Russia. A History полностью

The third dimension of the cultural revolution, which has received much attention from historians, was the rapid and systematic promotion of workers into white-collar positions, either directly from ‘the bench’ or after crash-course training programmes at institutions of higher education. As Sheila Fitzpatrick has shown, this programme of proletarian ‘advancement’ (vydvizhenie) represented ‘the positive corollary of the campaign against the “bourgeois” intelligentsia and the social purging of the bureaucracy’. In time, the beneficiaries of this process (the vydvizhentsy), formed the new Soviet intelligentsia, which was more numerous, plebeian, and (befitting an industrializing nation) technically oriented than its bourgeois predecessor. And it was also more beholden to the political leadership. Two themes thus dominate most accounts of the cultural revolution. One was its anti-intellectualism, tinged with a certain xenophobic colouring. The other was its social radicalism, rendered as ‘revolution from below’, where ‘below’ signified three distinct phenomena: the spontaneous actions of lower-level party committees and the Komsomol, the revolt of younger and previously marginal elements within the professions, and the promotion of proletarians. But one should not overlook the degree to which the cultural revolution was coded as a male pursuit and the advantage that proletarianism gave to ethnic Russians at the expense of peoples in less industrialized areas. Dissolution of both the party’s women’s department (Zhenotdel) and Jewish section (Evsektsiia) in 1930 may well have reflected these biases.

Communist Neo-Traditionalism

In 1933, after several years of almost unceasing tumult, the Soviet Union embarked on the Second Five-Year Plan. Early drafts of the Plan exhibited the same ‘great leap forward’ psychology that had characterized its predecessor. But by late 1932, when it became clear that the economy was overstrained, the key indices were scaled back. Instead of the 100 billion kilowatt-hours of electricity originally projected for 1937, the revised version (adopted by the Seventeenth Party Congress in February 1934) called for 38 billion; the target for pig iron was cut from 22 million to 14.5 million tons, and so forth. Referring to the famine, Alec Nove observes: ‘The terrible events of 1933 may have had their influence, by a kind of shock therapy’. The plan, still ambitious if scaled back, shifted the emphasis from ever-increasing inputs of labour, punctuated by occasional bouts of shock work (now deprecated as ‘storming’), and towards the assimilation and mastery of technology. As Stalin told a plenary session of the Central Committee in January 1933, the ‘passion for construction’ of the First Five-Year Plan had to be replaced by the passion for mastering technology. That required more vocational training, but also more labour discipline.

Few terms appeared more frequently in Bolshevik discourse in the early 1930s than ‘labour discipline’. Precisely because the industrial labour force had absorbed millions of male peasants and unskilled urban women, the demands for increasing labour discipline became ever shriller, the measures to combat violations ever harsher. Stricter control over the organization of production led to the abrogation of several First Five-Year Plan innovations: the ‘continuous work week’ (nepreryvka, a staggered schedule of four days on and one day off); the ‘functional system of management’ (a Taylorist approach that in its Soviet application encouraged parallel lines of authority and avoidance of personal responsibility); and production collectives and communes (shopfloor units that workers organized to protect themselves from the fluctuations in wages and the general disorganization of production).

The restoration of a more hierarchical approach to management entailed an expansion of the responsibilities, prestige, and privileges of managerial and technical personnel. ‘The ground should shake when the director goes around the factory,’ declared M. M. Kaganovich in a pep talk to managers, adding that ‘workers like a powerful leader’. Successful directors had to do more than shake the ground. Presiding over vast complexes with tens of thousands of workers, they learned how to wheel and deal for scarce resources, establish cosy relations with local party and NKVD officials, read the signals emanating from Moscow, and above all fulfil—or at least appear to fulfil—the quantitative targets of the plan. As a veteran journalist later recalled, ‘it was during those years that the names of metallurgical factory directors became known, not only to a narrow circle of economic officials, but broad sections of the Soviet public. For their work, for their successes, the country celebrated them as in wartime it had followed the successes of military leaders.’