Russia. A History полностью

Peasant resistance to collectivization also spawned opposition, if less dramatic, in the party itself. Some who had supported Stalin against Bukharin and the ‘Right Opposition’ began to have second thoughts in the wake of the collectivization drive. By late 1930 several prominent party members of the RSFSR and Trans-caucasian governments expressed misgivings that Stalin construed as factionalism and opposition (‘the Syrtsov–Lominadze Right-Left Bloc’). Retribution did not prevent the formation of other groups in 1932, most notably the conspiratorial circle of M. N. Riutin and the group of A. P. Smirnov, G. G. Tolmachev, and N. B. Eismont. Even loyal Stalinists such as S. V. Kosior, I. M. Vareikis, K. Ia. Bauman, and M. A. Skrypnyk began to question the growing centrism of power as well as Stalin’s pro-Russian nationality policy.

In sum, the state won only a partial victory over the peasantry. True, it did bring the peasants under its administrative control and, through the machine tractor stations, made them technologically dependent. The kulaks and the clergy, rival élites in the village, had been annihilated. But peasant resistance extracted certain concessions, such as the legalization of private plots and the exclusion of domestic animals from the collective. In the longer term, a combination of administrative incompetence, underinvestment, and peasant alienation led to extremely low levels of productivity and thus an agricultural sector that, rather than providing resources and capital investment for industrial development, became a net drain on economic growth.

A Nation on the Move

Not unlike the enclosures at the dawn of the English Industrial Revolution, collectivization ‘freed’ peasants to work and live else where. Of course, there was nothing new about peasant seasonal out-migration (otkhod), particularly from villages in the ‘landhungry’ provinces of central Russia. But during the First Five-Year Plan, the number of peasant departures increased dramatically, in 1931–2 reaching an all-time high. Between 1928 and 1932, according to a recent estimate, at least ten million peasants joined the urban work-force as wage or salary earners.

In general, departures took three forms: involuntary deportations (through dekulakization); relocation through agreements between collective farms and individual industrial enterprises (a process known euphemistically as orgnabor or ‘organized recruitment’); and voluntary independent movement officially labelled samotek or ‘drifting’. These distinctions are analytically useful but hardly capture the scale or complexity of population movement in the 1930s. There was much ‘push’ (to leave the village), but also much ‘pull’ (demand for labour at the other end). Such was the competition among recruiters that train-loads of recruits were waylaid and rerouted to other destinations. In other cases, recruits upon arrival found working or living conditions so unappealing that they soon moved on—via samotek—to places where conditions were reportedly better. As Stephen Kotkin has noted, ‘The train, that ally of the Bolshevik leadership and its bureaucrats and planners, was being used against them: construction workers were using the trains to tour the country’.

The growth of Magnitogorsk, the celebrated socialist ‘planned’ city built on the steppe behind the Urals, was spectacular: from 25 inhabitants in March 1929 to 250,000 by the autumn of 1932. But older cities swelled too. Moscow’s population increased from 2.2 million in 1929 to 3.6 million by 1936; Leningrad’s rose from 1.6 million in 1926 to 3.5 million by the end of the 1930s. Regional centres, particularly in the industrial heartland, were also inundated by newcomers. Stalino (Donetsk), a coal and steel town in the Donbas, doubled its population between 1926 and 1937, reaching 246,000 by the latter year.

This phenomenal growth in urban population did not in itself constitute urbanization, a process that normally suggests qualitative as well as quantitative change. Indeed Moshe Lewin’s neologism, ‘ruralization’—the squeezing of the village into the city and the subjection of urban spaces to rural ways—is more accurate. Railway stations became temporary shelters, clearinghouses of information, informal labour exchanges, and (illicit) bazaars. Factories took on many of the same functions, as did parks.