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Unlock This CourseThe Five-Year Plans pulled millions of peasants into the towns far faster than homes could be built. Remember, the plans put heavy industry first, so very little was spent on housing. The result was severe overcrowding. In Moscow in 1940 the average person had only about four square metres of living space, even less than in 1930.
Most families in the older cities lived in a communal flat. In the new industrial towns many workers slept in barracks, which were long wooden huts with rows of beds, or in huts dug into the earth. Running water and proper drains were rare.
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Food was short too. While bread was rationed, from 1929 to 1935, ration cards were graded. Workers in heavy industry got the biggest rations and office workers got less. Many workers ate their main meal in the factory canteen. In the early 1930s townspeople ate less meat and milk than they had in 1928.
Life did get a little easier in the middle of the 1930s. Rationing ended and more goods reached the shops, although prices were high. In 1935 Stalin announced, 'Life has become better, comrades. Life has become more joyous.' There were real gains as well. Everyone had a job, basic health care and schooling were free, and workers had paid holidays, clubs and cinemas.
During the first Five-Year Plan workers often changed jobs, hunting for better food and housing. This upset the plans, so the government tied workers down with stricter and stricter rules.
A worker who missed a single day without a good reason could be sacked. That also meant losing the ration card and the room that came with the job.
Every worker had to carry a labour book. Nobody could get a new job without showing it, so a bad record followed a worker everywhere.
The working day went up from seven hours to eight, and the working week to six days out of seven. Leaving a job without permission meant two to four months in prison. Being more than 20 minutes late counted as absence. The punishment was up to six months of work at reduced pay, with up to a quarter of wages taken away.
Workers could not fight back. The trade unions were run by the party and did not organise strikes. Pay depended on output. From 1931 Stalin dropped the idea of equal wages, and most workers were put on piece rates linked to their norm. Factories were often dangerous, and accidents were common because speed mattered more than safety.
Peasants were worse off than any group of workers. Remember, kolkhoz members were paid by labour days out of whatever was left after the state had taken its quota. Payment came once a year, after the harvest, and mostly in grain and potatoes, with very little cash. In a poor year there was almost nothing to share out.
The private plot kept most families alive. They ate what they grew and sold any extra at the collective farm markets in the towns. From 1939 every member had to earn a minimum number of labour days each year, between 60 and 100 depending on the region, so that peasants did not spend all their time on their own plots.
Peasants were not given internal passports, so they could not move to a town without permission from the farm. To many it felt like serfdom, the old system that had tied peasants to a landowner's estate until 1861. The party's Russian initials were VKP. Peasants joked bitterly that the letters stood for 'second serfdom'.
Kolkhoz members had no state pension. In 1940 most villages still had no electricity or running water. New village schools and clinics were the main improvement. Many young people left for the towns whenever they could, by joining the army, going away to study or signing up for work on a building site.
Communism promised equality, but Stalin's policies created a society with clear layers.
The nomenklatura lived best. They were given larger flats, special shops closed to the public, a dacha, a car with a driver and holidays by the Black Sea. But they were also the group most at risk in the purges.
Skilled workers, engineers and managers were badly needed. They earned several times the pay of the unskilled and got better rations and housing. Stakhanovites did best of all. Free evening classes meant an ambitious worker could train and rise to be a manager.
Collective farm peasants were at the bottom, with the lowest incomes, no passports and no pensions. Unskilled workers in the towns, many of them former peasants, were only a little better off, with low pay and a bed in a barracks.
Below all of these were the prisoners in the gulags and the families of former kulaks in the special settlements.
Don't write that everyone was equal because the USSR was Communist. Privileges depended on your job and your rank. Don't say that life only got worse. Jobs, schooling and health care were real gains, and the middle of the 1930s was easier than the start. And keep town and countryside apart: ration cards, labour books and the 1940 law were for workers, while labour days and private plots belonged to the kolkhoz.
Extract A (a practice extract written for this lesson, in the style of a modern history textbook)
From a modern history textbook.
The Revolution had promised equality, yet by the late 1930s Stalin's Russia was a land of glaring privilege. Party bosses were driven to special shops that ordinary citizens could not even enter, and they relaxed at weekends in comfortable country houses. Meanwhile workers' families were crammed into a single room and queued to use a shared kitchen. Out in the villages, the peasants who grew the nation's food had no pensions, no passports and seldom any electricity. New masters had simply replaced the old.
(a) What impression does the author give about Soviet society in the 1930s? You must use Extract A to explain your answer. [6 marks]
The author gives the impression that Soviet society in the 1930s was deeply unequal and unfair. The language is critical: the USSR is called 'a land of glaring privilege', which suggests the inequality was obvious and shocking. The author sets groups against each other to stress the gap. Officials are 'party bosses' who 'relaxed' in 'comfortable country houses', while workers' families were 'crammed into a single room'. The word 'crammed' makes their housing sound unfit for people. The author has also chosen what to include. The extract opens by reminding us that the Revolution 'promised equality' and ends with 'new masters had simply replaced the old', so the reader sees a broken promise. Nothing is said about gains such as free schooling or full employment, which makes the picture one-sided.
What lifts this to the top level: it names one clear impression, proves it with short quotations and what they suggest, and explains how the author's choices (the contrast, the opening and ending, what is left out) create that impression.
Here the author builds the impression through contrast, so point it out: 'party bosses' against 'crammed' families and peasants with 'no pensions'. Then say what has been left out. You do not need your own knowledge of living conditions to answer, so don't spend time adding facts about ration cards or labour books.