THE FIVE‑YEAR PLANS

In 1928 the Communist Party launched the First Five‑Year Plan, a blueprint for economic development that set growth targets and allocated resources. The plan emphasized the development of heavy industry–chemical production, defense industries, machine‑building, mining, and steel‑making. The government declared it a success in 1932 and immediately embarked on a second five‑year plan that paid more attention to worker training, efficient use of resources, and production of consumer goods.

Initially the economists at Gosplan, the central planning agency, assumed that they could hire unemployed men to staff expanding industries, but they soon realized that there were not enough men available. Planners and party officials noticed that women, who made up 55 percent of the unemployed in 1930, were lining up to apply for the new jobs. So they once again ordered that training programs for women be established and that managers end discriminatory hiring practices. This time they enforced the decrees. They also encountered less local resistance than in the past, for many managers realized that they had to employ women if they were to meet the plan’s demands. Women, especially young ones driven by necessity and hopeful of bettering their situations, flocked to the new jobs. The result was that the vast majority of workers joining the paid‑labor force for the first time in the 1930s were women: 4 million were employed between 1929 and 1935, 1.7 million of them in industry. By 1940, women made up 39 percent of the paid‑labor force in the Soviet Union, a higher percentage than anywhere else in the European world. In the United States, by contrast, 25 percent of paid workers in 1940 were female. The percentages for France, Germany, Italy, and Sweden in that year were 37, 30, 28, and 28 respectively.¹

Soviet women entered fields that had been predominantly male, such as engineering and press operating; they took jobs in new industries such as light‑bulb manufacturing; and they increased their participation in sectors already heavily female, such as textile production. They also moved into the professions in record numbers. By the late 1930s in the Russian republic of the Soviet Union, 63 percent of physicians, 42 percent of economists, and 36 percent of faculty at institutions of higher education were women. Twenty‑three percent of all journalists, writers, and editors and 30 percent of all visual and performing artists were women. By contrast, American women held 14 percent of professional and technical jobs in the late 1930s. In much of the European world, hard hit by economic depression, women were being laid off, not hired.²

Patterns of gender difference in the workplace, although considerably weakened, were not eliminated. Peasants just arrived in the cities were still going to work as servants, now in the households of the new elite. Most female workers were employed in clerical work, education, food service, and textiles, which were paid less than male preserves such as metalworking. Occupations that were judged detrimental to women’s reproductive health or beyond their physical strength, such as underground mining, were closed to them. Men harassed women entering previously male fields. The notions that men would lead and women would devote much of their time to family life remained powerful as well. Only 12 percent of the top jobs in the party and government of the Russian republic were held by women in 1939. In that year, women were 63 percent of physicians, but only 15 percent of the heads of medical institutions. Although the overwhelming majority of food‑service workers, women led only 34 percent of food‑service enterprises. To put this in perspective, it should be noted that similar gender patterns prevail worldwide today.³

COLLECTIVIZATION

As he set the First Five‑Year Plan in motion, Stalin ordered the collectivization of agriculture. Marxists had long believed that private agriculture was a retrograde economic system that nurtured conservative values in rural people. In the early 1920s, the party had proposed to raise peasant consciousness and productivity by establishing collective farms. Villagers would own the means of production–tools, seed, and livestock–in common, but the land would be public property. Managers trained in modern farming methods would direct operations following plans made in Moscow. Party leaders knew that many peasants would not willingly give up the old ways, so they contented themselves with setting up demonstration collective farms until the late 1920s.

In 1929, Stalin ordered wholesale collectivization to begin, because he believed that it was essential to the success of the First Five‑Year Plan that the government should manage agriculture as well as industry. Party workers recruited from the cities streamed into the countryside, where they seized control of crops, livestock, and equipment, rewarded those who cooperated with them, and punished those who resisted. Peasants branded “kulaks”–those with a bit more property than average, those who spoke up against communists, and those who were simply in the wrong place at the wrong time–were arrested and deported to “special settlements” in desolate areas far from their homes. Ksenia Dubovitskaia was ten years old when the collectivizers came to her family’s house in a village in Tambov province. “These people started confiscating our property, which consisted of two sheep and one heifer, and all the linens like our bedding and other village things and they even took off me… a yellow dress that my older brother Grigory’s wife had sewn for me out of my mother’s skirt. They loaded it all up and took it away and we were left ‘naked as the day we were born.’ A day later my father was arrested… and two days after that we were thrown out of our house.”⁴

The government expected that attacking the wealthier peasants would rally poorer ones to support collectivization. Instead, most peasants did as the Uzbeks had done during the unveiling campaign: they united against the outsiders. First they tried to avoid the collectivizers or put them off, and when that did not work, they turned to more direct measures–protesting, destroying property, and attacking government agents and their collaborators.

Soon police were reporting that the countryside was awash in babi bunty, a term that translates, very loosely, as “the grannies’ revolt.” Peasant women had turned on landlords and merchants in the past. Now they attacked the collectivizers. They broke up meetings held to cultivate their support by yelling out their complaints, a tactic working‑class and peasant women had used against the Zhenotdel during the civil war. They refused to surrender their chickens, cows, and pigs. They marched on barns and tool sheds to take back what the collectivizers had seized. They prevented party operatives from arresting their neighbors. Sometimes they drove communists out of their villages and declared the collective farms dissolved. Many times they physically attacked the men they saw as persecutors. In Central Asia and Siberia, where resistance to collectivization was even more widespread than in the Slavic areas, women played a less prominent role, but there were some female‑led uprisings there too. In volatile Uzbekistan in 1930, the leaders of a crowd of three hundred women tried to strangle several communist leaders, not an easy task when wearing robes and veils.⁵

Local party and police officials feared that sending armed police and soldiers against unarmed women would increase the unrest, and they shrank from using force on women, particularly older ones who reminded them of their mothers. They also thought that men, especially village elders and priests, were behind the protests, that they were sending the women out because they knew the police would be loath to move against them. There may have been some truth in this. When asked why the men were taking a back seat, one male peasant replied wryly, “They [the women] are equal now; as they decide, so we will agree.”⁶ The resistance built to a furious level, and in March 1930 Stalin published an article that condemned the collectivizers for abusing the peasants.

After a short pause, however, the government renewed the pressure, with disastrous results. The violent assault on the villages, coupled with massive disruptions caused by the cumbersome process of establishing new management, led to catastrophic declines in food production. The situation was exacerbated by continuing resistance: peasants across the Soviet Union, from the steppes of Ukraine to the forests of Siberia, preferred slaughtering their livestock and privately selling or consuming their crops to turning them over to the government. As grain supplies dwindled, still more animals had to be destroyed before they starved to death. The central government compounded the calamity by refusing to lower the amount of grain farmers were required to deliver to the authorities. By 1932, famine, this time created by Moscow’s policies, ravaged the countryside. “So many laid [sic] dead in the streets around the cities, in yards and in houses,” remembered Anastasia Serikova, a child when famine swept through her village in Krasnodar in the Caucasus. “A cart came around all the time with a white horse, took the dead to the cemetery and threw them in a ditch like dead dogs. They’d throw them in from up top and sprinkle some dirt on them.”⁷

As conditions worsened, peasant women gave up their protests and turned to trying to survive. Once again hungry mothers took to the roads. Maria Belskaia was eight when she set off with her mother Arina and five brothers and sisters to find food in 1933. Her father had been arrested and their neighbors, starving themselves, had driven the family from their village in the Altai region of Siberia. Belskaia later described their pilgrimage: “We knocked on people’s windows and begged in Christ’s name for a piece of bread or a potato. While we still had flour, Mother would mix it with cherry blossoms or hawthorn and boil it in our little pot…. But then the flour ran out, and we had to live on whatever good people could give us. In those hungry days, there were not many good people around.”⁸

Belskaia’s family survived; many others did not. Between 5 and 7 million people died tragically in the famine of 1932–33. More than 2 million kulaks were deported to Siberia and Central Asia; a hundred thousand more were imprisoned.⁹ By 1933, the famished peasants had lost their battle with Soviet power. The government made some concessions; it granted villagers the right to own their houses and gardens and to keep cows and smaller animals. In city markets, they could sell their produce. Thereafter, the peasants’ “private plots” became the main source of fruits and vegetables for townspeople.