20. The number of peasant households would plunge from 25–26 million to 19 million by 1937. Many of those who left the village were young males, those most in favor of the regime’s social transformation, including early stalwarts of the collective farms. Fitzpatrick, Stalin’s Peasants, 81; Wheatcroft and Davies, “Population,” 69.
21. Kotkin, Magnetic Mountain, 72–105.
22. The regime used “taxation” against private traders. NEPmen were also being systematically evicted from their apartments. Davies, Development of the Soviet Budgetary System,112; Davies, Soviet Economy in Turmoil, 97–101, citing Kontrol’nye tsifry narodnogo khoziaistva SSSR 1929/30 (1930), 188; Pravda, Oct. 12, 1929; and Ekonomicheskaia zhizn’, Feb. 14, 1930; Ball, Russia’s Last Capitalists, 78. On Feb. 9, 1930 Stalin would criticize those “trying to ‘supplement’ the slogan of the liquidation of the kulaks as a class with the slogan of the liquidation of the urban bourgeoisie,” a mistake given that the latter, unlike the kulaks, had no control over the means of production. But the “dekulakization” of the NEP-era “bourgeoisie”—the majority of whom were petty traders—proceeded apace, and would further unhinge the supply of food and other goods in cities. Sochinenia, XII: 186; Ianvarskii ob” edinennyi plenum MK i MKK, 31 (Bauman); Rukeyser, Working for the Soviets, 217.
23. Tikhomirov, Promyslovaia kooperatsiia, 15–7. On June 28, 1931, the Council of People’s Commissars issued a directive to shore up enforced artisan “cooperatives.” Kiselev and Shchagin, Khrestomatiia po otechestvennoi istorii, 401–5 (RGAE, f. 3429, op. 1, d. 5249–6, l. 42–6).
24. Fitzpatrick, “After NEP.” NEPmen and other “non-laboring elements” were denied access to state-owned housing and to rationing—but not if they reinvented themselves.
25. Lih et al., Stalin’s Letters to Molotov, 207–8; Rubinstein, Razvitie vnutrennei torgovli, 290; Randall, Soviet Dream World, 19–21, 24–6; Hessler, Social History of Soviet Trade, 177–82.
26. Kotkin, Magnetic Mountain, 225.
27. Of perhaps 2 million functionaries, around 160,000 were subjected to investigation as of mid-1931 and at least 5,000 in the central economic administration and 4,500 on the railways were arrested, mostly for “sabotage.” Davies, Soviet Economy in Turmoil, 117–8, 134–5, 533; XVI s”ezd VKP (b) (2nd ed.), 316; Chistka sovetskogo apparata, 22.
28. Werth, “Stalin’s System,” 50 n25 (no citation).
29. Sotsialisticheskoe stroitel’stvov SSSR, 344–5; Davies, Soviet Economy in Turmoil, 126–7. As a side effect, the number of students in secondary schools plummeted from around 1 million in 1928–30 to a mere 4,234 in 1931–32. Before the end of 1932, secondary students would shoot up again, to 1.2 million, although their preparation left much to be desired. Nove, Economic History of the USSR (1992), 199. On March 15, 1931, the politburo decreed an end to worker advancement into administration and ordered those recently advanced to be returned to where they were actually needed: as skilled workers in factories. Spravochnik partiinogo rabotnika, VIII: 386.
30. In 1929–30, only 3,166 people graduated from engineering and technical schools, but that was compared with just 1,282 in 1928–29; the education of the graduates was not comprehensive. Soviet engineers-in-training learned mostly on the job, including while working alongside European and American specialists employed in the USSR. Davies, Socialist Offensive, 123 (citing Pravda, May 11, 1930), 124–5; Hoover Institution, AER, box 4, R. W. Stuck ms., 29.
