeed, harness social and economic power for the war effort more effectively than liberal democracies or even Nazi Germany. While Stalin is to a great extent responsible for the enormous initial losses in the war, once he pulled himself together he proved an effective war leader. Unlike Hitler, it needs to be remembered, Stalin did not overestimate his own military genius and usually followed the advice of military specialists. But generals who did not produce desired outcomes were unceremoniously punished: 30 were executed by firing squads in 1941 and 1942. Stalin and his generals felt no compunction about the massive squandering of human life on the front; even Hitler had to take more seriously public opinion over mass casualties. The Soviet political and economic system worked well during this time of crisis. But no economy or society can remain on a war footing forever and the Soviet system was in many ways less well suited to meet the challenges of peace.
Both tsars and communists felt the challenge of modernity. The Great Reforms of the 1860s and 1870s primarily aimed to create a modern Russia that would be capable of retaining its position as a European Great Power. Russia’s defeat at the hands of the Japanese called into question the Russian Empire’s modernity; the empire ’s collapse in the midst of World War I discredited it entirely. While the tsars, fundamentally premodern in their political and social conceptions, had never felt comfortable with modernity, for communists being at the avant-garde of history was absolutely central for their self-image. Unfortunately Russia in 1917 lagged far behind in literacy, urbanization, industrialization and other indices of modernity, and matters went from bad to catastrophic during the chaotic Civil War period (to 1921). In the 1920s, during NEP, allowing the economy to recover at least to prewar levels was the order of the day. But once Stalin had consolidated his personal power, the way for a mass drive toward communist modernity was open. The decade after 1928 witnessed astonishing - and brutal - changes in the Soviet economy and society. The success of the Soviet Union in defeating Nazi Germany is one indication that Stalinist modernity had succeeded, at least on the military front.
Military victory is not, however, the only measure of modernity. Other typical indices include literacy, urbanization, industrial production, public participation in politics. While by 1945 the Soviet literacy rate was around 80 percent, only around one-third of Soviet citizens lived in cities. Since 1928 industrial production had increased markedly and by 1945 the USSR was one of the two main industrial and military powers on earth, a position it would occupy for several more decades. But the living standards of Soviet citizens, though perhaps better in the late 1940s than 20 years earlier, can only be described as appalling when compared to those taken for granted by Americans or western Europeans. In particular it is difficult to reconcile the concept of modernity with the miserable conditions of the Soviet countryside where, by most measures, life was more difficult in 1945 than a generation earlier. Despite Lenin’s famous statement that “Communism equals Soviet power plus the electrification of the entire country,” most rural dwellers did not enjoy electricity in their homes in 1945.
Civil society, a crucial factor in modernity, was also very underdeveloped in the USSR. Censorship was heavy-handed, not only restricting information and free discussion, but demanding that journalism and literature serve the communist cause. As for public participation in the political process, the USSR obviously lacked free elections or a functioning parliament. The fact that millions belonged to the Communist Party by the 1940s is nearly irrelevant (though not treated that way by Soviet propaganda) as few of these individuals had any influence on policy-making. Women certainly played a far greater role in employment and public affairs in 1945 than in tsarist times, but women were under-represented within the Communist Party and completely absent from the highest level of Kremlin politics (the Politburo). Taking these different factors together, Soviet modernization must be characterized as peculiar and incomplete, an immensely strong state coupled with weak living standards and an almost absent civil society.
On another level the failure of Soviet modernization was even more complete. The October Revolution had aimed not simply to replace one regime with another, but to create a totally new kind of state and indeed a New Human Being. In 1945 the USSR was indeed an enormously strong state and considerably more economically developed than the Russian Empire had been. But despite the destruction of private property among peasants, the considerable weakening of religious belief, and the disappearance of numerous social categories (clergy, nobility, merchants), social stratification remained and had been considerably strengthened since the mid-1930s. The October Revolution aimed to usher in a new and better era in world history and, judged according to that standard, must be considered a failure.
World History
