Everyday. Everyday life of people in the 20s and 30s

REMINDER: Labels may be inaccurate and sometimes completely unclear. Let's try together to bring them into divine form. And the author does not bear any responsibility for them.
Arrival of participants of the international congress of soil scientists in Moscow. Russia, 1930

Opening of the international congress of soil scientists. In the background is a portrait of Lenin on the wall. Russia, 1930.

Participants of the International Congress of Soil Scientists visit the Moscow Kremlin. Russia, 1930.

A group of people during the 14th anniversary of the revolution on Red Square in Moscow on November 7, 1931.

The streets of Moscow are being built at a hasty pace. Moscow, 1931

The Kremlin (with a flag), and in the foreground is the Lenin Mausoleum. Moscow, Russia, 1932.

A beggar in rags on one of the streets of Moscow, 1932

Two men on the roof overlooking the center of Moscow and the Kremlin. 1932.

Boarding the tram. 1932

Women with children somewhere in poor areas of Moscow. 1932

A man with a briefcase sits on a chair against the background of an artificial romantic landscape, waiting for a picture from a street photographer. Moscow, 1932.

Workers visit one of the many museums in Moscow. 1932

Bolsheviks and the Church. 1932

View of pedestrians, cars, buses and trams on Sverdlov Square (formerly Teatralnaya Square) in Moscow. Photo taken from the top of the Bolshoi Theater 1932

This photograph was taken during the big parade on Red Square in Moscow, 1932.

Market in Moscow. Russia, 1933.

Top view of the May Day parade on Red Square. Moscow, USSR, 1933

Units of the Russian army lined up on Red Square during the May Day parade. Moscow, USSR, 1933

Moscow during the celebration of the October Revolution, 1933.

Tanks on Red Square in Moscow during the celebration of the October Revolution of 1917. Russia, 1933.

An impressive parade on Red Square in Moscow in honor of the 17th anniversary of the October Revolution. Russia, 1933.

A large parade on Red Square in Moscow during the celebration of the October Revolution of 1917. Russia, 1933.

The final part of the parade on Red Square in Moscow on the occasion of the 17th anniversary of the October Revolution was a parade of armored vehicles. Russia, 1933.

Hair extensions and wigs for sale. Moscow, 1933.

Professor Schmidt is the leader of the Arctic expedition on the icebreaker "Sibiryakov". At the North Station (?) in Moscow he gives interviews to journalists. 1933

Red Square with a Soviet policeman and traffic controller. Moscow, 1935

Metro tunnel in Moscow. 1935.

Panorama of Okhotny Ryad: metro station in the center of Moscow. On the left is a building under construction and a mountain of rubble in the foreground. Moscow, 1935.

Panorama of Okhotny Ryad: metro station in the center of Moscow, the square is filled with horses and carts. Moscow, 1935.

Semicircular subway platform and tunnel. Moscow, Russia 1935

Underground metro stations. Moscow, 1935.

A game of chess between Salomon Flor and Vyacheslav Vasilieviches Rogozhin (right) during a chess tournament in Moscow, 1936

Chess player Jose Raul Capablanca in a match against Ryumin at a chess tournament in Moscow in 1936.

Representatives of various ethnic minorities in the "new" Soviet parliament. Moscow, 1938

View of Red Square, where the sports parade is taking place. Moscow, Russia, 1938

Soviet Russia of the pre-war era provides unique material for studying the culture, everyday life and everyday life of ordinary people. This routine can be observed especially clearly in Moscow, as the capital of this vast country, and therefore the standard for all other cities. First, it’s worth figuring out who these Muscovites were in the 1930s.

After forced collectivization and the beginning of the accelerated industrialization of the country, crowds of yesterday's peasants poured into the cities. These peasants brought their culture with them to the cities, which did not fit well in the urban environment. The townspeople, that small layer that managed to survive the revolutionary hurricane, remained in the minority in the face of new settlers. Of course, these newly minted proletarians were not very cultured.

The density and overcrowding in Moscow was terrifying. But this did not stop more and more new waves of people from arriving in the city. Due to them, the population of Moscow quickly grew to 4137 thousand in 1939. The influx of marginal elements into the cities brought to life that increase in crime, which official propaganda was usually silent about. The rampant hooliganism and drunkenness, it seems, would allow one to doubt the moral qualities proletarians, which were attributed to them by theorists of Marxism-Leninism.

However, not only increased crime characterized the period of the 30s, but also positive aspects - such as an increase in the level of literacy among the population, an increase in the number of hospitals, the opening of new theaters and museums for the general public. Since 1939, constant television broadcasting has been organized. However, all this was leveled out against the background of a general decline in the standard of living in Moscow and other cities in the pre-war years.

Life was extremely harsh and unpretentious. Many houses lacked heating and running water due to poor maintenance. In the 30s, a card system for food distribution was in effect in Moscow and throughout the country. Huge queues for food were a common sight in Moscow at that time.

In addition, the 30s were the height of Stalin’s repressions. People were afraid to speak the truth openly, because the Soviet terror machine saw a political motive in everything, even minor offenses, a “threat to socialist society.”

However, at the same time there was the work of such writers as Bulgakov and Akhmatova. At the same time, official propaganda painted images of a happy, optimistic life.

Ivy Litvinova, wife of the future People's Commissar for Foreign Affairs M. Litvinov, soon after arriving in Russia in difficult times at the end civil war made a valuable observation. She thought, she wrote to a friend in England, that in revolutionary Russia“ideas” are everything, and “things” are nothing, “because everyone will have everything they need, without excesses.” But, “walking along the streets of Moscow and looking into the windows on the first floor, I saw Moscow things randomly stuffed in all corners and realized that they had never meant so much”1. This idea is extremely important for understanding everyday life in the USSR in the 1930s. Things were of great importance in the 1930s in the Soviet Union, if only because they were so difficult to get.

The new, extremely important role of things and their distribution was reflected in everyday speech. In the 1930s people didn’t say “buy”, they said “get it”. The expression "hard to come by" was constantly in use; A new term has become very popular to denote all those things that are difficult to get - “scarce goods”. In case they came across any of the scarce goods, people walked around with nets, known as “string bags,” in their pockets. Seeing the line, they joined it and, only after taking their place, asked what it was for. Moreover, they formulated their question like this: not “What are they selling?”, but “What are they giving?” However, the supply of goods through normal channels was so unreliable that a whole layer of vocabulary emerged to describe alternative options. Goods could be sold unofficially or from under the counter (“to the left”) if the person had “acquaintances and connections” with the right people or “blat”2.

1930s were for Soviet people a decade of enormous hardship and hardship, far worse than the 1920s. In 1932 - 1933 all the main grain-growing regions were struck by famine, in addition, in 1936 and 1939. poor harvests caused major disruptions in the food supply. The cities were flooded with new arrivals from the villages, there was a catastrophic shortage of housing, and the card system threatened to collapse. For most of the city

The entire life of the population revolved around the endless struggle for the basic necessities - food, clothing, a roof over their heads.

With the closure of the urban private sector in the late 20s. and with the beginning of collectivization a new era began. An American engineer who returned to Moscow in June 1930 after several months of absence describes the dramatic consequences of the new economic course:

“It seems like all the shops on the streets have disappeared. The open market has disappeared. The Nepmen disappeared. State-owned stores had spectacular empty boxes and other decorations in their windows. But there were no goods inside.”3

At the beginning of the Stalinist period, the standard of living dropped sharply in both the city and the countryside. Famine 1932-1933 claimed at least 3 - 4 million lives and affected the birth rate for several years. Although state policy was aimed at protecting urban population And while the peasants were allowed to bear the brunt, the city dwellers suffered too: the death rate rose, the birth rate fell, and the consumption of meat and lard per person in the city in 1932 was less than a third of what it was in 19284.

In 1933, the worst year of the entire decade, the average married worker in Moscow consumed less than half the amount of bread and flour consumed by the same worker in St. Petersburg at the beginning of the 20th century, and less than two-thirds of the corresponding amount of sugar. There was virtually no fat in his diet, very little milk and fruit, and meat and fish - only a fifth of the norm at the turn of the century5. In 1935 the situation improved somewhat, but the crop failure of 1936 gave rise to new problems: the threat of famine in some rural areas, the flight of peasants from collective farms and long lines for bread in the cities in the spring and summer of 1937. The best harvest of the pre-war period, long preserved in people's memory, was harvested in the fall of 1937. However, the last pre-war years brought with them a new round of shortages and an even greater decline standard of living6.

During the same period, the urban population of the USSR grew at a record pace, which caused a huge shortage of housing, overload of all public services and all kinds of inconveniences. In 1926 - 1933 The urban population increased by 15 million people. (by almost 60%), and before 1939 another 16 million were added to it. The number of Moscow residents jumped from 2 to 3.6 million people, in Leningrad it grew almost as sharply. The population of Sverdlovsk, an industrial city in the Urals, from less than 150 thousand people, increased to almost half a million people, and the population growth rates in Stalingrad, Novosibirsk and other industrial centers were equally impressive. In cities such as Magnitogorsk and Karaganda, a new mining center where prison labor was widely used, the population growth rate rose from zero in 1926 to a level of one hundred percent. extra thousand. people in 19397. Five Year Plans

30s gave unconditional priority to industrial construction over housing. Most of the new townspeople ended up in dormitories, barracks, and even dugouts. Compared to them, even the notorious communal apartments, where the whole family huddled in one room and there was no possibility of privacy, were considered almost a luxury.

With the transition to central planning in the late 1920s. shortages of goods became an integral feature of the Soviet economy. In hindsight, we can view it in part as a structural feature, the product of an economic system with “soft” fiscal constraints that encouraged all producers to stockpile8. But in the 1930s. Few people thought so; the shortage was considered a temporary problem, part of a general belt-tightening tactic, one of the sacrifices required by industrialization. The shortages of those years, unlike the post-Stalin period, were indeed caused as much by underproduction of consumer goods as by systemic distribution problems. In the first five-year plan (1929-1932), priority was given to heavy industry, with the production of consumer goods taking a good if second place. The communists also attributed the food shortage to the desire of the kulaks to “hide” grain, and when there were no more kulaks, they explained it as anti-Soviet sabotage in the chain of production and distribution. However, no matter what rational explanations were given for the shortage, it was impossible to ignore it. It has already become a central fact of economic and everyday life.

When in 1929-1930. For the first time, food shortages began and lines for bread appeared; the population was alarmed and indignant. Here is a quote from a review of reader letters to Pravda, prepared for the party leadership:

“What is the expression of dissatisfaction? Firstly, the fact that the worker is hungry, does not consume any fat, bread is a surrogate that cannot be eaten... It is a common occurrence that a worker’s wife stands in line for whole days, her husband comes home from work, but lunch is not ready, and Everything here is an insult to the Soviet regime. In the queues there is noise, shouting and fighting, swearing at the Soviet authorities.”9

It soon got worse. In the winter of 1931, the Ukrainian village was struck by famine. Despite the silence of the newspapers, news of him spread instantly; in Kyiv, Kharkov and other cities, signs of famine were evident, despite all the efforts of the authorities to restrict movement around railway and access to cities. On next year famine gripped the main grain-producing regions of central Russia, North Caucasus and Kazakhstan. Information about him was still hidden, and in December 1932 internal

giving up a passport in an attempt to control the flight of starving peasants to the cities. Bread shortages periodically arose even after the hunger crisis had passed. Even in good years grain queues in individual cities and regions assumed sufficiently alarming proportions that the issue of them was brought to Politburo meetings.

The most serious and large-scale relapse of bread lines occurred in the winter and spring of 1936-1937, after the crop failure of 1936. As early as November, bread shortages were reported in cities Voronezh region, allegedly caused by an influx of peasants coming to the city for bread, because there is not a grain in the villages. IN Western Siberia that winter, people stood for bread from 2 a.m., a local memoirist described in his diary huge queues in a small town, with jostling, crushing, hysterical fits. A woman from Vologda wrote to her husband: “My mother and I have been standing since 4 in the morning, and we didn’t even get black bread, because they didn’t bring any at all, and this was the case almost all over the city.” From Penza, a mother wrote to her daughter: “We are having a terrible panic with bread. Thousands of peasants spend the night at bread stalls, 200 km away. they come to Penza to buy bread, it’s just indescribable horror... It was frosty, and 7 people, going home with bread, froze. The windows in the store were broken and the door was broken.” It was even worse in the village. “We have been standing in line for bread since 12 o’clock at night, but they only give us a kilogram, even if you are dying of hunger,” a woman from a Yaroslavl collective farm wrote to her husband. “We’ve been walking around hungry for two days... All the collective farmers stand to buy bread, and the scenes are terrible - people are choking, many have been killed. Send us something, otherwise we’ll die of hunger.”10

Bread shortages arose again throughout the country in 1939 - 1940. “Joseph Vissarionovich,” a housewife from the Volga wrote to Stalin, “something really terrible has begun. Bread, and even then, you have to go at 2 am and stand until 6 am, and you will get 2 kg of rye bread.” A worker from the Urals wrote that in his city you have to stand in line for bread at 1-2 am, and sometimes earlier, and stand for almost 12 hours. From Alma-Ata in 1940 it was reported that there “there are huge queues near bread shops and stalls all day long and even at night. Often, when passing these lines, you can hear screams, noise, bickering, tears, and sometimes fights.”11

The shortage was not limited to bread. The situation was no better with other basic foodstuffs, such as meat, milk, butter, vegetables, not to mention such necessary things as salt, soap, kerosene and matches. Fish also disappeared, even from areas with developed fishing. “Why is there no fish, I can’t figure it out myself,” one indignant citizen wrote in 1940 to A. Mikoyan, who headed the People’s Commissariat of Food. “We have seas and they remain the same as they were before, but then there was as much of it as you wanted and whatever you wanted, but now I’ve even lost the idea of ​​what it looks like.”12

Even vodka in the late 1930s. it was difficult to get. This was partly the result of a short-lived campaign of sobriety, expressed in the adoption of Prohibition in individual cities and workers' towns. However, the temperance movement was doomed, since there was a much more pressing need to pump out funds for industrialization. In September 1930, Stalin, in a note to Molotov, emphasized the need to increase vodka production to pay for increased military spending due to the threat of a Polish attack. Within a few years, state production of vodka grew so much that it provided a fifth of all state income; by the middle of the decade, vodka had become the main item of trade in state-owned commercial stores13.

Even more severe than basic foodstuffs were the shortages of clothing, shoes and various consumer goods - often completely unaffordable. This state of affairs reflected both the priorities of state production, strictly oriented towards heavy industry, and the disastrous consequences of the destruction of crafts and cottage industries at the beginning of the decade. In the 1920s handicraftsmen and artisans were either the only or the main producers of many household items: pottery, baskets, samovars, sheepskin coats and hats - just a small part of the extensive list. All of these goods became available in the early 1930s. practically inaccessible; in public canteens, spoons, forks, plates, cups were in such short supply that workers stood in line for them, just like for food; There were usually no knives at all. Throughout the decade, it was completely impossible to obtain such simple basic necessities as troughs, kerosene lamps and pots, because the use of non-ferrous metals for the production of consumer goods was now prohibited14.

A recurring theme of complaint was the poor quality of the few products available. Clothes were cut and sewn carelessly, and there were numerous reports of glaring flaws in clothing sold in government stores, such as lack of sleeves. The handles of pots fell off, matches refused to light, and foreign objects were found in bread baked from flour with impurities. It was impossible to repair clothes, shoes, household utensils, find a locksmith to change a lock, or a painter to paint a wall. To top off all the difficulties faced by ordinary citizens, even if they themselves had the necessary skills, they, as a rule, could not get the raw materials to make or repair something. It was no longer possible to buy paint, nails, boards, or anything else needed for home repairs at retail; in case of urgent need, all this had to be stolen from a state enterprise or construction site.

Usually it was impossible to even buy threads, needles, buttons and the like. It was forbidden to sell flax, hemp, linen, and yarn to the population, since all these materials were in great shortage15.

Law of March 27, 1936, again legalizing private practice in such areas as shoe repair, carpentry and carpentry, tailoring, hairdressing, laundry, metal repair, photography, plumbing repair and wallpaper work, the situation only slightly improved. Private traders were allowed to take on apprentices, but they could only work to order and not for sale. The customer had to come with his own material (i.e., to sew a suit from a tailor, he had to bring his own fabric, threads and buttons). Other handicrafts, including almost all those related to food production, remained prohibited. Bakery, sausage production and other food products were excluded from the scope of legal private labor activity; however, peasants were still allowed to sell homemade pies in specially designated places16.

One of the most difficult problems for consumers was shoes. In addition to the disaster that befell all small-scale production of consumer goods, shoe production was also affected by an acute shortage of leather - a consequence of the mass slaughter of livestock during collectivization. As a result, the government banned all artisanal shoemaking in 1931, leaving the consumer completely dependent on state-owned industry, which produced shoes in insufficient quantities and often of such poor quality that they fell apart as soon as they were put on. Any Russian who lived in the 1930s had a lot of horror stories about how he tried to buy shoes or have them repaired, how he patched them at home, how he lost them or how they were stolen from him (see, for example ., Zoshchenko’s famous story “Galosh”), etc. It was even more difficult with children's shoes than with adult ones: when a new one began in Yaroslavl in 1935 academic year, in the city stores there was not a single pair of children's shoes17.

The Politburo has repeatedly decided that something needs to be done in the field of supply and distribution of consumer goods. But even Stalin’s personal interest in this problem did not produce results18. At the end of the 1930s, as at the beginning, there was constant talk about an acute shortage of clothing, shoes, and textile products: in Leningrad, queues of 6,000 people formed; according to the NKVD, such long lines lined up at one shoe store in the center of Leningrad queues, that they interfered with street traffic, and store windows were broken in the stampede. Residents of Kyiv complained that thousands of people stood in line all night in front of clothing stores. In the morning, the police allowed customers into the store in batches of 5-10 people, who walked “taking

holding hands (so that no one jumps in line) ... like prisoners"19.

If there was a shortage, there had to be scapegoats. People's Commissar of Food A. Mikoyan in the early 1930s. wrote to the OPTU that he suspected “sabotage” in the distribution system: “We send a lot, but the goods do not arrive.” The OGPU helpfully kept ready a list of “counter-revolutionary gangs” who baked dead mice into bread and tossed nuts into salad. In Moscow in 1933, supposedly former kulaks “threw garbage, nails, wire, broken glass into food,” trying to injure workers. The search for scapegoats, “pests,” took on wider proportions after shortages of bread in 1936 - 1937: for example, in Smolensk and Boguchary, local leaders were accused of creating an artificial shortage of bread and sugar; in Ivanovo - that they poisoned the bread for the workers; in Kazan, bread lines were declared the result of rumors spread by counter-revolutionaries20. At the next round of acute shortages, in the winter of 1939 - 1940, similar accusations began to fall from the public, and not from the government; concerned citizens began to write to political leaders, demanding to find and punish the “saboteurs”21.

Housing

Despite the huge increase in urban population in the USSR in the 1930s, housing construction remained almost as neglected as the production of consumer goods. Until the Khrushchev period, nothing was done to somehow cope with the monstrous overpopulation that remained characteristic of Soviet cities for more than a quarter of a century. Meanwhile, people lived in communal apartments, where one family usually occupied one room, in dormitories and barracks. Only a small group with extreme privileges had separate apartments. A much larger number of people settled in the corridors and “corners” of other people’s apartments: those who lived in the corridors and hallways usually had beds, and the inhabitants of the corners slept on the floor in the corner of the kitchen or some other common area.

After the revolution, most of the residential buildings in the city became the property of the state, and the city councils managed these housing stock22. The authorities in charge of housing issues determined how much space should be allocated to each apartment resident, and these living space standards - the notorious “square meters” - were forever imprinted in the heart of every resident big city. In Moscow in 1930, the average standard of living space was 5.5 m2 per person, and in 1940 it dropped to almost 4 m2. In new and rapidly industrializing cities

The situation was even worse: in Magnitogorsk and Irkutsk the norm was slightly less than 4 m2, and in Krasnoyarsk in 1933 it was only 3.4 m2 23.

City housing departments had the right to evict tenants - for example, those who were considered " class enemies”, - and move new people into already occupied apartments. The latter custom, euphemistically referred to as “densification,” was one of the worst nightmares for city dwellers in the 1920s and early 1930s. An apartment occupied by one family could suddenly, at the behest of the city authorities, turn into a multi-family or communal one, and the new residents, as a rule, came from the lower classes, were completely unfamiliar to the old ones and were often incompatible with them. Once the ax was raised, it was almost impossible to avoid the blow. The family that originally occupied the apartment was unable to move anywhere, both due to the housing shortage and the lack of a private rental market.

From the end of 1932, after internal passports and city registration were reintroduced, residents of large cities were required to have a residence permit issued by internal affairs departments. In houses with separate apartments, the responsibility to register residents was assigned to building managers and cooperative boards. As under the old regime, building managers and janitors, whose main function was to maintain order in the building and the adjacent courtyard, were in constant communication with the internal affairs bodies, monitored residents and worked as informants24.

In Moscow and other large cities, all kinds of housing fraud flourished: fictitious marriages and divorces, registration of strangers as relatives, rental of “beds and corners” at exorbitant prices (up to 50% of monthly earnings). As reported in 1933, “the occupation [for housing] of stokers, gatehouses, basements and stairwells has become a mass phenomenon in Moscow.” The shortage of housing led to the fact that divorced spouses often remained living in the same apartment, unable to leave. This is what happened to the Lebedevs, for example, whose attachment to a luxury apartment of almost 22 m2 in the center of Moscow forced them to continue cohabiting (with their 18-year-old son) for six years after their divorce, despite relations so bad that they were constantly attracted to to court for beating each other. Sometimes physical violence went much further. In Simferopol, authorities discovered the decomposing corpse of a woman in the Dikhov family’s apartment. She turned out to be the Dikhovs’ aunt, whom they killed in order to take possession of the apartment25.

The housing crisis in Moscow and Leningrad was so acute that even the best connections and social status often they were not yet guaranteed to receive a separate apartment. Politicians and government officials were drowning in requests and complaints from citizens

due to lack of suitable housing. A thirty-six-year-old Leningrad worker, who had lived in the corridor for five years, wrote to Molotov, begging him to give him “a room or a small apartment to build a personal life in,” which he “needs like air.” The children of one Moscow family of six asked not to be moved into a closet under the stairs, without windows, with a total area of ​​6 m2 (i.e. 1 m2 per person)26.

Common for Russian cities Stalin era The type of housing was communal apartments, one room per family.

“There was no running water in the room; corners where two or three generations slept and sat were blocked off with sheets or curtains; In winter, food was hung in bags outside the window. Common sinks, latrines, baths and kitchen appliances (usually just primus stoves... burners and cold water taps) were located either in no man's land between living rooms, or downstairs, in unheated hallways covered with linen.”27

The term “communal” has a certain ideological connotation, conjuring up a picture of a collective socialist hostel. However, reality was strikingly different from this picture, and even in theory there were few attempts to provide a detailed ideological basis for this concept. True, during the years of the Civil War, when city councils first began to “densify” apartments, they put forward as one of their motives the desire to equalize the standard of living of workers and the bourgeoisie; Communists often took pleasure in observing the despair of respectable bourgeois families forced to allow dirty proletarians into their apartments. During the short period of the Cultural Revolution in the late 1920s and early 1930s. Radical architects favored communal apartments for ideological reasons and built new housing for workers with shared kitchens and bathrooms. In Magnitogorsk, for example, the first permanent residential buildings were built according to a design that not only forced families to use common bathrooms and latrines, but also initially did not include kitchens - since it was assumed that everyone would eat in public canteens28. However, with the exception of new industrial cities like Magnitogorsk, most communal apartments of the 1930s. were not built, but converted from old separate apartments, and such conversion was mainly explained by very practical reasons: a shortage of housing.

In fact, judging by most stories, communal apartments did not at all contribute to the cultivation of the spirit of collectivism and habits of communal life among the residents; in fact, they did the exact opposite. Each family jealously guarded personal property, such as pots, pans, and plates, stored in the kitchen, a common area. Demarcation lines were strictly drawn. Envy and

greed flourished in the closed world of communal apartments, where often the size of the rooms and the size of the families occupying them did not correspond to each other, and families living in large rooms caused deep resentment of those who lived in small ones. This indignation was the source of many denunciations and lawsuits, the purpose of which was to increase the living space of the informer or plaintiff at the expense of the neighbor.

One protracted squabble of this kind is described in the complaint of a Moscow teacher, whose husband was sentenced to 8 years in prison for counter-revolutionary agitation. Their family (parents and two sons) lived for almost two decades in a large - 42 m2 - room in a Moscow communal apartment. “For all these years, our room has been a bone of contention for all the residents of our apartment,” the teacher wrote. Hostile neighbors persecuted them in every possible way, including writing denunciations to various local authorities. As a result, the family was first deprived of their rights, then they were not given passports, and finally, after the arrest of the head of the family, they were evicted29.

Life in a communal apartment, side by side with people of different origins, with very different biographies, strangers to each other, but obliged to share the apartment’s amenities and keep them clean, without the right to privacy, constantly in front of the neighbors, was extremely mentally exhausting for most residents. It is not surprising that the satirist M. Zoshchenko, in his famous story about the morals of a communal apartment, called its inhabitants “ nervous people" A list of the dark aspects of life in a communal apartment was contained in a government decree of 1935, condemning “hooligan behavior” in the apartment, including “the organization ... of systematic drinking parties, accompanied by noise, fights and swearing, beatings (in particular women and children) , insults, threats of violence, taking advantage of one’s official or party position, depraved behavior, national persecution, mockery of a person, committing various dirty tricks (throwing out other people’s things from the kitchen and other common areas, spoiling food prepared by other residents, other people’s things and products, and etc.)"30.

“Each apartment had its own madman, as well as its own drunkard or drunkards, its own troublemaker or troublemakers, its own informer, etc.,” said a veteran of communal apartments. The most common form of madness was persecution mania: for example, “one neighbor was convinced that the others were mixing crushed glass into her soup, that they wanted to poison her”31. Living in a communal apartment certainly aggravated mental illness, creating nightmarish conditions for both the patient and his neighbors. A woman named Bogdanova, 52 years old, single, living in a nice 20-meter room in a communal apartment in Leningrad, waged a war with her neighbors for many years, using countless denunciations and

lawsuits. She claimed that her neighbors were kulaks, embezzlers, speculators. The neighbors insisted that she was crazy, the NKVD was constantly involved in sorting out their squabbles, and the doctors were of the same opinion. And despite this, the authorities considered it impossible to evict Bogdanova, since she refused to move to another apartment, and her “extremely nervous state” did not allow her to be moved by force32.

Along with all these horror stories It is impossible not to cite the memories of the minority about the spirit of mutual assistance that reigned among their neighbors in the communal apartment, who lived as if they were one big family. In one Moscow communal apartment, for example, all the neighbors were friends, helped each other, did not lock the doors during the day and turned a blind eye to the wife of an “enemy of the people” who illegally settled with her little son in her sister’s room33. Most of the good memories of the communal apartment, including the one mentioned above, relate to the memories of childhood: children whose private property instincts were less developed than their parents were often glad that their peers lived with them and they had someone to play with, and loved to observe the behavior of many adults so different from each other.

In the new industrial cities, a characteristic feature of the housing situation - and of urban public services in general - was that housing and other public services were provided by enterprises, and not by local councils, as was customary in other places. Thus, “departmental towns” became an integral feature of life in the USSR, where the plant not only provided work, but also controlled living conditions. In Magnitogorsk, 82% of the living space belonged to the main industrial facility city ​​- Magnitogorsk Iron and Steel Works. Even in Moscow, departmental housing received in the 1930s. widespread34.

Usually it took the form of barracks or dormitories. At one large industrial new building in Siberia in the early 1930s. 95% of the workers lived in barracks. In Magnitogorsk in 1938, barracks made up only 47% of the available housing, but to this should be added 18% of dugouts, covered with turf, straw and scraps of metal, built by the residents themselves35. Single-story barracks, consisting of large rooms with rows of iron beds or divided into small rooms, as a rule, served as housing for single workers in new industrial cities and were a common sight on the outskirts of old ones; married workers with families also sometimes had to live in them, despite the lack of privacy. Students, as well as young unmarried skilled workers and employees, were usually accommodated in dormitories.

John Scott describes a relatively decent barracks in Magnitogorsk - a low, whitewashed wooden building, “double walls lined with straw. Roof covered with tar paper, in the spring

was leaking. The barracks had thirty rooms. In each, the residents installed a small brick or iron stove, so that as long as there was wood or coal, the rooms could be heated. The low-ceilinged corridor was illuminated by one small electric light bulb.” In a room for two people, “measuring six by ten feet, there was one small window, which was covered with newspapers to prevent the draft. There was a small table, a small brick stove and a three-legged stool. The two iron bunks were narrow and rickety. There was no spring mesh on them, only thick boards lay on an iron frame.” There were no bathrooms in the barracks, and apparently no running water. “There was a kitchen, but one family lived in it, so everyone cooked on their own stoves”36.

Scott, as a foreigner, albeit a worker, was accommodated in a better barracks than usual. The whole of Magnitogorsk was full of barracks, “one-story buildings, stretching in rows as far as the eye could see, and not having any characteristic distinctive features. “You go home, you look, you look,” one local resident said confusedly. “All the barracks look the same, you can’t find yours.” In such new cities, barracks were usually divided into large common bedrooms, where there were “bunks for sleeping, a stove for heating, a table in the middle, often there were not even enough tables and chairs,” as they said about the Siberian Kuznetsk. Men and women tended to live in different barracks, or at least different common rooms. In the largest barracks, for 100 people, 200 or more often lived, and they slept on beds in shifts. Such overpopulation was not something out of the ordinary. In one Moscow barracks, which belonged to a large electrical plant, in 1932 there lived 550 people, men and women: “Everyone had 2 square meters, there was so little space that 50 people slept on the floor, and some used beds with straw mattresses one at a time”37.

Workers and student dormitories were arranged like barracks: large rooms (separate for men and women), sparsely furnished with iron beds and bedside tables, with a single light bulb in the middle. Even at such an elite Moscow plant as Hammer and Sickle, 60% of workers in 1937 lived in dormitories of one kind or another. A survey of workers' dormitories in Novosibirsk in 1938 revealed the deplorable condition of some of them. The two-story wooden construction workers' dormitories had no electricity or any other lighting, and the construction department supplied them with neither fuel nor kerosene. Among the residents were single women, whom the report recommended to immediately relocate, since in the dormitory “there is everyday corruption of workers (drunkenness, etc.).” However, conditions were better in other places. Women workers, mostly Komsomol members, lived in relative comfort in a dormitory furnished with beds, tables and chairs, with electricity, although without running water38.

The miserable living conditions in the barracks and dormitories caused dissatisfaction, and in the second half of the 1930s. a campaign was launched to improve them. Social activists brought curtains and other nice little things there. Businesses were instructed to share large rooms in dormitories and barracks so that the families living there could have some privacy. The Ural Machine-Building Plant in Sverdlovsk reported in 1935 that it had already converted almost all of its large barracks into small separate rooms; a year later, Stalin's metallurgical plant announced that all 247 working families living in "common rooms" in its barracks would soon receive separate rooms. In Magnitogorsk, this process was almost completed by 1938. But the era of barracks did not end so quickly, even in Moscow, not to mention the new industrial cities of the Urals and Siberia. Despite the 1934 resolution of the Moscow Council prohibiting further construction of barracks in the city, 225 new barracks were added to the 5,000 existing Moscow barracks in 193839.

THE TROUBLES OF CITY LIFE

In life Soviet city 1930s everything was going wrong. In old cities, public services - public transport, roads, electricity and water - were overwhelmed by sudden population growth, increasing industrial demands and meager budgets. New industrial cities had it even worse, since their public utilities started from scratch. “The physical appearance of cities is terrible,” wrote an American engineer who worked in the Soviet Union in the early 1930s. “The stench, dirt, and devastation amaze the senses at every step.”40

Moscow was the showcase of the Soviet Union. The construction of the first lines of the Moscow metro, with escalators and frescoes on the walls of underground palace stations, was the pride of the country; even Stalin and his friends rode along them the night after their opening in the early 1930s.41. There were trams, trolleybuses and buses in Moscow. More than two-thirds of its residents used sewerage and running water at the beginning of the decade, and by the end of it, almost three-quarters. Of course, most lived in houses without bathrooms and washed about once a week in public baths - but at least the city was relatively well provided with baths, unlike many others42.

Outside Moscow, life instantly changed for the worse. Even the Moscow region was poorly provided with public services: in Lyubertsy, the regional center of the Moscow region, with a population of 65,000 people. there was not a single bathhouse; in Orekhovo-Zuevo, an exemplary workers' settlement with a nursery, a club and a pharmacy, there was no street lighting or running water. In Voronezh

Until 1937, new houses for workers were built without running water or sewerage. In the cities of Siberia, the majority of the population managed without running water, sewerage and central heating. Stalingrad, with a population approaching half a million, even in 1938 did not have a sewer system. In Novosibirsk in 1929 there were sewerage and water supply systems of limited size and for more than 150,000 people. population - only three baths43.

Dnepropetrovsk, a rapidly growing, well-planned industrial city in Ukraine with a population of almost 400,000 people, located in the center of a fertile agricultural region, had no sewerage system in 1933, and its workers' settlements lacked paved streets, public transport, electricity and running water. Water was rationed and sold in barracks for a ruble per bucket. The entire city lacked power - in winter almost all the lights on the main street had to be turned off - despite its proximity to the large Dnieper hydroelectric power station. The secretary of the city's party organization sent a desperate message to the center in 1933, in which he asked for funds for urban improvement, pointing out a serious deterioration in the health situation: malaria was rampant in the city, with 26,000 cases of the disease recorded that summer, compared with 1,000,044 in the previous year. .

New industrial cities had even fewer amenities. The top of the Lenin City Council in Siberia, in a tearful letter to higher management, painted a gloomy picture of their city:

“Gor. Leninsk-Kuznetsky with a population of 80 thousand people. ...extremely behind in the field of culture and improvement... Out of 80 km. Only one street in the city is paved, and it is not completely paved. In spring and autumn, due to the lack of well-maintained roads, crossings, and sidewalks, the dirt reaches such proportions that workers have great difficulty getting to work and back home, and classes in schools are disrupted. The street lighting situation is not in the best condition. Only the center is illuminated for only 3 kilometers; the rest of the city, not to mention the outskirts, is in darkness.”45

Magnitogorsk, an exemplary new industrial city, in many ways also a showcase, had only one paved street 15 km long and very poor street lighting. “Most of the city used cesspools, the contents of which were emptied into tanks attached to trucks”; even in the relatively elite Kirov region there was no decent sewage system for many years. The city's water supply was polluted by industrial waste. Most Magnitogorsk workers lived in settlements on the outskirts of the city, consisting of “temporary huts lined up along the only dirt road... covered with huge puddles of dirty

water, heaps of garbage and numerous open outhouses”46.

Residents and guests of Moscow and Leningrad left vivid descriptions of the trams there and the incredible crush in them. There were strict rules that required passengers to enter through the back door and exit through the front, thereby forcing passengers to constantly move forward. Often the crowd did not allow a person to get off at his stop. The traffic schedule was very inconsistent: sometimes the trams simply did not run; in Leningrad one could see “wild trams” (i.e. unscheduled, with self-proclaimed drivers and conductors) that plied the rails, illegally boarded passengers and pocketed fares47.

In provincial towns, where paved streets remained a relative rarity at the end of the decade, public transport of any kind was minimal. In Stalingrad in 1938 there was a tram park with 67 km of tracks, but there were no buses. Pskov, with a population of 60,000 people, in 1939 had neither a tram fleet nor paved streets: all city transport consisted of two buses. Penza also did not have trams before the Second World War, although they were planned to be launched back in 1912; There urban transport in 1940 consisted of 21 buses. Magnitogorsk acquired a short tram route in 1935, but at the end of the decade there were still only 8 buses, which the plant administration used to “go around the city and its outskirts and pick up their workers wherever they lived.”48

Along the streets of many Soviet cities in the 1930s. it was dangerous to walk. The most notorious were the new industrial cities and workers' settlements in the old ones. Here, drunkenness, the concentration of restless single men, insufficient law enforcement, poor living conditions, unpaved and unlit streets all combined to create an atmosphere of savagery and lawlessness. Robberies, murders, drunken fights and attacks on passers-by for no apparent reason were commonplace. National conflicts often broke out in workplaces and barracks in a multinational environment. The authorities attributed all these problems to peasant workers who had recently arrived from the village, often having a dark past or being “déclassé elements”49.

Destructive, antisocial behavior in the USSR was called “hooliganism.” The term had a complex history and changing meaning during the 1920s and early 1930s. it was associated with disruptive, disrespectful, antisocial behavior, most often found in young men. All shades of this concept were recorded in the list of “hooligan” actions given in 1934 in one legal journal: insults, fist fights, breaking windows, shooting in the streets,

pestering passers-by, disrupting cultural events in the club, breaking plates in the dining room, disrupting citizens’ sleep with fights and noise late at night50.

An outbreak of hooliganism in the first half of the 1930s. caused public concern. In Orel, hooligans terrorized the population so much that workers stopped going to work; in Omsk, “evening shift workers were required to spend the night at the plant so as not to run the risk of being beaten and robbed.” In Nadezhdinsk in the Urals, citizens “were literally terrorized by hooliganism not only at night, but even during the day. Hooligan actions were expressed in aimless harassment, shooting in the streets, insulting, beating, breaking windows, etc. Whole gangs of hooligans entered the club, disrupted all cultural events held by the club, entered the workers’ dormitories, caused pointless noise there, and sometimes a fight, interfering with the normal rest of the workers.”51

Parks were often the scene of hooligan activity. The park and club of one factory village on the Upper Volga, with a population of 7,000 people, were described as a real patrimony of hooligans:

“At the entrance to the park and in the park itself, you can buy wine of all varieties in any quantity. It is not surprising that drunkenness and hooliganism in the village assumed large proportions. Hooligans mostly go unpunished and are becoming more and more brazen. Recently they injured the production manager of a chemical plant, Comrade Davydov, and beat up the driver Suvorev and other citizens.”

Hooligans disrupted the grand opening of the Khabarovsk Park of Culture and Recreation. The park was poorly lit as darkness fell, “the hooligans began their “tours”... unceremoniously pushing women in the back, tearing off their hats, swearing, starting fights on the dance floor and in the alleys”52.

Crime also flourished on trains and in railway stations and stations. Gangs of robbers attacked passengers on commuter and long-distance trains in Leningrad region: They were called "bandits", a harsher term than "hooligan", and were sentenced to death. The stations were always crowded with people - people trying to buy tickets, visitors who had nowhere to stay, speculators, pickpockets, etc. They wrote about one station in the Leningrad region that it “resembles more of a flophouse than a comfortable railway junction. Suspicious people live in the passenger area for 3-4 days, drunk people often lie around, speculators sell cigarettes, some people wander around dark personalities. There is constant drunkenness and unimaginable dirt in the buffet.” At the Novosibirsk station there was only one way to get a ticket - from a gang of resellers headed by a “professor”: “of average height, nickname “Ivan Ivanovich”, in a white straw hat, with a pipe in his mouth”53.

THE ART OF SHOPPING

Announcing in the late 20s. private entrepreneurship was outlawed, the state became the main, and often the only, distributor of various benefits and goods. All basic social benefits, such as housing, medical care, higher education and vouchers to holiday homes, were provided by government departments54. To receive them, citizens had to submit an application to the appropriate authority. There, their claims were assessed based on various criteria, including the class origin of the applicant: proletarians belonged to the highest category, “class alien” dispossessed people - to the lowest. There were almost always long waiting lists because the required goods were in short supply. Having finally found himself first on the list, the citizen, in principle, should have received an apartment of the required size or a voucher to a rest home. Apartments and vouchers were not obtained for free, but the fee for them was low. There was no legal private market for most social goods.

In the field of trade - i.e. distribution of food, clothing and other consumer goods - the situation was somewhat more complicated. The state was not the only legal distributor, since peasants were allowed to trade their products in collective farm markets since 1932. In addition, the existence of “commercial” stores with high prices, although they were owned by the state, also introduced a certain quasi-market element. Nevertheless, in this area the state had almost a monopoly.

Considering the size of the task at hand - to replace private trade - and the fact that it was solved hastily, without a well-thought-out plan, during a period of general crisis and turning point, it is difficult to be surprised that the new distribution system constantly failed. Yet the scale of the disruption and its impact on the daily lives of citizens is astounding. Only collectivization surpassed this catastrophe in its scope and far-reaching consequences. Of course, townspeople, as a rule, did not die of hunger due to new system trade, were not subject to arrest and deportation, like peasants during collectivization. And yet, at the end of the 1920s. Living conditions in the city suddenly and sharply deteriorated, causing enormous hardship and inconvenience for the population. Although in the mid-1930s. The situation improved somewhat; the distribution of consumer goods remained the main problem of the Soviet economy for the next half century.

Having some ideas about trade, for example, that the profit-based capitalist market is evil, and the resale of goods at a premium is a crime (“speculation”), Soviet political leaders thought little about what “socialist trade” actually was. They don't

did not foresee that their system would create chronic shortages, as the Hungarian economist János Kornai later argued; on the contrary, they expected it to generate abundance. Likewise, they did not realize that by creating a state monopoly on distribution, they were handing over the central distribution function to the state bureaucracy, which had such a profound impact on the relationship between state and society and social stratification. As Marxists, Soviet leaders believed that production, not distribution, was paramount. Many of them retained the feeling that trade, even state trade, was a dirty business - and the formal and informal distribution systems that emerged in the 1930s only confirmed this point of view.

Initially, the main aspects of the new trading system were rationing by cards and the so-called “closed distribution”. When rationing by cards, a certain limited amount of goods was released upon presentation, along with payment, of a special card. With closed distribution, goods were distributed at the place of work through closed stores, where only employees of a given enterprise or institution or persons from a special list were allowed. Subsequently, as can be seen, this laid the foundation for a system of hierarchically differentiated access to consumer goods, which became an integral feature of Soviet trade and a source of stratification in Soviet society.

Both rationing and closed distribution were the result of improvisation in the face of economic crisis, rather than thoughtful policies adopted for ideological reasons. True, some ardent Marxist theorists have brought to light old arguments from the Civil War that rationing is precisely the form of distribution that befits socialism. However, the party leadership was not too happy with such reasoning. They felt that the cards were something to be ashamed of, evidence of the economic crisis and poverty of the state. When in the late 1920s. cards appeared again, this happened on the initiative of the localities, and not by decision of the center. The abolition of bread cards in early 1935 was presented to the public as a big step towards socialism and the good life, although in fact it led to a fall in real incomes and many low-paid workers resented the changes. At closed meetings of the Politburo, Stalin especially insisted on how important it was to abolish cards57.

Despite the lack of enthusiasm for cards among senior management, they were resorted to so often that this measure can be seen as inevitable under Stalin's distribution. The card system was introduced in Russia during the First World War and lasted throughout the civil war. She

again officially in force from 1929 to 1935 and from 1941 to 1947 "- in general, almost half of the Stalinist period. Even when the card system was abolished, local authorities could arbitrarily introduce it without the sanction of the center as soon as supply problems arose. In the end In the 1930s, both cards and closed distribution slowly spread throughout the country again as a result of unauthorized initiatives by local authorities.When goods were really scarce, cards seemed to them - and often to the local population - the most in a simple way deal with the problem. Closed distribution attracted the local elite (but not the population) because it guaranteed them privileged access to scarce goods.

The rationing system was primarily an urban phenomenon; it spontaneously developed in the cities of the USSR in 1928-1929, starting with Odessa and other Ukrainian cities, in response to supply interruptions caused by difficulties during grain procurements. At first it concerned all basic food products, then it began to cover the most common industrial goods, such as outerwear and shoes58.

As during the Civil War, the rationing system during the First Five-Year Plan was characterized by outright social discrimination. Highest category were industrial workers, the lower classes were traders, including former ones who changed their occupation during Last year, priests, innkeepers and other class-alien elements who were not given cards at all59. The same principle of “proletarian priority” was in effect here, which was applied in other areas (for admission to higher educational establishments, provision of housing) within the framework of the general Soviet policy of promoting the proletariat. However, in practice, the distribution of goods by cards followed a more complex scheme. First, the principle of “proletarian priority” was violated when various categories of intellectual workers, such as professors and engineers, acquired equal rights with workers. Secondly, the level of government supply in general and rationing by cards in particular varied significantly depending on the region, department, industry or enterprise60.

However, the most important factor, undermining the principle of “proletarian priority”, was closed distribution. This meant the distribution of rationed goods at the place of work through closed shops and canteens, accessible only to workers registered at a given enterprise61. Closed distribution developed simultaneously with the rationing system, coexisting with a network of “open distribution” consisting of publicly accessible state stores, and during the period of the first five-year plan, the closed distribution system covered industrial workers, railroad workers, logging workers, state farm personnel, office workers government agencies and many others

category - at the beginning of 1932, the total number of closed stores reached 40,000, accounting for almost a third of the city's retail outlets. The concentration of supplies at the place of work increased with the development of a network of factory canteens, where workers received hot meals during the day. During the years of the first five-year plan, their number increased fivefold, reaching 30,000. In July 1933, they served two-thirds of Moscow residents and 58% of Leningrad residents62.

Closed distribution was intended to protect the working population from the worst consequences of shortages and to link rationing of goods to employment. But he quickly acquired another function (described in more detail in Chapter 4) - providing privileged supplies to certain categories of privileged persons. For various elite categories of officials and specialists, special closed distributors were created, supplying them with goods of much higher quality than those available in ordinary closed stores and factory canteens. Foreigners working in the Soviet Union had their own closed distribution system called In-snab63.

In 1935, closed distribution was officially abolished. However, six months later, inspectors from the People's Commissariat of Foreign Trade noted that “some stores are reserving goods for certain groups of buyers, reviving various shapes closed supply." Despite the fact that the People's Commissar of Trade I. Weitzer banned this practice, it continued to exist, being beneficial to the local elite, which was provided with privileged access to goods. When acute shortages re-emerged at the end of the decade, the number of closed distribution points immediately multiplied. For example, with the appearance of large lines of bread in Kustanai, Alma-Ata and other provincial cities at the end of 1939, local authorities created closed stores where only representatives of the “nomenklatura” were allowed. In institutions and enterprises throughout the country, closed buffets for employees operated64.

For state and cooperative stores in the 1930s. Low prices and long queues were typical, and they constantly ran out of goods. But if you had money, you could find other options. The legal alternative was represented by collective farm markets, Torgsin stores and state “commercial” stores.

Collective farm markets were the successors to peasant markets that existed in Russian cities over the centuries. During the NEP period they were tolerated, but many of them, like Moscow’s Sukharevka, acquired a very bad reputation and were covered up by local authorities during the first five-year plan. However, in May 1932, the legality of their existence was recognized in a government decree regulating their activities. This decree was prompted by the urgent need to revive the flow of products from

villages into a city that threatened to dry up completely. One of its features was that it again gave the right to trade to peasants and rural artisans - but to no one else. Any city dweller who engaged in trade was branded with the nickname “speculator”, and local authorities were strictly punished “to prevent the opening of shops and shops by private traders and in every possible way to eradicate resellers and speculators trying to make money at the expense of workers and peasants”65.

In practice, the Soviet government never managed to rid the collective farm markets of “resellers and speculators,” which became the main focus of black market activities and all sorts of shady dealings. Despite the fact that the fight against “speculation” never ended, the authorities were quite tolerant of townspeople trying to sell second-hand clothes or personal belongings, or even sell a small amount of new goods (purchased or made personally). Markets became de facto oases of private trade in the Soviet economy66.

Prices on the collective farm market, which fluctuated freely and were not set by the state, were always higher than in ordinary state stores, and sometimes even higher than in commercial stores, which will be discussed below. In 1932, meat in Moscow markets cost 10-11 rubles per kilogram, while in regular stores it cost 2 rubles; potatoes - 1 ruble kilogram (in the store - 18 kopecks)67. In the mid-1930s. the price difference smoothed out somewhat, but still remained significant and was always ready to increase at the slightest interruption in supply. Most ordinary wage workers could not afford the collective farm market, and they went there only on special occasions.

The same anomaly is not very for a long time were Torgsin stores, from 1930 to 1936, trading scarce goods for foreign currency, gold, silver and other valuables. The forerunners of later currency stores in the USSR, Torgsin's stores differed from them in that they were open to any citizen who had the appropriate currency. Their goal was simple: to replenish Soviet reserves of hard currency to enable the country to import more equipment for industrialization. Torgsin's prices were low (lower than "commercial" prices and the prices of the collective farm market), but for a Soviet citizen, purchases in Torgsin were expensive, because he had to sacrifice either the remains of the family silver, or his grandfather's gold watch, or even his own wedding ring. Some of the central stores of Torgsin, especially the Moscow store on Gorky Street, which arose on the site of the famous Eliseevsky grocery store, were distinguished by luxurious furnishings and lush decoration. During the years of famine, as a shocked foreign journalist wrote, “people in whole groups [stood] in front of shop windows, looking with envy at the pyramids of fruits that towered there.”

Comrade; tastefully arranged and hung boots and coats; butter, white bread and other delicacies inaccessible to them”68.

“Commercial” originally referred to state-owned stores that sold goods without cards at higher prices. They emerged as recognized trading institutions at the end of 1929; At first they sold clothes, cotton and woolen fabrics there, but soon the assortment expanded to include both luxurious delicacies like smoked fish and caviar, and more essential goods: vodka, cigarettes, basic food products. During the period of the card system, commercial prices, as a rule, were two to four times higher than the prices of goods sold using cards. So, for example, in 1931 shoes that cost 11 - 12 rubles in a regular store. (if you could find them there!), in a commercial store they cost 30 - 40 rubles; trousers in a regular store were sold for 9 rubles, in a commercial store - for 17 rubles. Cheese in a commercial store was twice as expensive, sugar more than eight times more expensive. In 1932, commercial stores accounted for a tenth of all retail turnover. By 1934, after a significant reduction in the difference between commercial and regular prices, their share had increased to one fourth69.

With the abolition of rationing in 1935, the network of commercial stores expanded. Fashion stores and specialty stores opened in many cities, selling manufactured goods of higher quality and at higher prices than regular government stores. The new People's Commissar of Trade, I. Weitzer, preached the philosophy of “Soviet free trade,” which involved customer focus and competition between stores within the structure of state trade. In the third quarter of the 1930s. There were undoubtedly significant improvements in the trading system, mainly due to a significant increase in public investment, the amount of which in the second Five-Year Plan (1933-1937) was three times greater than in the first.

However, the fruits of these improvements could for the most part only be enjoyed by the wealthiest segments of the population. A further reduction in the difference between commercial and ordinary government prices occurred as much through an increase in ordinary prices as through a decrease in commercial prices. If in the early 1930s. Since citizens at all levels of Soviet society were burdened mainly by acute shortages, starting from the middle of the decade, complaints from low-income groups of the population were no less often heard that their real income was too low and therefore goods were still unaffordable. “I can’t afford to buy food in commercial stores, everything is very expensive, you walk around like a shadow, and only get thinner and weaker,” one Leningrad worker wrote to the authorities in 1935. When basic government prices for clothing and other manufactured goods doubled in January 1939 (the largest single

mental increase in prices over the decade), the NKVD noted the strongest murmurs among the urban population and many complaints that the privileged elite were indifferent to the suffering of ordinary citizens, and Molotov, who promised that prices would not rise again, deceived the people71.

Speculation

As we have seen, it was extremely difficult to obtain goods of any kind, from shoes to apartments, through official government distribution channels. Firstly, there simply weren’t enough goods. Secondly, the departments that distributed them did so extremely inefficiently and were thoroughly corrupt. Government stores had long lines and often empty shelves. Local government waiting lists for housing grew so large, and informal methods of circumventing them so rampant, that virtually no one could wait their turn without some additional measures.

As a result, informal distribution has become extremely important - i.e. distribution bypassing the formal bureaucratic system. During the Stalin era in the USSR, the “second economy” flourished (although this term itself is of more recent origin); it existed as long as the “first” one, and in fact can be considered the successor to the private sector of the 1920s, despite its transition from a legal, albeit barely tolerated by the state, to an illegal position. Like the private sector of the NEP, the second economy of the Stalin era essentially distributed goods produced and owned by the state, with privately produced products playing a clearly secondary role in it. Leakage of goods occurred at any link in the production and distribution system, at any stage of the path from the factory floor to the rural cooperative store. Any worker in the trading system at any level could be involved in this in one way or another, which is why this occupation, although it provided an above-average standard of living, was considered dubious and did not provide high social status.

As J. Berliner and other economists pointed out, Stalin’s first economy could not have functioned without the second, since all industry relied on the practice of more or less illegally obtaining the necessary raw materials and equipment, and industrial enterprises maintained for this purpose a whole army of agents experienced in the second economy - “pushers”72. What was true for industry was, a fortiori, true for ordinary citizens. Everyone has happened to buy food or clothing from speculators or get an apartment, iron

a travel ticket, a voucher to a holiday home “through connections”, although some more often resorted to the services of the second economy and were better able to do this than others.

The Soviet leadership indiscriminately called “speculation” any acquisition of goods for resale at more than high price and considered such actions as a crime. This side of the Soviet mentality can be explained by Marxist ideology (although very few Marxists outside Russia were so passionately and categorically opposed to trade), but it also seems to have national Russian roots. Be that as it may, both speculation and its moral condemnation were extremely firmly established in Soviet Russia.

Who were the “speculators”? Among them one could meet successful businessmen underworld, leading a luxurious life and having connections in many cities, and old women, crushed by poverty, buying sausage or stockings in the store in the morning, so that a few hours later they can resell them on the street at a small margin. Some speculators in earlier times were engaged in legal trade: for example, a man named Zhidovetsky, sentenced to eight years in prison for speculation in 1935, bought cuts of woolen fabrics in Moscow and transported them for resale to Kyiv. Others, like Timofey Drobot, who was sentenced to five years in prison in the Volga region for profiteering in 1937, were formerly peasants who were torn out of their native soil by dispossession and forced to eke out an existence as renegades, barely making ends meet74.

Among the high-profile cases of speculation described in the newspapers, the largest and most complex is associated with the activities of a group of people, allegedly former kulaks and private traders, who launched a fairly large-scale trade in bay leaves, soda, pepper, tea and coffee, using connections and points in a number of Volga and Ural cities, as well as in Moscow and Leningrad. One of the group members was carrying 70,000 rubles at the time of the arrest, the other was said to have made a total of over 1.5 million rubles from this case. Handicraftsmen from Dagestan Nazhmudin Shamsudinov and Magomet Magomadov were at a lower level compared to the grocery gang, but they also had 18,000 rubles with them when they were arrested for disturbing public order in a restaurant in Grozny, the capital of Chechnya, and besides, they only that they sent home another 7,000 rubles.75.

Many provincial speculators, in order to purchase goods, simply took a train to better-supplied Moscow or Leningrad and bought it in stores there. A group of 22 speculators, who appeared in court in Voronezh in 1936, used this method, opening a legal tailoring workshop to cover the resale of goods obtained in this way, which, at the time of the arrest of the group, included 1677 m of fabric,

44 dresses, as well as 2 bicycles, many pairs of shoes, gramophone records and some kind of rubber glue76.

However, in a well-organized, large-scale business, more effective methods receipt of goods, rather than the usual purchase of them in government stores among other buyers. Large businessmen often had “connections” with store directors and warehouse workers (or were store directors themselves) and systematically took goods from the back door. The store manager and other sales employees could be directly involved in the case, such as the commercial director of a Leningrad clothing store, who was tried for leading a gang of speculators who received goods directly from the store's warehouse. However, in this store more than one commercial director was associated with speculators. One of the sellers and the head of the fire department, for example, let professional speculators know in advance when the goods would arrive and let them skip the line, earning 40 - 50 rubles each time.77.

Similar cases are illustrated by a series of three cartoons under the general title “The Magician”, published in “Crocodile”. The first picture shows an open stall full of goods, the second shows the stall closed for the night, the third shows it the next morning, open and empty. “Before your eyes, I locked the stall for the night,” says the magician. - The next morning I open it. Hello hop!.. And the stall is completely empty. Nothing fantastic: just sleight of hand and a lot of fraud.”78

Anyone who worked in trade was popularly believed to have had some connection with the second economy or at least abused his preferential access to goods. A similar opinion is reflected in many of Crocodile's jokes. In one cartoon, for example, a mother tells her daughter: “It’s all the same, honey. Whether you have a party or a non-party member, as long as you serve in the air defense missile system.” On another, an employee of a cooperative store looks in confusion at the incoming batch of shirts: “What should I do? How to distribute? I received 12 shirts, but I only have 8 family members.”79 It is not surprising that workers in cooperative stores were often tried for profiteering.

The work of a conductor on the railway was often associated with speculation. For example, the conductor of the Stalin railway. in Donbass, he bought shoes and various industrial goods in Moscow, Kyiv and Kharkov and sold them on the way. Another guide “took fabric from people who worked in textile factories in the area. He also traveled by train to Shepetivka, located near the border, and there obtained goods smuggled across the Russian-Polish border.” Possible speculators were considered to be bathhouse workers and drivers (who

could use company cars to travel around collective farms and buy their products for sale in the city). Petty speculation was carried out by many housewives who stood in line at government stores and purchased goods such as clothing and textiles to sell at the market or to neighbors. For example, according to newspapers, housewife Ostroumova regularly speculated in fabrics. She bought only 3-4 m at a time, but when she was arrested in her apartment, 400 m of fabric was found in her suitcase80.

The apartment often served as a place for resale of goods81. Neighbors, knowing that a certain person (usually a woman) had a certain product or could get it, visited in the evening to see what she had. Such transactions, like many other operations in the sphere of the “second economy,” were viewed from completely opposite positions by their participants, who saw them as a friendly favor, and by the state, which considered them a crime. Also popular among speculators railway stations and shops in front of which street peddlers sold goods previously purchased inside.

But the main place of speculation was, apparently, the collective farm market. All sorts of things were traded here illegally or semi-legally: agricultural products bought from peasants by middlemen, industrial goods stolen or purchased from store warehouses, second-hand clothes, even cards and false passports. The law allowed peasants to sell their own products at the market, but prohibited others from doing this for them, although this was often more convenient for peasants than hanging around the market all day. A report from Dnepropetrovsk describes this process as follows:

“Often on the road to the bazaar, collective farmers are met by a reseller. - What are you bringing? - Cucumbers. The price is named, and the cucumbers collected from the individual garden of the collective farmer are purchased by the reseller in bulk and sold on the market at an increased price.

Many resellers are well-known, but they are often under the protection of market tax collectors.”82

In principle, any private individual did not have the right to sell industrial goods on the collective farm market, with the exception of rural artisans selling their products. However, this rule was extremely difficult to enforce, partly because state producers used markets to sell their products to peasants. This practice was intended to encourage peasants to bring agricultural products to the market, but at the same time it gave speculators the opportunity to buy manufactured goods and resell them at a premium. According to newspaper reports, in 1936 in Moscow, at the Yaroslavl and Dubininsky markets, speculators, “both Muscovites and visitors,” were in full swing selling rubber slippers, galoshes, shoes, ready-made clothes and gramophone records83.

DATING AND CONNECTIONS

A concerned resident of Novgorod, Pyotr Gatsuk, wrote in 1940 to A. Vyshinsky, deputy chairman of the Council of People's Commissars, decrying such a phenomenon as blat:

A citizen who does not have blat, Gatsuk argued, is actually deprived of his rights:

“Not having cronyism is the same as not having civil rights, the same as being deprived of all rights... If you come with any request, everyone will be deaf, blind and dumb. If you need...to buy something in a store, you need blat. If it is difficult or even impossible for a passenger to get a ticket, through connections it is easy and simple. If you don’t have an apartment, there’s no point in going to the housing department or the prosecutor’s office—a little money and you’ll get an apartment right away.”84

Blat undermines the principle of planned distribution in a socialist economy; it is “alien and hostile to our society,” Gatsuk concluded. Unfortunately, at the moment he is not punishable by law. Gatsuk proposed to declare it a criminal offense entailing special sanctions (Vyshinsky, a lawyer by training, or someone from his office emphasized this passage).

Gatsuk was not alone in believing that life in the USSR was impossible without cronyism. " Keyword, the most important word in the language was “blat,” wrote British journalist Edward Crankshaw about the late Stalinist period. - Without the appropriate cronyism, it was impossible to get a train ticket from Kiev to Kharkov, find housing in Moscow or Leningrad, buy lamps for the radio, find a roof repairman, interview a government official... For many years, [blat] was the only way to get what you needed "85.

It was not only Gatsuk who viewed blat as something pathological, completely inappropriate and alien to Russian society. In 1935, an authoritative Soviet dictionary classified the word “blat” as “thieves’ slang” used by criminals, adding that the new colloquial vulgarism “by blat” meant “by illegal means”86. Respondents to the post-war Harvard Refugee Interview Project, distancing themselves as much as possible from both the word and the practice it denotes, said that “blat” is “a Soviet slur.”

in”, “a word of folk origin, never found in literature”, “a word generated by an abnormal way of life”, and apologized for its use (“Sorry, but I’ll have to resort to Soviet jargon...”). “Blat” is the same as bribery, some said; “Blat” is patronage or patronage. There were an abundance of euphemisms for blat: “blat means acquaintance”; “blat... in polite society they called it “the letter z” (from the word “familiar”)”; Blat was also called “zis,” an abbreviation for “acquaintance and connection”87.

Blat can be defined as a system of relationships associated with the exchange of goods and favors, equal and non-hierarchical, in contrast to relations of patronage. According to the participants in these relationships, they were based on friendship, although money sometimes changed hands. Thus, from their point of view, the Russian proverb “a hand washes a hand” was a crude parody of genuine personal respect and warm feelings that they associated with “thieves” deeds. A much better idea of ​​cronyism was given (as participants in such relationships believed) by another proverb cited by one of the Harvard project respondents: “As they say in the Soviet Union: “Don’t have 100 rubles, but have 100 friends.”88.

Only a small part of the respondents to the Harvard project showed a desire to talk about their own “thieves’ affairs”89, and when doing this, they always talked specifically about friendship and emphasized the human factor of “thieves” relationships. “Friends” mean a lot in the Soviet Union, said one woman who clearly used connections extensively, because they help each other. In response to a hypothetical question about what she would do if she had problems, she painted a picture of a supportive community of family, friends, and neighbors: “My family... had friends who could help me... One... was the head of a large trust. He often helped and would turn to us himself if he needed help. He was our neighbor... One of my relatives was the chief engineer at a plant. He could always help if asked.”90.

The former engineer, who essentially became a real specialist in cronyism, being a supplier for the sugar trust, constantly used the word “friend”: “I make friends easily, but in Russia you can’t do anything without friends. I was friends with several prominent communists. One of them advised me to go to Moscow, where he had a friend who had just been made head of the construction of new sugar factories... I went to talk to him, and over an almighty glass of vodka we became friends.” He struck up friendships not only with his superiors, but also with the provincial supply officials with whom he dealt: “I invited the director to have lunch with me, gave him vodka. We became good friends... My boss really appreciated this

the ability to make friends and obtain necessary materials”91.

Drinking was an important aspect of “thieves” relationships among men. For the respondent quoted above, drinking and making friends were inextricably linked; besides, drinking, at least sometimes, clearly facilitated heart-to-heart talk, as, for example, during his first meeting with his future boss at the sugar trust, when he tried to find out how much he understood his work and admitted that “A couple of years ago I didn’t even know what sugar was made from.” True, sometimes this respondent spoke about drinking more as a means to achieve a goal: “usually it works,” he noted casually, describing one such friendly gathering with vodka. Other respondents also stated that The best way to achieve something or solve a problem - bring a bottle of vodka to someone who can help. However, vodka was not just an offering, it had to be drunk together before the matter was settled - hence the expression “drinking buddies”, characteristic of “thieves” relationships92.

Some people were experts in cronyism. You can solve any problem, said one Harvard respondent, if you know “professional thieves,” “people who have connections at the top and know the Soviet system. They know who they can bribe or give a gift to, and what kind of gift.” Another type of “blat” professionalism is captured in the story of a supply trip (based on the real experience of a Polish Jew exiled to Kazakhstan during the war), which presents sketches of portraits of a number of “blat” professionals in the industry, nice and generous people , who were, according to the author’s definition, “members ... of an invisible underground community of those whose positions give them the opportunity to exchange services with other members”93.

Professional “thieves” served as the theme of a humorous poem by the popular poet V. Lebedev-Kumach, published in 1933 in “Krokodil” and entitled with the pun “Blat-not” - referring to a special notebook where the phone numbers and addresses of “thieves” acquaintances are entered in addition with mysterious encrypted records like the following: “Peter’s friend (sanatorium)”, “Sergey (records, gramophone)”, “Nick.Nick. (about grub).” The “secret code” indicated to the owner of the “blat-note” where it is better to get qualified help in a particular matter (“Just call - and in a minute there will be “Nick.Nick” on the line.” He will get you everything you need”). The only problem, the poem said at the end, is that association with these shady characters may eventually lead you to interrogation by the prosecutor's office94.

The supplier of the sugar trust, whose words were quoted several times above, belonged precisely to the category of professional “thieves”. Like many others, he enjoyed his work: “I loved my job. It paid well, I had a lot of connections, I traveled all over the Soviet Union - daily allowances and travel certificates came in very handy - and besides, I received satisfaction from what I had achieved, because I succeeded where others failed. Pleasure from one's work was characteristic of blat virtuosos, non-professionals for whom blat was the calling of the soul. One such virtuoso was a very remarkable personality: an exile from Leningrad who worked as an accountant on a collective farm, he was a jack of all trades (he was a skilled carpenter, making boxes and barrels), but considered himself a representative of the intelligentsia. In the summer, he let in tenants and became especially friendly with the director of a large Leningrad garage, with whom he went hunting and maintained regular “thieves” relationships (wood from the forest was exchanged for flour and sugar from the city). “My father was appreciated,” his son recalled. - He worked well, and besides, he could do a lot. He helped many people, loved to organize things through connections, and knew how to do it.”95

Blat was not at all the prerogative of professionals and virtuosos. Some of the respondents to the Harvard project believed that “thieves” relationships are only possible for people who are more or less wealthy: “You know, no one will help a poor person. He has nothing to offer in return. Blat usually means that you, in turn, must do something for someone.” However, those who made such statements, denying the existence of “thieves” connections in themselves for the reason that they, they say, were too insignificant people for this, often in another place in their interviews told some episodes from their own lives when they in essence, they used cronyism (getting a job or getting promoted thanks to personal connections)96. From these and other data, it apparently follows that the principle of reciprocity could be interpreted very broadly: if someone simply liked you, this could already become the basis for a “criminal” relationship.

The deals through cronyism in the lives of Harvard respondents, which they talked about (usually without using the word “blat”), pursued many goals: for example, obtaining registration or false documents, a better place of work, materials for building a summer house. A huge number of these “thieves” transactions were associated with the acquisition of clothes and shoes (“I... had a friend who worked in a department store, and I got clothes through her,” “I knew one person who worked at a shoe factory, a friend of my wife ; so I managed to get my shoes good quality on the cheap"). According to one respondent, whose father worked in a cooperative

store, his family had such extensive “thieves” connections that “we always had everything. The suits were very expensive, although they could be obtained at state prices. We only had to stand in line for shoes because we didn’t have friends who worked in shoe stores.”97

The theme of cronyism arose surprisingly often in Krokodil, which published cartoons on its pages depicting the procedures for entering a university, obtaining medical certificates, and places in good holiday homes and restaurants. “Why are you, buddy, sick so often? “I know the doctor,” you can read under one of the cartoons. Another shows a holidaymaker and a doctor talking on the balcony of a luxury holiday home. “I’ve been here for a month and I haven’t seen the director yet,” says the vacationer. “What, you don’t know him? How did you get the room then?”98

One of the Krokodil cartoons illustrates the inherent tendency of informal Soviet distribution mechanisms to turn any formal bureaucratic relationship into a personal one. It is entitled "Good Mannering" and depicts a store manager politely talking to a customer. The cashier and another woman are looking at them. “Our director is a polite person,” says the cashier. “When the fabric is released, each buyer is called by name and patronymic.” - “Does he really know all the buyers?” - "Certainly. Whoever he doesn’t know, he won’t let go.”99

Personal connections softened the harsh conditions of life in the USSR, at least for some of its citizens. They also questioned the significance of Stalin's great economic restructuring, creating a second economy based on patronage and personal contacts, parallel to the first, socialist one, based on state ownership and central planning. Due to the acute shortage of goods, this second economy, apparently, was even more important in the lives of ordinary people than the private sector during the NEP, paradoxically as it may seem.

True, even for people with connections, inconvenience has become the inevitable norm Soviet life. Citizens spent long hours queuing for bread and other basic necessities. The journey to and from work became torture: in big cities, people with shopping bags tried to squeeze into crowded, shaking buses and trams, in small cities they wandered along unpaved streets, covered with snow in winter, and covered with puddles in spring and autumn, more reminiscent of the sea. Many of life's little pleasures, such as cafes and neighborhood shops, disappeared with the end of the NEP; under the new centralized

the state trading system often had to travel downtown to get shoes repaired. At home, in communal apartments and barracks, life was spent in painful overcrowding, lacking comfort, and often poisoned by squabbles with neighbors. An additional source of discomfort and irritation was the “continuous work week,” which eliminated rest on Sundays and often led to the fact that all family members had different days off100.

Of course, all these difficulties, shortages, inconveniences were phenomena of the transition period - but is it so? As the 1930s progressed, especially as living standards fell again at the end of the decade, many people must have asked themselves this question. True, in the mid-1930s the curve began to rise, and the subsequent decline could be explained by the imminent threat of war. Moreover, the deprivations of the present could always be countered by a vision of an abundant socialist future (this will be discussed in the next chapter). According to one Harvard respondent, he “thought that all the difficulties were due to the sacrifices necessary to build socialism, and that once a socialist society was built, life would be better.”101

Contrary to the horror stories that are now written about that time, it was in the pre-war years that there existed a symphony of power and people that is not often encountered in life. The people, inspired by the great idea of ​​​​building the first just society in the history of mankind without oppressors and the oppressed, showed miracles of heroism and selflessness. And the state in those years, now portrayed by our liberal historians and publicists as a monstrous repressive machine, responded to the people by caring for them.

Free medicine and education, sanatoriums and rest homes, pioneer camps, kindergartens, libraries, clubs became a mass phenomenon and were available to everyone. It is no coincidence that during the war, according to eyewitnesses, people dreamed of only one thing: for everything to become the same as before the war.

This is what, for example, the US Ambassador wrote about that time in 1937-1938. Joseph E. Davis:

“With a group of American journalists, I visited five cities, where I examined largest enterprises: tractor plant (12 thousand workers), electric motor plant (38 thousand workers), Dneproges, aluminum plant (3 thousand workers), which is considered the largest in the world, Zaporizhstal (35 thousand workers), hospital (18 doctors and 120 nurses), nurseries and kindergartens, the Rostselmash plant (16 thousand workers), the Palace of Pioneers (a building with 280 rooms for 320 teachers and 27 thousand children). The last of these institutions represents one of the most interesting phenomena in the Soviet Union. Similar palaces are being built in all major cities and are intended to bring to life the Stalinist slogan about children as the most valuable asset of the country. Here children discover and develop their talents...”

And everyone was sure that his talent would not wither or go to waste, that he had every opportunity to realize any dream in all areas of life. The doors of secondary and high school. Social elevators worked at full capacity, lifting yesterday's workers and peasants to the heights of power, opening up to them the horizons of science, the wisdom of technology, and the stage of the stage. “In the everyday life of great construction projects” a new country, unprecedented in the world, was rising - “a country of heroes, a country of dreamers, a country of scientists.”

And in order to destroy any possibility of exploitation of a person - be it a private owner or the state - the very first decrees in the USSR introduced an eight-hour working day. In addition, a six-hour working day was established for teenagers, the work of children under 14 years of age was prohibited, labor protection was established, and vocational training for youth was introduced at the expense of the state. While the United States and Western countries were suffocating in the grip of the Great Depression, in the Soviet Union in 1936, 5 million workers had a six-hour or more reduced workday, almost 9% of industrial workers took a day off after four days of work, 10% of workers, Those employed in continuous production received two days off after three eight-hour working days.

The wages of workers and office workers, as well as the personal income of collective farmers, more than doubled. Adults probably no longer remember, and young people don’t even know that during the Great Patriotic War some collective farmers donated planes and tanks to the front, built with personal savings that they managed to accumulate in the not so long time that passed after the “criminal” collectivization. How did they do this?

The fact is that the number of compulsory workdays for “free slaves” in the thirties was 60-100 (depending on the region). After this, the collective farmer could work for himself - on his plot or in a production cooperative, of which there were a huge number throughout the USSR. As the creator of the Russian Project website, publicist Pavel Krasnov, writes, “... In the Stalinist USSR, those who wanted to show personal initiative had every opportunity to do this in the cooperative movement. It was only impossible to use hired labor, contractual-cooperative labor - as much as you wanted.

There was a powerful cooperative movement in the country; almost 2 million people constantly worked in cooperatives, producing 6% of the gross industrial output of the USSR: 40% of all furniture, 70% of all metal utensils, 35% of outerwear, almost 100% of toys.

In addition, the country had 100 cooperative design bureaus, 22 experimental laboratories, and two research institutes. This does not include part-time cooperative rural artels. In the 1930s, up to 30 million people worked there.

It was possible to engage in individual work - for example, to have your own darkroom, paying taxes on it, doctors could have a private practice, and so on. Cooperatives usually involved highly qualified professionals in their field, organized into effective structures, which explains their high contribution to the production of the USSR.

All this was liquidated by Khrushchev at an accelerated pace since 1956 - the property of cooperatives and private entrepreneurs was confiscated, even private farms and private livestock.”

Let us add that at the same time, in 1956, the number of compulsory workdays was increased to three hundred. The results were not long in coming - the first problems with the products immediately appeared.

In the thirties, piecework wages were also widely used. Additional bonuses were practiced for the safety of mechanisms, savings in electricity, fuel, raw materials, materials. Bonuses were introduced for exceeding the plan, reducing costs, and producing products improved quality. A well-thought-out system for training qualified industrial workers and Agriculture. During the years of the second five-year plan alone, about 6 million people were trained instead of the 5 million provided for by the plan.

Finally, in the USSR, for the first time in the world, unemployment was eliminated - the most difficult and insoluble in the conditions of market capitalism social problem. The right to work, enshrined in the USSR Constitution, became real for everyone. Already in 1930, during the first five-year plan, labor exchanges ceased to exist.

Along with the industrialization of the country, with the construction of new plants and factories, housing construction was also carried out. State and cooperative enterprises and organizations, collective farms and the population commissioned 67.3 million square meters of usable residential area in the second five-year plan. With the help of the state and collective farms, rural workers built 800 thousand houses.

Investments of state and cooperative organizations in housing construction, together with individual ones, increased 1.8 times compared to the first five-year plan. Apartments, as we remember, were provided free of charge at the lowest rent in the world. And, probably, few people know that during the second five-year plan, almost as much money was invested in housing, communal and cultural construction, and in healthcare in the rapidly developing Soviet Union as in heavy industry.

In 1935, the best metro in the world in terms of technical equipment and artistic design went into operation. In the summer of 1937, the Moscow-Volga canal was put into operation, solving the problem of water supply to the capital and improving its transport connections.

In the 1930s, not only did dozens of new cities grow in the country, but water supply was built in 42 cities, sewage systems were built in 38, the transport network developed, new tram lines were launched, the bus fleet expanded, and trolleybuses began to be introduced.

During the pre-war five-year plans in the country, for the first time in world practice, social forms of popular consumption, which, in addition to wages, were used by every Soviet family. Funds from them were used for the construction and maintenance of housing, cultural institutions, free education and medical care, various pensions and benefits. Expenditures on social security and social insurance increased threefold compared to the first five-year plan.

The network of sanatoriums and rest homes quickly expanded, vouchers to which, purchased with social insurance funds, were distributed by trade unions among workers and employees free of charge or on preferential terms. During the second five-year period alone, 8.4 million people rested and were treated in rest homes and sanatoriums; expenses for maintaining children in nurseries and kindergartens increased 10.7 times compared to the first five-year plan. Average life expectancy has increased.

Such a state could not help but be perceived by the people as their own, national, dear, for which it is not a pity to give one’s life, for which one wants to perform feats... As the embodiment of that revolutionary dream of the promised country, where the great idea of ​​​​people's happiness was visibly, before their eyes, brought to life. It was customary to mock Stalin’s words “Life has become better, life has become more fun” during perestroika and post-perestroika years, but they reflected real changes in the social and economic life of Soviet society.

These changes could not go unnoticed in the West. We have already become accustomed to the fact that Soviet propaganda cannot be trusted, that the truth about how things are in our country is told only in the West. Well, let's see how the capitalists assessed the successes of the Soviet state.

Thus, Gibbson Jarvie, chairman of the United Dominion Bank, stated in October 1932:

“I want to make it clear that I am not a communist or a Bolshevik, I am a definite capitalist and individualist... Russia is moving forward while too many of our factories are idle and approximately 3 million of our people are desperately looking for work. The Five Year Plan was ridiculed and predicted to fail. But you can consider it certain that under the terms of the five-year plan more has been done than planned

... In all the industrial cities that I have visited, new areas are springing up, built according to a definite plan, with wide streets, decorated with trees and squares, with houses of the most modern type, schools, hospitals, workers' clubs and the inevitable nurseries and kindergartens where people are cared for about children of working mothers...

Don't try to underestimate Russian plans and don't make the mistake of hoping that the Soviet government might fail... Today's Russia is a country with a soul and an ideal. Russia is a country of amazing activity. I believe that Russia’s aspirations are healthy... Perhaps the most important thing is that all the youth and workers in Russia have one thing that, unfortunately, is lacking in capitalist countries today, namely hope.”

And here is what Forward magazine (England) wrote in the same 1932:

“The enormous work that is happening in the USSR is striking. New factories, new schools, new cinema, new clubs, new huge houses - new buildings everywhere. Many of them have already been completed, others are still surrounded by forests. It is difficult to tell the English reader what has been done in the last two years and what is being done next. You have to see it all to believe it.

Our own achievements that we accomplished during the war are only a trifle compared to what is being done in the USSR. Americans admit that even during the period of the most rapid creative fever in the Western states there was nothing similar to the current feverish creative activity in the USSR. Over the past two years, so many changes have occurred in the USSR that you refuse to even imagine what will happen in this country in another 10 years.

Get rid of the fantastic horror stories, told by English newspapers, which so stubbornly and absurdly lie about the USSR. Also throw out of your head all those half-truths and impressions based on misunderstanding, which are put into practice by amateurish intellectuals who look patronizingly at the USSR through the eyes of the middle class, but do not have the slightest idea of ​​what is happening there: the USSR is building a new society on healthy basics

To realize this goal, one must take risks, one must work with enthusiasm, with such energy as the world has never known before, one must struggle with the enormous difficulties that are inevitable when trying to build socialism in a vast country isolated from the rest of the world. Having visited this country for the second time in two years, I got the impression that it is moving along the path of solid progress, planning and building, and all this on a scale that is a clear challenge to the hostile capitalist world.

The American “Nation” echoed the forward:

“Four years of the Five Year Plan have brought with it some truly remarkable achievements. Soviet Union worked with wartime intensity on the creative task of building a basic life. The face of the country is literally changing beyond recognition: this is true of Moscow with its hundreds of newly paved streets and squares, new buildings, new suburbs and a cordon of new factories on its outskirts. This is also true of smaller cities.

New cities arose in the steppes and deserts, at least 50 cities with populations ranging from 50 to 250 thousand people. All have emerged in the last four years, each being the center of a new enterprise or series of enterprises built to exploit domestic resources. Hundreds of new power plants and a number of giants, like Dneprostroy, constantly embody Lenin’s formula: “Socialism is Soviet power plus electrification.”

The Soviet Union organized the mass production of an endless variety of items that Russia had never produced before: tractors, combines, high-quality steels, synthetic rubber, ball bearings, powerful diesel engines, 50 thousand kilowatt turbines, telephone equipment, electric mining machines, airplanes , cars, bicycles and several hundred new types of cars.

For the first time in history, Russia is extracting aluminum, magnesite, apatite, iodine, potash and many other valuable products. The guiding points of the Soviet plains are no longer crosses and church domes, but grain elevators and silos. Collective farms build houses, barns, and pigsties. Electricity penetrates the village, radio and newspapers have conquered it. Workers learn to operate the latest machines. Farm boys produce and maintain farm machinery that is larger and more complex than anything America has ever seen. Russia is beginning to “think with machines.” Russia is rapidly moving from the age of wood to the age of iron, steel, concrete and motors.”

This is how proud British and Americans spoke about the USSR in the 30s, envying the Soviet people - our parents.

From the book by Nellie Goreslavskaya “Joseph Stalin. The Father of Nations and His Children", Moscow, Book World, 2011, pages 52-58.

Introduction

A radical revolution in the spiritual development of society, carried out in the USSR in the 20-30s. XX century, component socialist transformations. The theory of the cultural revolution was developed by V.I. Lenin. The cultural revolution and the construction of a new socialist way of life is aimed at changing the social composition of the post-revolutionary intelligentsia and at breaking with the traditions of the pre-revolutionary cultural heritage through the ideologization of culture. The task of creating a so-called “proletarian culture” based on Marxist-class ideology, “communist education,” and mass culture came to the fore.

The construction of a new socialist way of life included the elimination of illiteracy, the creation of a socialist system of public education and enlightenment, the formation of a new, socialist intelligentsia, the restructuring of life, the development of science, literature, and art under party control. As a result of the cultural revolution of the USSR, significant successes were achieved: according to the 1939 census, literacy of the population began to reach 70%; in the USSR a first-class comprehensive school, the number of Soviet intelligentsia reached 14 million people; there was a flourishing of science and art. In cultural development, the USSR reached the forefront in the world.

A distinctive feature of the Soviet period of cultural history is the huge role of the party and state in its development. The party and the state established complete control over the spiritual life of society.

In the 20-30s, a powerful cultural shift undoubtedly occurred in the USSR. If the social revolution destroyed the semi-medieval estate in the country, which divided society into “people” and “tops,” then cultural transformations over two decades moved it along the path of bridging the civilizational gap in the everyday life of many tens of millions of people. In an unimaginably short period of time, people’s material capabilities ceased to be a significant barrier between them and at least elementary culture; inclusion in it began to depend much less on the socio-professional status of people. Both in scale and pace, these changes can indeed be considered a nationwide “cultural revolution.”

Significant changes occurred in the 20s. in the everyday life of the Russian population. Life, as a way of everyday life, cannot be considered for the entire population as a whole, because it is different for different segments of the population. The living conditions of the upper strata of Russian society, which before the revolution occupied the best apartments, consumed high-quality food, and benefited from the achievements of education and health care, have worsened. A strictly class principle of distribution of material and spiritual values ​​was introduced, and representatives of the upper strata were deprived of their privileges. True, the Soviet government supported the representatives of the old intelligentsia it needed through a ration system, a commission to improve the living conditions of scientists, etc.

During the years of NEP, new layers emerged that lived prosperously. These are the so-called Nepmen or the new bourgeoisie, whose way of life was determined by the thickness of their wallet. They were given the right to spend money in restaurants and other entertainment establishments. These layers include both the party and state nomenklatura, whose income depended on how they performed their duties. The way of life of the working class has seriously changed. It was he who was to take a leading place in society and enjoy all the benefits. From the Soviet government he received the rights to free education and medical care, the state constantly increased his wages, provided social insurance and pension benefits, and through workers' schools supported his desire to receive higher education. In the 20s the state regularly surveyed the budgets of working families and monitored their occupancy. However, words often differed from deeds; material difficulties hit primarily the workers, whose income depended only on wages; mass unemployment during the NEP years and low cultural level did not allow workers to seriously improve their living conditions. In addition, numerous experiments to inculcate “socialist values,” labor communes, “common boilers,” and dormitories affected the lives of workers.

Peasant life during the NEP years changed slightly. Patriarchal relations in the family, common labor in the fields from dawn to dusk, and the desire to increase their wealth characterized the way of life of the bulk of the Russian peasantry. It became more prosperous, and a sense of ownership developed. The weak peasantry united into communes and collective farms and established collective labor. The peasantry was most concerned about the position of the church in the Soviet state, because they connected their future with it. The policy of the Soviet state towards the church in the 20s. was not constant. In the early 20s. Repression fell on the church, church valuables were confiscated under the pretext of the need to fight hunger. Then in the very Orthodox Church There was a split on the issue of attitude towards Soviet power and a group of priests formed a “living church”, abolished the patriarchate and advocated the renewal of the church. Under Metropolitan Sergius, the church entered the service of Soviet power. The state encouraged these new phenomena in the life of the church and continued to carry out repressions against supporters of maintaining the old order in the church. At the same time, it carried out active anti-religious propaganda, created an extensive network of anti-religious societies and periodicals, and introduced into everyday life Soviet people socialist holidays as opposed to religious ones, even went to change the dates working week so that weekends do not coincide with Sundays and religious holidays.