To what extent was equality achieved under Stalin?

Consequently in 1917, the peasants turned their support towards the Bolsheviks who promised land redistribution, whereas the Provisional Government had not kept their word on this issue. When the Bolsheviks came into power, the peasants were fulfilled by the right to take over the estates of the gentry without compensation by the Land Decree of October 1917. Land could no longer be bought, sold or rented; it would be owned by the entire people.

The New Economic Policy (NEP) promised an even better future for Lenin’s peasantry: “the cultural and economic policies of these years created a feeling of relative satisfaction among the peasantry”. This positive mood was enhanced by the memories of War Communism, when the Bolsheviks had implemented rigid control by enforcing grain requisitioning upon the peasants.

Conditions worsened under Stalin.  There was a desperate need for currency to fund rapid industrialisation. With the threat of war present collectivisation was quickly put in place. Historians call this the Great Turn, and some believe that this is the point at which the Soviet Union ‘went wrong’. “It now followed a path that led to totalitarianism, tyranny and inhumanity”. Roy Medvedev and Stephen Cohen were amongst the first historians to argue and initiate the debate that the USSR would have been more successful with the NEP.  

“Russian peasants saw the collectivisation of agriculture at the beginning of the 1930s as the imposition of a new serfdom.” Stalin forced peasants to collectivise against their will, and further inequalities were accentuated by the fact that the state bought the peasant’s grain and sold it for twenty times more. On the other hand, the Bolsheviks portrayed collectivisation positively via propaganda films such as Join the Collective Farm – one man loses a horse, another breaks his plough, a third has no seeds. Pitching in together, they fulfil their needs by collectivisation. 

However, in reality, there was great hostility between the peasants and the kolkhoz (collective farm) administrators because of income differentiation and the “chronic friction between the individual interests of the peasants and the interests of the state”. Furthermore, the peasants “were being exploited in order to keep the privileged in power”.

In order to force the peasantry to join kolkhozes, Stalin used fear. This was achieved by the liquidation of the kulaks. They had been labelled as the new the ‘class enemy’.  This ideological weapon was falsely justified by the peasant’s desire that they wanted to escape kulak exploitation.

‘Dekulakisation’ was carried out by the ‘Twenty-five Thousanders’ who waged class warfare. The local police, secret police (the OGPU), and the military backed them up, creating a quarter of a million agents, who collectivised 25 million peasant households. They killed thousands of others who resisted and also sent several million to forced labour camps along with the political opponents. The way in which collectivisation was carried out demonstrates the force, terror and propaganda that was used. These are all qualities of a dictatorship and reveal the unequal nature of society under Stalin.

It seems that the Bolsheviks had tried to enforce equality upon the peasants through collectivisation. The Bolsheviks had never been fond of the peasants; they had conservative tendencies and petty-bourgeois attitudes. However, they would create the profit so desperately needed for industrialisation; without it there would be no socialism.

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Industrialisation and the Equality of the Proletariat

It is crucial to note that Stalin was not the initiator of suppressing the rights of the proletariat.  The working class of 1917 had been critical for the success of the Bolshevik Revolution, but their control in industry was eradicated between 1918 and 1921. The extreme Left of the Libertarian historiographical school believe that it was October that marked the end of the freedom that the workers had gained in February 1917. The Bolshevik party had quickly taken control of factories and reduced the role of the soviets, highlighting how the “Bolsheviks hijacked the Revolution for their own ends at the expense of the proletariat”.

Urban workers struggled to survive during the years of War Communism. There was little food, great unemployment, low wages and state violence. Industry was nationalised and the workplace became likened to militarised factories - ‘worse than a tsarist prison camp’ where workers were imprisoned or shot if production targets were not reached. The Bolshevik state coerced the unions, using them as instruments to keep the workers under control. Internal passports were introduced to prevent the workers from fleeing to the countryside. This control reached its zenith, according to E. Meshcherskaya, in 1933, with thousands denied passports.

In order to quell the agitated spirits of the workers, the Bolsheviks became adept in the use of terror. The Red Terror began in the summer of 1918, to terrify hostile social groups. “Execution, previously the exception, now became the rule.” Large numbers of workers were arrested, guilty of counter-revolution or ‘bourgeois provocation’. Lenin soon realised that the enforcement of continuous terror would not last, so that concessions and a measure of economic liberalisation were implemented otherwise known as the NEP.

In contrast, things became even worse for the workers under the NEP; some had called it the ‘New Exploitation of the Proletariat’. They were less happy than the peasants due to a steep rise in unemployment in its first two years. Wages remained low and it seemed to the workers that the peasants were doing well at their expense. Their dislike grew for the new single managers and bourgeois specialists who had more privileges than them.

As Soviet Russia slipped into the rule of Stalin, the standard of living for the average worker fell which “convinced many of the older and middle generations that this newly developed industrial wealth was being exploited.” Also, “harsh discipline and arbitrary managerial authority” was instilled. Between 1928 and 1929, when the ‘Great Leap Forward’ had begun, the trade unions had lost any autonomy that they had previously. Rostow demonstrates how “Party ideology has ceased to emphasise proletarian superiority” where a sharp loss in political privileges and social status has been eminent.

Lenin had insisted on the ‘Party maximum’ to prevent this inequality from happening. It is believed that if Lenin had remained in power, he would have managed industrialisation more humanely. Previously, no party member had received a higher salary than a skilled worker, but Stalin had ended this in 1931 when he attacked ‘petty-bourgeois egalitarianism’. He demanded substantial increases on wage differentials, and increased the pay of managers, engineers and officials.

The new intelligentsia and technicians formed a new upper class where “inequalities became not only very large but were implanted in the official ideology by Stalin personally.” Stalin had no problem in the use of patronage and privilege, strongly believing that it was an essential part of the ‘power-mechanism’. He justified this with incentives; human skills were in short supply so rewards were needed for those who excelled.

Corruption soon became manifest. Managers were driven in chauffeured cars, with dachas to go to in the countryside, larger flats and access to meat. When one family had 150 roubles a month to live on and another had 3000, this was clearly more than privilege, it was a new Soviet bourgeoisie and “was the most visible signs of the existence of two groups in society”. The difference between the pay of those at the top and those at the bottom, in the late 1930s, was so great that they were larger than those in the USA. This epitomises inequality where the “Soviet society had returned rapidly to a hierarchy of power and privilege”. 

Industrialisation during the early 1930s has been described as a “phase of heroic, frenzied, and euphoric advance”. In its vanguard was the Stakhanovite propaganda movement. Stakhanov’s overfulfillment of his production target was rapidly eulogized as an exemplar for all Soviet industry by way of trying to overcome the huge influx of backward peasants. It was through the Stakhanovite movement that the state was “extracting more profit from the worker in order to benefit the elite.” The application of this new system had created a new privileged class of ‘technocratic intellectuals’ who became the “mainstay of the regime.” 

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The Purges: Stalin’s equaliser

The Purges were the devices used by Stalin to create universal distrust, extensive suspicion and widespread fear – all features inimical to an egalitarian society. The historiographical argument as to whether or not the Purges were completely “masterminded by an evil puppet master” is mute in respect of their impact on equality in Soviet society.

Party membership was reduced from three and a half million members in 1933 to less than two million in 1937. This was achieved by the three phases of the Purges throughout the 1930s: the chistka of 1932-35, where twenty percent of the party was expelled non-violently after collectivisation, a combination of show trials, and the Yehovshchina; a period of mass terror from 1937 to 1938.  The Purges aimed ‘to ensure iron proletarian discipline’ and cleanse ‘the party’s ranks of all unreliable, unstable and hanger-on elements.’

The Purges were not limited to the party - they included all areas of society and all institutions. These groups included associates of those who had been purged (colleagues, subordinates, family and friends made up the largest category of all and caused the terror to increase exponentionally) to any persons with unorthodox views, to artists, historians, and people in the media, to peasants and industrial workers. Robert Conquest believes that all those arrested and executed during the Purges reached up to 10 million. Absurdly, the sheer scale to which the Purges were carried out made Russia’s citizens more equal than ever; they all experienced fear, terror and resented “the rigid police and party controls which penetrate even their personal lives”.

Perversely, it was felt that confessions were required in order to legitimise arrests and prove that the state was correct. People were aggressively interrogated and beaten in order to achieve this. Many died during the torture. Survivors were either shot or sent to Gulag camps where they were often worked to death in terrible conditions. This slave labour was integral for continuing industrialisation, with huge human resources required for perilous work in the mines, timber forests and construction sites.

In order to fulfil quotas, propaganda was used by the media to encourage ordinary people to criticise anyone from the party officials to the workers. This was almost too successful; there was a flood of denunciations for “dubious class origins, long-forgotten sins, and current misdeeds”.  It gathered a momentum of its own, and like the Nazi state, there was more information than the government could deal with. Ironically, perceived inequality between family and neighbours, led to these denouncements.

Although the regime claimed that socialism had in the main been achieved and exploiting classes eliminated, the state did not wither away as Communist theory implied. Stalin announced, in January 1934, that the state would increase its powers as the remaining ‘class enemies’ were desperate for power after their defeat and isolation. Anyone who argued against this was labelled a potential wrecker and guilty of a criminal offence. This symbolises precisely what the state had become under Stalin: an unequal bureaucracy where one man’s ideals are true and all other views are fundamentally wrong and punishable.

This one party state, dominated by one leader, backed up by the NKVD, was an extreme police state, far exceeding the levels of control and oppression experienced under Tsarism, and indeed, pre-Stalinist Communism. This confirms the loss of contact with the Marxist libertarian ideal of Communist egalitarianism.

Although the terror was halted at the end of 1938, Central Committee members and army officers continued to be purged into 1939. Overall, the Purges had a terrible destabilising effect on Russian society. The reality and fear of the Purges remained until after Stalin’s death. Stephan Ivanovich Semenov illustrates the effect of the Purges with his testimony: “[Stalin] took away the future away from citizens who were not born because he killed their mothers and fathers…” This profound statement reflects the terrible unequal acts that took place under Stalin.

 

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Equality: Gender and Personal Expression

Lenin had felt that the rights of women were an important first step to achieving communism. Under the Tsars, women were habitually denigrated; peasant proverbs, such as “The more you beat the old women, the tastier the soup will be” were commonly used. Lenin felt that traditional and bourgeois matrimony was akin to slavery, thus in 1917 he introduced a divorce law that enabled either partner to terminate their marriage because of incompatibility. Later in 1920, the Soviet Union became the first country to legalise abortion on demand. This shows that perhaps for the first time, women would feel equal.

However, by the mid-1920s the USSR had the highest divorce rate in Europe, twenty five times higher than Britain. Women were abandoned when they became pregnant, demonstrated by Beryl Williams who quotes a Communist observer: “The women remains tied with chains to the destroyed family hearth. The man, happily whistling, can leave it, abandoning the women and children.” In an unpublished correspondence, Beryl Williams described Soviet Russia as “a macho world for all the talk of equality.”

However, under Stalin, women’s lives seemed to be improving. The Great Retreat of the mid-1930s marked a positive time that was pro-family, pro-discipline and anti-abortionist. Marriage would have to be taken seriously, and children were urged to love and respect their parents, “even if they are old-fashioned and do not like the Komsomol [Young Communist League]”. The Family Code of May 1936 saw that abortion was outlawed except in cases where the women’s health or life was threatened. Divorce became harder as both parties had to attend the proceedings and expenses increased. Mothers who had six children or more received cash payments of 2000 roubles a year for five years as well as additional payments for each child up to the eleventh child. This would greatly increase the opportunities of these children since they would have a much securer family. An extract from a letter to a women’s magazine named Rabonista in 1936 shows great enthusiasm: “I can’t find the words to express my gratitude to the Party and to the Government, to dear comrade Stalin for his care of us women”.

The Cultural Revolution of 1928-1931 marked the denunciation of all non-Marxists working in academic subjects or artistic subjects. All artists had to come together under the Union of Writers and had to follow the principles of socialist realism. Robert Service believes that “No great work of literature was published in the 1930s and all artistic figures went in fear of their lives.” Equality includes the right to personally express feelings and beliefs, yet around 1500 writers were killed during the Purges for doing just this.

Religious expressionism was utterly immoral from the Bolshevik point of view. It was a sign of backwardness and had been representative of the upper classes who supported the aristocratic Tsars. In January 1918, the Decree on the Separation of the Church and State was written which refused the Church permission to own property. Religious education in schools was outlawed and the priests and clerics were declared ‘servants of the bourgeoisie’. 

Under Stalin, the Young Communists mounted fierce attacks upon religion. Eighty percent of the village churches were closed down and only one in forty were functioning by the end of the 1930s. However on 4 September 1943, “Stalin startled the world by his sudden rehabilitation of the Greek Orthodox Church”. The reason for this was given out to be because they had proved themselves loyal to the regime. The true reason for the reinstatement was in order to gain further support, especially from the thousands of religious people in Soviet Russia. This period of religious freedom was too brief, however, to determine whether the rights they were afforded were equal. Hundreds of thousands had perished since the Bolshevik takeover, especially under Stalin, who quintessentially lacked the implementation of egalitarian rights.

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Conclusion

There are so many factors and conditions of equality, it is critical to compare the levels of equality under Russia’s leaders, to come to a judgement on Stalin. Comparison with other countries is ineffective for the purposes of this question as the Soviet Union was the world’s only Communist state for the majority of this period.

On the balance of evidence, little equality was achieved in the Soviet Union under Stalin. Although James R. Millar has said that “more than half of the post-Stalin generation believes that inequality reached its peak under Brezhnev”, under Stalin there was more inequality between 1928-1953 than there had ever been under the Tsars. In the first years of Stalin’s leadership, the national minorities had experienced discrimination on the same level as under the Romanovs. However, as Stalin’s reign progressed and the Purges were implemented, great oppression followed. This is illustrated by the relief and overwhelming joy that the national minorities had felt when the Soviet Union had been invaded by Germany in the Second World War. Moreover, the peasants suffered more terror than they had ever experienced; collectivisation split up communities where kulaks and thousands of unwilling peasants were killed or sent to Gulags. Furthermore, inequalities were at hand through exploitation; grain was sold much higher than the rate that it was bought from the peasants. Due to industrialisation, it is clear to see the inequalities manifested by the great privileges given to the managers and technicians, which created a great divide between the unskilled workers and the skilled. In addition, the Purges instilled fear into the industrial workers, as well as encompassing the entire Soviet society from the government itself to artists or religious persons. Up to ten million were arrested and executed; an amount so vast that whole families and communities were destroyed, creating a chaotic and unstable lifestyle, undeniably with the loss of equal opportunities. Evidence indicates that women enjoyed equality under Stalin more than under the rule of the Tsars - while Lenin’s reforms were radical, there were unintended negative consequences for women. Communist restrictions upon religion demonstrate further inequalities in expression.

All areas of society experienced suffering and torment under Stalin – even those at the apex of the Soviet hierarchy. Theoretically, women lived with more legal protection under Stalin compared to any other previous leader of Russia, but this cannot be celebrated given the overall extent of oppression and suppression. The whole of society under Stalin suffered more than they had under the Tsars, thus there was a type of negative equality in hardship and fear. Soviet society was oppressed by collectivisation, industrialisation and ultimately, the Purges. The extent to which positive equality was achieved under Stalin in the Soviet Union was minimal, limited by Stalin’s strategies, fear-mongering, and the threat of war. In the words of Marx, “Political power… is merely the organised power of one class for oppressing another.”

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Bibliography

Corin, Chris and Fiehn, Terry, Communist Russia Under Lenin and Stalin, London: Hodder Murray, 2007

Daniels, Robert V. The Stalin Revolution: Foundations of Soviet Totalitarianism, second edition, D. C. Heath and Company, 1972

Davies, Sarah, ’Us’ against ‘Them’: Social identity in Soviet Russia 1934-41,

The Russian Review 56, 1997

Deutscher, Isaac, Stalin: A Political Biography, Penguin Books, 1966

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Fitzpatrick, Sheila, Stalin's Peasants: Resistance and Survival in the Russian Village after Collectivization, USA: Oxford University Press, 1996,

Which gives more detail about the second serfdom of the peasants under collectivization.

Fitzpatrick, Sheila, (Ed.), Stalinism: New Directions, Routledge, 2000,

From which the Davies review was taken.

Getty, J. Arch, Origins of the Great Purges, Cambridge University Press, 1985,

Gilbert, Martin, Routledge Atlas of Russian History, 4th edition, Routledge, 2007

Gooding, John, Rulers and Subjects: Government and People in Russia, 1801-1991, UK: Hodder Education, 2003

Harms, William, , April 28, 1994.

Kinder, Hermann and Hilgemann, Werner, Penguin Atlas of World History. Vol. 2, Penguin Books, 1988

Marx, Karl and Engels, Friedrich, The Communist Manifesto, Penguin Books, 1977

Marx, Karl, Engels, Friedrich, and Levitsky, Serge L., Das Kapital, USA: Regnery Gateway, 1996

Millar, James R. Politics, Work and Daily Life in the USSR, Cambridge University Press, 1987

Montefiore, Simon Sebag, Stalin: The Court of the Red Tsar, Weidenfield & Nicolson, 2003

Nove, Alec, Stalinism and After, George Allen & Unwin Ltd., 1975

Phillips, Steve, Lenin and the Russian Revolution, Heinemann, 2000

Rendle, Matthew, The Problems of ‘Becoming Soviet’: Former Nobles in Soviet Society, 1917-41, European History Quarterly 2008 38

Rostow, W.W. The Dynamics of Soviet Society, London: Secker & Warburg, 1953

Service, Robert, A History of Twentieth-Century Russia, Penguin, 1997

Stites, Richard, Revolutionary Dreams, USA: Oxford University Press, 1991

Streich, Michael, , February 10, 2009

Trotsky, Leon, The Revolution Betrayed, India: Aakar Books, 2007

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DVD resources

Unknown director, Join the Collective Farm, 1925, DVD: Soviet Propaganda: Capitalist Sharks and Communism’s Shining Future, Disc 2, Odeon Entertainment, 2007.

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