Moscow, 1937

by Karl Schlogel

  ‘Russia in flux’ (John Maynard) or the ‘quicksand society’ (Moshe Lewin) – for once the entire country came to a stop momentarily, whether in the cities or on a river steamer, in a yurt in Kazakhstan or in a hotel in Leningrad. Life in the Soviet sixth of the world came to a pause for a second – a fascinating and impressive achievement that would not have been possible but for the tremendous labour of preparation, organization and education. But that was the precondition of the success of a unique X-ray image of a nation in flux.

  An organization capable of carrying out the survey and of gathering the data had to be built up. Its scaffolding consisted of around a million enumerators, recruited chiefly from among students, teachers, white-collar workers, bookkeepers and collective farm managers. In addition, there were around 17,000 instructors. This army of people had to have buildings and offices. The enumerators had to be provided with skis and winter clothing, and sometimes with interpreters.10 The population had to be kept informed about the progress of the census. Two hundred million punched cards had to be printed and distributed throughout the country. Hollerith machines were ordered from Germany and set up in the central processing centres – Moscow, Leningrad and Kharkov. Information brochures were distributed among the population in vast numbers.11

  The sociological and demographic snapshot of 6 January 1937 had been taken only after a number of false starts and postponements. It had originally been scheduled for September 1932 – as a balance sheet of the results of the Great Leap Forward of the First Five-Year Plan. It was then postponed to 1935, and then again to 1936. All the questionnaires were still headed ‘All-Union Census 1936’.12 As a major political initiative, it was given huge prominence. High-ranking party and government leaders such as Molotov, Kaganovich and Mikoian were among the members of the commission of the Council of People’s Commissars responsible for implementing the census, as well as leading demographers and statisticians. Stalin himself took a hand in the final editing of the questionnaire – there had been three versions in all, the first being the most detailed. It was Stalin who had insisted on including the question about religious affiliation – in striking contrast to Lenin’s advice, this took a highly sceptical view of individual statements of religious belief. According to the ‘Instructions for enumerators’, the question was directed towards ‘current convictions’ rather than ‘the religion that the interviewee had given himself or been given by his parents’.13 Significant resources had to be mobilized for the information campaign and the analysis of the data. The enumerators and instructors had been selected and trained by 1 December 1936 and up to 100 million forms had to be printed and distributed.14 With hindsight, demographers and historians have given high marks to the entire process. The margin of error was very low, at about 0.5 to 0.6 per cent – i.e. around 1 million people.15

  But the most important effort during the preparation phase went into the formulation of the catalogue of questions with which the enumerators were to gather and classify information.

  Soviet demographers and statisticians already had relevant experience in this field, and there was an impressive corps of trained statisticians and demographers in existence, some of them going back to the organizations of the pre-revolutionary administration. They could build on the knowledge and experience acquired during the first great census of the Russian Empire in 1897, as well as during a second census that had been scheduled for 1912 but had fallen victim first to a postponement and finally to the outbreak of war. And they could also base their work on two earlier censuses carried out by the Soviet Union in 1920 or 1923 and 1926. The propaganda accompanying the 1937 census had pulled the pre-revolutionary censuses to pieces, claiming they were designed to obscure the true nature of class relations,16 and stressing the flaws in the 1926 census, even though it had resulted in the publication of a monumental work of over forty volumes.

  For the census itself, systematic handouts were produced that also incorporated foreign experience. Thus a Dictionary of Occupations was produced by a team led by S. Iozefovich, listing 14,000 occupations, including many new ones that had not existed at the time of the 1926 census: combine-harvester operators, brigadiers and electric locomotive drivers. Occupations such as cattle traders, which had lost their importance, were eliminated from the dictionary. Categories such as ‘rentier’ disappeared, but among those that survived were ‘persons who live from renting out houses, loans, the sale of property and foreign remittances’. The group of déclassé persons features in detail – beggars and pedlars, for example – whereas magicians and pimps have now disappeared. Of interest, too, is the ‘Dictionary of Religions, produced for processing the data gathered during the census of 1937’, which listed 467 religions practised in the USSR.

  The questionnaire of 1937 contained a list of fourteen questions together with guidance about how to answer them. There were questions about 1) sex, 2) age, 3) nationality, 4) mother tongue, 5) religion, 6) marital status, 7) citizenship, 8) literacy, 9) education, 10) training level, 11) secondary education, 12) current occupation, 13) place of work, and 14) social class.17

  With these questions the bureaucracy of the national census strove to gauge the dimensions of Soviet society; this enabled it to read Soviet society like a book, but also to structure it from the leadership’s perspective.

  Ten years after the census of 1926: balance sheet after the Great Leap Forward

  What was the task facing the census authorities ten years after the census of 1926? Why had another census become necessary? How did the enumerators react to people’s questions? Mikhail Zoshchenko, who had already taken part in the census of 1923, believed that this time everything would be different. The present census ‘would help to organize life even better’.18 The population was told that the statistical data were needed to help improve infrastructure planning in the changed conditions of the day: the construction of schools, hospitals and roads.

  The political leadership, inadequately informed about the conditions and mood among the people, needed a more thoroughgoing analysis, a confirmation of its thesis of the disappearance of mutually hostile classes and the victory of socialism, which would provide legitimation for the new constitution that had been passed by the Congress of the Soviets in December 1936. The constitution spoke of the ‘friendly classes of workers and peasants’ and of ‘two forms of property’ – state property and cooperative property. The new constitution was intended to eliminate the unequal treatment of Soviet citizens with regard to voting rights and the exclusion of certain categories from political life, and to introduce a ‘universal, equal, direct and secret suffrage’. The constitution was supposed also to take account of the changed structure of the USSR, since the number of the republics in the union had now risen from seven to eleven. This was the result of transforming the autonomous Kazakh and Kyrgyz republics into Union republics, and of dissolving the Transcaucasian Federation into the republics of Armenia, Azerbaijan and Georgia.19

  The pressure of high expectations weighed heavily on the census. There was a very explicit belief in an enormous growth in population, in a continuous, more or less complete introduction of literacy, and in a complete disappearance of the ‘former people’. But there was also great uncertainty and a need to shed light on the situation and to get one’s bearings. Ignoring the basic rules of science, the political leadership more or less pre-empted certain results with a torrent of newspaper articles and propaganda leaflets. The census was supposed to provide proof of ‘tempestuous growth’, ‘monumental progress’ and ‘extraordinary successes’. This expectation referred above all to the general increase in population, as well as to the fact that ‘our homeland is displaying an incomparable rate of population growth’ and is overtaking the capitalist countries. There were widely held expectations, partly generated by Stalin’s speech at the Seventeenth Party Congress, where he referred to a total population of 168 million, and partly by extrapolation from the figures from the 1926 census, which went as high as 180.3 million
.20

  Self-analysis, self-education, data acquisition

  The census failed to satisfy such expectations. A document attempting to justify this failure was issued shortly after the census was concluded. It underlined once again the importance of population growth in the rivalry between socialism and capitalism.

  The total population of the USSR amounts to around 162 million people, as compared to 147 million according to the census of 17 December 1926. That means an increase of 15 million people, or 10.2%, in ten years. Thus the average growth over a period of ten years amounts to 1% per annum. This rate of growth far surpasses that of the growth in the majority of the industrialized capitalist countries – Germany at 0.7% for 1935, England (0.3%), France (negative growth of 0.05%) – and it is exceeded only by the USA and Japan (1.3%) for 1933.21

  The final figures – still at around 162 million – ended up well below the extrapolations and also below the increases constantly referred to by the leadership. They are the expression of the demographic catastrophe that had taken place between the two censuses and that resulted from collectivization and the famine it produced.

  Secondly, the census documented the fundamental shift in the ratio of the rural to the urban population, in particular the dramatic growth of the towns. The rural population still amounted to two-thirds of the whole, but was in decline. Of the 162 million, around 44 million lived in the towns, and a further116 million remained in the countryside.22 The statistics registered the doubling of the urban population, from 21.6 million to 51.9 million, between 1926 and 1937.23 Growth was particularly marked in the urban districts and the newly established industrial estates. The population of the Moscow region had increased by 39.3 per cent since 1926, that of the Gorky region by 25.9 per cent, the Sverdlovsk region by 31.6 per cent and the Donetsk region by as much as 59.1 per cent. Since 1926 the number of towns with over 50,000 inhabitants had doubled, while forty-five towns in the RSFSR had over 100,000 inhabitants and twenty-three had over 200,000.24 In certain towns we can in fact speak of hyper-urbanization. In some towns population growth was particularly dramatic. Moscow had grown from 2 million in 1926 to 3.7 million in 1937 – i.e. by 185 per cent. During the same period, Leningrad grew from 1.6 million to close on 3 million – i.e. by 180 per cent. Other towns had an even more dramatic growth rate. Zaporozh'e grew by 440 per cent, Stalinsk by more than 4,000 per cent and Kemerovo by over 500 per cent.25

  This can be contrasted with regions where the population had grown only slightly or had even declined. The Kalinin region was a notable instance of the latter, since its population had dwindled by 92.3 per cent compared with the 1926 level, the Western region by 92.3 per cent, the Volga Germans by 85.6 per cent and the Saratov region by 77 per cent.26 This reflects not just the extent of migration to the towns but also the consequences of the famine and the deportation of the peasant population in these territories.

  A third group is provided by the republics of Central Asia and the Caucasus. These showed an ‘extraordinarily high rate of population growth’.27

  The census also rendered visible the ethnic structure of the multinational state. Altogether 109 nations, nationalities or ethnic groups were listed in the statistics, some of them with no more than a few tens of thousands. The 1926 census had been based on the premise of a far larger number of nationalities – 195 in all.28 As was only to be expected, the largest group, with around 94 million, were the Russians, followed by the Ukrainians with circa 26 million, the Belorussians with around 5 million and the Jews with 2.7 million.29 But it was not just the USSR that was polyethnic, but also the RSFSR and the large towns. Moscow had eleven large national groups: 87.5 per cent Russians, 6.5 per cent Jews, 0.8 per cent Tatars, 0.8 per cent Poles, 0.8 per cent Ukrainians, 0.7 per cent Belorussians, 0.5 per cent Latvians, 0.4 per cent Germans, 0.3 per cent Armenians, 0.1 per cent Lithuanians and 0.1 per cent Estonians.30

  The census also recorded the changes in the ethnic landscape resulting from the enforced migration and deportation of the kulaks from Ukraine to the east. In addition, it revealed the decline of certain ethnic groups, such as the Volga Germans, as a consequene of famine. In Siberia and the Urals, the statistics brought a new mixed ethnic landscape into being, ‘a tiger skin’. In every case they demonstrated that the USSR and the RSFSR were both polyethnic formations, with mixtures and distortions created by migration and deportations. A relatively large Ukrainian community of 53,000 people suddenly made its appearance in the Sverdlovsk region of Siberia, in the Far East. Islands – that is to say, ethnically mixed urban communities – formed, particularly in the ‘large-scale urban building sites’.31 Similarly, population growth in some rural regions could be explained by the numbers of deportees and ‘special’ settlers – as, for example, in Karelia, whose population was augmented by the arrival of 77,000 prisoners and guards, in the Komi Autonomous Republic, whose population grew with the addition of 15,000 camp inmates, and in the Far East, with an additional 354,000 prisoners.32

  The rubric ‘Sex’ revealed an obvious disequilibrium between the sexes, one that had become evident even in the 1920s, as the consequence of the First World War and the Civil War. In 1920 the proportion of men to women was 44.9 per cent to 55.1.33 By 1926 the proportions were 47.8 per cent men and 52.2 per cent women. In 1937 the proportion of women rose to 52.7 per cent, and in 1939 it still stood at 52.6 per cent.34 One factor reinforcing this trend was migration and the great number of men who had been deported.35

  Under ‘Age’, the chief finding was that a greater number of older people remained in the villages, while the younger ones migrated to the towns.36

  The statistics on education showed a decline in illiteracy, although illiteracy rates among the population as a whole remained very high, with men more literate than women (men 86 per cent, women 66.2 per cent). Among young people, literacy rates exceeded 90 per cent.37 The unequal distribution as between town and country, men and women, young and old, was also reflected in educational attainment. Here a divergence between east and west can also be observed.38

  ‘Religious affiliation’ is particularly revealing, having been included in Soviet demography in 1937 for the first and only time. As mentioned, a Dictionary of Religions, listing 467 different faiths, was created specially for the purpose in the run-up to the census of 1937. The questions under this rubric evidently provoked great scepticism and even trepidation. The collectivization and the militant anti-God movement were still fresh in the memory. People feared expulsion from the collective farms, being treated like kulaks, being taxed more heavily or even being deported.39 On the other hand, the discussions surrounding the constitution had made people feel freer and more optimistic. Priests had urged their parishioners to call for the reopening of the churches. In the light of the more difficult conditions facing people, the result was striking: 55.3 million people over sixteen – i.e. 56.7 per cent – claimed to be believers, while 42.2 million – i.e. 43.3 per cent – described themselves as unbelievers.40 There were 900,000 ‘Don’t knows’. The proportion of believers was smaller among the literate young. The overwhelming proportion of believers were Christian (75.3 per cent); 14.9 per cent called themselves Muslims, 0.5 per cent Jews and 0.2 per cent Buddhists.41

  Analysis of the occupational structure revealed above all a sharp increase in the proportion of ‘workers’ and ‘white-collar workers’ and a growing differentiation of vocational groups and specialisms. Blue-and white-collar workers were further subdivided by status and function – higher-, middle-and lower-ranking personnel, planners and supervisors. There was a list of freelance professionals – artists, writers and directors – but also ‘others’, such as hairdressers.

  The rubrics reflect the changes in social and vocational structures brought about by collectivization and industrialization. There is an evident increase in the number of white-collar workers and administrators. Overall, we see a simplification of the class structure and a simultaneous internal modernization and differentiation among social
and vocational groups. The picture of society that emerges is far richer and more varied than normally comes to mind when we think of ‘Stalinist society’. There are shoemakers, hairdressers, bakers, watch- and clockmakers, tailors, dentists, laundries, cafés and haberdasheries, even if their variety is concealed by their collective names or the term ‘cooperative’. Society still has its ‘church servants’, house owners and ‘non-working’ vagabonds and beggars. ‘Stalinist society’ is a society that emerged from the great vortex of the upheavals caused by war and revolution – that is to say, a highly fragmented, atomized society, but also one whose elements had been thoroughly mixed, in the sense that elements of the old world coexisted with others that had just formed and were starting to make a significant impact. The dissolving of fixed structures and class barriers, on the one hand, was a fundamental cause of the hyper-mobility characteristic of the early 1930s, while, on the other hand, the strengthening of new groups and group identities constituted a retarding and stabilizing feature. Even at a time of a ‘Great Leap Forward’, ‘society’ – which in this instance is a theoretical construct, an intellectual expedient – could not simply free itself from existing circumstances. The coexistence and amalgam of the old order and the new was the characteristic feature of those years. What we must focus on is the overall conclusion: the society revealed by the census was far from being as homogeneous as the leadership may have imagined or desired. It was also far removed from the simplistic idea of a society that could just be ordered around and regimented. On the contrary, it was highly heterogeneous, chaotic, anarchic and stubborn.