Figure 2.3 Bezprizornye (street orphans). Source: David King Collection, London.
What constituted a crime and how criminals should be punished/rehabilitated combined with the building of a court system and overall social (not political) laxity, with the effect that many petty-criminal acts were not prosecuted. Indeed the decade was characterized by the seldom-legal activities of bands of unsupervised children - the so-called bezprizornye - who lived on the streets and engaged in prostitution, thievery, and other deviant behaviors. The bezprizornye, often orphans or displaced children whose parents had left Russia, died, had been arrested, or otherwise disappeared, formed a juvenile criminal class that the Soviet authorities was quite incapable of dealing with throughout the NEP period.48
With the industrial push of the Five-Year Plans in the 1930s and the mass arrests and dislocations of collectivization on the countryside, millions of Soviet citizens found themselves uprooted. American historian Moshe Lewin speaks of a “quicksand society” at this time, where previously accepted norms and social structures had disappeared but new standards of everyday life were still being worked out.49 Archival research has shown that communist authorities in the 1930s were very worried about the potential for social unrest posed by millions of people on the move from countryside to city. The 1932 law introducing internal passports, required of all Soviet citizens, was one attempt to keep tabs on the potentially troublesome populace. In order to live or reside in any part of the USSR, citizens had to present this vital document. Residence in large cities such as Moscow and Leningrad required additional special permission.
In the early 1930s harsh laws were passed to punish, among other things, theft of state property, speculation (often selling that property), banditry, and hooliganism (a catch-all term that could range from vandalism to vagrancy to public drunkenness). The repressive apparatus put in place to fight such criminality would be used in the second half of the 1930s against those accused of political crimes during the Great Terror. The label of “socially harmful elements” and “enemies of the people,” thus shifted from everyday criminals to real or imagined political opponents like “Trotskyites” or “Zinovievists.” We should not, however, lose sight of the fact that under Stalin, the distinction between “ordinary” and “political” crime was fuzzy or even nonexistent. A peasant who “expropriated state property” (by taking home grain to her family) or a worker who “sabotaged production” (by showing up for work drunk and damaging a machine) was regarded as just as great a threat to the stability of Soviet society as were followers of Trotsky.50
The mass arrests of the late 1930s sent millions to Siberian labor camps, and these individuals, even after they had served their sentences, would for decades afterwards bear the stigma of having been arrested as an “enemy of the people.” In many ways their experiences paralleled those of Siberian exiles of the nineteenth century who were also often forbidden to return to European Russia even after serving their sentences. The mass arrests not only stigmatized the millions who spent time in the Gulag but left its mark on their parents, spouses, and children who were often treated with fear and mistrust back at home.51
Amusements, Free Time, Leisure
Since Adam bit into the fruit, if we accept the biblical account, human beings have been condemned to earn their living “by the sweat of their brow.” But life is more than just work: festivals, amusements, and games have always provided relief from the workday grind. Still, the concept of mass “leisure” and “free time” is a quite recent one, dating from the spread of industrialization in the nineteenth century. By the late nineteenth century, as middle-class people and skilled workers began to enjoy somewhat more time away from the job as well as having a little more money to spend on pleasure, a new “leisure industry” began to take shape in Russia, as in western Europe.
When one speaks of amusements in the Russian context, it makes sense to start with vodka. In Russian culture vodka is inextricably linked with celebrations, conviviality, and social gatherings. Drinking - at least in its socially acceptable form - is never done alone, but always with companions, usually male. True, in the family sphere one might celebrate a birth or wedding, or mourn a death at a funeral, by drinking vodka. Special guests were usually welcomed with a glass and, as even present-day visitors to Russia can attest, refusing such a welcoming drink can be very awkward indeed. At the workplace, newcomers were often expected to pay for a round of drinks for co-workers; refusing to drink would gain one a poor reputation as antisocial. Vodka also played a role in masculine rites of passage, as when apprentices or younger workers treated older workers to vodka upon finishing training or being advanced to a more skilled job. Bosses too were expected to provide libations for special occasions - for example a name day or birth of a child.
Most drinking in pre-revolutionary Russia, however, took place in the tavern, often the only place where men could gather outside church, work, or the home. Women were not welcome in taverns; indeed a respectable woman, even if seeking her husband inside, would not cross the tavern threshold. Because taverns rarely served very much aside from vodka, their social function inevitably involved imbibing. In this way conviviality, relaxation, and getting away from the worries or irritations of home life generally involved drinking. To be sure, lack of funds and long working hours prevented most workers or peasants from visiting taverns frequently, but Sundays generally found drinking establishments full - and employers complained of increased absenteeism on Mondays. By the early twentieth century one could visit a number of different “classes” of taverns in Russian cities, from modest establishments offering little more than vodka and billiards to more refined places where one could listen to music, play cards, and perhaps even have dinner with a lady. In this way the boundary between lower - class taverns and respectable restaurants and cafes was becoming hazy.52
The prohibition on sales of vodka proclaimed upon the declaration of war with Germany dealt traditional taverns a mortal blow. While wine and beer continued to be legal in most parts of Russia, even these could not be sold in St Petersburg. These prohibitions on hard liquor continued well into the Soviet period before being completely abolished in the mid-1920s. Allowing the sale and consumption of vodka did not, however, mean that the communists accepted this form of prerevolutionary conviviality. Drunkenness was termed socially harmful and possibly even counterrevolutionary. Propaganda efforts showed the bad effects of excessive alcohol consumption on the human body as well as on family and society as a whole. One poster of the 1920s even connected public drunkenness with another “backward practice,” religion, showing drunken men lying unconscious on the ground, with the caption “Drunkenness: a survival of religious festivals.” The proper communist could drink vodka but must never become drunk: drunkenness was one of the most common reasons for individuals to be kicked out of the party in the 1920s.53
Of course the tavern was not the only place of amusement for Russians. Already by the later nineteenth century church, state, and societal organizations had recognized that alternatives to drinking as a pastime had to be offered. But the most frequent “solution” - setting up tearooms where workers could sit and read in a “cultured” manner - did not find wide appeal. In the end not charities but private enterprise offered more popular alternatives to the tavern. By the early twentieth century, a Russian city dweller of relatively modest means had a number of choices on how to spend an evening: at a music hall or cabaret, in a crowd cheering on athletes at the bicycle races or a prizefight, at the circus (unlike in the west, Russian circuses are permanent, not traveling, institutions), at a movie, or simply at home, reading one of the action-packed books written specifically for a semiliterate public. While the intelligentsia bemoaned or mocked such new manifestations of culture, we need not accept their elitism. After all, the main purpose of leisure was enjoyment, not necessarily edification. It should be noticed, however, that nearly all of these new forms of leisure activity involved an urban population, not the peasant majority.54
The middle class, too, enjoyed new forms of leisure. One was simple consumerism, though the word did not exist yet. But Russian cities did have growing numbers of department stores where middle-class people - in particular women
- could spend time looking at, trying on, or even purchasing fashionable clothing or other items. The department store gave middle-class women a respectable place to spend time in public, another innovation. While men of this class were expected to spend their times at work earning money, one important task for bourgeois women was to spend that money in a wise and economical manner, while also creating a respectable home. The quest for respectability extended to all spheres of life, as numerous very popular books on good manners and proper public behavior attest. Clearly many Russians both desired to be seen as respectable and were unsure of exactly what respectability entailed. The mass-produced instruction book helped someone without an elite upbringing to fit in with “polite society.”
The railroad enabled more and more people to leave their native place, whether for a short visit, to work in the city for a longer period, or to change ones residence permanently by emigration abroad or to Siberia. While most Russians could not afford to be “tourists” (a word that came to Russian from English in the early twentieth century) in this period, the number of excursions and resorts
- especially on the Black Sea - was growing. And, of course, wealthier Russians spent their summers in German spas or the French Riviera in greater numbers than ever before. After the revolution, and in particular from the late 1920s onward, it became difficult for Soviet citizens to travel abroad, but they did to some extent pursue turizm within their vast country. Only after World War II, though, indeed not until the 1960s or 1970s, did it become fairly common for Soviet citizens to spend a summer vacation away from home.55
In the years immediately after 1917 most Russians were more interested in simple survival to be much concerned with leisure. During the NEP, dance halls and restaurants catered mainly to the sordid tastes of the nepmen but were far too expensive for most honest Soviet citizens. The communists were concerned, however, with creating wholesome and enjoyable leisure activities. Like pre-revolutionary middle-class reformers, communists deplored the tavern and advocated new ways of spending free time. One alternative was “physical culture” - fizkultura - that is, sport, body-building, gymnastics, and the like. Fizkultura combined public ceremonies, enthusiastic poems, and physical activity - with a certain amount of military training thrown in for good measure. Physical activity was seen as a way of promoting health, keeping young (and not-so-young) people away from vices, and building class consciousness. Large-scale marches became a traditional way to celebrate International Worker’s Day (May 1) and the anniversary of the Great Socialist Revolution of 1917 in November. The USSR also sponsored a number of professional sports teams, in particular for football (“soccer”), such as the Moscow Dinamo team whose stadium, constructed in 1935, could hold 35,000 fans. Other Soviet sportsmeny excelled in hockey, track, and basketball (the incorporation of Lithuania in 1941 would help there) but the USSR did not participate in the Olympic Games until 1952.56
Taking the span 1861-1945 on a macro level, many constants are apparent throughout these roughly four generations. While the USSR in 1945 was vastly more industrialized than the pre-reform Russian Empire, even at the latter date most Soviet citizens still lived on the countryside. While no longer serfs, kolkhozniki in 1945 lacked basic civil rights (such as the right to move away from the collective farm) that other Soviet citizens possessed. Women, though enjoying many more rights than in 1861, continued to be employed disproportionately in low-status, low-paying jobs and remained under-represented in the Communist Party, especially at its higher reaches. Sexual “deviants” like homosexuals continued to live their lives on the edges of society, subject to both personal scandal and even to criminal penalties. Those who broke the law continued to be subject to severe punishments; indeed it was more likely that a convicted felon would receive the death sentence.
For all that, society as a whole had changed immensely. Serfs became free peasants, and from the 1890s streamed to the cities to become industrial workers. The nascent industrial working class of 1917 grew enormously during the Five-Year Plans of the 1930s, bringing millions of peasants (often unwillingly) to growing industrial cities. Everyday life also changed as electricity spread across cities, towns, and even to the countryside. Women increasingly took on paying work outside the home and were encouraged by communist ideology to join the party and play a public role in spreading communist ideals. While traditional gender roles and even symbols of middle-class comfort began to run in the second half of the 1930s, the new middle class had shed the antigovernment, critical stance of the pre-revolutionary intelligentsia. Instead the “New Class” of privileged Soviet intellectuals and functionaries were relentlessly positive about the achievements and progressive trends in the Soviet state.
World History
