The purges were essentially of two kinds, each extensive and feeding off the other. ‘Social purging’ (i.e. the exclusion of individuals from privileged backgrounds from institutions of higher education) was most pronounced in 1928–9. Usually carried out by Komsomol and local party committees, this type of purge was often spontaneous, irritated authorities in the affected commissariats, and ultimately provoked resolutions of condemnation. The second, more formal, purge was conducted by special commissions of Rabkrin (the Workers’ and Peasants’ Inspectorate) and the party’s Central Committee. With a mandate from the Sixteenth Party Conference, Rabkrin removed some 164,000 Soviet employees in the course of 1929–30. The purge in the party, which removed about 11 per cent of its members in 1929, sought primarily to expel careerists, corrupt elements, and those guilty of criminal offences, but it also took into account political criteria, such as the failure to carry out the party line in the countryside.
Purges constituted one aspect of the cultural revolution: no less important was the intensification and politicization of struggles within the professions. These conflicts generally pitted the pre-revolutionary (predominantly non-Marxist) intelligentsia against the new Soviet intelligentsia (overwhelmingly communist). What the former interpreted as a full-scale assault against culture itself, the latter saw only as its ‘proletarianization’. The former expected intellectuals to set an example for the masses or to take them under their wing; the latter advocated subordination to and learning from the masses. This reversal of valorization prematurely terminated many careers and led to the temporary abolition of secondary-school education. Not for nothing did the Marx–Engels metaphor of ‘withering away’ of school and law appeal to cultural revolutionaries.
Perhaps the best-documented struggle of the cultural revolution was in literature. Thus, writers and critics affiliated with the Russian Association of Proletarian Writers (with the Russian acronym RAPP) fought bitterly against their Marxist rivals in the ‘Literary Front’ (Litfront). And both stridently attacked the political aloofness of ‘fellow travellers’, as well as the decadent individualism of the literary avant-garde. The former Komsomol activist, L. L. Averbakh, helped RAPP to establish, if only briefly, ‘proletarian hegemony’ (typified by its cult of the ‘little man’) over literature. Time Forward!, Valentin Kataev’s novel of 1932 about a record-breaking shift at Magnitogorsk, represented its apotheosis. But what has been called a ‘wave of reaction’ against this ethos of the First Five-Year Plan was apparent even before the end of the Plan. ‘It was as if’, writes Katerina Clark, ‘everyone had tired of the “little man”, of sober reality and efficiency; they looked for something “higher”.’ This yearning corresponded to Stalin’s own impatience with the turbulence of literary politics. On 23 April 1932 a Central Committee resolution ‘On the Reformation of Literary-Artistic Organizations’ formally abolished RAPP and called for the creation of a ‘single Union of Soviet Writers with a communist fraction in it’.
The ‘proletarian episode’ in Soviet literature had its analogues in other fields such as legal theory, pedagogy, and architecture. In each case, rival claimants to the correct interpretation of Marxism battled it out, employing such terms of abuse as ‘bourgeois pseudo-science’, ‘Menshevizing idealism’, and ‘right deviation-ism’. As in literary criticism, the iconoclastic and even nihilistic tendencies of the cultural revolutionaries (E. B. Pashukanis’s ‘commodity exchange’ theory of the law; V. N. Shulgin’s notion of the ‘withering away of the school’; anti-urbanism among town planners) ran their course until the Central Committee—or, in the case of historical writing, Stalin himself—intervened to restore order if not the status quo ante.
The third dimension of the cultural revolution, which has received much attention from historians, was the rapid and systematic promotion of workers into white-collar positions, either directly from ‘the bench’ or after crash-course training programmes at institutions of higher education. As Sheila Fitzpatrick has shown, this programme of proletarian ‘advancement’ (vydvizhenie) represented ‘the positive corollary of the campaign against the “bourgeois” intelligentsia and the social purging of the bureaucracy’. In time, the beneficiaries of this process (the vydvizhentsy), formed the new Soviet intelligentsia, which was more numerous, plebeian, and (befitting an industrializing nation) technically oriented than its bourgeois predecessor. And it was also more beholden to the political leadership. Two themes thus dominate most accounts of the cultural revolution. One was its anti-intellectualism, tinged with a certain xenophobic colouring. The other was its social radicalism, rendered as ‘revolution from below’, where ‘below’ signified three distinct phenomena: the spontaneous actions of lower-level party committees and the Komsomol, the revolt of younger and previously marginal elements within the professions, and the promotion of proletarians. But one should not overlook the degree to which the cultural revolution was coded as a male pursuit and the advantage that proletarianism gave to ethnic Russians at the expense of peoples in less industrialized areas. Dissolution of both the party’s women’s department (Zhenotdel) and Jewish section (Evsektsiia) in 1930 may well have reflected these biases.
Communist Neo-Traditionalism
In 1933, after several years of almost unceasing tumult, the Soviet Union embarked on the Second Five-Year Plan. Early drafts of the Plan exhibited the same ‘great leap forward’ psychology that had characterized its predecessor. But by late 1932, when it became clear that the economy was overstrained, the key indices were scaled back. Instead of the 100 billion kilowatt-hours of electricity originally projected for 1937, the revised version (adopted by the Seventeenth Party Congress in February 1934) called for 38 billion; the target for pig iron was cut from 22 million to 14.5 million tons, and so forth. Referring to the famine, Alec Nove observes: ‘The terrible events of 1933 may have had their influence, by a kind of shock therapy’. The plan, still ambitious if scaled back, shifted the emphasis from ever-increasing inputs of labour, punctuated by occasional bouts of shock work (now deprecated as ‘storming’), and towards the assimilation and mastery of technology. As Stalin told a plenary session of the Central Committee in January 1933, the ‘passion for construction’ of the First Five-Year Plan had to be replaced by the passion for mastering technology. That required more vocational training, but also more labour discipline.
Few terms appeared more frequently in Bolshevik discourse in the early 1930s than ‘labour discipline’. Precisely because the industrial labour force had absorbed millions of male peasants and unskilled urban women, the demands for increasing labour discipline became ever shriller, the measures to combat violations ever harsher. Stricter control over the organization of production led to the abrogation of several First Five-Year Plan innovations: the ‘continuous work week’ (nepreryvka, a staggered schedule of four days on and one day off); the ‘functional system of management’ (a Taylorist approach that in its Soviet application encouraged parallel lines of authority and avoidance of personal responsibility); and production collectives and communes (shopfloor units that workers organized to protect themselves from the fluctuations in wages and the general disorganization of production).