After the inauguration of the five-year plans the influx turned into a deluge. Peasants of yesterday became workers of today. Russia finally acquired vast crowds of proletarians characteristic of the industrial revolution. Whether the condition of the workers in the Soviet Union improved compared to tsarist times remains an open question. That it continued to be miserable cannot be reasonably doubted. Soviet workers profited from increased educational and cultural opportunities, but their pitiful real wages probably remained below the prerevolutionary level as late as the early 'fifties. After all, the huge industrialization was made possible by keeping industrial wages down as well as by squeezing the peasants. In addition, workers suffered from the totally inadequate and deteriorating urban housing, and, together with other Soviet citizens, they had to contribute their efforts and their scarce time to various 'voluntary' projects, to their own and others' political education, and to other prescribed activities. In contrast to tsarist days, they could not strike or otherwise openly express their discontent. The material condition of the Soviet proletariat did improve, however, after the death of Stalin. Still, it remained quite poor as the Soviet system came to its end.
Whereas the initial impact of the Bolshevik revolution, coupled with famine and other catastrophes, did much to level Russian society, smashing the rigid class structure of imperial Russia and even destroying entire classes, before long social differentiation began to grow again. In particular, the five-year plans produced a tremendous expansion of administrative and technical personnel, which, together with the already existing Party and government bureaucracies, became, broadly speaking, the leading class in the country. One author estimated that the Soviet economy employed 1,700,000 bookkeepers alone! Scientists, writers, artists, professors, and other intellectuals, purged and integrated into the new system, became prominent members of the privileged group. Army and naval officers and their families provided additional members. Altogether, the privileged, distinguished primarily by their education and nonmanual occupations, came to compose about 15 per cent of the total population. Relatively speaking - paradoxically, if you will - they enjoyed greater advantages compared to the masses than their counterparts in Western capitalist societies. It is also of interest that material differences within the educated class and within the worker and peasant classes, who were often paid according to some form of the piece rate, were very marked in Soviet Russia. Paid vacations and other rewards supplied by the regime were distributed in a similarly uneven manner. In fact,
wages and salaries tended to show a greater differentiation in the U.S.S.R. than in the West, although, of course, Soviet citizens could not accumulate fortunes based on profits, rent, or interest.
As the new Soviet elite advanced to the fore, Soviet society lost many of its revolutionary traits and began to acquire in certain respects a strikingly conservative character. The transformation occurred essentially during the thirties, but on the whole it continued and developed further during the Second World War and in the postwar years. While state laws and regulations were crucial in this process, they reflected, as well as contributed to, basic social and economic changes.
Initially the Bolshevik regime took a disdainful and even negative view of the family. Marriages became matters of little importance in the eyes of the state, while divorce could be obtained simply by declaration of one of the parties involved. Abortions were legal and extremely common. In the thirties, all that changed. Authorities declared themselves in favor of a strong Soviet family. Particular emphasis was placed on having many children. Mothers with five or six living offspring received the Motherhood Medal, those with seven or eight were awarded a decoration known as Motherhood Glory, while those with ten achieved the status of Heroine Mother. Financial grants to large families helped further the implementation of the new policy. At the same time abortions lost their legal sanction, while divorce became much more difficult to obtain in the U.S.S.R. than in most countries in the West. The family - the proper, Marxist, Soviet family, to be sure - was hailed as a mainstay of the socialist order.
Discipline improved in the army, and it made an effective reappearance in schools and elsewhere. Ranks, titles, decorations, and other distinctions, whether bureaucratic, military, or academic, were restored and acquired vast importance. Even social manners made a comeback. Pomp and circumstance re-entered the stage. Uniforms blossomed everywhere, reminding observers of tsarist Russia. Generalissimo Stalin toasting his marshals at a gargantuan Kremlin reception presented a far different picture from Lenin in his worn-out coat haranguing workers in squares and factory yards. In a sense, the Soviet regime had arrived. Equally important changes took place, as we shall see, in education and culture, where the avant-garde and experimental approach of the early years gave place to rock-ribbed conservatism. Patriotism and historical tradition emerged again, although in a minor key and as aids, rather than rivals, to the fundamentally Marxist ideology.
Women constituted half, actually considerably more than half, the population of the Soviet Union, and they certainly contributed their share to its history. In a
very real sense they carried half, or more, of the burden of that history on their shoulders. The communist program included liberating women from oppression, discrimination, and drudgery as part of the liberation of humankind. The first decade or more after the October Revolution was full of promise for Soviet feminists, as well as of new departures in the position and activities of Soviet women, perhaps most notably and permanently so among the Islamic peoples of the country. But, for the Soviet leaders, feminist ideals were always ancillary to the fundamental Marxist vision of class straggle and the building of socialism. And they were crushed, together with other autonomous views, once the U.S.S.R. was set in the firm Stalinist mold. There was some relaxation but no basic change in the situation after the death of the crucial dictator.
Lapidus and other scholars have done much recently to present and interpret the position of Soviet women in both its positive and its negative aspects. The former include, notably, the great increase in education, to where women came to be proportionately better represented as students in Soviet institutions of higher learning than men. Concurrently women rose remarkably in the professions, so that today, for example, the great majority of the doctors of medicine in Russia are women. Yet, as it has been repeatedly pointed out, few women reached the top rungs of their profession, medicine included, and they were strikingly absent at the highest levels of both Party and government. Moreover, Soviet women both held full-time jobs and performed the great bulk of the work at home, a task made all the more difficult by the hard conditions of life in the Soviet Union. It might be added that feminism in the Western sense was at best in its incipient stage in the U.S.S.R. Nor were all its emphases - as a student of Soviet society will readily understand - particularly relevant to the Soviet scene.
Its multinational composition was a major problem for the Soviet Union as it had been for the Russian Empire. While in 1917 Great Russians formed about half of the population of the country, and Ukrainians and White Russians, or Belorassians, approximately another quarter, the remaining quarter consisted of a staggering variety of ethnic and linguistic groups. The Caucasus alone contains a fantastically complicated mixture of peoples. More than a hundred and fifty languages and dialects were spoken in the Soviet Union. Soviet nationalities ranged from ancient civilized peoples, such as the Armenians and the Georgians, to primitive Siberian tribes. They included Lutherans and Catholics as well as Orthodox, and Moslems and Buddhists together with shamanists. Moreover, many of these peoples showed nationalist tendencies in the years of revolution and civil war, which corresponded only too well to the generally nationalist atmosphere of the twentieth century.
Soviet authorities developed several basic policies in dealing with national groups. They allowed them no independence in ideological, political, economic,
or social matters, and even no deviation from the established official line. The U.S.S.R. remained essentially a most highly centralized state. The single Communist party of the Soviet Union acted as an especially important foundation and guarantee of that unity. At the same time, Soviet rulers granted a kind of cultural autonomy to the nationalities in the Soviet Union - indeed they sponsored heavily such autonomy - stating that their cultures should be 'national in form, and socialist in content.' The form included the language and the cultural tradition of a given people, which, however, had to be fitted, as in the case of the Russians proper, into the Soviet-Marxist framework. Thus, the government tried to destroy Islam as well as Orthodoxy and interpreted Georgian history as well as Russian in the simple terms of a class straggle.
But this dual approach to nationalities proved difficult to maintain in practice. Cultural autonomy could easily
