Russian History: A Very Short Introduction

The new relationship between party and people required a reformed legal system, shorn of catch-all concepts like ‘enemy of the people’ and ‘counter-revolutionary activity’, which enabled prosecutors to incriminate anyone they chose. In principle, the new ‘socialist legality’ was to require genuine evidence of criminal activity to be produced in court before a conviction could be obtained. Judicial procedures were democratized by the introduction of ‘comrade courts’, consisting of ordinary citizens in the workplace or apartment block, empowered to reach a verdict and pronounce sentence on petty crimes. The idea was that society should become self-policing, at least for minor offences.

Stalin’s successors attempted to increase agricultural production and make consumer goods available. Perhaps most important of all, they embarked on a huge programme of domestic construction, with the ultimate aim of providing each family with its own apartment. During the 1960s and 1970s, sufficient progress was made to turn most Soviet citizens into modest de facto property owners, with therefore a stake in preserving the system, whatever its faults. The Soviet welfare system also functioned well enough by the 1960s to give most citizens entitlements to education, child care, and health care, about whose defects they grumbled, without wishing to abolish them. The collective strength of the ruling elite ensured that Soviet society became unyieldingly hierarchical. For most people, the way to get on in life was to elbow one’s way upwards. The idea of a hierarchy of dwelling places may sound strange, but it was an integral part of Soviet life. For the supply of food, consumer goods, and social benefits in a society of scarcity, the best-provided city was Moscow; next came Leningrad and the capitals of the union republics; then towns with enterprises deemed ‘of all-Union significance’; then other towns; and finally at the bottom of the ladder the villages. The aim of young people was to rise as far up this hierarchy as possible, using a mixture of educational qualifications and personal connections to obtain employment and a propiska

(residence permit) in a higher-ranking location.

Those born in the villages tried to leave them. The long-term price of collectivization and neglect of agriculture was a poverty-stricken and demoralized countryside, populated mainly by women and elderly men who had not been able to escape. Young men found it easier to escape rural life than women, since military service enabled them to leave the village, acquire new skills, and obtain an urban propiska. Agricultural productivity was very low, as one could see in the empty shelves of grocers’ shops. The Soviet state had to expend precious foreign currency importing grain in order to keep up the tacit ‘social contract’ with the urban workers: cheap food in return for low pay.

In the towns, the struggle for life chances became paramount. For many people, their employer was a vital resource person: if he could negotiate favourable deals with Gosplan, the supply of food, fuel, housing, putevki (paid holidays), and consumer goods was likely to be satisfactory for his employees. The benefits of the social security system were distributed at the workplace, through trade union branches. One might argue that every Soviet workplace was a ‘primary collective’, where the ostensible productive function was secondary to enabling people to conduct the normal and essential business of their lives in spite of

the omnipresent pressure from the state.

Life inside the collective was fairly easy. One did not have to work too hard: pilfering, tukhta (padding the figures), and mutual cover-ups ensured that every employee could cope with life, no matter how deficient the collective’s output. Since neither terror nor a normal market were available, it was impossible to eradicate these practices. On the other hand, talented or unusual people found life in the collective very difficult. To ensure its survival, the collective’s members would band together to discipline or extrude individuals who might threaten its existence through non-conformity with prevailing social and political norms. In this way, collectives largely policed themselves: mutual surveillance remained one of their paramount functions.