The Russian lower classes of the cities and countryside experienced
profound changes in their ways of life after 1917. But it is necessary
to remember that the past fifty years have not been a single uninterrupted
period of growth and development. Seven or eight of the fifty
years were taken up by armed hostilities which resulted in severe
setback and widespread destruction, unparalleled in any other
belligerent country. Another twelve or thirteen years were spent
on replacing the losses.
The actual periods of growth cover the years from 1928 to 1941
and from 1950 onwards, about thirty years in all. And in these
years an unusually high proportion of soviet resources, about
one quarter of the national income on the average, was absorbed
in the arms races that preceded and followed the Second World
War. If one could calculate the advance in ideal units of truly
peaceful years, one would conclude that the Soviet Union achieved
its progress within twenty or, at the most, twenty-five years.
This has to be kept in mind when one tries to assess the performance.
But, of course, present Soviet society is the product of the turmoil
of this half- century so that in its development gain and loss,
construction and destruction, have been inseparable; and the combination
of productive effort, unproductive work, and waste has affected
both the material life and the spiritual climate of the USSR.
The first and most striking feature of the transformed scene is
the massive urbanization of the USSR. Since the revolution the
town population has grown by over 100 million people. Here again
a corrective in the time scale is needed.
The decade after 1917 was marked by a depopulation of the cities
and a slow reverse movement. The effect of the Second World War
was the same, at least in European Russia. The periods of intensive
urbanization were between the years 1930 and 1940 and between
1950 and 1965. About 800 big and medium- sized towns and over
2000 small urban settlements were built. In 1926 there were only
26 million town dwellers.
In 1966 their number was about 125 million. In the last fifteen
years alone the urban population has increased by 50 to 60 million
people, that is by as much as the entire population of the British
Isles. Within the lifetime of a generation the percentage of the
town dwellers in the total population has risen from 15 to 55
per cent; and it is fast climbing up to 60 per cent. In the United
States--to take the previous record in this field--it took over
160 years for the urban population to increase by 100 million
people; or, if the more relevant percentile comparison is made,
it took a full century, from 1850 to 1950, for the proportion
of the town dwellers to rise from 15 to 70 per cent.
Throughout those hundred years the phenomenal growth of the American
cities and towns was stimulated and facilitated by mass immigration,
influx of foreign capital and shill, and immunity from foreign
invasion and wartime destruction, not to speak of the inducements
of climate. Soviet urbanization, in tempo and scale, is without
parallel in history. Such a change in social structure, even if
it had taken place in more favorable circumstances, would have
created huge and baffling problems in housing, settlement, health,
and education and Soviet circumstances were as if designed to
intensity and magnify beyond measure the turmoil and the shocks.
Only a small proportion of the expansion was due to natural growth
or to the migration of townspeople. The mass of the new town dwellers
were peasants, shifted from the villages, year after year, and
directed to industrial labor. Like the old advanced nations of
the West, the Soviet Onion found the main reserve of industrial
manpower in the peasantry. In the early states the growth of capitalist
enterprise in the West was often accompanied by the forcible expropriation
of farmers--in Britain by the .'enclosures'-- and by draconian
labor legislation.
Later the West relied in the main on the spontaneous work of the
labor market, with its laws of supply and demand, to bring the
required manpower to industry. This euphemism means that in the
course of many decades, if not of centuries, rural overpopulation,
and some- times famine, threw great masses of redundant hands
onto the labor market. In the soviet Union the State secured the
supply of labor by means of planning and direction. Its dominant
economic position was the decisive factor; without it, it would
hardly have been possible to carry out so gigantic a transformation
within so short a time.
The transfer of the rural population began in earnest in the early
1930's, and it was closely connected with the collectivization
of farming, which enabled the government's agencies to lay hands
on the surplus of manpower on the farms and to move it to industry.
The beginnings of the process were extremely difficult and involved
the use of much force and violence. The habits of settled industrial
life, regulated by the factory siren, which had in other countries
been inculcated into the workers, from generation to generation,
by economic necessity and legislation, were lacking in Russia.
The peasants had been accustomed to work in their fields according
to the rhythm of Russia's severe nature, to toil from sunrise
to sunset in the summer and to drowse on the tops of their stoves
most of the winter. They had now to be forced and conditioned
into an entirely new routine of work. They resisted, worked sluggishly,
broke or damaged tools, and shifted restlessly from factory to
factory and from mine to mine. The government imposed discipline
by means of harsh labor codes, threats of deportation, and actual
deportation to forced labor camps.
Lack of housing and acute shortages of consumer goods, due in
large measure to deliberate acts of an anti-consumptionist policy--the
government was bent on obtaining the maximum output of producer
goods and munitions--aggravated the hardships and the turbulence.
It was common in the cities, even quite recently, for several
families to share a single room and a kitchen; and in the industrial
settlements, masses of workers were herded in barracks for many
years. crime was rampant.
At the same time, however, many millions of men and women received
primary or even secondary education, were trained in industrial
skills, and settled down to the new way of life. As time went
on, social friction and conflicts engendered by the upheaval lessened.
since the Second World War the feats of Soviet industry and arms
have appeared to justify retrospectively even the violence, the
suffering, the blood, and the tears. But it could be said, of
course, that without the violence, the blood, and the tears, the
great work of construction could have been done far more efficient-
1y and with healthier social, political, and moral after- effects.
;Whatever the truth of the matter, the transformation of the social
structure continues; and continues without such forcible stimulation.
Year after year the urban population is expanding on the same
scale as before; and the process, though planned and regulated,
obeys its own rhythm. In the 1930's the government had to drag
a sullen mass of peasants into the towns; in this last decade
or so it has been con- fronted by a spontaneous rush of people
from the country to towns; and it has had to exert itself and
make rural life a 1i page 6 missing extraordinary secrecy. The
social and cultural stratification of the working class is sometimes
even more important than the economic one.
The prodigious growth of the working class has resulted in many
social and cultural discrepancies and incongruities, reflecting
the successive phases of industrialization and their overlapping.
Each phase brought into being a different layer of the working
class and produced significant cleavages. The bulk of the working
class is strongly marked by its peasant origins. There are only
very few working-class families who have been settled in town
since before the revolution and have any sort of industrial tradition
and memories of pre-revolutionary class struggle.
In effect, the oldest layer of workers is the one which formed
itself during the reconstruction period of the 1920's. Its adaptation
to he rhythm of industrial life was relatively easy--these workers
came to the factory of their own accord and were not yet subjected
to strict regimentation. Their children are the most settled and
the most distinctly urban element of the industrial population.
From their ranks came the managerial elements and the labor aristocracy
of the 1930's and 1940's. Those who remained in ranks were the
last Soviet workers to engage heavily, under the New Economic
Policy, in trade union activities, even in strikes, and to enjoy
a certain freedom of political expression. The contrast between
this and the next layer is extremely sharp.
Twenty-odd million peasants were shifted to the towns during the
1930's. Their adaptation was painful and jerky. For along time
they remained uprooted villagers, town dwellers against their
will, desperate, anarchic, and helpless. They were broken to the
habits of factory work and kept under control by ruthless drill
and discipline. It was hey who gave the Soviet towns the gray,
miserable, semi-barbarous look that so often astonished foreign
visitors. They brought into industry the peasants, crude individualism.
Official policy played on it, prodding the industrial recruits
to compete with one another for bonuses, premiums, and multiple
piece rates. Worker was thus turned against worker at the factory
bench; and pretexts of ''socialist competition'' were used to
prevent the formation and manifestation of any class solidarity.
The terror of the 1930's left an indelible imprint on the men
of this category. Most of them, now in their fifties, or sixties,
are probably--through no fault of their own--the most backward
element among Soviet workers--uneducated, acquisitive, servile.
Only in its second generation could this layer of the working
class live down the initial shocks of urbanization. This all too
sketchy description gives us only a general idea of the extraordinary
social and cultural heterogeneity of the soviet working class'
The process of transplantation and expansion was too rapid and
stormy to allow for the mutual assimilation of the diverse layers,
the formation of a common outlook, and the growth of class solidarity.
Yet as the working class grows more educated, homogeneous, and
self-confident, its aspirations are likely to focus on demands
for greater freedom of expression and workers, genuine participation
in control over industry. And if this happens the workers may
re-enter the political stage as an independent factor, ready to
challenge the bureaucracy, and ready to resume the struggle for
emancipation in which they scored so stupendous a victory in 1917,
but which for so long they have not been able to follow up.
The obverse side of the expansion of the working class is the
shrinkage of the peasantry. Forty years ago rural small holders
made up more than three-quarters of the nation; at present the
collectivized farmers constitute only one quarter. How desperately
the peasants resisted this trend, what furious violence was let
loose against them, how they were forced to contribute to the
sinews of industrialization, and how resentfully and sluggishly
they have tilled the land under the collectivist dispensation--all
this is now common knowledge.
But as Herbert Butterfield has said: ''It is the tendency of contemporaries
to estimate the revolution too exclusively by its atrocities,
while posterity always seems to err through its inability to take
these into account or vividly appreciated them.'' The Russian
peasantry has had a tragic fate. Under the ancient regime the
Russian countryside was periodically swept by famine, as china's
countryside was and as India's still is. In the intervals between
the famines, uncounted millions of peasants and peasant children
died of malnutrition and disease, as they still do in so many
underdeveloped countries.
The old system was hardly less cruel towards the peasantry than
Stalin's government, only its cruelty appeared to be part of the
natural order of things, which even the moralist's sensitive conscience
is inclined to take for granted. This cannot excuse or mitigate
the crimes of Stalinist policy; but it may put the problem into
proper perspective. Those who argue that all would have been well
if only the peasant had been left alone, the idealizers of the
old rural way of life and of the peasantry individualism, are
purveying an idyll which is a figment of their imagination. The
old primitive small holding was, in any case, too archaic to survive
into the epoch of industrialization. It has not survived either.
In England or the United States and even in France, its classical
homeland, we have witnessed a dramatic shrinkage of the peasantry
in recent years. In Russia the small holding was a formidable
obstacle to the nation's progress; it was unable to provide food
for the growing urban population; it could not even feed the children
of the over- populated countryside.
The only reasonable alternative to forcible collectivization lay
in some form of collectivization or cooperation based on the consent
of the peasantry. Just how realistic this alternative was for
the USSR no one can now say with any certainty. What is certain
is that forcible collectivization has left a legacy of agricultural
in- efficiency and antagonism between town and country which the
Soviet onion has not yet lived down. These calamities have been
aggravated by yet another blow the peasantry has suffered, a blow
surpassing a11 the atrocities of the collectivization.
Most of the 20 million men that the Soviet Union lost on the battlefields
of the Second World War were peasants. So huge was the gap ;in
rural manpower that during the late 1940s and in the 1950s in
most villages only women, children, cripples, and old men were
seen working in the fields. This accounted in some measure for
the stagnant condition of farming, and for much else besides;
for dreadful strains on family relations, sexual life, and rural
education; and for more than the normal amount of apathy and inertia
in the countryside.
The peasantry's weight in the nation's social and political life
has, in consequence of all these events, steeply declined. The
condition of farming remains a matter of grave concern, for it
affects the standard of living and the morale of the urban population.
A poor harvest is still a critical event, politically; and a succession
of bad harvests contributed to Kbrushchev's downfall in 1964.
Nor has the peasantry been truly integrated into the new industrial
structure of society.
Much of the old individualistic farming, of the pettiest and most
archaic kind, is still going on behind the facade of the kolhoz.
Within a stone's throw of automated computer-run concerns there
are still shabby and Oriental bazaars crowded with rural traders.
Yet the time when the Bolsheviks were afraid that the peasantry
might be the agent of a capitalist restoration has long passed.
True, there are rich kolhozes and poor one; and here and there
a crafty muzhik manages to by-pass all rules and regulations and
to rent land, employ hired labor surreptitiously, and make a lot
of money.
However, these survivals of primitive capitalism were hardly more
than a marginal phenomenon. If the pre- sent population trend--the
migration from country to town-- continues, the peasantry will
go on shrinking; and there will probably be a massive shift from
the collectively owned to the State-owned farms. Eventually, farming
may be expected to be "Americanized" and to employ only
a small fraction of the nation's manpower.
Meanwhile, even though the peasantry is dwindling, the muzhik
tradition still looms very large in Russian life, in custom and
manners, in language; literature, and the arts. Although a majority
of Russians are already living in town, most Russian novels, perhaps
four out of five, still take village-life as their theme and the
muzhik as their chief character. Even in his exit he casts a long
melancholy shadow on the new Russia.