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"Dear Comrade, You Ask What We Need": Socialist Paternalism and Soviet Rural "Notables" in the Mid-1930s

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 January 2017

Lewis H. Siegelbaum
Lewis H. Siegelbaum*
Affiliation:
Department of History, Michigan State University
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Extract

In their Dictatorship over Needs, Ferenc Fehér, Agnes Heller, and Gyorgy Markus sought to analyze the nature of domination and subordination in Soviet-type societies in terms of the direct administration of production and distribution by a self-selecting corporate ruling group. This dictatorship, initially justified by the interests of the proletariat and the party's self-assigned role as its vanguard, was perpetuated not merely by coercion but also by various mechanisms of legitimation. Among these was the construction of a self-image of the state as a wise, stern, but also beneficent father. Thus, “everything that a subject may get (consumer goods, a flat, heating, clothes, theatre tickets, etc.) is ‘due to the state'; it is not granted as a right or given in exchange for something else, but provided as an amenity that can be revoked.” It follows that “Soviet subjects ask for favours, their right proper is ius supplicationis.”

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Articles
Information
Slavic Review , Volume 57 , Issue 1 , Spring 1998 , pp. 107 - 132
Copyright
Copyright © Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies. 1998

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References

Research for this paper was funded by the International Research and Exchanges Board and an All-University Research Grant from Michigan State University. I wish to express my thanks to these institutions as well as to Leslie Moch, the anonymous readers for this journal, and its editor. The views expressed herein are exclusively those of the author

1. Feher, Ferenc, Heller, Agnes and Markus, Gyorgy, Dictatorship over Needs: An Analysis of Soviet Societies (New York, 1983), 180 Google Scholar. Elsewhere, Feher has argued that “charismatic legitimation” and the frequent resort to repression under Stalin precluded “the guarantees without which paternalism is meaningless.” See Ferenc, Feher, “Paternalism as a Mode of Legitimation in Soviet-Type Societies,” in Rigby, T. H. and Feher, Ferenc, eds., Political Legitimation in Communist States (London, 1982), 66–67.Google Scholar

2. Janos, Kornai, The Socialist System: The Political Economy of Communism (Princeton, 1992), 56 Google Scholar. Kornai characterizes the soft budget constraint as a “manifestation” of paternalism (144).

3. Katherine, Verdery, What Was Socialism, and What Comes Next? (Princeton, 1996), 19, 24.Google Scholar Verdery defines socialist paternalism as a “cultural relation between state and subject” that “emphasized a quasi-familial dependency” and “posited a moral tie linking subjects with the state through their rights to a share in the redistributed social product” (63).

4. As Stephen Kotkin argues, “Scarcity, far from being the Soviet system's Achilles heel, was one of the keys to its strength. The tighter the overall balance of services or supplies, the more leverage the authorities could exercise.” At the same time, however, tightness of supplies engendered the “little tactics of the habitat,” viz., informal distribution networks, theft, “bazaaring,” and so forth, all of which can be subsumed under the category of the “second economy.” See his Magnetic Mountain: Stalinism as a Civilization (Berkeley, 1995), 246, 253.

5. Rogachevskaia, L. S., Sotsialisticheskoe sorevnovanie v SSSR: lstoricheskie ocherki 1917–1970 gg. (Moscow, 1977), 59–64Google Scholar. The distinction between contests and competitions was that whereas the former were initiated from above, the latter depended on challenges ostensibly issued by one group of workers to others. Such challenges could coincide with or be sparked by the announcement of a contest.

6. The correspondence is in Gosudarstvennyi arkhiv Rossiiskoi Federatsii (GA RF), f. 7689, op. 11, dd. 50, 51, 125, 127, 128, 129 (correspondence of the union's central committee with Stakhanovites of sovkhozes awarded prizes in the contest).

7. Western historians of the Soviet countryside have overwhelmingly concentrated on the collective farm sector, treating sovkhoz workers almost as an afterthought. To take one recent example, the peasants in Sheila Fitzpatrick's Stalin's Peasants (Oxford, 1994) consist almost exclusively of Kolkhozniki.

8. Sovkhoznaia gazeta, 12 October 1934, 1; 4 October 1934, 1; 17 October 1934, 3.

9. Kommunisticheskaia partita sovetskogo soiuza v rezoliutsiiakh i resheniiakh s'kzdov, konferentsii i plenumov TsK, 9th ed., 15 vols. (Moscow, 1983–89), 6: 22.

10. Borisov, Iu. S., “Dokumenty o politicheskoi i organizatsionno-khoziaistvennoi deiatel'nosti politotdelov sovkhozov v 1933–1935 gg.,” in Materialy po istorii SSSR (Moscow, 1959), 7: 365 Google Scholar (Doc. 1). For this characterization of the 70, 000 (17.5 percent of all sovkhoz officials), see Zaidner, V. I., Partiinoe rukovodstvo sovkhozami v gody dovoennykh piatiletok (Rostov-na-Donu, 1984), 69 Google Scholar. Some 8, 000 people, mainly party professionals, were mobilized to serve in the politotdely in 1933–34.

11. Pravda, 5 February 1935, 1, 3 (speech to the Seventh Congress of Soviets). The rate of losses among calves on state farms was 18.5 percent in 1934 as compared to a reported 13.8 percent on collective farms.

12. Both the department and the unions had been in existence for a short while: the former emerged from the reorganization of Narkomsovkhoz in April 1934; the latter consisted of three of the seven new unions created after the dissolution of the Union of Workers of Animal-Breeding Sovkhozes in September 1934. For details see Potichnyj, Peter J., Soviet Agricultural Trade Unions, 1917–70 (Toronto, 1972), 63–66.Google Scholar

13. GA RF, f. 7689, op. 11, d. 52 (protocols and memoranda of union central committee on results of the contest), 11. 38–42ob.; d. 1 (protocols of the presidium of the union's central committee), 1. 5; Sovkhoznaia gazeta, 17 October 1934, 3; 28 October 1934, 4. Cf. the contest for the best livestock kolkhoz in 1934 (Rossiiskii gosudarstvennyi arkhiv ekonomiki [RGAE], f. 9477, op. 1, dd. 91, 128, 129); and the contests between May and December 1935 for the best sovkhoz swineherds, shepherds, milkers, and calfherds as reported in Sovkhoznaia gazeta, 11 May, 27 May, and 1 June 1935.

14. By 1 January 1935, workers from 433 of the 900 sovkhozes within the trade union's orbit were already participating. The correspondence between the union's central and regional committees was devoted entirely to the contest; protocols of regional contest commission sessions and lists of prizewinners make up at least a dozen folders, some running in excess of 200 pages, in the union's fond. See GA RF, f. 7689, op. 11, dd. 46–48, 52–55, 57–62.

15. The chair of the Central Contest Commission was Erikh Kviring, head of the Cattle and Dairy Department of Narkomsovkhoz and younger brother of the Ukrainian party apparatchik and Communist Academy administrator, Emmanuel.

16. GA RF, f. 7689, op. 11, d. 52, 1. 34. The process of selection in the Western oblast seems typical: of the 505 names submitted by sovkhoz commissions to the obkom of the union, 25 were forwarded to the oblast commission. As of 25 May 1935, the latter had awarded prizes to 13, 10 of whom were nominated for consideration by the Central Contest Commission. GA RF, f. 7689, op. 11, d. 49 (protocols of sessions of contest commissions), II. 112–116ob. For the North Caucasus krai, see the report in d. 55, 1. 48–48ob.

17. The list of recipients of regional commission prizes is in GA RF, f. 7689, op. 11, d. 46, II. 23–55. For data on their gender, age, occupations, social backgrounds, and party status, see Zaidner, Partiinoe rukovodstvo, 91–92.

18. Sovkhoznaia gazeta, 8 August 1935, 3. The range of monetary awards, which were pegged to occupational categories, is somewhat at variance with the resolution of the Central Contest Commission in GA RF, f. 7689, op. 11, d. 47, II. 24–28. Although undated, the resolution must have been earlier, for only 113 recipients are listed.

19. Sovkhoznaia gazeta, 8 August 1935, 3. Between 1932 and the spring of 1935, Nasunov had received awards on eight occasions. For details, see GA RF, f. 7689, op. 11, d. 50, 1.202.

20. Trud v SSSR: Statisticheskii sbornik (Moscow, 1935), 62. The next largest category was grain workers (517, 900). Workers on pig, sheep, and horse farms totaled 568, 700. Altogether, 2.83 million people worked on state farms.

21. Zelenin, I. E., Sovkhozy SSSR v gody dovoennykh piatiletok, 1928–1941 (Moscow, 1982), 210–11Google Scholar. Limits on the number of animals and the size of plots prescribed in the legislation for both collective and state farms were frequently transgressed, leading to further restrictions—and violations.

22. Trud v SSSR, 32. The next two lowest categories were public cafeteria workers (122 rubles) and forestry workers (130 rubles).

23. Ibid., 27–28.

24. Zelenin, Sovkhozy SSSR v gody dovoennykh piatiletok, 130–31.

25. Trud v SSSR, 325.

26. Gromyko, M. M., Trudovye traditsii russkikh krest'ian Sibiri (XVIII-pervaia polovina XIX v.) (Novosibirsk, 1975), 71–72.Google Scholar

27. B. M., Firsov and I. G., Kiseleva, Byt velikorusskikh krest'ian-zemlepashtsev: Opisanie materialov etnograficheskogo biuro kniazia V. N. Tenisheva (na primere Vladimirskoi gubernii) (St. Petersburg, 1993), 205–6.Google Scholar

28. In Fedor Abramov's Two Winters and Three Summers, a novel set in the far north just after World War II, Marfa Pavlovna despises her husband because “in the entire village there was not another man who would fiddle with a cow's teats.” “Let them laugh,” her husband says, “I'm making it easier for you.” Fedor, Abramov, Brat'ia i sestry, Dve zimy i tri leta (Leningrad, 1973), 338.Google Scholar

29. Calfherds averaged 116 rubles and cattlehands 108. Among the main occupational groups, the best paid were the drovers. The 24 who reported their wages averaged 185 rubles per month. Wage data was calculated on the basis of what was reported for the three-month period immediately preceding the date of the letters sent by prizewinners.

30. GA RF, f. 7689, op. 11, d. 50, 1. 158; d. 128, 1. 166; d. 51, 1. 202; d. 127, 1. 67.

31. GA RF, f. 7689, op. 11, d. 52, 1. 24.

32. On 11 December 1934, the presidium of the central committee resolved to produce for mass circulation a “red book of notables of sovkhozes” consisting of “the best, most advanced, shockworkers” awarded by the regional commissions and the Central Contest Commission. Although names began to be collected in February, no such book ever appeared. GA RF, f. 7689, op. 11, d. 1, 1. 8; d. 52, 1. 1.

33. Pravda, 6 May 1935, 2–3. In December 1935, Trubacheev, the chair of the union's central committee, invoked Stalin's speech after denouncing a sovkhoz director who allegedly said, “I will work for the calves, but will do nothing for people.” GA RF, f. 7689, op. 11, d. 42 (stenogram of meeting of chairs of oblast and krai committees with union activists and Stakhanovites), 1. 47.

34. And not merely the rural population. For the now classic analysis of “The Stalinist Myth of the ‘Great Family'” within “High Stalinist Culture” of the mid-1930s, see Katerina Clark, The Soviet Novel: History as Ritual (Chicago, 1981), 114–35. For Stalin's statement that adumbrated the slogan “cadres decide everything,” see lzvestiia, 29 December 1934, 1. On the kolkhoz shockworker congress and the charter, see Fitzpatrick, Stalin's Peasants, 117–27. Fitzpatrick refers to the “conspicuous consultation between the regime and representatives of the peasantry” over the size and use of private plots (103).

35. Sovkhoznaia gazeta, 26 August 1935, 1. This was an editorial that cited a letter Soms had sent to politotdely on 3 August.

36. Of course, to remain faithful to the canons of socialist realism, it was important to demonstrate that this contradiction was already being overcome. See, for example, Sovkhoznaia gazeta, 29 October 1934, 2, which criticized the author of a book on the subject for failing to notice that “in our sovkhozes former hedniaki, batraki, and seredniaki, having become tractor-drivers, combiners, machinists, etc., have transformed themselves literally before our eyes into industrial workers. “

37. James von Geldern, “The Centre and the Periphery: Cultural and Social Geography in the Mass Culture of the 1930s,” in Stephen White, ed., New Directions in Soviet History (Cambridge, 1992), 62–80 (quotation on 68).

38. This was Klavdiia Maksimovskaia. GA RF, f. 7689, op. 11, d. 129, 1. 137.

39. GA RF, f. 7689, op. 11, d. 50, 1. 163 (Romashova); d. 50, 1. 1 (Arshak); d. 51, 1. 295 (Arkacheev); d. 51, 1. 50 (Aleksandrova); d. 50, 1. 34 (Sychev).

40. GA RF, f. 7689, op. 11, d. 51, 1. 163–163ob. (Romashova); d. 129, 1. 137 (Maksimovskaia). For exceptions, see GA RF, f. 7689, op. 11, d. 125, 11. 46, 69, 88–88ob.

41. GA RF, f. 7689, op. 11, d. 50, 11. 34, 42 (Sychev); d. 125, 1. 23 (Shmakov).

42. GA RF, f. 7689, op. 11, d. 50, 1. 151. Volkova's situation is all the more remarkable in that the Karavaevo sovkhoz was something of a showpiece.

43. GA RF, f. 7689, op. 11, d. 128, 1. 166 (Kubanova); d. 129, 1. 124 (Voronova); d. 50, 1. 57 (Lemeshchenko).

44. GA RF, f. 7689, op. 11, d. 51, 1. 295ob. (Arkacheev); d. 128, 1. 125ob. (Maksimova); d. 51, 1. 78ob. (Malashnikova).

45. GA RF, f. 7689, op. 11, d. 51, 1. 50 (Aleksandrova); d. 50, 1. 35 (Sychev); d. 50, 1. 84 (Karpov); d. 129, 1. 124 (Voronova); d. 128, 1. 166 (Kubanova).

46. GA RF, f. 7689, op. 11, d. 50, 1. 35ob. (Sychev); d. 51, 1. 88ob. (Ishambaev). See also d. 51, 1. 78 (Malashnikova); d. 51, 11. 100 (Shenkliuev), 116 (Koriakina), 163 (Romashova); and d. 128, 1. 9ob. (Gorusova).

47. E. A. Osokina, lerarkhiia potrebleniia: O zhizni liudei v usloviiakh stalinskogo snabzheniia, 1928–1935 gg. (Moscow, 1993), 51. See also the letter sent to Pravda in September 1930 from Mordovia in RGAE, f. 7486, op. 1, d. 102, 1. 239: “To buy, but where? In the rabkoop? It would be better not to mention it. “

48. Osokina, lerarkhiia potrebleniia, 54.

49. GA RF, f. 7689, op. 11, d. 42, 1. 192ob. The official from the Central Union of Cooperative Societies (Tsentrosoiuz) who reported on the dearth of shoes and other consumer goods pleaded a lack of funds and suggested that the cattle and dairy sovkhoz union “go to VTsSPS [the Central Council of Trade Unions] and raise a ruckus” (11. 194ob.-195).

50. GA RF, f. 7689, op. 11, d. 44 (stenogram of discussions with sovkhoz notables), 1. 2lob.; d. 125, 11. 35, 58.

51. One might assume that in other cases respondents were at least semiliterate, but it is not always clear that they—as opposed to relatives, friends, or sovkhoz officials— actually wrote the letters.

52. These reported rates of illiteracy and semiliteracy were significantly higher than official figures that put the proportion of union members who were illiterate at 9.9 percent and semiliterate at 17.5 percent, as of November 1934. GA RF, f. 7689, op. 11, d. 1, 1. 7. Even these figures were characterized as among the highest of any of the 163 trade unions in the USSR (Sovkhoznaia gazeta, 6 March 1936, 3). Whatever the case, the expressed aim of liquidating illiteracy by 1 May 1935 was a pipe dream.

53. GA RF, f. 7689, op. 11, d. 50, 1. 35. See also d. 50, 1. 110 (Vorob'eva).

54. GA RF, f. 7689, op. 11, d. 51, 1. 163ob.

55. For more on the occupational diseases of milkmaids and other livestock workers, see Roberta Manning, “Women in the Soviet Countryside on the Eve of World War II,” in Beatrice, Farnsworth and Lynne, Viola, eds., Russian Peasant Women (New York, 1992), 217–18.Google Scholar

56. GA RF, f. 7689, op. 11, d. 125, 1. 26.

57. See Siegelbaum, Lewis H., Stakhanovism and the Politics of Productivity in the USSR, 1935–1941 (Cambridge, Eng., 1988), 66–.Google Scholar

58. For Stalin's speech, see I. V. Stalin, Sochineniia, 3 vols. (Stanford, 1967), 1: 86–99. For an English translation of the proceedings of the conference, see Labour in the Land of Socialism: Stakhanovites in Conference (Moscow, 1936). The song, by Aleksandr Aleksandrov with lyrics by Vasilii Lebedev-Kumach, can be found in Geldern, James von and Stites, Richard, eds., Mass Culture in Soviet Russia: Tales, Poems, Songs, Movies, Plays, and Folklore, 1917–1953 (Bloomington, 1995), 237–38.Google Scholar

59. GA RF, f. 7689, op. 11, d. 127, II. 68–69ob.

60. Katherine Verdery (What Was Socialism, 24) considers surveillance “the negative face” of socialist regimes’ problematic legitimation as opposed to “promises of social redistribution and welfare,” that is, socialist paternalism. My argument is that these two “faces” were genetically part of the same body. For interesting reflections on surveillance in the twentieth century, see Peter, Holquist, “'Information Is the Alpha and Omega of Our Work': Bolshevik Surveillance in Its Pan-European Con text,” Journal of Modern History 69 (September 1997): 415–50.Google Scholar

61. GA RF, f. 7689, op. 11. d. 127, 11. 70–7lob.

62. G A RF, f. 7689, op. 11, d. 51, 11. 128, 130 (Koriakina); d. 125, 11. 27ob. (Shmakov) and 134 (Arsenteva).

63. GA RF, f. 7689, op. 11, d. 50, II. 41–43ob. For another case of denunciation involving the alleged refusal of the Gorniak (Azov-Black Sea krai) farm administration to allow Tat'iana Gubkina to take her sick daughter—who later died—to the hospital, see GA RF, f. 7689, op. 11, d. 239 (correspondence of central committee with oblast committees and order-bearing workers about their work and improving living and cultural conditions), 1. 28. This case went to the RSFSR Procurator's office.

64. GA RF, f. 7689, op. 11, d. 129, 11. 59ob., 63.

65. See, for example, GA RF, f. 7689, op. 11, d. 125, II. 35, 58.

66. GA RF. f. 7689, op. 11, d. 127, 1. 25. Mikhailenko's letter concluded: “I await with impatience your reply and send regards to our best leaders, strong and mighty. “

67. GA RF, f. 7689, op. 11, d. 50, II. 112, 117, 118.

68. GA RF, f. 7689, op. 11, d. 125, II. 79, 88–88ob.

69. Ibid., II. 38, 46, 49. Adilov included raincoats and boots for young drovers in his initial letter. For another case of a prizewinner hosting a “drunken party” among “doubtful” types, see ibid., 1. 134.

70. GA RF, f. 7689, op. 11, d. 41 (stenogram of meeting of Stakhanovites of Stalingrad krai sovkhozes, 1–2 December 1935), II. 6–7, 30, 56; d. 43 (stenogram of meeting of Stakhanovite livestock workers with specialists and workers’ committee chairs, 7–9 December 1935), 1. 71; d. 45 (memoranda and information from oblast and krai committees to union central committee on socialist competition and development of Stakhanovite movement), 1. 7. Klavdiia Maksimovskaia, a twenty-three-year-old milking brigade leader in the Northern krai, contemplated suicide after learning of the rumor that she “was fulfilling her plan with water” and had been “shunned” by the sovkhoz administration. GA RF, f. 7689, op. 11, d. 129, 1. 134–134ob.

71. GA RF, f. 7689, op. 11. d. 127, 1. 101.

72. As Michel Foucault noted in a Gramscian vein, “power would be a fragile thing if its only function were to repress, if it worked only through the mode of censorship, exclusion, blockage and repression… . If, on the contrary, power is strong this is because … it produces effects at the level of desire.” Michel, Foucault, Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings, 1972–1977 (New York, 1980), 59.Google Scholar

73. GA RF, f. 7689, op. 11, d. 128, 1. 181; d. 127, 1. 5. Nesterenko had earlier carried on a correspondence with Kubanova's daughter (initiated by the latter), urging the ten-year-old Niura to study better “so that there will not be a single mistake in your letters,” inquiring about whether her sister, Raia, was also a Pioneer, and informing her that “we” had sent a pair of combed valenki. GA RF, f. 7689, op. 11, d. 128, II. 170–80.

74. GA RF, f. 7689, op. 11, d. 129, 1. 110ob. The letter was dated 26 January 1936.

75. GA RF, f. 7689, op. 11, d. 42, 1. 79 (emphasis mine). Cf. the earlier statement by Soms (Sovkhoznaia gazeta, 26 August 1935, 1), which criticized politotdely for failing to distinguish “the best shockworkers and notables from the general mass of workers. “

76. GA RF, f. 7689, op. 11, d. 42, 1. 84; d. 45, 1. 7.

77. GA RF, f. 7689, op. 11, d. 41, 11. 16, 19; d. 45, 1. 111. Evdokiia was one of the two Vinogradova “sisters” (they were unrelated) who pioneered the Stakhanovite movement in the textile industry.

78. Sovkhoznaia gazeta, 14 February 1936, 1–2; 16 February 1936, 1, 3; 17 February 1936, 2; 18 February 1936, 2; 24 February 1936, 1–4. In 1935, medals were awarded to milkers for so many thousands of liters of milk produced, to calfherds for so many calves reared, and so on.

79. Fitzpatrick, Stalin's Peasants, 182. The same point is made in Matt F. Oja, “From Krestianka to Udarnitsa: Rural Women and the Vydvizhenie Campaign, 1933–1941,” The Carl Beck Papers in Russian and East European Studies, no. 1203 (1996): 5–16; Jennifer Fleming, “'Private’ Gardens and ‘Public’ Farms: Cultivating Soviet Rural Womanhood in the 1930s” (M.A. thesis, Michigan State University, 1997), drawing on mainly literary sources; and on the “semantic system of visual propaganda,” Victoria E., Bonnell, “The Peasant Woman in Stalinist Political Art of the 1930s,” American Historical Review 98, no. 1 (February 1993): esp. 72–82Google Scholar. One also thinks especially of Vera Mukhina's monumental sculpture from 1937, Worker and Collective Farm Woman.

80. Sovkhoznaia gazeta, 26 November 1935, 3.

81. GA RF, f. 7689, op. 1 1, d. 239, II. 39–40.

82. GA RF, f. 7689, op. 11, d. 328 (correspondence of the union central committee with order-bearers [1938]), 1. 58–58ob.

83. Fehér, Heller, and Markus, Dictatorship over Needs, 180.

84. Besides, as Katherine Verdery has noted, “the whole point was not to sell things: the center wanted to keep as much as possible under its control, because that was how it had redistributive power; and it wanted to give away the rest, because that was how it confirmed its legitimacy with the public” (What Was Socialism, 26).

85. Fitzpatrick, Stalin's Peasants, 16.

86. See GA RF, f. 7689, op. 11, d. 239, 328, 422 (correspondence of union central committee with oblast and workers’ committees and individual order-bearers [1939]).