Moscow, 1937

by Karl Schlogel

  Likhachev was present at almost every public occasion of importance. He was there in February 1937 when Ordzhonikdze visited the car plant a few days before his suicide; he was also present at Ordzhonikidze’s funeral in Red Square, where he led the delegation from the car plant. With no more than a brief interruption, he rose to the apex of Soviet society, crowning his progress with his election to the Supreme Soviet on 12 December 1937 as a deputy for a constituency in the Kursk region. But his real significance lay not in his parliamentary mandate but in his management of one of the largest Soviet factories and the transformation of 40,000 immigrant peasants into a more or less homogeneous workforce that soon referred to itself with pride as the avtozavodtsy, the car workers.

  Factory patriotism: the factory as melting pot

  At the beginning of the thirties, the large factories were referred to in official Bolshevik propaganda as ‘proletarian fortresses’. But, as Sergo Ordzhonikidze remarked, they were really more like ‘nomadic gypsy camps’.21 The building sites and factories were the provisional endpoint of a vast migration that had gripped millions of people. A second great wave of migration – following a decade of war and civil war – now passed over the entire country. Its starting point was the village; its goal was the town. Millions of people were swept out of their villages into the towns following the violent process of collectivization, with its brutal attack on the traditional village and the peasants’ way of life. The same thing resulted from the unleashing of war on the village and from the famine that had overwhelmed village populations in large parts of European Russia, Ukraine, the northern Caucasus and the Volga region. The town became a place of refuge that offered some hope of survival. Here people could find food supplies that had been taken away from the peasantry; here they could go to ground and escape persecution; here they could look for a route into a civilized world with schools, training, radios and places to live. The rising population figures of Moscow, the houses bursting at the seams in Proletarskii District, the chaotically crowded building sites and workshops of the newly built factories, are all products of what Moshe Lewin called ‘the quicksand society’, which threatened to bury all established structures, overran or undermined all institutional networks, subverted existing hierarchies and shredded all pre-existing routines.

  How was an experienced workforce supposed to emerge from such a chaotically assembled mass? How was it supposed to learn to obey the rhythms and ordered processes essential to manufacturing and to develop into a ‘coherent body of workers’? Only a very few of the 40,000 employees of the car plant – that was the number in the late 1930s – were ‘traditional proletarians’ – in other words, second- or third-generation workers. The overwhelming majority of them had never seen the inside of a factory or operated a machine. The encounter with the city came as an enormous shock, an experience they could come to terms with only by making a supreme effort.

  They could stand for hours on the hill by their dwellings with their heads back and mouths open, following airplanes in flight with greedy curiosity. Trams startled them, and they jumped aside to avoid automobiles. The factory staggered them – the impression made on them by its incomprehensible appearance was enormous.

  The young peasant Ivan Gomozenkov, who had come to Moscow in 1937, recalled that

  electric lights shone in every building along the street. I had never seen such electric lights before – I liked them so much …! I liked Moscow so much that I think I would have sold my soul to stay in Moscow! Why? Because Moscow is a beauty. And when I went to Red Square, oh, I liked it, especially the Kremlin!22

  The factory with its machinery came as a shock:

  The ground shook from the rumble of machinery. On the machines I was walking past there poured an endless stream of water and milk (soon I learned it was not milk but a chemical emulsion) … I was trying not to bother anyone and not to get caught on some sort of a flywheel. It seemed as if one careless movement and I’d be hurled into a machine.23

  With its trams, the Metro, cinemas, theatres, pubs, shops and culture parks, and its dark, seductive and not unthreatening corners, Moscow must have made an overwhelming impression on the immigrant peasants from the provinces. They were more than willing to put up with the drawbacks of this exciting experience in exchange for entry into this new world: wretched living conditions, hour-long journeys on foot, queues and, by no means the least of their tribulations, the mockery of the established Muscovites.

  Migration to the towns was nothing new for the peasants of Russia. From as early as the middle of the nineteenth century, the process of industrialization had fed on this migration; for two generations knowledge of the city and industry, as well as the new opportunities to earn money, had trickled through to the countryside. But the current situation represented a radical break. The migrants of the thirties no longer came into the towns just for a season, for the winter, with the intention of returning to their village. They now left their villages behind for ever. Collectivization had robbed them of their independent economy. Hundreds of thousands had fled from active repression; they had entered the towns so as to go into hiding. The village cosmos they left behind now lay in ruins. But that did not mean they now stayed in one place. On the contrary, they kept on moving if they found something better. As long as labour was in such short supply and the employers were so eager to take on any worker who turned up at their works, they could all keep on the move. The ability to switch from one factory to the next was almost the only, and certainly the most important, weapon in the hands of the newly emerging working class, once the unions had become the ‘conveyor belts’ of management by the state, the Party and the industry. Moving on was an everyday mass phenomenon, a feature of ‘Russia in flux’; it epitomized the dynamics of the dissolution of the old peasantry and the formation of a working class from scratch. It was the sign of a provisional state, a basic social instability that threatened to destroy every trace of a new consolidation of labour discipline and routine.

  Throughout the day an unending flow of people spills along the factory corridors, through the workshops, along the stairwells. This is the best index of both the level of discipline and the organization of production. In the corridor of the electronics factory they trade books and sell ice cream. Sometimes it’s a factory, sometimes it’s a department store.24

  It followed that the supreme principle of all industrial and factory policy was to call a halt to mass emigration from the country to the town and the movement from factory to factory, and to get the entire process under control. The strict regulation of movement into the towns, the introduction of internal passports in December 1932, the importance of work records, the tightening up of work discipline were the obvious first steps. But these disciplinary, policing measures could be evaded and remained largely ineffectual when it came to ‘re-forging the masses’.25 The problem was how to persuade people to think and work in accordance with the rhythm of production as opposed to the rhythm of the seasons. In other words, it was vital for the workers to internalize work rules, to respect the need for punctuality – all ‘new men’ have watches! – and to learn how to operate machines and submit to the discipline of the production line.

  Proletarskii District and the car plant thus became a giant social laboratory. It represented a break with the past and a starting point for an entry into a new way of life. It was the place for the explicit and implicit metamorphosis of a world that had been smashed but had not yet disappeared. It was filled with expectations, dreams, hopes and traumas. This was where people encountered new opportunities. It was the site of a millionfold mimicry and a desperate need to fit in, a process of acculturation under the conditions of a state of emergency, since everything depended on whether a person could discover a route into the new, Soviet society. The way back had been cut off, blocked; the only route that remained was the escape into one’s new role, one’s new identity. The creation of a workforce with an identity of its own was of crucial importance for the stabili
ty of the country and the regime.

  The conditions in which this process unfolded have been well described by an American working in the USSR:

  Kuznetsov lived with about 550 others, men and women, in a wooden structure about 800 feet long and fifteen feet wide. The room contained approximately 500 narrow beds, covered with mattresses filled with straw or dried leaves. There were no pillows or blankets. Coats and garments were being utilized for covering. Some of the residents had no beds and slept on the floor or in wooden boxes. In some cases beds were used by one shift during the day and by others at night. There were no screens or wall to give any privacy to the occupants of the barracks … I could not stay in the barracks very long. I could not stand the stench of kerosene and unwashed bodies. The only washing facility was a pump outside. The toilet was a rickety, unheated shanty, without seats.26

  In order somehow or other to come to terms with this daily experience, with no electric light, no waste disposal, but instead with overcrowded dormitories and corridors, lice, rats, brawls and rapes, there were Comrades’ Courts for the dispensation of justice in barracks with over 100 inhabitants. Even so, the barracks were one step higher than the worst living conditions of all – the self-made, improvised shelters in wooden huts and dugouts.

  Without some knowledge of this background, it is not possible to understand the outbursts of rage, despair, hatred and desire for revenge that were common occurrences in the works meetings during 1937. The cause of such outbursts almost always lay in such basic needs: light, heating, toilet facilities, hygiene, health care and transport. The whole process of coping with these novel and barely tolerable conditions brought the new arrivals from the villages to the point of total exhaustion, and it is a miracle that there were not any major outbreaks of fury or excesses of violence. Basically, these were social spaces in which the immigrants were left to their own devices and their own fates, territories from which ‘the state’ was absent, but where the black market, prostitution and violence were daily occurrences and where the police never ventured. ‘Hooliganism’ was the name for an entire spectrum of ‘antisocial behaviour’. Stabbings occurred daily. ‘Gangs had to patrol their neighborhoods because they could not rely on the police to maintain order in their settlements.’27 Paradoxically, the state had in fact ‘faded away’, but more in the sense of being a ‘failing state’.

  What did the immigrants bring with them into the towns, into the unknown and even hostile world? Their basic lack of needs, their ability to cope with a hopeless situation. The lessons of the otkhod, the immigration to the towns which took place in the nineteenth century, were still current, namely the assistance given by the regional and village networks, the solidarity of the work cooperatives (arteli) – which became ‘brigades’ in socialist parlance. They also brought their natural intelligence and the ability to adapt to new and surprising situations and, lastly, the traditions of their home culture: songs, regional dances, the church calendar and the festivals, communal drinking, group boxing contests, survival techniques and long-standing habits of fending for oneself – for example, by starting up a garden or breeding rabbits in the backyard of the barracks. ‘The Soviet brigades were often no more than the new name for the old village cooperatives (arteli).’28 The collective, the brigade, was no more than a new name for the group which carried out mainly traditional work and frequently also shared out the wages equally. The immigrants’ experience and the images that absorbed them seeped into the town with them. The traumatic experiences of collectivization and deportation filled nocturnal dreams over Moscow when the young peasants had lain down beneath their workbenches or on their bedsteads in the barracks. We can be quite certain that most of the political jargon, all the talk of Trotskyism, Bukharinism, sabotage, spying, and so on, must have gone over their heads and remained a book with seven seals. This meant that Proletarskii District, this ‘village in the town’, must have remained largely beyond the perimeter of the dominant ‘political culture’.

  In this way an intermediary space must have come into being, consisting of old experiences with new ones overlapping them: icons and pictures of Lenin, orthodox holidays and revolutionary festivities, the cinema together with village dances in a clearing in a city park, the daily march to work and the metro journey on holidays, leisure time with agitprop or card games, dominoes and football. This was the city as the great educator of the ‘quicksand society’. The factory was in demand as the means of disciplining a mass of people working stubbornly in accordance with its own rhythms, but these people were also stretched to their limits and beyond. The more unskilled workers poured into the towns, the further productivity declined. Every progress in training was immediately cancelled out by the floods of unskilled workers who could not even read or write. It was a labour of Sisyphus to train these peasant workers to adapt to industrial rhythms, and absenteeism became a basic component of everyday factory life.

  ‘Mass criticism’, or the orchestration of hatred and despair

  The factory chronicle whose publication had been planned for 1933 was not yet ready by the jubilee year of 1937, even though the Central Committee had put Boris Tal, the former editor of the magazine Bolshevik, in charge. Work on the history of the factory was halted even though much preparatory material had already been amassed.29 Boris Tal was arrested on 2 November 1937 and sentenced to death.30 He had been deputy head of the Propaganda and Agitation Section in the Central Committee of the Communist Party, as well as deputy editor- in-chief of the government newspaper Izvestiia since 1936. The great confusion that had afflicted other socialist building sites and projects – the Moscow–Volga Canal, the census, film production – had now caught up with the representation of the showpieces of the Soviet car industry.

  But this was not the only indicator pointing to the fact that 1937 represented a major caesura. Important though the contribution of the Stalin automobile plant was for the motorization of the USSR, the planned quota for that year had only been 86 per cent fulfilled. Only 60,259 trucks were built (instead of 65,000) and only 1,294 cars were produced (instead of 5,060). The failure to produce enough spare parts was particularly damaging, since only 75.1 per cent of the target figures were reached. There had been similar failures in 1936.

  Even if there is no documented history of the factory, there are definite signs that the hurricane that swept over other factories – Serp i Molot and Elektrozavod – did not spare the Stalin automobile plant. In 1937 routine production was disrupted by an unbroken chain of events. Management and factory structures were cut back, and the authority of the management was badly undermined and weakened by the increasing attacks on wreckers and enemies of the people, and by the lack of vigilance. Even though the Party organization in the car works was powerful, its position became more or less hopeless when faced with 40,000 workers of both sexes. At the beginning of 1937, there were 3,017 Party members in the factory, including 823 candidate members. In 1936, it had 103 active circles, with about 3,000 members. There were agitprop brigades, with 220 propagandists and 500 agitators, and speakers whose ready wit and universal expertise in explaining policy were much praised. But they were unable to achieve total coverage of the workforce; in fact they did not even reach the late shifts or the night shifts.31

  The work of education, training and disciplining, on whose success the integration of the immigrant peasants ultimately depended, made scarcely any inroads into the constant influx of newcomers. The rapid expansion of production and the workforce rendered nugatory every attempt at progress in training and skills development, and this in turn cancelled out every increase in production. All measures taken – and these looked very impressive in quantitative terms – turned out to be a drop in the ocean. Advanced training courses, the use of trainees, improved literacy, socialist competition, a convoluted payment system – all of these efforts to stimulate production and make it more efficient failed to guarantee production increases. In this already strained situation, whatever was not in the plan, w
hatever was not dictated by the needs of the production process, necessarily disrupted work routines and factory life in general. This proved to be the case in 1937 to a hitherto unprecedented degree. Production called for tranquillity, discipline and a functioning routine, while 1937 was the opposite of tranquillity. One wave of meetings followed after another; newly established committees and managements were quickly voted out or exposed in public meetings, subjected to mass criticism, forced to perform self-criticism and, as often as not, arrested as soon as the meeting had finished. In 1937 leaders in almost every walk of life were overthrown and replaced: in factory administrations, in the factory and union committees, in the Party organizations and finally in the Soviet state itself.

  There can be no doubt that the shocks unleashed by the purges led to a reverse for the production process and on occasion to its total breakdown:

  Overall the purges disrupted production and left a legacy of embitterment and fear extremely detrimental to normal industrial and societal function. Industrial growth fell from 28.8 percent in 1936 to 11.8 percent in 1938, and contemporaries wrote of an ‘atmosphere of distrust’ that poisoned initiative and cooperation. In 1938 the annual call for norm revisions was skipped because the managerial ranks had been so badly depleted. At the end of that year Party leaders launched a campaign to reestablish the authority of managers and engineers, crediting them with technical innovations that a short time earlier they would have attributed to Stakhanovites.32