Even more important for the fate of the Soviet republics was the tremendous growth in centralization of the economy. Republican plans for economic development were swamped by new central authorities’ grandiose schemes for regional development based on economic, not ethnic, criteria. In the northern autonomous republics of Russia, no local authority could compete with the sheer economic power of the GULAG, even when the political arm of the NKVD was not involved. Ukrainian and Siberian economic development followed the dictates of the all-union industrial Commissariats, Gosplan, and other agencies. The result in many areas was massive economic development but also ultimate erosion of the authority of local party committees and republican governments. The republican authorities (including the Russian republic) were largely left with agricultural issues, by their nature requiring more local control. The hierarchy that emerged from industrialization was not based on the federal state structure, but on the economic structure. The hierarchy was not ethnic or politicaclass="underline" a district or a republic with many factories under a high priority commissariat such as heavy industry or defense was favored both with investment and consumer goods. A district with light industry was not. This system favored the Ukrainian Donbass and neglected central Russian towns where the predominant industries were textile factories.
In some respects the central authorities continued to pay attention to local issues. For all the centralization, the formal federal structure remained. The 1936, “Stalin” constitution perpetuated the federal structure of the USSR, by now including twelve union republics and many autonomous republics under them. The end of the “indigenization” policy in the party came with the assault on local nationalism, but Stalin did not replace the local minorities in the party leadership with Russians. Local nationality party members came to be the majority in almost all union and autonomous republics, including the leadership groups, though Stalin continued to bring in occasional trusted outsiders at the top, like Nikita Khrushchev in the Ukraine in the wake of the 1937–38 terror. The Soviet Union’s central leadership was multi-national. Stalin himself was Georgian as was Orzdzhonikidze and the post-1938 head of the NKVD, Lavrentii Beriia. Molotov and Voroshilov were both Russian, while Kaganovich and the foreign minister in the 1930s, Maxim Litvinov, were Jewish. Mikoyan was Armenian. The campaign against local nationalism did not imply cultural Russification. Stalin and the leadership were perfectly happy for the non-Russians to speak and write native languages, as long as Moscow retained political control and Moscow ran most of the economy. In Russian-speaking Ukrainian cities the newspapers were still mostly in Ukrainian until 1939. After about 1932 the Soviet authorities began to heavily promote the celebration of non-Russian writers and artists in the central press, organizing meetings with Stalin and other leaders in Moscow to great press coverage. Pre-revolutionary Russian culture received a similar positive re-evaluation, culminating in the Pushkin anniversary celebrations of 1937. In the same years in the Ukraine new statues of the poet Taras Shevchenko appeared, to great organized festivity, and similar figures were glorified or occasionally invented in the other republics. This was not merely a cultural campaign, for it formed one of the foundations of “friendship of peoples,” the Soviet attempt to bond the various nations of the Soviet Union by downplaying conflicts of the past and emphasizing the supposedly harmonious present and future. In a predominantly centralized economy and state, the promotion of local culture alongside Russian provided a way to build a multinational society that would move toward a unified socialist state.
Soviet policy was not uniform in all the non-Russian republics in these years. In the Muslim areas Soviet leadership moved very cautiously against Islam. In Central Asia the main issue in the 1920s had been the abolition of the veil for Muslim women, an issue on which the small local intelligentsia was in general agreement. Most of the southern Islamic areas were also not yet the object of massive industrialization drives, though collectivization, when it came, was normally as harsh as in Russia and the Ukraine. The one great disaster in Central Asia was in Kazakhstan. Kazakhstan was still to a large extent nomadic in 1930 and collectivization implied “sedentarization,” that is, nomadic herders were to settle down and raise their stock in one area. This policy set off internal struggles inside the clans that combined with intense party pressure and produced a massive crisis. The nomadic Kazakhs responded by slaughtering their animals or fleeing across the border to other Soviet republics and even to China. Over a million became refugees and over a million, some twenty percent of the Kazakh population, died of hunger or disease. In the succeeding years, the Kazakh authorities managed to resettle most of the refugees in Kazakhstan, and stock-raising slowly recovered, but the demographic catastrophe’s effects lasted for decades.
Another series of paradoxes grew from the outcome of the transformation of Soviet society. Though terrorized by the events of 1937–38, the population at the end of the 1930s was much better educated, more urban, and in most ways more “modern” than in 1928. Some thirty-one percent of the population lived in urban areas, double the pre-1917 figure, and almost all of the population had at least basic literacy. Ties with older traditions disappeared. The Orthodox Church and other religions were essentially smashed by the anti-religious campaigns: only a few hundred churches remained open in the entire country, and the great majority of the clergy were dead or in camps. The traditional rhythm of the Russian year, with Shrovetide, Lent, and Easter simply evaporated without churches to support it, and the Communist festivals, November 7 and May 1 replaced them, with a secular New Year celebration in between. The huge expansion in urban population meant that millions left the world of the peasantry. People who had never seen a complex machine before now ran tram lines and built airplanes. Basic consumer goods were scarce, but movies, popular music, and the radio provided mass entertainment of a more or less modern sort. Mass education, especially in technical subjects, was a priority and tens of thousands of students received the basics of modern science, while surviving crowded, unheated dormitories and wretched and erratic food. This sort of speeded-up education allowed Stalin to fill the positions left empty by the arrests of the great terror with people from peasant and working class backgrounds but who were more or less able to do their jobs.
The five-year plans were a qualified success. The Soviet leadership regularly used deceptive statistical methods to make the results look better, but the actual results in industry were impressive enough by 1940. The USSR was now the world’s third industrial power, after the United States and Germany. The new industrial plants had modern equipment, and many of them were located in the Urals and Siberia, places of yet untapped wealth that were also far from the increasingly threatened frontier. Small villages had turned into cities, and entirely new industrial areas came into being. Some of the promises of socialism were beginning to be realized. The People’s Commissariat of Health doubled the number of doctors and medical personnel between 1932 and 1940, and vaccination and hygiene programs markedly decreased the death rates from disease. At the same time, years of famine, deprivations, and crowded and unsanitary housing provided immense obstacles to the new and mostly female medical personnel. The Communists had always promoted the equality of women, and by the 1930s the work force was almost half female. Some women began to appear even as tractor drivers on the collective farms and workers in heavy industry. Some professions, such as medicine, were rapidly becoming primarily the domain of women. The successes of women pilots and workers were the subject of huge propaganda campaigns in the media. The large gap in education between women and men virtually closed, at least in the cities. As in all cases, the reality of daily life provided major obstacles: in light industry, where most workers were women, there was never enough daycare for children. Though women were paid the same as men for the same work, the predominantly female light industries were lower in priority and hence the wages were lower and fewer, and worse consumer goods were available through the workplace. The burden of family continued to fall on women even when daycare centers and kindergartens appeared. It was women who bore the brunt of standing in lines for scarce commodities and forming informal networks to obtain them.