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At a time of bloody terror the Soviet Union experienced impressive industrial growth and a
profound social transformation. These were not unconnected phenomena, for the kind of
industrialization that took place could
have occurred only against a background of terror.
The industrial sector of the economy during the second five-year plan was less chaotic, at
least compared to the extraordinary period at the beginning of the industrialization drive.
According to Soviet figures admittedly unreliable, they certainly overstate growth national
income and industrial output doubled in the course of the second five-year plan. The planners
still set impossible goals, and the standard of living continued to be extremely low (although
significantly improved), but there was a sense, especially during the middle of the decade,
that normality was gradually returning. The abolition of rationing in 1935 was a sign of
improvement. At the end of the decade, however, as a consequence of the purges and war
preparations, the pace of economic growth slackened.
As the ex-peasants slowly adjusted to industrial discipline, labor productivity gradually
improved. To bring about this improvement the regime used a number of different methods.
One was moral appeal we should not underestimate its significance. Such appeals,
especially at the outset of the in
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dustrialization drive and among the young, must have been powerful. Many believed that they
were in fact working for a better, richer, and more just society, and that it was necessary to
make sacrifices for this cause. Some young communists did go voluntarily to distant parts of
Siberia and endured extraordinary hardships for a cause they believed in.
Moral appeal, however, was never sufficient, and so the regime provided material incentives.
The new factories required skilled workers, and in order to encourage people to learn skills,
the gap between the earnings of the skilled and unskilled workers was increased. Stalin
explicitly denounced the earlier egalitarian promise of the revolution and mocked it as petit
bourgeois. The compensation system was designed to give incentives for working hard.
Soviet workers operated under the system of piece-rates. Norms were established, and these
norms were gradually raised, which meant that in order to receive the same salary a worker
constantly had to increase hi output.
The Stakhanov movement came into existence in this context. In 1935 Aleksei Stakhanov, a
miner in the Donbass region, overfulfilled his norm by 1400 percent. Obviously Stakhanovs
great achievement was artificially created: several people stood behind him in order to carry
out auxiliary tasks and assist in his superhuman achievement. He was built up as an example.
He became the central figure of a vast propaganda drive, called socialist competition.
Stakhanovists on the one hand received all sorts of benefits and privileges from the factory
management, and on the other the norms for everyone else were raised, since the
Stakhanovists showed that it was possible to produce more. Undoubtedly the movement
while it might have contributed to raising the productivity of some individual workers made
the confusion, already rampant in Soviet industry, worse. The more farsighted managers
understood that Stakhanovite methods were incompatible with the rational organization of
production and therefore resisted the officially inspired campaign. In addition, the campaign
created a great deal of bitterness and division within the working class. This divisiveness,
thoug perhaps not planned, also served the purposes of the regime. The creation of a new
labor aristocracy was yet another factor that made workers solidarity in the Stalinist state
impossible. Stakhanovite methods that is spectacular, spurt-like achievements, rather than
a rationally organized and steady tempo appealed at least to some among the Soviet
leadership. After a couple of years, the leadership realized that the movement was more
harmful than helpful, that the cost in confusion was greater than the benefit of some
increased productivity. While the name was retained, the content ofthe movement was quietly
abandoned.

The social transformation that occurred in the Soviet Union in the 1930s was largely the
consequence of the vast industrialization drive. Nevertheless, it is significant that it took place
against the background of terror. On the one hand, the great industrial expansion, and the
struggle against the
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old intelligentsia, opened up avenues for social advancement. On the other, the draconian
methods used for the creation of labor discipline at a time when the working class was new,
ill-disciplined, and unused to conditions of modern labor could have occurred only in an
extraordinarily repressive state.
In the course of the 1930s the government used increasingly harsh methods to impose
discipline. In the case of mishaps, workers were accused of sabotage, which in the
atmosphere of the 1930s was a serious matter indeed. For violation of discipline, such as
absenteeism, workers were administratively punished, at times even losing their ration cards,
a punishment that was likely to mean starvation. Workers had to carry with them a labor
book in which violations of labor discipline were entered. The process culminated in the 1940
labor code, a fitting instrument of the Stalinist state. According to the labor code, leaving a
place of employment without the permission of the employer became a criminal offense,
liable to punishment by imprisonment and forced labor. Now ministries became legally
empowered to move workers where they saw fit, even if that meant dividing families. This was
a military-type mobilization of labor, unparalleled in peacetime. Life in freedom and in the
concentration camps were not so very different after all.
In spite of the unenviable conditions of labor, life in the countryside was immensely harder
than in the cities. By the end of the decade, almost all agricultural work was done in
collectives or state farms. Even more than in the cities, labor was reduced to something
resembling slavery. The state specified the number of days the peasant had to work on
collective land, and it took a large share (usually a third) of the fruit of the peasants labor for
almost nothing in the form of compulsory deliveries. At the same time the state assumed no
responsibility for the social welfare of the peasantry. There was no safety net. The collective
farms, and within them the peasant households themselves, were compelled to take care of
the sick and old. There was no minimum salary, and of course, no one had even heard of the
idea of paid vacations. Under the circumstances peasants were not motivated to work
efficiently and it was not surprising that productivity remained abysmally low. Overall output
in grain (again according to dubious Soviet statistics) increased by one third between 1932
and 1937, but that increase occurred not because of any improvement in productivity but
because of the inclusion of new areas under cultivation. Recovery from the immense trauma
of collectivization was slow.
From the point of view of living standards, there was a large difference among collectives.
Some were able to provide for their members decently; in many others the peasants
remained close to starvation. Everywhere the private plot provided a large share of the
peasants yearly income. The regime faced a dilemma: private plots were not only
ideologically obnoxious, but the leaders rightly feared that they took away the attention and
energy of
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the peasants from their work in the kolkhoz. On the other hand, these plots not only provided
a large share of the peasants income, but also made a major contribution to feeding the
population. At the time of collectivization,
the most determined resistance was occasioned by the governments attempt to deprive the
peasant household of its horse and especially its cow. By 1935, when the collective farm
model charter was published when the collective farm and the Soviet village assumed its
final form the regime had reconciled itself to the existence of the private plot, including the
right to own one cow, a specified number of household animals, and unlimited poultry. The
regime found it necessary to watch constantly whether the peasant was not enlarging his plot
and animal holdings at the expense of the collective farm. Every time the regime attempted

to bring order, to clamp down, total output suffered and that the Soviet Union could il
afford.
The peasant family received from the plot half of its money income, and almost all the animal
products and vegetables it was able to enjoy. The collective farm itself supplied the peasant
only with grain. In instances where
the farm was near a city, the peasant was fortunate because money could be made by selling
in the market. On the other hand, individual peasants taking their produce to the market were
a primitive method of distribution, leading to a great deal of wasted time and energy. Most of
the work on the plots was done by women, further increasing the disproportionate share of
the burden on their shoulders. It is not too much to say that without these plots, the system of
collective farms could not have survived.
The system could exist only because there was force behind it. The MTSs were centers of
Soviet power, and the collective farms themselves became focal points for communist
education. The party organization network in the 1930s remained weak. Nevertheless, it was
powerful enough, having the backing of the NKVD to enforce the decisions of the party. The
Soviet village remained backward; nevertheless the new power, in the form of representatives
from the city and a new bureaucracy, transformed the lives of the Soviet peasantry