Ivy Litvinova, wife of the future People's Commissar for Foreign Affairs M. Litvinov, shortly after arriving in Russia at a difficult time at the end civil war made a valuable observation. She thought she was writing to a friend in England that in revolutionary Russia"ideas" are everything, and "things" are nothing, "because everyone will have everything they need, no frills." But, “walking along the streets of Moscow and looking into the windows on the first floor, I saw Moscow things randomly stuffed into all corners and realized that they had never meant so much”1. This idea is extremely important for understanding everyday life in the USSR in the 1930s. Things were of great importance in the 1930s in the Soviet Union, if only because they were so hard to get.

The new, extremely important role of things and their distribution was reflected in everyday speech. In the 1930s people did not say "buy", they said - "get". The expression "hard to get" was constantly in use; a new term for all those things that are difficult to get - "scarce goods" has gained great popularity. In case they came across any of the scarce goods, people went around with nets, famously called "string bags", in their pockets. Seeing the line, they joined it and, only taking their place, asked what she was behind. Moreover, they formulated their question as follows: not “What are they selling?”, But “What are they giving?” However, the flow of goods through the usual channels was so unreliable that a whole layer of vocabulary arose describing alternative options. Goods could be sold unofficially or from under the counter (“to the left”) if the person had “acquaintances and connections” with the right people or “blat”2.

1930s were a decade of great hardship and deprivation for the Soviet people, much worse than the 1920s. In 1932 - 1933 all the main grain-growing regions were struck by famine, in addition, back in 1936 and 1939. poor harvests caused great disruptions in the food supply. The cities were flooded with newcomers from the villages, there was a catastrophic lack of housing, and the rationing system threatened to collapse. For most of the urban

th population, all life revolved around an endless struggle for the most necessary things - food, clothing, a roof over their heads.

With the closure of the urban private sector in the late 20s. and the beginning of collectivization came new era. An American engineer who returned to Moscow in June 1930 after several months of absence describes the dramatic consequences of the new economic course:

“It seems that all the shops on the streets have disappeared. The open market is gone. Nepmen disappeared. In state-owned stores, showcases flaunted showy empty boxes and other decorative items. But there were no goods inside.”3

The standard of living at the beginning of the Stalin period dropped sharply both in the city and in the countryside. Famine of 1932-1933 claimed at least 3-4 million lives and affected the birth rate for several years. Although the policy of the state was aimed at protecting the urban population and allowing the peasants to take the brunt, the townspeople also suffered: the death rate increased, the birth rate fell, and the consumption of meat and fat per person in the city in 1932 was less than a third of what what happened in 19284.

In 1933, the worst year in a decade, the average married worker in Moscow consumed less than half the amount of bread and flour consumed by the same worker in St. Petersburg in the early 20th century, and less than two-thirds of the corresponding amount of sugar. His diet was virtually fat-free, very low in milk and fruit, and meat and fish were only a fifth of what he consumed at the turn of the century. In 1935, the situation improved somewhat, but the poor harvest of 1936 gave rise to new problems: the threat of famine in certain rural areas, the flight of peasants from collective farms, and long lines for bread in the cities in the spring and summer of 1937. The best harvest of the pre-war period, which was preserved for a long time in of people's memory, was collected in the fall of 1937. However, the last pre-war years brought with them a new round of shortages and an even greater drop in living standards6.

During the same period, the urban population of the USSR grew at a record rate, which caused a huge shortage of housing, congestion of all public services and all sorts of inconveniences. In 1926 - 1933 the urban population increased by 15 million people. (by almost 60%), and by 1939 another 16 million were added to it. The number of Moscow residents jumped from 2 to 3.6 million people, in Leningrad it grew almost as sharply. The population of Sverdlovsk, an industrial city in the Urals, which was less than 150,000 people, increased to almost half a million people, and the population growth rates were equally impressive in Stalingrad, Novosibirsk and other industrial centers. In cities such as Magnitogorsk and Karaganda, a new mining center that made extensive use of prison labor, the population growth curve rose from zero in 1926 to more than a hundred thousand people. in 19397. Five year plans

30s gave industrial construction unconditional priority over residential construction. Most of the new townspeople ended up in dormitories, barracks, and even dugouts. Compared to them, even the infamous communal apartments, where the whole family huddled in one room and there was no way to retire, were considered almost a luxury.

With the transition to central planning in the late 1920s. shortage of goods became an integral feature of the Soviet economy. In hindsight, we can view it in part as structural characteristic, the product of an economic system with "soft" budgetary enforcement that encouraged all producers to stockpile. But in the 1930s few people thought so; scarcity was seen as a temporary problem, part of the overall belt-tightening tactic, one of the sacrifices that industrialization demanded. The shortages of those years, unlike in the post-Stalin period, were indeed caused as much by the underproduction of consumer goods as by systemic distribution problems. In the first five-year plan (1929-1932), priority was given to heavy industry, and the production of consumer goods occupied well if second place. The communists also attributed the shortage of food to the desire of the kulaks to "hide" bread, and when the kulaks were gone, they explained it as anti-Soviet sabotage in the chain of production and distribution. However, whatever rational explanations were given for the deficit, it was impossible to ignore it. It has already become a central fact of economic and everyday life.

When in 1929-1930. For the first time, food shortages began and queues for bread appeared, the population was alarmed and outraged. Here is a quote from a review of readers' letters to Pravda, prepared for the party leadership:

“What is the dissatisfaction? Firstly, that the worker is hungry, does not consume any fats, bread is a surrogate that cannot be eaten ... It is a common occurrence that the worker's wife stands in line all day long, the husband will come from work, but lunch is not ready, and everything here is a curse on the Soviet government. There is noise, shouting and fighting in the queues, swearing at the address of the Soviet government”9.

It soon got worse. In the winter of 1931, the Ukrainian village was struck by famine. Despite the silence of the newspapers, the news of him spread instantly; in Kyiv, Kharkov and other cities, signs of famine were evident, despite all the efforts of the authorities to restrict movement across railway and access to cities. The following year, famine swept the main grain-growing regions of central Russia, the North Caucasus and Kazakhstan. Information about him was still concealed, and in December 1932 internal

denial of the passport in an attempt to control the flight of starving peasants to the cities. The shortage of bread periodically arose even after the famine crisis had passed. Even in good years, the bread lines in individual cities and districts took on alarming enough dimensions for the question of them to be brought to the Politburo meetings.

The most serious and large-scale recurrence of the bread lines occurred in the winter and spring of 1936-1937, after a poor harvest in 1936. As early as November, a shortage of bread in the cities was reported. Voronezh region, allegedly caused by the influx of peasants who come to the city for bread, because there is not a grain in the villages. In Western Siberia that winter, people were standing for bread from 2 am, a local memoirist described in his diary huge queues in a small town, with crush, crush, hysterical fits. A woman from Vologda wrote to her husband: “My mother and I have been standing since 4 in the morning, and we didn’t even get black bread, because they didn’t bring any at all, and so it is almost all over the city.” From Penza, a mother wrote to her daughter: “We have a terrible panic with bread. Thousands of peasants spend the night at the grain stalls, 200 km. they come to Penza for bread, an indescribable horror ... It was frosty, and 7 people, going home with bread, froze. Glass was broken in the store, the door was broken. It was even worse in the countryside. “We have been standing in line for bread since 12 o’clock at night, and they give only a kilogram, even if you are dying of hunger,” a woman from the Yaroslavl collective farm wrote to her husband. - For two days we go hungry ... All the collective farmers are behind the bread, and the scenes are terrible - people choke, many were hurt. Send something or we'll starve."

Bread shortages arose again throughout the country in 1939-1940. “Iosif Vissarionovich,” a housewife from the Volga wrote to Stalin, “something really terrible has begun. Bread, and then, you have to go at 2 o'clock in the morning, stand until 6 in the morning, and you will get 2 kg of rye bread. A worker from the Urals wrote that in his city one had to queue for bread at 1-2 am, and sometimes even earlier, and stand for almost 12 hours. From Alma-Ata in 1940 it was reported that there “there are huge queues near the bread shops and stalls all day and even at night. Often, as you walk past these lines, you can hear screams, noise, squabbles, tears, and sometimes fights.”11

The shortage was not limited to bread. The situation was no better with other basic foodstuffs such as meat, milk, butter, vegetables, not to mention much-needed things such as salt, soap, kerosene and matches. Fish have also disappeared, even from areas with developed fisheries. “Why is there no fish, so I can’t think of it myself,” one indignant citizen wrote in 1940 to A. Mikoyan, who headed the People’s Commissariat of Food. “We have the seas and have remained the same as they were before, but then there was as much of it as you want and what you want, and now I have even lost the idea of ​​what it looks like”12.

Even vodka in the late 1930s. it was hard to get. This was partly the result of a short-lived campaign of sobriety, expressed in the adoption of Prohibition in individual cities and workers' settlements. However, the sobriety movement was doomed, because there was a much more urgent need to pump out funds for industrialization. In September 1930, in a note to Molotov, Stalin emphasized the need to increase the production of vodka in order to pay for the increase in military spending in connection with the threat of a Polish attack. In a few years, the state production of vodka grew so much that it gave a fifth of the entire state income; by the middle of the decade, vodka had become the main trade item in state commercial stores.

Even more than basic food, clothing, footwear and various consumer goods were in short supply - often completely unavailable. This state of affairs reflected both the priorities of state production, strictly oriented towards heavy industry, and the disastrous consequences of the destruction of crafts and cottage industry at the beginning of the decade. In the 1920s handicraftsmen and artisans were either the only or the main producers of many household items: pottery, baskets, samovars, sheepskin coats and hats - only a small part of an extensive list. All these goods became in the early 1930s. practically inaccessible; in the public canteens, spoons, forks, plates, and cups were in such short supply that workers stood in line for them, just as for food; there were usually no knives at all. During the whole decade, it was absolutely impossible to get such simple necessities as troughs, kerosene lamps and kettles, because the use of non-ferrous metals for the production of consumer goods was no longer allowed14.

A constant theme of complaint was the poor quality of the few goods available. The clothes were cut and sewn carelessly, and there were many reports of such glaring shortcomings in the clothes sold in state stores, such as the lack of sleeves. Pot handles fell off, matches did not want to light up, foreign objects came across in bread baked from flour with impurities. It was impossible to mend clothes, shoes, household utensils, find a locksmith to change the lock, or a painter to paint the wall. On top of all the difficulties that fall to the lot of ordinary citizens, even if they themselves had the necessary skills, they, as a rule, could not get raw materials and materials to make or fix something. It was no longer possible to buy paint, nails, boards, or anything else needed for home repairs in the retail trade; in case of urgent need, all this had to be stolen from a state-owned enterprise or construction site.

Usually, even threads, needles, buttons, and the like, it was impossible to buy. It was forbidden to sell flax, hemp, canvas, yarn to the population, since all these materials were in short supply15.

The law of March 27, 1936, which re-legalized private practice in such areas as shoe repair, joinery and carpentry, tailoring, hairdressing, laundry, metal repairs, photography, plumbing repairs, and wallpapering, did little to improve the situation. Private traders were allowed to take on apprentices, but they could only work on commission, not for sale. The customer had to come with his own material (i.e., to sew a suit at the tailor, you had to bring your own fabric, threads and buttons). Other types of handicrafts, including almost all those related to food production, remained prohibited. The bakery business, the manufacture of sausages and other food products were excluded from the sphere of legal private labor activity; however, peasants were still allowed to sell homemade pies in specially designated places16.

One of the biggest problems for the consumer was footwear. In addition to the catastrophe that befell the entire small-scale production of consumer goods, the production of shoes was also affected by an acute shortage of leather - a consequence of the mass slaughter of livestock during collectivization. As a result, the government in 1931 banned all handicraft shoe making, making the consumer completely dependent on the state industry, which produced shoes in insufficient quantities and often Bad quality that it fell apart as soon as it was put on. Any Russian who lived in the 1930s had a lot of horror stories in store about how he tried to buy shoes or give them for repair, how he patched them at home, how he lost it or how it was stolen from him (see, for example, ., Zoshchenko's famous story "Kalosha"), etc. With children's shoes it was even more difficult than with adults: when the new school year began in Yaroslavl in 1935, not a single pair of children's shoes was found in the shops of the city17.

The Politburo has repeatedly decided that something needs to be done in the field of supply and distribution of consumer goods. But even Stalin's personal interest in this problem did not yield any results18. In the late 1930s, just as in the beginning, there was constant talk about an acute shortage of clothing, footwear, textile products: in Leningrad, queues of 6,000 people gathered, according to the NKVD, such long lines lined up at one shoe store in the center of Leningrad. queues that they interfered with traffic, and the windows of the store were smashed in the stampede. Residents of Kyiv complained that thousands of people were queuing in front of clothing stores all night. In the morning, the police let buyers into the store in batches of 5-10 people who walked, “taking

join hands (so that no one gets in without a queue) ... like prisoners”19.

Since there was a shortage, there had to be scapegoats. People's Commissar for Food A. Mikoyan in the early 1930s. wrote to the OPTU that he suspected "sabotage" in the distribution system: "We send a lot, but the goods do not reach." The OGPU obligingly kept ready a list of "counter-revolutionary gangs" who baked dead mice into bread and tossed nuts into salads. In Moscow in 1933, allegedly former kulaks “thrown rubbish, nails, wire, broken glass into food”, trying to cripple the workers. The search for scapegoats, "pests", took on a wider scale after the shortages of bread in 1936 - 1937: for example, in Smolensk and Boguchary, local leaders were accused of creating an artificial shortage of bread and sugar; in Ivanovo - that they poisoned the bread for the workers; in Kazan, the bread lines were declared the result of rumors spread by counter-revolutionaries20. At the next round of acute shortages, in the winter of 1939-1940, such accusations began to fall from the public, and not from the government, concerned citizens began to write to political leaders, demanding to find and punish "saboteurs"21.

Housing

Despite the huge increase in the urban population in the USSR in the 1930s, housing construction remained almost as neglected as the production of consumer goods. Until the Khrushchev period, nothing was done to somehow cope with the monstrous overpopulation, which remained characteristic of Soviet cities for more than a quarter of a century. Meanwhile, people lived in communal apartments, where one family, as a rule, occupied one room, in hostels and barracks. Only a small, extremely privileged group had separate apartments. Where more people settled in the corridors and "corners" of other people's apartments: those who lived in the corridors and front rooms usually had beds, and the inhabitants of the corners slept on the floor in the corner of the kitchen or some other common area.

Most of the residential buildings in the city after the revolution became the property of the state, and the city councils disposed of these housing stock22. The authorities, who were in charge of housing issues, determined how much space should fall on each tenant of the apartment, and these living space norms - the notorious "square meters" - were forever imprinted in the heart of every resident big city. In Moscow in 1930 the average standard of living space was 5.5 m2 per person, and in 1940 it dropped to almost 4 m2. In new and rapidly industrializing cities

However, the situation was even worse: in Magnitogorsk and Irkutsk, the norm was slightly less than 4 m2, and in Krasnoyarsk in 1933 - only 3.4 m2 23.

City housing departments had the right to evict tenants - for example, those who were considered "class enemies" - and to move new ones into already occupied apartments. The last custom, designated by the euphemism "compacting", was one of the worst nightmares for the townspeople in the 1920s and early 1930s. An apartment occupied by one family could suddenly, at the behest of the city authorities, turn into a multi-family or communal apartment, and the new tenants, as a rule, came from the lower classes, were completely unfamiliar with the old ones and often incompatible with them. Once the ax was raised, it was almost impossible to avoid a blow. The family that originally occupied the apartment was unable to move anywhere, both because of a housing shortage and the lack of a private rental market.

From the end of 1932, after internal passports and city registration were reintroduced, residents of large cities were required to have a residence permit issued by departments of internal affairs. In houses with separate apartments, the duty to register tenants was entrusted to building managers and boards of cooperatives. As in the old regime, house managers and janitors, whose main function was to maintain order in the building and the adjacent courtyard, were in constant contact with the internal affairs bodies, monitored the residents and worked as informers24.

All sorts of frauds with housing flourished in Moscow and other large cities: fictitious marriages and divorces, registration of strangers as relatives, renting out “beds and corners” at exorbitant prices (up to 50% of monthly earnings). As it was reported in 1933, "the occupation [for housing] of stokers, gatehouses, cellars and stairwells has become a mass phenomenon in Moscow." The shortage of housing led to the fact that divorced spouses often remained to live in the same apartment, unable to leave. This was the case, for example, with the Lebedevs, whose attachment to a luxurious apartment of almost 22 m2 in the center of Moscow forced them to continue their cohabitation (together with their 18-year-old son) for six years after the divorce, despite such bad relations that they were constantly attracted to court for beating each other. Sometimes the physical abuse went much further. In Simferopol, authorities found the decomposing body of a woman in the Dikhov family's apartment. She turned out to be the Dikhovs' aunt, whom they killed in order to take possession of the apartment.

The housing crisis in Moscow and Leningrad was so acute that even the best connections and social status often did not guarantee a separate apartment. Politicians and government officials were drowning in the requests and complaints of citizens

the lack of suitable housing. A thirty-six-year-old Leningrad worker, who had lived in a corridor for five years, wrote to Molotov, begging him to give him "a room or a small apartment to build a personal life in it," which he "needs like air." The children of one Moscow family of six asked not to be moved into a closet under the stairs, without windows, with a total area of ​​6 m2 (i.e., 1 m2 per person)26.

Common for Russian cities Stalin era type of housing were communal apartments, one room per family.

“There was no running water in the room; sheets or curtains screened out corners where two or three generations slept and sat; food was hung in bags outside the window in winter. Shared sinks, latrines, bathtubs and kitchen appliances (usually just stoves... burners and faucets with cold water) were located either in the no-man's land between the living rooms, or downstairs, in an unheated passage hung with linen”27.

The term "communal" has a certain ideological connotation, conjuring up a picture of a collective socialist community. However, the reality was strikingly different from this picture, and even in theory there were few attempts to bring a detailed ideological basis to this concept. True, during the years of the Civil War, when the city councils first began to "compact" apartments, they put forward as one of the motives the desire to equalize the standard of living of workers and the bourgeoisie; Communists often enjoyed watching the despair of respectable bourgeois families forced to let dirty proletarians into their apartment. During the short period of the Cultural Revolution in the late 1920s and early 1930s. radical architects favored communal apartments for ideological reasons and built new housing for workers with shared kitchens and bathrooms. In Magnitogorsk, for example, the first capital residential buildings were built according to a project that not only forced families to use shared bathrooms and latrines, but also initially did not provide for kitchens - since it was assumed that everyone would eat in public canteens28. However, with the exception of new industrial cities like Magnitogorsk, most of the communal apartments of the 1930s. were not built, but converted from old separate apartments, and such alteration was mainly due to quite practical reasons: a lack of housing.

In fact, judging by most of the stories, communal apartments did not at all contribute to the education of the spirit of collectivism and the habits of communal life among the residents; in fact they did just the opposite. Each family jealously guarded personal property, such as pots, pans, plates, stored in the kitchen - a common area. The lines of demarcation were strictly drawn. envy and

Greed flourished in the closed world of the communal apartment, where often the size of the rooms and the sizes of the families occupying them did not correspond to each other, and families living in large rooms aroused deep resentment from those who lived in small ones. This indignation was the source of many denunciations and lawsuits, the purpose of which was to increase the living space of the informer or plaintiff at the expense of a neighbor.

One protracted squabble of this kind is described in the complaint of a Moscow teacher whose husband was sentenced to 8 years in prison for counter-revolutionary agitation. Their family (parents and two sons) lived for almost two decades in a large - 42 m2 - room in a Moscow communal apartment. “Throughout all these years, our room has been a bone of contention for all the tenants of our apartment,” the teacher wrote. Hostile neighbors chased them all possible ways, including writing denunciations to various local authorities. As a result, the family was first deprived of their rights, then they were not issued passports, and finally, after the arrest of the head of the family, they were evicted29.

Living in a communal apartment, side by side with people of different backgrounds, with very different biographies, strangers to each other, but obliged to share the apartment amenities and keep them clean, without the right to privacy, constantly in front of the neighbors, was extremely mentally exhausting for most residents. It is not surprising that the satirist M. Zoshchenko, in his famous story about the manners of the communal apartment, called its inhabitants " nervous people". A list of the gloomy aspects of life in a communal apartment was contained in a government decree of 1935, condemning "hooligan behavior" in the apartment, including "developing ... systematic drinking parties accompanied by noise, fights and swearing in the square, beatings (in particular women and children) , insults, threats to deal with, using one’s official or party position, depraved behavior, national persecution, mockery of a person, doing various dirty tricks (throwing other people’s things out of the kitchen and other public places, spoiling food made by other residents, other people’s things and products, and etc.)”30.

“Each apartment had its own madman, as well as its own drunkard or drunkards, its own troublemaker or troublemakers, its own scammer, etc.,” said a veteran of communal apartments. The most common form of insanity was persecution mania: for example, “one neighbor was convinced that the others were mixing crushed glass in her soup, that they were trying to poison her”31. Living in a communal apartment certainly exacerbated the mental illness, creating nightmarish conditions for both the patient and his neighbors. A woman named Bogdanova, 52 years old, alone, who lived in a good 20-meter room in a communal apartment in Leningrad, waged war with her neighbors for many years, using countless denunciations and

lawsuits. She claimed that her neighbors were kulaks, embezzlers, speculators. The neighbors assured her that she was crazy, the NKVD, constantly involved in the analysis of their squabbles, and the doctors were of the same opinion. And despite this, the authorities considered it impossible to evict Bogdanova, since she refused to move to another apartment, and her “extremely nervous state” did not allow her to be moved by force32.

Along with all these horror stories, one cannot fail to cite the memories of a minority about the spirit of mutual assistance that reigned among their neighbors in a communal apartment, who lived, as it were, as one big family. In one Moscow communal apartment, for example, all the neighbors were friends, helped each other, did not lock their doors during the day and turned a blind eye to the wife of an “enemy of the people” who illegally settled with her little son in her sister’s room33. Most of the good memories of the communal apartment, including the one mentioned above, relate to the memories of childhood: children whose private property instincts were less developed than their parents were often glad that their peers lived with them and they had someone to play with, and loved to observe the behavior of many adults so dissimilar to each other.

In the new industrial cities, a characteristic feature of the housing situation - and of urban utilities in general - was that housing and other public services were provided by enterprises, and not by local councils, as was customary elsewhere. Thus, “departmental towns” became an integral feature of life in the USSR, where the plant not only provided work, but also controlled living conditions. In Magnitogorsk, 82% of the living space belonged to the main industrial facility of the city - the Magnitogorsk Iron and Steel Works. Even in Moscow, departmental housing received in the 1930s. widespread 34.

Usually it looked like barracks or hostels. On one large industrial new building in Siberia in the early 1930s. 95% of the workers lived in barracks. In Magnitogorsk in 1938, barracks accounted for only 47% of the available housing, but to this should be added 18% of dugouts covered with turf, straw and scraps of metal, built by the residents themselves35. One-story barracks, consisting of large rooms with rows of iron beds or divided into small rooms, as a rule, served as housing for unmarried workers in new industrial cities and presented a common picture on the outskirts of old ones; married workers with families also sometimes had to live in them, despite the lack of privacy. The dormitories usually accommodated students, as well as young unmarried skilled workers and employees.

John Scott describes a relatively decent hut in Magnitogorsk as follows - a low whitewashed wooden building, “double walls are lined with straw. The roof covered with roofing paper, in the spring about

leaked. There were thirty rooms in the barrack. In each, the tenants installed a small brick or iron stove, so that as long as there was wood or coal, the rooms could be heated. The low-ceilinged corridor was lit by a single small electric bulb. In the room for two, “six by ten feet in size, there was one small window, which was sealed with newspapers to keep out the draft. There was a small table, a small brick stove, and a three-legged stool. The two iron bunks were narrow and wobbly. There was no spring net on them, only thick boards lay on an iron frame. There were no bathrooms in the barracks, and apparently no running water either. “There was a kitchen, but only one family lived in it, so everyone cooked on their own stoves.”36

Scott, as a foreigner, although a worker, was placed in a barracks better than usual. The whole of Magnitogorsk was full of barracks, “one-story buildings stretching in rows as far as the eye could see, and not having any characteristic distinguishing features. “You go home, look for it, look for it,” one local resident said in confusion. “All the barracks look the same, you won’t find your own.” In such new cities, the barracks were usually divided into large dormitories, where there were "beds for sleeping, a stove for heating, a table in the middle, often there were not even tables and chairs," as they said about the Siberian Kuznetsk. Men and women tended to live in different barracks, or at least in different common rooms. In the largest barracks, for 100 people, 200 or more often lived, sleeping in shifts on the beds. Such overpopulation was not something out of the ordinary. In one Moscow barracks, which belonged to a large electrical plant, in 1932 550 people, men and women, lived: “Everyone had 2 square meters, there was so little space that 50 people slept on the floor, and some mattresses in turn"37.

Workers' and students' dormitories were arranged in the style of barracks: large rooms (separately for men and women), sparsely furnished with iron beds and bedside tables, with a single light bulb in the middle. Even at such an elite Moscow plant as the Hammer and Sickle, 60% of the workers in 1937 lived in dormitories of one kind or another. A survey of workers' dormitories in Novosibirsk in 1938 revealed the deplorable state of some of them. The construction workers' two-story wooden dormitories had no electricity or any other kind of lighting, and the construction department did not supply them with fuel or kerosene. Among the tenants were single women, whom the report recommended to be immediately relocated, since in the dormitory "there is a domestic decomposition of workers (drunkenness, etc.)". However, conditions were better elsewhere. The female workers, mostly Komsomol members, lived in relative comfort, in a dormitory furnished with beds, tables and chairs, with electricity, although no running water.

The miserable living conditions in barracks and dormitories caused discontent, and in the second half of the 1930s. launched a campaign to improve them. Social women brought curtains and other pleasant little things there. Businesses were instructed to share large rooms in dormitories and barracks so that the families living there could have at least some privacy. The Ural Machine-Building Plant in Sverdlovsk reported in 1935 that it had already converted almost all of its large barracks into small separate rooms; a year later, the Stalin Metallurgical Plant reported that all 247 working-class families living in "common rooms" in its barracks would soon be given separate rooms. In Magnitogorsk this process was almost completed by 1938. But the era of barracks did not end so quickly, even in Moscow, not to mention the new industrial cities of the Urals and Siberia. Despite the decision of the Moscow City Council in 1934, which prohibited the further construction of barracks in the city, in 1938 225 new ones were added to the 5,000 already existing Moscow barracks39.

THE TROUBLES OF CITY LIFE

In the life of the Soviet city of the 1930s. everything was going upside down. In the old towns, utilities—public transport, roads, electricity and water—were overwhelmed by sudden population growth, rising demands from industry, and tight budgets. The new industrial cities fared even worse, since the utilities there started from scratch. “The physical appearance of cities is terrible,” wrote an American engineer who worked in the Soviet Union in the early 1930s. “The stench, dirt, devastation strike the senses at every step.”40

Moscow was the showcase of the Soviet Union. The construction of the first lines of the Moscow metro, with escalators and frescoes on the walls of underground stations-palaces, was the pride of the country; even Stalin and his friends swept through them the night after they were opened in the early 1930s41. Trams, trolleybuses and buses ran in Moscow. More than two-thirds of its inhabitants used sewerage and running water at the beginning of the decade, and by the end of it, almost three-quarters. Of course, the majority lived in houses without baths and washed about once a week in public baths - but at least the city was relatively well provided with baths, unlike many others42.

Outside of Moscow, life instantly changed for the worse. Even the Moscow region was poorly provided with utilities: in Lyubertsy, the regional center of the Moscow region, with a population of 65,000 people. there was not a single bathhouse, in Orekhovo-Zuevo, an exemplary workers' settlement with a nursery, a club and a pharmacy, there were no street lighting and running water. In Voronezh

new houses for workers until 1937 were built without running water and sewerage. In the cities of Siberia, the majority of the population did without running water, sewerage and central heating. Stalingrad, with a population approaching half a million, even in 1938 had no sewerage. In Novosibirsk in 1929 there were sewerage and water supply systems of limited size and for more than 150,000 people. of the population - only three baths43.

Dnepropetrovsk, a rapidly growing, well-organized industrial city in the Ukraine of almost 400,000, located in the center of a fertile agricultural region, had no sewerage in 1933, and its workers' settlements lacked paved streets, public transportation, electricity, and running water. Water was rationed and sold in the barracks at a ruble per bucket. There was not enough energy in the whole city - in winter almost all the lights on the main street had to be turned off - despite the proximity to the large Dnieper hydroelectric power station. The secretary of the city's party organization sent a desperate message to the center in 1933, asking for funds for urban improvement, pointing to a serious deterioration in the health situation: malaria was rampant in the city, 26,000 cases of the disease were registered that summer, while in the previous year - 1000044 .

The new industrial cities had even fewer amenities. The top leadership of the Leninsky City Council in Siberia, in a tearful letter to the higher leadership, painted a gloomy picture of their city:

"Gor. Leninsk-Kuznetsky with a population of 80 thousand people. ... extremely lagged behind in the field of culture and improvement ... From 80 km. streets of the city, only one street is paved, and that is not completely. In spring and autumn, due to the lack of well-maintained roads, crossings, sidewalks, the dirt reaches such proportions that workers find it difficult to get to work and back home, and classes are disrupted in schools. The situation with street lighting is not in the best condition. Only the center is lit for only 3 kilometers, the rest of the city, not to mention the outskirts, is in darkness.

Magnitogorsk, a model new industrial city, in many ways also a showcase, had only one cobbled street 15 km long and very little street lighting. "Most of the city used cesspools, the contents of which were emptied into tanks hitched to trucks"; even in the relatively elite Kirovsky district for many years there was no decent sewage system. The city's water supply system was polluted by industrial waste. Most of the Magnitogorsk workers lived in settlements on the outskirts of the city, consisting of "temporary huts lined up along the only dirt road ... covered with huge puddles of dirty

water, heaps of garbage and numerous open latrines"46.

Residents and guests of Moscow and Leningrad left vivid descriptions of the local trams and the incredible crush in them. There were strict rules that required passengers to enter through the back door and exit through the front, thus forcing passengers to constantly move forward. Often the crowd did not allow a person to get off at their stop. The traffic schedule was very unstable: sometimes the trams simply did not run; in Leningrad one could see "wild trams" (i.e. unscheduled, with self-proclaimed drivers and conductors) that ran along the rails, illegally put passengers on board and pocketed the fare47.

In provincial towns, where paved streets remained relatively rare at the end of the decade, public transport of any kind was minimal. In Stalingrad in 1938 there was a tram fleet with 67 km of tracks, but there were no buses. Pskov, with a population of 60,000, in 1939 had neither a tram depot nor cobbled streets: all city transport consisted of two buses. In Penza, too, there were no trams before the Second World War, although they were planned to start up as early as 1912; there, urban transport in 1940 consisted of 21 buses. Magnitogorsk acquired a short tram route in 1935, but at the end of the decade there were still only 8 buses running there, which factory officials used to “go around the city and the outskirts and give rides to their workers wherever they lived”48.

Along the streets of many Soviet cities in the 1930s. it was dangerous to walk. The most notorious were the new industrial cities and workers' settlements in the old ones. Here, drunkenness, the accumulation of restless single men, insufficient law enforcement forces, poor living conditions, unpaved and unlit streets - all together contributed to an atmosphere of savagery and lawlessness. Robberies, murders, drunken brawls and assaults on passers-by for no apparent reason were commonplace. Ethnic conflicts often broke out in the workplaces and barracks in a multinational environment. The authorities attributed all these problems to peasant workers who had recently arrived from the countryside, often with a dark past or were "declassed elements"49.

Destructive, antisocial behavior in the USSR was called "hooliganism." The term had a complex history and changing meaning during the 1920s and early 1930s. it was associated with disruptive, irreverent, antisocial behavior, most commonly seen in young men. All shades of this concept were recorded in the list of "hooligan" actions given in 1934 in one legal journal: insults, fistfights, smashing windows, shooting in the streets,

pestering passers-by, disrupting cultural events in the club, breaking plates in the dining room, disturbing the sleep of citizens with fights and noise late at night50.

An outbreak of hooliganism in the first half of the 1930s caused public concern. In Orel, the hooligans terrorized the population so much that the workers stopped going to work; in Omsk, "workers of the evening shift were obliged to spend the night at the factory so as not to run the risk of being beaten and robbed." In Nadezhdinsk in the Urals, citizens “were literally terrorized by hooliganism not only at night, but even during the day. Hooligan actions were expressed in aimless harassment, shooting in the streets, inflicting insults, beatings, smashing windows, etc. Whole gangs of hooligans entered the club, disrupted all the cultural events held by the club, entered the workers' dormitories, raised an aimless noise there, and sometimes even a fight, interfering with the normal rest of the workers.

Parks often became the scene of action of hooligans. The park and club of a factory village on the Upper Volga, with a population of 7,000 people, were described as a real estate of hooligans:

“At the entrance to the park and in the park itself, you can buy wines of all varieties in any quantity. It is not surprising that drunkenness and hooliganism in the village took on large proportions. Hooligans for the most part go unpunished and are becoming more and more impudent. Recently, they inflicted wounds on the head of the production of a chemical plant, comrade Davydov, beat the driver Suvorev and other citizens.

Hooligans thwarted the grand opening of the Khabarovsk Park of Culture and Leisure. The park was poorly lit by nightfall "the hooligans started their 'tour'... unceremoniously pushing women in the back, tearing off their hats, cursing, starting fights on the dance floor and in the alleys"52.

Crime also flourished on trains and at railway stations and stations. Gangs of robbers attacked passengers on suburban and long-distance trains in Leningrad region: they were called "bandits", a term more severe than "hooligan", and sentenced to death. The stations were always crowded with people - people trying to buy tickets, visitors who have nowhere to stay, speculators, pickpockets, etc. It was written about one station in the Leningrad region that it “reminds more of a rooming house than a well-maintained railway junction. Suspicious people live in the passenger room for 3-4 days, drunks often lie around, speculators sell cigarettes, some dark personalities stagger around. There is constant drunkenness and unimaginable filth in the buffet. At the Novosibirsk railway station, there was only one way to get a ticket - from a gang of resellers, headed by a “professor”: “of medium height, nicknamed Ivan Ivanovich, in a white straw hat, with a pipe in his mouth”53.

THE ART OF SHOPPING

Announced in the late 20's. private entrepreneurship is illegal, the state has become the main, and often the only distributor of various benefits and goods. All basic social benefits such as housing, health care, higher education, and holiday home vouchers were provided by government departments. To receive them, citizens had to apply to the appropriate authority. There, their claims were evaluated based on various criteria, including the class origin of the applicant: proletarians belonged to the highest category, "class alien" dispossessed - to the lowest. Almost always made long lists waiting lists, because the required benefits were not enough. Finally, being first on the list, a citizen, in principle, should have received an apartment of the required size or a ticket to a rest home. Apartments and vouchers were not free, but the payment for them was low. There was no legal private market for most social goods.

In the field of trade - i.e. distribution of food, clothing and other consumer goods - the situation was somewhat more complicated. The state was not the only legal distributor, since from 1932 the peasants were allowed to trade their products in the collective farm markets. In addition, the existence of "commercial" stores with high prices, although they were state-owned, also introduced a kind of quasi-market element. Nevertheless, the state was almost a monopoly in this area.

Considering the size of the task - to replace private trade - and the fact that it was carried out in a hurry, without a preconceived plan, during a period of general crisis and turning point, it is hardly surprising that the new distribution system constantly failed. Yet the scale of the disruptions and their impact on the daily lives of citizens is astounding. Only collectivization surpassed this catastrophe in its scope and far-reaching consequences. Of course, the townspeople, as a rule, did not starve to death because of the new trading system, they were not subjected to arrests and deportations, as peasants were during collectivization. However, in the late 1920s living conditions in the city suddenly and dramatically deteriorated, which caused great hardship and inconvenience for the population. Although in the mid-1930s the situation improved somewhat, the distribution of consumer goods remained the main problem of the Soviet economy for the next half century.

Having some ideas about trade, such as that a capitalist market based on profit is evil, and the resale of goods with a margin is a crime ("speculation"), Soviet political leaders thought little about what "socialist trade" actually was. They don't

did not foresee that their system would create chronic deficits, as the Hungarian economist Janos Kornay later argued; on the contrary, they expected it to produce abundance. Similarly, they did not realize that, by creating a state monopoly on distribution, they were leaving the central distribution function at the mercy of the state bureaucracy, which had such a profound effect on the relationship between the state and society and social stratification. Like Marxists, Soviet leaders considered production, not distribution, to be the main thing. Many of them retained the feeling that trade, even state-owned trade, was a dirty business, and the formal and informal distribution systems that emerged in the 1930s only confirmed this view.

Initially, the main aspects of the new trading system were card rationing and so-called "closed distribution". When rationing by cards, a certain limited amount of goods was released upon presentation, along with payment, of a special card. With closed distribution, goods were distributed at the place of work through closed stores, where only employees of the given enterprise or institution or persons from a special list were allowed. In the future, as can be seen, this marked the beginning of a system of hierarchically differentiated access to consumer goods, which became an integral feature of Soviet trade and a source of stratification in Soviet society.

Both cards and closed distribution were the result of improvisation in the face of the economic crisis, rather than a deliberate policy adopted on ideological grounds. True, some fiery theoreticians of Marxism have brought to light the old civil war arguments that ration cards are just the form of distribution that befits socialism. However, such arguments were not to the taste of the party leadership. They felt that the cards were something to be ashamed of, evidence of the economic crisis and the poverty of the state. When in the late 1920s the cards reappeared, this happened at the initiative of the localities, and not by decision of the center. The abolition of bread cards at the beginning of 1935 was presented to the public as a big step towards socialism and a good life, although in fact it led to a fall in real incomes and many low-paid workers resented the changes taking place. At closed meetings of the Politburo, Stalin especially insisted on the importance of abolishing ration cards.

Despite the lack of enthusiasm for cards among the top leadership, they were resorted to so often that this measure can be regarded as inevitable in the Stalinist distribution. The card system was introduced in Russia during the First World War and existed throughout the civil war. She is

again officially operated from 1929 to 1935 and from 1941 to 1947 "- in general, almost half of the Stalin period. Even when the card system was canceled, local authorities could arbitrarily introduce it without the sanction of the center, as soon as there were problems with the supply. In the end In the 1930s, both cards and closed distribution slowly spread again throughout the country as a result of an unauthorized initiative by local authorities.When goods were really scarce, cards seemed to them - and often to the local population - the most in a simple way deal with the problem. Closed distribution attracted the local elite (but not the population) by guaranteeing them privileged access to scarce goods.

The rationing system was primarily an urban phenomenon; it spontaneously developed in the cities of the USSR in 1928-1929, starting with Odessa and other Ukrainian cities, in response to supply interruptions caused by difficulties in grain procurement. At first, it covered all basic foodstuffs, then it began to cover the most common industrial products, such as outerwear and shoes58.

As in the years of the civil war, the rationing system during the first five-year plan was in the nature of outright social discrimination. The highest category was made up of industrial workers, the lowest - merchants, including former ones who changed their occupation for Last year, priests, tavern-keepers and other class alien elements who were not given cards at all59. Here the same principle of "proletarian priority" operated, which was applied in other areas (in admission to higher educational institutions, the provision of housing) within the framework of the general Soviet policy of promoting the proletariat. However, in practice, the distribution of goods by cards followed a more complex pattern. First, the principle of "proletarian priority" was violated when various categories of knowledge workers, such as professors and engineers, gained equal rights with workers. Secondly, the level of state supply in general and the rationing of cards in particular varied significantly depending on the region, department, industry or enterprise60.

However, the most important factor undermining the principle of “proletarian priority” was closed distribution. This meant the distribution of rationed goods at the place of work through closed shops and canteens, accessible only to workers registered in this enterprise61. Closed distribution developed concurrently with the rationing system, coexisting with an "open distribution" network of publicly accessible state stores, and during the first five years, the closed distribution system embraced industrial workers, railroad workers, logging workers, state farm personnel, government employees, and many others.

categories - at the beginning of 1932 total number closed stores reached 40,000, accounting for almost a third of the city's retail outlets. The concentration of supply at the place of work intensified with the development of a network of factory canteens, where workers received hot meals during the day. During the years of the first five-year plan, their number increased fivefold, reaching 30,000. In July 1933, they served two-thirds of the inhabitants of Moscow and 58% of the inhabitants of Leningrad62.

Closed distribution was conceived to protect the working population from the worst effects of shortages and to link rationing of goods to employment. But it quickly acquired another function (described in more detail in Chapter 4) - the provision of privileged supplies for certain categories of privileged persons. For various elite categories of officials and specialists, special closed distributors were created, supplying them with goods of a much higher quality than those available in ordinary closed shops and factory canteens. Foreigners working in the Soviet Union had their own closed distribution system called In-snab.

In 1935, closed distribution was officially abolished. However, six months later, inspectors from the People's Commissariat for Foreign Trade noted that "some stores are reserving goods for certain groups of customers, reviving various forms of closed supply." Despite the fact that the People's Commissar for Trade I. Veytser banned such a practice, it continued to exist, being beneficial to the local elite, which was provided with privileged access to goods. When acute shortages reappeared at the end of the decade, the number of closed distribution outlets immediately multiplied. So, for example, with the appearance of large bread lines in Kustanai, Alma-Ata and other provincial cities at the end of 1939, local authorities created closed stores where only representatives of the "nomenklatura" were allowed. In institutions and enterprises across the country, closed buffets were operated for employees64.

For state and cooperative stores in the 1930s. characterized by low prices and long lines, and they were constantly running out of goods. But if you had money, you could find other options. Collective-farm markets, Torgsin stores, and state-owned "commercial" stores represented the legal alternative.

Collective farm markets were the successors of the peasant markets that existed in Russian cities over the centuries. During the NEP period they were tolerated, but many of them, like Moscow's Sukharevka, acquired a very bad reputation and were covered up by the local authorities during the first five years. However, in May 1932 the legitimacy of their existence was recognized in a government decree regulating their activities. This decree was brought to life by an urgent need to revive the flow of products from

villages into a city that threatened to completely dry out. One of its features was that it again gave the right to trade to peasants and rural handicraftsmen - but to no one else. Any city dweller who engaged in trade was stigmatized as a “speculator”, and local authorities were severely punished “not to allow the opening of shops and shops by private merchants and in every possible way to eradicate dealers and speculators who are trying to profit at the expense of workers and peasants”65.

In practice, the Soviet government was never able to get rid of "dealers and speculators" collective farm markets, which became the main focus of the black market and all sorts of dark deals. Despite the fact that the fight against "speculation" never ended, the authorities were quite tolerant of the townspeople who tried to sell second-hand clothes or personal belongings, or even sell a small amount of new goods (bought or made by themselves). Markets became de facto oases of private trade in the Soviet economy66.

Collective-farm market prices, freely fluctuating and not set by the state, were always higher than in ordinary state stores, and sometimes even higher than in commercial stores, which will be discussed below. In 1932, meat in the Moscow markets cost 10-11 rubles a kilogram, while in ordinary stores - 2 rubles; potatoes - 1 ruble kilogram (in the store - 18 kopecks)67. In the mid 1930s. the difference in prices smoothed out somewhat, but still remained significant and was always ready to increase at the slightest interruption in supply. The majority of ordinary hired workers could not afford the collective farm market, and they went there only on special occasions.

Torgsin's stores, from 1930 to 1936, traded in scarce goods for foreign currency, gold, silver and other valuables, represented the same anomaly for a very short time. Forerunners of later currency shops in the USSR, Torgsin's shops differed from them in that they were open to any citizen who had the right currency. Their purpose was simple: to replenish the Soviet reserves of hard currency in order to enable the country to import more equipment for industrialization. Torgsin's prices were low (lower than "commercial" and collective farm market prices), but purchases in Torgsin were expensive for a Soviet citizen, because he had to sacrifice either the remnants of family silver, or grandfather's gold watch, or even his own wedding ring. Some of the central stores in Torgsin, especially the Moscow store on Gorky Street, which arose on the site of the famous Eliseevsky grocery store, were distinguished by luxurious furnishings and lavish decoration. During the years of famine, as a shocked foreign journalist wrote, “whole groups of people [stood] in front of the shop windows, looking with envy at the pyramids of fruits that towered there.

Comrade; tastefully arranged and hung boots and coats; butter, white bread and other delicacies that are not available to them”68.

"Commercial" originally referred to state-owned stores that sold goods without cards at higher prices. As recognized commercial establishments, they appeared at the end of 1929; at first they traded clothes, cotton and woolen fabrics, but soon the assortment expanded, began to include both chic delicacies like smoked fish and caviar, and more essential goods: vodka, cigarettes, and basic foodstuffs. During the period of the card system, commercial prices, as a rule, were two to four times higher than the prices of goods sold on cards. So, for example, in 1931, shoes that cost 11-12 rubles in an ordinary store. (if you could find them there!), in the commercial cost 30 - 40 rubles; trousers in an ordinary store were sold for 9 rubles, in a commercial one - for 17 rubles. Cheese in a commercial store was twice as expensive, sugar - more than eight times. In 1932, commercial stores gave a tenth of the total retail turnover. By 1934, after a significant reduction in the difference between commercial and ordinary prices, their share had increased to one-fourth.

With the abolition of cards in 1935, the network of commercial stores expanded. Fashion shops, specialty stores, were opened in many cities, selling industrial goods of higher quality and at higher prices than in ordinary state stores. The new people's commissar of trade, I. Veytser, preached the philosophy of "Soviet free trade", which assumed a focus on the buyer and competition between stores within the framework of the state trade structure. In the third quarter of the 1930s there have undoubtedly been significant improvements in the trading system, mainly due to a significant increase in public investment, the size of which in the second five-year plan (1933-1937) was three times greater than in the first70.

However, for the most part, only the wealthiest segments of the population could benefit from these improvements. A further reduction in the difference between commercial and regular government prices took place as much by raising regular prices as by lowering commercial prices. If in the early 1930s While citizens at all levels of Soviet society were mostly plagued by severe shortages, beginning in the middle of the decade, there were no less frequent complaints from low-income groups that their real income was too low and therefore goods were still unavailable. “I can’t afford to buy food in commercial stores, everything is very expensive, you walk and wander like a shadow, and you only get thinner and weaker,” one Leningrad worker wrote to the authorities in 1935. When in January 1939 basic government prices for clothing and other manufactured goods doubled (the largest single

a decade), the NKVD noted the strongest murmuring among the urban population and many complaints that the privileged elite was indifferent to the torment of ordinary citizens, and Molotov, who promised that prices would not rise again, deceived the people71.

Speculation

As we have seen, it was extremely difficult to obtain goods of any kind, from shoes to apartments, through official state distribution channels. First, there were simply not enough goods. Secondly, the departments that distributed them did so extremely inefficiently and were thoroughly corrupt. There were long queues at state-run stores and often empty stalls. Local government waiting lists for housing grew to such a size, and informal methods to bypass them flourished to such an extent that virtually no one could wait for their turn without taking some additional measures.

As a result, informal distribution became of great importance - ie. distribution bypassing the formal bureaucratic system. In the Stalin era, the “second economy” flourished in the USSR (although this term itself is of a later origin); it has existed for as long as the “first” and can actually be considered the successor to the private sector of the 1920s, despite its transition from a legal, albeit barely tolerated by the state, to an illegal position. Like the private sector of the NEP era, the second economy of the Stalinist era essentially distributed goods produced and owned by the state, and privately produced products played a clearly secondary role in it. The leakage of goods occurred at any link in the system of production and distribution, at any stage of the journey from the factory floor to the rural cooperative store. Any worker in the trading system of any level could be involved in this or that way, therefore this occupation, although it provided an above-average standard of living, was considered doubtful and did not give a high social status.

As J. Berliner and other economists pointed out, the Stalinist first economy could not function without the second, since the entire industry relied on the practice of more or less illegally obtaining the necessary raw materials and equipment, and industrial enterprises contained for this purpose a whole army of agents experienced in the second economy - "pushers"72. What is true of industry was a fortiori true of ordinary citizens. Everyone has happened to buy food or clothes from speculators or get an apartment, iron

a travel ticket, a ticket to a holiday home “by pull”, although some more often resorted to the services of the second economy and were better able to do this than others.

The Soviet leadership indiscriminately referred to as "speculation" any purchase of goods for resale at a higher price and considered such actions as a crime. This side of the Soviet mentality can be explained by Marxist ideology (although very few Marxists outside Russia were so passionate and categorical against trade), but it seems to have national Russian roots73. Be that as it may, both speculation and moral condemnation of it are extremely firmly established in Soviet Russia.

Who were the "speculators"? Among them one could meet prosperous businessmen of the underworld, leading a luxurious life and having connections in many cities, and poverty-stricken old women who bought sausage or stockings in the store in the morning to resell them on the street a few hours later with a small margin. Some speculators in the old days were engaged in legal trade: for example, a man named Zhidovetsky, sentenced to eight years in prison for speculation in 1935, bought cuts of woolen fabrics in Moscow and took them to Kyiv for resale. Others, like Timofey Drobot, who was sentenced to five years in the Volga region for speculation in 1937, used to be peasants who were torn from their native soil by dekulakization and forced to eke out an existence of renegades, barely making ends meet74.

Among the high-profile cases of profiteering described in the newspapers, the largest and most complex is related to the activities of a group of people allegedly former kulaks and private merchants, which launched a very decent scale trade in bay leaves, soda, pepper, tea and coffee, using connections and points in a number of Volga and Ural cities, as well as in Moscow and Leningrad. One of the members of the group was carrying 70,000 rubles at the time of his arrest, the other was said to have made a total of over 1.5 million rubles in this case. Handicraftsmen from Dagestan, Nazhmudin Shamsudinov and Magomet Magomadov, were on the lower rung of the grocery gang, but they had 18,000 rubles with them when they were arrested for disturbing the peace in a restaurant in Grozny, the capital of Chechnya, and besides, they only that they sent home another 7,000 rubles75.

Many provincial speculators simply took the train to the better-supplied Moscow or Leningrad to purchase goods and bought them in stores there. A group of 22 speculators, who appeared before a court in Voronezh in 1936, used this method, opening a legal tailoring workshop to cover the resale of goods thus obtained, among which, at the time of the arrest of the group, were 1677 m of fabric,

44 dresses, as well as 2 bicycles, many pairs of shoes, gramophone records and some kind of rubber glue76.

However, in a well-organized, large-scale business, more than effective methods receipt of the goods, rather than the usual purchase of it in state stores among other buyers. Big businessmen often had "connections" with store directors and warehouse workers (or were store directors themselves) and systematically took goods from the back door. The director of the store and other trade workers could participate directly in the case, as, for example, the commercial director of the Leningrad clothing store, who was tried for leading a gang of speculators who received goods directly from the store's warehouse. However, in this store, more than one commercial director was associated with speculators. One of the sellers and the head of the fire department, for example, let professional speculators know in advance when the goods arrived, and let them through without a queue, earning 40-50 rubles each time.77.

Such cases are illustrated by a series of three cartoons under the general heading "The Magician", published in "Crocodile". The first drawing shows an open stall full of goods, the second shows the stall closed for the night, the third shows the same stall the next morning, open and empty. “In front of your eyes, I locked the stall for the night with a padlock,” says the magician. - I open it in the morning. Hello gop! .. And the stall is completely empty. Nothing fantastic: only sleight of hand and a lot of fraud.

Anyone who worked in commerce was popularly considered to have had something to do with the second economy, or at least abused their preferential access to goods. A similar opinion is reflected in many of the Crocodile's jokes. In one cartoon, for example, a mother says to her daughter, “It doesn't matter, honey. Whether you will have a party member or a non-party member, if only he served in the air defense system. On the other, an employee of a cooperative store looks in dismay at the incoming batch of shirts: “What should I do? How to distribute? I got 12 shirts and I have only 8 family members.”79 Not surprisingly, workers in cooperative stores were often tried for profiteering.

Often, the work of a railroad conductor was also associated with speculation. For example, the conductor of the Stalin railway. in the Donbass he bought shoes and various industrial goods in Moscow, Kyiv and Kharkov and sold them on the way. Another conductor “took away fabrics in the area from people who worked in textile factories. He also traveled by train to Shepetovka, located near the border, and got there goods smuggled across the Russian-Polish border. Possible speculators were bathhouse workers and drivers (who

could use company cars to travel around the collective farms and buy their products for sale in the city). Petty speculation was practiced by many housewives who stood in line at government stores and bought goods such as clothing and textiles to sell in the market or to neighbors. So, for example, according to the newspapers, the housewife Ostroumova regularly speculated in fabrics. At one time, she bought only 3-4 m, but during the arrest in her apartment, 400 m of fabric were found in her suitcase80.

The apartment often served as a place for the resale of goods. Neighbors, knowing that a certain person (usually a woman) had a certain product or could get it, visited in the evening to see what she had. Such transactions, like many other operations in the sphere of the "second economy", were considered from completely opposite positions by their participants, who saw them as a friendly service, and by the state, which considered them a crime. Railway stations and shops were also popular with speculators, in front of which street peddlers sold goods previously bought inside.

But the main place for speculation was, apparently, the collective farm market. All kinds of things were traded here illegally or semi-legally: agricultural products bought from peasants by intermediaries, industrial goods stolen or purchased from store warehouses, worn clothes, even cards and fake passports. The law allowed peasants to sell their own products at the market, but forbade others from doing so for them, although this was often more convenient for the peasants than hanging around the market all day. A report from Dnepropetrovsk describes this process as follows:

“Often on the road to the bazaar, collective farmers are met by a dealer. - What are you carrying? - Cucumbers. The price was named, and the cucumbers, harvested from the collective farmer's individual garden, were bought in bulk by a reseller and sold at a higher price on the market.

Many dealers are known, but they are often under the auspices of market tax collectors.

In principle, any private person did not have the right to sell industrial goods on the collective farm market, with the exception of rural handicraftsmen selling their products. Enforcement of this rule, however, was extremely difficult, in part because state-owned manufacturers used markets to sell their products to peasants. This practice was intended to encourage peasants to bring agricultural products to the market, but at the same time, it gave speculators the opportunity to buy manufactured goods and resell them at a premium. According to newspaper reports, in 1936 in Moscow, at the Yaroslavl and Dubininsky markets, speculators, "both Muscovites and visitors," traded with might and main in rubber slippers, galoshes, shoes, ready-made dresses and gramophone records83.

DATING AND RELATIONSHIPS

A worried resident of Novgorod, Pyotr Gatzuk, wrote in 1940 to A. Vyshinsky, deputy chairman of the Council of People's Commissars, condemning such a phenomenon as blat:

A citizen who does not have blat, Gatsuk argued, is actually deprived of rights:

“Not having blat is the same as not having civil rights, the same as being deprived of all rights ... If you come with some request, everyone will be deaf, blind and dumb. If you need ... to buy something in a store - you need blat. If it is difficult or impossible for a passenger to get a ticket, it is easy and simple by pull. If there is no apartment, there is no need to go to the housing department, to the prosecutor's office - a little blasphemy, and you will immediately get an apartment”84.

Blat undermines the principle of planned distribution in the socialist economy, he is “alien and hostile to our society,” Gatzuk concluded. Unfortunately, in this moment he is not punished by law. Gatzuk suggested that it be declared a criminal offense, entailing special sanctions (Vyshinsky, a lawyer by training, or someone from his office emphasized this passage).

Gatsuk was not alone, believing that life in the USSR was impossible without blat. “The key word, the most important word in the language, was the word blat,” wrote British journalist Edward Crankshaw of the late Stalinist period. - Without the appropriate blat, it was impossible to get a train ticket from Kyiv to Kharkov, find housing in Moscow or Leningrad, buy lamps for the receiver, find a roof repairman, interview a government official ... For many years [blat] was the only way to get what you need »85.

Not only Gatsuk considered blat as something pathological, completely inconsistent with Russian society and alien to it. In 1935, an authoritative Soviet dictionary referred the word "blat" to the "thieves' jargon" used by criminals, while adding that the new colloquial vulgarism "by blat" means "by illegal means"86. Respondents to the post-war Harvard Refugee Interview Project, distancing themselves as far as possible from both the word and the practice it denotes, said that “blat” is “Soviet swearing.”

vo”, “a word of folk origin, never found in literature”, “a word generated by an abnormal way of life”, and apologized for its use (“Forgive me, but I have to resort to Soviet jargon ...”). "Blat" is the same as bribery, some said; "blat" is patronage or patronage. Euphemisms for blat were in abundance: “blat means acquaintance”; “blat... in decent society they called the letter z” (from the word “acquaintances”)”; Blat was also called “zis”, short for “acquaintance and connection”87.

Blat can be defined as a system of relationships associated with the exchange of goods and favors, equal in rights and non-hierarchical, in contrast to patronage relations. According to the participants in these relations, they were based on friendship, although money sometimes changed hands. Thus, from their point of view, the Russian proverb “hand washes hand” was a crude parody of genuine personal respect and warm feelings that they associated with “thieves” deeds. A much better idea of ​​blat was given (as the participants in such relationships believed) by another proverb cited by one of the respondents to the Harvard Project: “As they say in the Soviet Union: “Don’t have 100 rubles, but have 100 friends”88.

Only a small part of the Harvard Project respondents showed a desire to talk about their own “criminal” affairs,89 and in doing so, they always spoke about friendship and emphasized the human factor of “criminal” relationships. "Friends" mean a lot in the Soviet Union, said one woman, who clearly used clout a lot because they help each other. Asked hypothetically what she would do if she were in trouble, she painted a picture of a strongly supportive community of family, friends, and neighbors: “My family... had friends who could help me... One... was the head of a big trust. He often helped and would turn to us himself if he needed help. He was our neighbor... One of my relatives was the chief engineer at the plant. He was always available to help if asked.”90

The former engineer, who in fact became a real expert in blasphemy, being a supplier of a sugar trust, constantly used the word “friend”: “I easily make friends, but in Russia you can’t do anything without friends. I was friends with several prominent communists. One of them advised me to go to Moscow, where he had a friend who had just been made head of the construction of new sugar factories ... I went to talk to him, and we became friends over an almighty glass of vodka. He struck up friendships not only with his superiors, but also with supply officials in the provinces with whom he dealt: “I invited the director to dine with me, gave him vodka to drink. We have become good friends... My boss really appreciated this mine

the ability to make friends and get needed supplies.”91

Drinking was an important aspect of "thieves" relationships among men. For the respondent quoted above, drinking and making friends were inextricably linked; in addition, drinking, at least sometimes, clearly contributed to a heart-to-heart conversation, as, for example, when he first met his future boss in a sugar trust, when he tried to find out how much he knew about his work, and admitted that “I didn’t even know what sugar was made of until a couple of years ago.” True, at times this respondent talked about drinking more as a means to an end: “usually it works,” he remarked casually, describing some such friendly gatherings with vodka. Other respondents also stated that the best way to achieve something or solve a problem is to bring a bottle of vodka to someone who can help. However, vodka was not just an offering, it had to be drunk together before the matter was settled - hence the expression "drinking buddies", characteristic of "criminal" relationships92.

Some people were experts in pulling. You can solve any problem, said one Harvard respondent, if you know "professional blatniks," "people who have connections at the top and know the Soviet system. They know who can be bribed or given a gift, and what kind of gift.” Another type of "thug" professionalism is captured in the story of a supply trip (based on the real experience of a Polish Jew exiled to Kazakhstan during the war), which presents sketches of portraits of a number of "blatnik" industrial professionals, nice and generous people , who were, according to the author, "members ... of an invisible underground community of those whose positions enable them to exchange favors with other members"93.

Professional "blatniks" served as the subject of a humorous poem by the popular poet V. Lebedev-Kumach, published in 1933 in "Crocodile" and titled with a pun "blat-not" - this meant a special notebook where phone numbers and addresses of "thieves" acquaintances are entered in addition to mysterious encrypted recordings like the following: "Peter's friend (sanatorium)", "Sergei (records, gramophone)", "Nik.Nik. (about grubs). The “secret code” indicated to the owner of the “blat-note” where it is better to get qualified assistance in this or that matter (“Just call - and in a minute on the wire “Nick. Nick.” He will get you everything you need”). The only problem, said at the end of the poem, is that association with these dark personalities may eventually lead you to interrogation at the prosecutor's office94.

The supplier of the sugar trust, whose words have been quoted several times above, belonged precisely to the category of professional “blatniks”. Like many others, he enjoyed his work: “I loved my work. She was well paid, I had a lot of connections, I traveled all over the Soviet Union - daily and travel certificates came in very handy - and besides, I got satisfaction from what I had achieved, because I succeeded where others failed. Pleasure from one's work was characteristic of blat virtuosos, non-professionals, for whom blat was a calling of the soul. One such virtuoso was a very remarkable person: an exile from Leningrad, who worked as an accountant on a collective farm, he was a jack of all trades (skilled in carpentry, making boxes and barrels), but considered himself a representative of the intelligentsia. In the summer, he let the tenants in and especially became friends with the director of a large Leningrad garage, with whom he went hunting and maintained regular "thieves" relationships (a tree from the forest was exchanged for flour and sugar from the city). “My father was appreciated,” his son recalled. - He worked well, and besides, he could do a lot. He helped many people, he liked to arrange things by pull and knew how to do it.

Blat was not at all the prerogative of professionals and virtuosos. Some of the respondents of the Harvard Project believed that “thieves” relationships are possible only for people who are more or less wealthy: “You know, no one will help a poor person. He has nothing to offer in return. Blat usually means that you, in turn, have to do something for someone. However, those who made such statements, denying that they had "thieves" connections for the reason that they, they say, were too insignificant people for this, often told some episodes from their own lives elsewhere in their interviews, when they in fact, they used blasphemy (getting a job or getting promoted through personal connections)96. From these and other data, apparently, it follows that the principle of reciprocity could be interpreted very broadly: if someone simply liked you, this could already become the basis for “thieves” relationships.

The blat transactions in the life of the Harvard respondents that they talked about (as a rule, without using the word “blat” at the same time) pursued many goals: for example, obtaining a residence permit or fake documents, a better job, materials for building a summer house. A huge number of these "thieves" operations were associated with the purchase of clothes and shoes ("I ... had a girlfriend who worked in a department store, and I got clothes through her", "I knew one person who worked in a shoe factory, a friend of my wife ; so I was able to get good quality shoes for cheap"). According to one respondent whose father worked in a cooperative

store, his family had such extensive “thieves” connections that “we always had everything. The costumes were very expensive, although they could be obtained at government prices. We only had to queue for shoes because we didn’t have friends who worked in shoe stores.”97

The topic of blat surprisingly often arose in Crocodile, which placed on its pages cartoons depicting the procedures for entering a university, obtaining medical certificates, places in good rest houses and restaurants. “What are you, buddy, getting sick so often? “I am familiar with the doctor,” you can read under one of the cartoons. The other shows a vacationer and a doctor conversing on the balcony of a luxury holiday home. “I've been here for a month and have never seen the director yet,” says the vacationer. "What, you don't know him? How did you get a room then?”98

One of the Krokodil cartoons illustrates the tendency inherent in informal Soviet distribution mechanisms to turn any official bureaucratic relationship into a personal one. It is titled "Good Education" and depicts a store manager suavely conversing with a customer. The cashier and another woman look at them. “Our director is a polite person,” says the cashier. “When the fabric releases, each customer is called by name and patronymic.” - "Does he really know all the buyers?" - "Certainly. Whom he does not know, he will not let go.”99

Personal connections softened the harsh conditions of life in the USSR, at least for some of its citizens. In addition, they questioned the significance of Stalin's great restructuring of the economy, creating a second economy based on patronage and personal contacts, parallel to the first, socialist, based on state ownership and central planning. Because of the severe scarcity of goods, this second economy seems to have played an even greater role in the lives of ordinary people than the private sector during the NEP, paradoxically as it may seem.

True, even for people with connections, inconvenience has become an inevitable norm of Soviet life. Citizens spent long hours queuing for bread and other essentials. The way to and from work became torture: in big cities, people with shopping bags tried to squeeze into crowded, jolting buses and trams, in small ones they wandered along unpaved streets, covered with snow in winter, covered with puddles in spring and autumn, more reminiscent of the sea. Many of life's little pleasures, such as cafes and shops in the neighborhood, disappeared with the end of the NEP; under the new centralized

the state trading system often had to travel to the city center to have shoes repaired. At home, in communal apartments and barracks, life passed in painful crowding, was deprived of comfort, and it was often poisoned by squabbles with neighbors. An additional source of discomfort and irritation was the “continuous working week”, which abolished rest on Sundays and often led to the fact that all family members had different days off100.

Of course, all these difficulties, shortages, inconveniences were phenomena transition period- but is it? As the 1930s wore on, especially as living standards fell again at the end of the decade, many people must have asked themselves this question. True, in the mid-1930s the curve went up, and the subsequent decline could be explained by the imminent threat of war. In addition, the deprivations of the present could always be countered by the vision of an abundant socialist future (this will be discussed in the next chapter). In the words of one Harvard respondent, he "thought that all the difficulties were due to the sacrifices that are necessary for the construction of socialism, and that after the socialist society was built, life would be better"101.

My 20s were an absolute nightmare. In fact, everything should have pleased me: I was finally free - no parents, no teachers. I could undress in front of other people, with their permission, of course. I could find a job, make all my dreams come true. But nothing worked out, because at the age of 20 no one really knows how to do anything.

Too late, I realized how useless four years of college had been. I even lost money: I paid for my studies, but I didn’t earn anything and didn’t learn anything. In any case, the knowledge gained did not help me find a job. Besides, at the age of 20 I was in a hurry. I wanted to become successful as quickly as possible and find my life's work.

Someone told me: "Time is money." So every missed opportunity has a price. This formula is often repeated in economics classes. I often skipped them, but I know for sure that time is not money. Money can be spent and earned. Time cannot be earned or bought. There is no time vending machine that will give you a few more hours in exchange for five dollars.

At 20, I knew nothing, but I thought I knew everything. But it normal. At the age of 20, I chose a few classes and repeated them every day, because I thought that I was good at it. I wrote and programmed. I was not good at any of these things, but gradually they began to turn out better for me, because I did them constantly.

Advice for 20 year olds. Pick three to five activities and focus on them. Choose only what you are ready to do every day again and again. Don't wait for a revelation or a breakthrough. Just do it. I would have done it myself, only I had no one to tell me.

30 years

This is also a complete nightmare. The idea of ​​buying your own home is as big a scam as college. Both are legal ways to get you into debt and make you work. The lending industry zombifies with phrases like "Real estate is a smart investment" or "It's time to put down roots." A mortgage ties you to one place, takes all your money, and can drive you to suicide.

At 30, I realized that I underestimated those around me. I learned that the people around are just as good as me.

I'm tired of doing the same thing day after day. All the time I felt that I “almost achieved something”, “on the right track” and “we need to be patient a little more”. And then I gave up. At thirty I learned to lose. At 20, I couldn't lose. Everyone around was too "stupid", and I just missed one more try and one more.

But at 30, I realized that I underestimated those around me. I learned that the people around me are just as good as me, I realized that you can’t find one thing for a lifetime. You will have to pursue several goals at once, to do what pleases not only you, but also those around you.

Advice for 30 year olds. If you hang out with the right people and work on worthwhile projects, sooner or later one of them will pop. Or, if you're lucky, two.

40 years

This is a living hell. First, you can no longer eat and experience stress. Food and stress lead to aging of the body. But, of course, you need to eat, but only half of what you are used to. And you will experience stress. But you will need to deal with him, otherwise he will kill you.

To eat less and be less nervous, you need to do what you love. Then you don't have to stress. Another way to worry less is to stop accumulating unnecessary things around you.

At 20, you feel like you know what you're doing. At 30 you want to make more money

In my 20s and 30s, I constantly made mistakes in relationships, parenting, running a business, just about everything. And he was terribly worried about it. But now I don't care, I don't care anymore. Admitting mistakes is better than constantly worrying about them.

Advice for 40 year olds. At 20, you feel like you know what you're doing. At 30, you just want to make more money. At 40, do what you love. To find such an activity, remember what you loved at 20, and dedicate yourself to it. Just don't expect too much.

50 years

The woman brought her son to Gandhi and asked: "Gandhi, tell him to stop eating sweets." Gandhi replied, "Come back in two weeks." The woman and her son went home hundreds of kilometers away. Two weeks later they again came to Gandhi. And he said to the boy: "Stop eating sweets." The woman asked, “Gandhi, why did you make us go back and forth? Why didn't you say it the first time?"

Gandhi replied, "Before I told your son to stop eating sweets, I had to stop eating sweets myself."

Advice for 50 year olds. But I don't know anything about this age. Come back in a couple of years.

about the author

Entrepreneur, founded more than 20 companies, 17 of them failed. He writes articles, books, blogs and podcasts. His book I Was Blind But Now I See was ranked #1 in the motivational books section of Amazon.com in 2011.

Introduction

fundamental revolution in spiritual development society, carried out in the USSR in the 20-30s. 20th century component socialist transformations. The theory of the cultural revolution was developed by V.I. Lenin. The cultural revolution and the construction of a new socialist way of life is aimed at changing the social composition of the post-revolutionary intelligentsia and at breaking with the traditions of the pre-revolutionary cultural heritage through the ideology of culture. The task of creating the so-called "proletarian culture" based on the Marxist-class ideology, "communist education", mass culture was put forward to the fore.

The construction of a new socialist way of life provided for the elimination of illiteracy, the creation of a socialist system of public education and enlightenment, the formation of a new, socialist intelligentsia, the restructuring of life, the development of science, literature, and art under party control. As a result of the implementation of the cultural revolution of the USSR, significant successes were achieved: according to the 1939 census, the literacy of the population began to be 70%; in the USSR a first-class comprehensive school, the number of Soviet intelligentsia reached 14 million people; there was a flourishing of science and art. In the cultural development of the USSR came to the forefront in the world.

A distinctive feature of the Soviet period in the history of culture is the enormous role played by the party and the state in its development. The party and the state have established complete control over the spiritual life of society.

In the 1920s and 1930s, there was undoubtedly a powerful cultural shift in the USSR. If the social revolution destroyed the semi-medieval estates in the country, which divided society into “the people” and “the top”, then cultural transformations in two decades moved it along the path of overcoming the civilizational gap in the daily lives of many tens of millions of people. In an unimaginably short period of time, the material possibilities of people ceased to be a significant barrier between them and at least elementary culture, and initiation into it became much less dependent on the socio-professional status of people. Both in scale and pace, these changes can indeed be considered a nationwide “cultural revolution”.

Significant changes took place in the 1920s. in the life of the population of Russia. Life, as a way of everyday life, cannot be considered for the entire population as a whole, because it is different for different segments of the population. The living conditions of the upper strata of Russian society, which before the revolution occupied the best apartments, consumed high-quality food, and enjoyed the achievements of education and health care, deteriorated. A strict class principle was introduced for the distribution of material and spiritual values, and representatives of the upper strata were deprived of their privileges. True, the Soviet government supported the representatives of the old intelligentsia it needed through a system of rations, a commission to improve the life of scientists, and so on.

During the years of NEP, new strata were born that lived prosperously. These are the so-called Nepmen or the new bourgeoisie, whose way of life was determined by the thickness of their wallet. They were given the right to spend money in restaurants and other entertainment establishments. These layers include both party and state nomenklatura, whose incomes depended on how they performed their duties. The way of life of the working class has seriously changed. It was he who was to take a leading place in society and enjoy all the benefits. From the Soviet government, he received the rights to free education and medical care, the state constantly raised his wages, provided social insurance and pension maintenance, supported his desire for higher education through the workers' faculty. In the 20s. the state regularly conducted a survey of the budgets of working families and monitored their occupancy. However, words often disagreed with deeds, material difficulties hit primarily workers, whose incomes depended only on wages, mass unemployment during the NEP years, and a low cultural level did not allow workers to seriously improve their living conditions. In addition, the life of the workers was affected by numerous experiments in planting "socialist values", labor communes, "common boilers", hostels.

Peasant life during the NEP years has changed slightly. Patriarchal relations in the family, common work in the field from dawn to dusk, the desire to increase one's wealth characterized the way of life of the bulk of the Russian peasantry. It became more prosperous, he developed a sense of the owner. The weak peasantry united in communes and collective farms and organized collective labor. The peasantry most of all worried about the position of the church in the Soviet state, because it connected its future with it. The policy of the Soviet state towards the church in the 20s. was not constant. In the early 20s. repressions fell upon the church, church valuables were confiscated under the pretext of the need to fight hunger. Then a split occurred in the Orthodox Church itself over the question of the attitude towards Soviet power, and a group of priests formed a "living church", abolished the patriarchate and advocated the renewal of the church. Under Metropolitan Sergius, the church stood at the service of Soviet power. The state encouraged these new phenomena in the life of the church, continued to carry out repressions against supporters of the preservation of the old order in the church. At the same time, it carried out active anti-religious propaganda, created an extensive network of anti-religious societies and periodicals, introduced socialist holidays into the life of Soviet people as opposed to religious ones, and even changed the terms of the working week so that days off did not coincide with Sundays and religious holidays.

DneproGES, 1934.

Contrary to the horror stories that are now being written about that time, it was in the pre-war years that there was a symphony of power and people that is not often found in life. The people, inspired by the great idea of ​​building the first just society in the history of mankind without oppressors and the oppressed, showed miracles of heroism and selflessness. And the state in those years, now portrayed by our liberal historians and publicists as a monstrous repressive machine, responded to the people by taking care of them.

Free medicine and education, sanatoriums and rest houses, pioneer camps, kindergartens, libraries, circles became a mass phenomenon and were available to everyone. It is no coincidence that during the war, according to the recollections of eyewitnesses, people dreamed of only one thing: that everything should become as it was before the war.

Here is what, for example, the US Ambassador wrote about that time in 1937-1938. Joseph E. Davis:

“With a group of American journalists, I visited five cities, where I examined the largest enterprises:

a tractor plant (12 thousand workers), - an electric motor plant (38 thousand workers), Dneproges, - an aluminum plant (3 thousand workers), which is considered the largest in the world, Zaporizhstal (35 thousand workers), a hospital (18 doctors and 120 nurses), nurseries and kindergartens, the Rostselmash plant (16 thousand employees), the Palace of Pioneers (a building with 280 rooms for 320 teachers and 27 thousand children).

The last of these institutions is one of the most interesting developments in the Soviet Union. Such palaces are being erected in all major cities and are intended to put into practice the Stalinist slogan about children as the most valuable asset of the country. Here, children reveal and develop their talents ... "

And everyone was sure that his talent would not wither and would not go to waste, that he had every opportunity to fulfill any dream in all spheres of life.

The doors of the secondary and high school. Social elevators worked at full capacity, elevating yesterday's workers and peasants to the heights of power, opening before them the horizons of science, the wisdom of technology, the stages of the stage.

"In the everyday life of great construction projects" a new country, unprecedented in the world, was rising - "the country of heroes, the country of dreamers, the country of scientists."

And in order to destroy any possibility of exploiting a person - whether it be a private trader or the state - the first decrees in the USSR introduced an eight-hour working day.

In addition, a six-hour working day was established for adolescents, the work of children under 14 years of age was prohibited, labor protection was established, and production training for young people was introduced at the expense of the state.

While the United States and Western countries were suffocating in the grip of the Great Depression, in the Soviet Union in 1936, 5 million workers had a six-hour or more reduced working day, almost 9% of industrial workers took a day off after four days of work, 10% of workers, employed in continuous production, after three eight-hour working days received two days off.

The wages of workers and employees, as well as the personal incomes of collective farmers, more than doubled. Adults, probably, no longer remember, and young people do not even know that during the Great Patriotic War, some collective farmers gave the front planes and tanks, built on personal savings, which they managed to accumulate in a not so long time that had passed after the "criminal" collectivization. How did they do it?

The fact is that the number of mandatory workdays for "free slaves" in the thirties was 60-100 (depending on the region). After that, the collective farmer could work for himself - on his plot or in a production cooperative, which were great amount throughout the USSR. As the creator of the Russian Project website, publicist Pavel Krasnov, writes, “... In the Stalinist USSR, those who wished to take personal initiative had every opportunity to do so in the cooperative movement. It was impossible only to use hired labor, contractual cooperative - as much as you like.

There was a powerful cooperative movement in the country, almost 2 million people constantly worked in cooperatives, who produced 6% of the gross industrial output of the USSR: 40% of all furniture, 70% of all metal utensils, 35% of knitwear, almost 100% of toys.

In addition, there were 100 cooperative design bureaus, 22 experimental laboratories, and two research institutes in the country. This does not include part-time cooperative rural artels. Up to 30 million people worked in them in the 1930s.

It was possible to engage in individual work - for example, to have your own darkroom, paying taxes on it, doctors could have a private practice, and so on. The cooperatives usually involved high-class professionals in their field, organized in efficient structures, which explains their high contribution to the production of the USSR.

All this was liquidated by Khrushchev at an accelerated pace from the age of 56 - the property of cooperatives and private entrepreneurs was confiscated, even personal subsidiary plots and private livestock.

We add that at the same time, in 1956, the number of mandatory workdays was increased to three hundred. The results were not long in coming - the first problems with the products immediately appeared.

In the thirties, piecework wages were also widely used. Additional bonuses were practiced for the safety of mechanisms, savings in electricity, fuel, raw materials, and materials. Bonuses were introduced for overfulfillment of the plan, cost reduction, and production of higher quality products. A well-thought-out system of training qualified workers in industry and agriculture was carried out. During the years of the second five-year plan alone, about 6 million people were trained instead of the 5 million envisaged by the plan.

Finally, in the USSR, for the first time in the world, unemployment was eliminated - the most difficult and insoluble in the conditions of market capitalism social problem. The right to work enshrined in the Constitution of the USSR has become real for everyone. Already in 1930, during the first five-year plan, labor exchanges ceased to exist.

Along with the industrialization of the country, with the construction of new plants and factories, housing construction was also carried out. State and cooperative enterprises and organizations, collective farms and the population in the second five-year plan put into operation 67.3 million square meters usable living space. With the help of the state and collective farms, rural workers built 800,000 houses.

Investment investments by state and cooperative organizations in housing construction, together with individual investments, increased by 1.8 times compared with the first five-year plan. Apartments, as we remember, were provided free of charge at the lowest rent in the world. And, probably, few people know that during the second five-year plan, almost as much money was invested in housing, communal and cultural construction, in health care in the rapidly developing Soviet Union as in heavy industry.

In 1935, the best subway in the world in terms of technical equipment and decoration was put into operation. In the summer of 1937, the Moscow-Volga canal was put into operation, which solved the problem of the capital's water supply and improved its transport links.

In the 1930s, not only did dozens of new cities grow in the country, but water supply was built in 42 cities, sewerage was built in 38 cities, a transport network developed, new tram lines were launched, the bus fleet expanded, and a trolleybus began to be introduced.

During the years of the pre-war five-year plans in the country, for the first time in world practice, social forms of popular consumption, which, in addition to wages, each Soviet family used. Funds from them went to the construction and maintenance of housing, cultural and community facilities, free education and medical care, various pensions and benefits. Three times, in comparison with the first five-year plan, spending on social security and social insurance has increased.

The network of sanatoriums and rest houses expanded rapidly, vouchers to which, purchased with social insurance funds, were distributed by trade unions among workers and employees free of charge or on preferential terms. During the second five-year plan alone, 8.4 million people rested and received medical treatment in rest homes and sanatoriums, and the cost of maintaining children in nurseries and kindergartens increased 10.7 times compared to the first five-year plan. The average life expectancy has risen.

Such a state could not but be perceived by the people as their own, national, native, for which it is not a pity to give their lives, for which one wants to perform feats ... As the embodiment of that revolutionary dream of a promised country, where the great idea of ​​​​people's happiness was visibly, before our eyes embodied in life. Stalin’s words “Life has become better, life has become more fun” in perestroika and post-perestroika years, it is customary to scoff, but they reflected real changes in the social and economic life of Soviet society.

These changes could not go unnoticed in the West either. We have already become accustomed to the fact that one cannot trust Soviet propaganda, that the truth about how things are in our country is only spoken in the West. Well, let's see how the capitalists assessed the successes of the Soviet state.

Thus, Gibbson Jarvey, chairman of United Dominion Bank, stated in October 1932:

“I want to make it clear that I am not a communist or a Bolshevik, I am a definite capitalist and individualist… Russia is moving forward while too many of our factories are idle and about 3 million of our people are desperately looking for work. The five-year plan was ridiculed and predicted to fail. But you can take it for granted that, under the terms of the five-year plan, more has been done than planned...

In all the industrial cities that I have visited, new districts are springing up, built according to a definite plan, with wide streets, decorated with trees and squares, with houses of the most modern type, schools, hospitals, workers' clubs and the inevitable nurseries and kindergartens where the children of working mothers are cared for...

Don't try to underestimate Russian plans and don't make the mistake of hoping that the Soviet government might fail... Today's Russia is a country with a soul and an ideal. Russia is a country of amazing activity. I believe that Russia's aspirations are healthy...

Perhaps the most important thing is that all the youth and workers in Russia have one thing that, unfortunately, is lacking today in the capitalist countries, namely, hope.».

And here is what the Forward magazine (England) wrote in the same 1932:

“The huge work that is going on in the USSR is striking. New factories, new schools, new cinemas, new clubs, new huge houses - new buildings everywhere. Many of them have already been completed, others are still surrounded by forests. It is difficult to tell the English reader what has been done in the last two years and what is being done next. You have to see it all in order to believe it.

Our own achievements, which we achieved during the war, are nothing compared to what is being done in the USSR. Americans admit that even during the period of the most rapid creative fever in the Western states, there was nothing like the current feverish creative activity in the USSR. Over the past two years, so many changes have taken place in the USSR that you refuse to even imagine what will happen in this country in another 10 years.

Get out of your head the fantastic horror stories told by the English newspapers, which lie so stubbornly and absurdly about the USSR. Also, throw out of your mind all those half-truths and impressions based on misunderstanding, which are set in motion by amateurish intellectuals who patronizingly look at the USSR through the eyes of the middle class, but who have not the slightest idea of ​​what is happening there: the USSR is building a new society on healthy people. basics.

In order to achieve this goal, one must take risks, one must work with enthusiasm, with such energy as the world has never known before, one must struggle with the enormous difficulties that are inevitable when trying to build socialism in a vast country isolated from the rest of the world. Visiting this country for the second time in two years, I got the impression that it is on the path of lasting progress, plans and builds, and all this on a scale that is a clear challenge to the hostile capitalist world.

The forward was echoed by the American "Nation":

“The four years of the five-year plan have brought with them truly remarkable achievements. The Soviet Union worked with wartime intensity on the creative task of building basic life. The face of the country is literally changing beyond recognition: this is true of Moscow with its hundreds of newly paved streets and squares, new buildings, new suburbs and a cordon of new factories on its outskirts. This is also true of smaller cities.

New cities arose in the steppes and deserts, at least 50 cities with a population of 50 to 250 thousand people. All of them have emerged in the last four years, each of them is the center of a new enterprise or a number of enterprises built to develop domestic resources. Hundreds of new power plants and a number of giants, like Dneprostroy, are constantly implementing Lenin's formula: "Socialism is Soviet power plus electrification."

The Soviet Union organized mass production an infinite number items that Russia has never produced before: tractors, combines, high-quality steels, synthetic rubber, ball bearings, powerful diesel engines, turbines of 50 thousand kilowatts, telephone equipment, electrical machines for mining, airplanes, automobiles, bicycles and several hundred new types of machines.

For the first time in history, Russia mines aluminum, magnesite, apatite, iodine, potash and many other valuable products. The guiding points of the Soviet plains are no longer crosses and church domes, but grain elevators and silos. Collective farms are building houses, stables, pigsties. Electricity penetrates the village, radio and newspapers have conquered it. Workers learn to work on the latest machines. The peasant boys build and maintain agricultural machines that are bigger and more complex than anything America has ever seen. Russia begins to "think in machines". Russia is rapidly moving from the age of wood to the age of iron, steel, concrete and motors.”

This is how the proud British and Americans spoke about the USSR in the 30s, envying the Soviet people - our parents.

Life in the 30s in the Union is easy to imagine from films and the memories of relatives. It is clear that in the country then everything was very poor for the most part. But at the same time there was a period of construction, enthusiasm, recovery from the post-revolutionary devastation ....
What was life like in the 1930s in other countries? Was it that much different?

1937, USA. House in the slums. Everything is very poor, but there are newspaper wallpapers on the walls and even a curtain made of figuratively cut newspaper.

1937, Czechoslovakia. If not for the clothes, it would be difficult to name the country in the photo

1937, USA. Woman at home in metropolitan Washington DC

1933, UK. An ordinary, by modern standards, even a large, English family

1936, USA. Mother with children in California

1932, France. A man sorts out garbage in the "capital of the world" Paris

1938, Poland. A hut where a large Polish family lives

Elderly couple in a shack. USA, 1937

1937, USA. And here is another pole, a completely different style, standard of living. This is a family dinner for the Mayor of Muncie and his wife.