in the 1930s, recalls the way of life as repressive, as an effort to stamp out any sign of individuality. The ‘law of the collective’ ruled in the household, recalls Bykov, and there was no use trying to kick against it – that ‘would unite everybody’ against those who refused to conform. Elizaveta Chechik had similar feelings about the communal apartment she grew up in:
To some extent we were brought up together by all the adults on the corridor. Some of the children I played with had very strict parents, Bolsheviks. I was afraid of them and felt uncomfortable in their presence. Looking back now, I realize that I grew up with the feeling that I was not free, that I could not be myself, in case someone observed me and disapproved. It was only when I was in the apartment and no one else was there that I felt release from this fear.69
The communal apartment had a profound psychological impact on those who lived in them for many years. During interviews many long-term residents confessed to an intense fear of being on their own.* The communal apartment practically gave birth to a new type of Soviet personality. Children, in particular, were influenced by collective values and habits. Families lost control of their own children’s upbringing in a communal apartment: their cultural traditions and habits tended to be swamped by the common principles of the household as a whole. Looking back on her childhood, Minora Novikova believes that the
Everything was held in common. There were no secrets. We were all equal, we were all the same. That is what I was accustomed to, and in later life it seemed strange to me when I encountered different ways. I remember on my first trip [as a geologist] I bought some sweets and shared them all around. The group leader said to me: ‘You should write down how much you spent, so that you can get reimbursed.’ That struck me as a monstrous idea, because from my childhood I was used to sharing anything I had.
Others who grew up in a
It was a different feeling of repression from arrest, imprisonment and exile, which I’ve also experienced, but in some ways it was worse. In exile one preserved a sense of one’s self, but the repression I felt in the communal apartment was the repression of my inner freedom and individuality. I felt this repression, this need for self-control, every time I went into the kitchen, where I was always scrutinized by the little crowd that gathered there. It was impossible to be oneself.70
3
Soviet citizens were quick to protest against material shortages and inequalities. They wrote in their thousands to the government to complain about corruption and inefficiencies, which they linked to the privileges of the new bureaucracy. Yet at the same time there were many citizens who perservered in the expectation that they would live to see the Communist utopia. The Soviet regime was sustained by this idea in the 1930s. Millions of people were persuaded to believe that the hardships of their daily lives were a necessary sacrifice for the building of a Communist society. Hard work today would be rewarded tomorrow, when the Soviet ‘good life’ would be enjoyed by all.
In
The Five Year Plans played a crucial role in this utopian projection. The conception of the Plan was to accelerate the arrival of the socialist future by speeding up the tempo of the whole economy (hence the slogan ‘The Five Year Plan in Four!’). Indeed the Plan was to conquer time itself by subordinating it to the proletarian will. In the capitalist economies of the West work was organized according to a strictly rational division of time. But in the Soviet Union work was structured according to the goals set by the Five Year Plans. Because the achievement of this goal was always imminent, it made sense to ‘storm’ production, to work for a brief but frenzied spell to reach that goal, when it would be possible to rest. The Stalinist economy was based on this ‘storming’ of production to meet the Five Year Plans, just as the system as a whole was based on the idea that present hardship would be rewarded in the Communist utopia. Nikolai Patolichev, a
We said to ourselves: ‘Today we don’t have things that we really need. Well, so what? We shall have them tomorrow.’ That was the power of our belief in the Party’s cause! Young people of my generation were happy in this belief.72
Looking back on the 1930s, many people recall a sense of living for the future rather than for the present. The feeling was particularly strong in the generation that had grown up since 1917 – young people, like Patolichev, who were totally immersed in the values and ideals of the Soviet regime. For this generation the Communist utopia was not a distant dream but a tangible reality, just around the corner and soon to arrive. Soviet schoolchildren in the 1920s and 1930s imagined Communism as a transformation of their own immediate reality (cows full of milk, busy factories) rather than in far-off science-fiction terms.73 That was how they had been brought up to regard the Soviet future by Soviet propaganda and by Socialist Realist literature and art. Socialist Realism, as officially defined at the First Congress of the Writers’ Union in 1934, entailed the ‘truthful, historically concrete representation of reality in its revolutionary development’. The artist’s role was to portray the world not as it was in the present but as it would become (and was becoming) in the Communist future.
According to Liudmila Eliashova (born in 1921) and her sister Marksena (1923), this conception of the Communist utopia was widely shared by their friends at school in Leningrad:
We were all educated in the expectation of a happy future. I remember when my sister broke our favourite porcelain doll. We did not have the money to buy another doll but we went to the department store, where there were dolls on display, and Marksena said: ‘When there is Communism we shall have that doll.’ We pictured Communism as a time, which we would live to see, when everything would be free, and everyone would have the happiest life imaginable. We were glad to be waiting for this beautiful future.74
Raisa Orlova, who grew up in Moscow in the 1930s, recalls the sense of ‘hurtling towards the future’. It made the present seem unreal:
I had an unshakeable conviction that my existence between these old walls [the apartment on Tverskaia Street in Moscow where she grew up] was merely a preparation for the real life to come. That life would start in a new and sparkling white house; there I would do exercises in the morning, there the ideal order would reign, there all my heroic achievements would commence. The majority of my contemporaries – whether they lived in tents, dug-outs, communal flats or what were then considered luxurious private apartments – shared the same kind of provisional, rough and ready approach to life. Faster, faster towards the great goal, towards the new life. Everything could and should be changed: the streets, the houses, the cities, the social order, human souls. And it didn’t seem all that difficult. First the enthusiasts would outline the plan on paper. Then they would tear down the old (‘You can’t make an omelette without breaking eggs’). Then they would clear the rubble, and in the space that had been cleared they would erect the edifice of the socialist dream. That’s how Russia was being reconstructed. We thought it was possible to do the same with people.75
Moscow was the building site of this utopia. In the imagination of the Communists, where ‘soon’ and ‘now’ were all confused, Moscow had a legendary status and significance as a symbol of the socialist utopia that was under construction. In this city of fantastic dreams and illusions, a foundation pit was a future housing block, the
