In what ways were the lives of Russian people affected by Stalin’s modernisation of the USSR?

The moral of this essay is that what is good for the State is not necessarily good for its people.

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If you type “benefits of Stalin for Russia” into google, one of its results is a long thread on Quora, in which six benefits are suggested repeatedly, that:

Stalin introduced universal, free education, equally available to all (including peasants and women) which “abolished illiteracy” and – prioritising sciences over religion – “opened scientific and white collar careers to everyone who wanted (university students had state scholarships and accommodation that allowed them to study without doing part-time jobs)”.

He improved health: the Stalin generation was “the first generation free from the fear of Typhus, Cholera and Malaria. Soviet women under Stalin were the first generation of women in the country able to give birth in safety of a hospital with access to parental care”. He also “pulled millions people out of poverty” and “sleeping in the street /homeless was unheard of”.

He improved agricultural output by collectivisation and thus “ensured food security for the growing urban workforce”.

He improved industrial output via the 5-Year Plans, so that “from 3rd world country, with 85% of population busy in agriculture destroyed by Civil War, to become industrial power in just 20 years – that’s unbelievable achievement.”

He introduced ‘Socialism in One Country’, abandoning hopes of worldwide communist revolutions: “this change enabled the Soviet Union to attain a certain degree of acceptance in the community of nations, to cease being the perennial outcast.”

The most-mentioned benefit was that, as a result of all the above, Russia survived/won the Second World War against Nazi Germany and “transformed the former Russian Empire into a superpower”. “If it weren’t for the rapid industrialization and military expansions, the German war machine would have had the USSR for lunch.” “Stalin pretty much saved the Slavic people from slavery and extermination under German General Plan Ost with his military modernisation and diplomatic efforts.”

All the above is true, but how did Stalin’s modernisation of the USSR affect the quality and quantity of the lives of people?

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Children

As regards children, it would seem that in many ways they were much better off. A baby had a 63% better chance of making it to 1 year old in 1940 than in 1913, and vaccination campaigns against tuberculosis & diphtheria reduced child mortality. Compulsory primary education expanded (there was 95% enrolment by 1932), and school leaving age was extended to 15 in 1936, so that by 1939, 94% of urban youth and 86% of rural youth were literate. After the ’Great Retreat’ of 1936, traditional teaching methods and very strict discipline were required, but Deana Levin found that the children appreciated it because they wanted to learn. If anything, it was the teachers who suffered – if a child failed, it was the teaching that was blamed, and school managers would discuss a teacher’s shortcomings with a class with the teacher present.

The number of university students increased from 112,000 to 600,000, 1914-39, with all the wider life and employment opportunities that that involved.

Indoctrination was built into the system – communist ideology was a compulsory subject, and the Pioneers and Komsomol were organisations for political activism, but it seems that most children were happily motivated to become keen communists.

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Women

Things were not so universally happy for women.

In the towns, they made clear advances. Maternity hospitals and clinics were expanded, the number of trained midwives increased significantly, and the 1936 Family Code provided maternity benefits. The 1936 Constitution promised gender equality, and women gained access to education and employment opportunities, including skilled and research roles; by 1940, they made up 40% of the workforce. Businesses established crèches to help female employees, and allowed women paid holidays to split their time between work and home.

However, women were not treated equally to men in the workplace and they were still expected to continue their domestic duties alongside their work. Moreover, the 'Great Retreat' to re-establish family values doubled down on this, by making divorce much harder (by increasing the cost 12-fold) and making abortion illegal.

And it was in the countryside that women were most dissatisfied. There, women were traditionally responsible for their household’s food, and they saw collectivization as a direct attack on family independence, resources and values; even in the midst of the Terror, there were babi bunty (women’s riots), and many women left the countryside to work in the towns.

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Villagers

Indeed, it was in the villages that Stalinism did most damage to people’s lives.

By 1937, 99% of Russia had been collectivized, and it true that larger farms, fertilisers and machinery meant that more grain was produced … but this was to feed the towns and for export, not for the comfort of the villagers. Procurement quotas were set at such high levels that they exceeded the capacity of most farms – 90% of the produce had to go to the state, with only 10% left to feed the collective ... which meant that no matter how many labordays (by which collective farmers were paid) the kolkhozniks worked, there was no surplus to pay them. The result was government-created famines across the country, notably in the Volga and Ukraine in 1932-33 (the Holodomor) in which perhaps 5 million people died through famine and the epidemics which followed.

Few of the peasants had wanted to collectivise – they ALL lost their private farms and their freedom, and many slaughtered their stock rather than hand them over to the collective. The state suppressed peasant opposition, enforced collectivisation … and 17 million peasants left the countryside to work in the towns, 1928-37.

It was the Kulaks who suffered most – though, led by a fanatical Komsomol and an aktivs of local peasants hoping to gain, dekulakisation was in practice extended also to anybody they disliked. Once identified, whole kulak families. including children and relatives, were stripped of everything (even their clothes) and paraded through the streets. 7m Kulaks were eliminated as a class: 2½ million were executed or died, and the rest used as forced labour in the GULAG, or transported to colonise Siberia. Their suffering is unimaginable.

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Townspeople

Things, however, were not greatly better in the towns.

There was a massive expansion of industrial infrastructure (eg electricity, railways, the amazing Moscow Underground, which carried 400 million passengers a year), but it was all to create industrial growth – there was little trickle down to the workers: everyday goods such as soap, clothes and furniture were scarce and of poor quality (in 1931, there was only one pair of shoes for every two Soviet citizens), rationing continued for meat, butter, and sugar into the late 1930s, and you had queue for everything.

Better housing was provided for the apparatchiki and the foreign experts, but good housing was expensive, and many townspeople lived in komunalki – overcrowded communal apartments in which a single family had one room, with shared kitchens and toilets.

The number of doctors more than doubled, 1928-40, and sanitation and public health campaigns reduced infectious diseases – but the Pioneers who went to establish the new industrial towns like Magnitogorsk and Komsomolsk lived in tents and wooden barracks, without running water or sewage systems, in conditions as bad as any largery.

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Workers

The same can be said for the Workers.

Increased industrialisation – and an adult education programme which taught 40 million adults to read and set up technical schools to train workers for industry – created job opportunities, and unemployment was nearly non-existent … but real wages fell by about 50% 1928-37, and conditions and rights at work worsened.

Wage bargaining was abolished, striking was illegal, and forced unpaid overtime became common. Workers were forced to meet demanding production targets and fined, sacked and even arrested if they failed to meet them. Arriving late was punishable by dismissal and loss of ration cards, absenteeism by prison sentences of up to 6 months, and damaging the production line got you sent to the GULAG as a 'counter-revolutionary'. Managers, pressed by GOSPLAN to meet their own impossible targets, cut corners, resulting in accidents and deaths: 25,000 workers died building the Belomor Canal. (Another casualty was massive and irrevocable environmental damage).

Meanwhile workers were bombarded by propaganda urging them to exceed their quotas ‘like Stakhanov’ – who had achieved his output in a ‘set up’ situation, in a deep and soft seam, with everything supplied and on hand to help him.

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All this occurred, moreover, in a social and political environment of oppression and Terror. In a country where you never knew whether the NKVD were watching and your neighbour might disappear without warning and without trace, the government made homosexuality illegal, attacked the Church, persecuted ethnic & racial minorities (especially Jewish people), and purged opponents, sending millions for forced labour in mining, logging and canal- and railway-building.

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In her account of Homo Sovieticus (‘Soviet Man’), Sheila Fitzpatrick paints a picture of a person who was not permanently depressed and destroyed by the Stalinist system. He had learned to ‘keep his head down’ and, under cover of that invisibility he ‘worked the system’, and even managed a degree of recalcitrance (eg in the telling of subversive jokes). However, it is clear that, even so, EVERY ASPECT – even his insubordination – was determined by that system. Stalin’s Russia affected EVERY aspect of his life, even those areas he considered his ‘private’ life.

It is arguable that all Stalin’s policies were for what he perceived as the good of the Communist USSR, and that there were benefits ‘along the way’ as he achieved his aims; but if you did not benefit, it was ‘tough’, life was controlled and demanding, and if you got in the way, you were ‘removed’.