The expressions of anti-Stalin sentiment that came to secret police attention were just the tip of the iceberg. Most people had been trained to keep their opinions to themselves. The ubiquity of informants and the habit of fear kept free expression to a minimum, to say nothing of more demonstrative forms of protest. The choice was simple: either accept—or pretend to accept—official values or find yourself in a camp or face to face with an executioner. This circumstance diminishes the value of such normally candid sources as diaries. One must assume that even in the privacy of their own homes, Soviet citizens exercised self-censorship and used their diaries more as potential alibis than vehicles for frankness. Newspaper reports on mass demonstrations, summaries prepared by state security on the public mood, and letters written to the authorities by ordinary citizens provide only part of the picture. Furthermore, many of these documents are still hidden in closed archives. Historians attempting to fathom the public mood during the Stalin era still face major obstacles.
The 190 million people living in Stalin’s Soviet Union on the eve of his death constituted an exceptionally complex community that bore little resemblance to the “New Man” featured on the covers of Soviet magazines.8 Many factors worked to give cohesion to Soviet society and promote support for the regime, and the motives for this support could vary from sincere enthusiasm to reconciliation with the inevitable to ordinary submission in the face of overwhelming power. The huge scale of violence and terror made fear and compulsion the backbone of the Stalinist system, albeit hidden behind a façade of enthusiasm. At the same time, loyalty and belief in the system and the man were not always feigned. The perpetual fear that was the primary instrument for unifying the people and suppressing independent thought was used alongside “positive” mechanisms of social manipulation. Both the carrot and the stick were applied to keep Soviet society moving in the desired direction.
One by-product of the regime’s policies was the creation of a large privileged class of officials. Those holding all but the most junior government or party posts enjoyed many benefits, including high social status and significant material perquisites. After the mass purges of the second half of the 1930s, the ranks of the Soviet nomenklatura stabilized. Repression against officials during the postwar period was more the exception than the rule. Furthermore, there is evidence that on the eve of Stalin’s death, officials and their relatives were essentially immune from prosecution. The requirement that any arrest or prosecution of a party member be approved by the leadership of party committees led to a bifurcation of the judicial system. In many cases members of the nomenklatura and their relatives avoided prosecution for administrative or criminal offenses that would bring severe punishment to an ordinary citizen.9
Another category—“the country’s best people”—approached the status of officials within the huge party-state apparat. These “best people” could be found in every social segment and professional group, including workers, peasants, writers, artists, and scientists. The best known examples were the so-called Stakhanovites, real or imagined shock workers at the forefront of production who were held up for admiration as “beacons” of the Soviet spirit. Enjoying a stature somewhere between ordinary citizens and officials, the Stakhanovites quickly assimilated the latter’s value system, although in theory they kept working away as before. They served as spokespeople, lobbying for the interests of enterprises and regions and enjoying significant material privileges. A typical representative of this category of beneficiary of the Stalinist system was the eponymous miner Aleksei Stakhanov, who earned celebrity and Stalin’s favor through his record-breaking productivity. He quickly developed a taste for the nomenklatura lifestyle and bombarded Stalin with requests:
Joseph Vissarionovich! Give me a nice car and I will justify your trust. Soon the Stakhanovite movement will be ten years old, and I’m going to Donbas and will again show people how to work. I keep asking and they keep giving me some broken down war trophy clunker, but if just once I got something nice, I’d stop asking.… Also, about the apartment.… I can’t get anywhere with my requests to fix it up. The walls are dirty, the furniture is frayed and broken …, while other people get their walls papered with silk twice a month and get all sorts of furniture. This isn’t correct, so I’m asking for a renovation and new furniture so I won’t be ashamed to invite people to my apartment.10
Another consequence of the channeling of benefits to the upper crust of Soviet society was the policy of disproportionately allotting resources to cities, especially major ones. Forced industrialization and militarization widened the gulf in living standards and social status between the rural majority and urban minority.11 Many urbanites, especially in the capitals and major industrial centers, belonged to a relatively privileged and well-remunerated class. During years of famine they may have been hungry, but since they received a government ration, they were not dying of starvation like the peasantry. They had internal passports, unlike the peasants, and relative freedom of movement. Urban populations also enjoyed better health care and a well-developed cultural and educational infrastructure. In the stores of Moscow and Leningrad, where most food and consumer goods were sent, shoppers could find what they needed and even had a degree of choice.12 The relative accessibility of educational institutions and high-paying jobs gave urbanites much better economic prospects. The monetary reform, which reduced prices in state stores while increasing taxes on peasant production, disproportionately favored the residents of capitals and industrial centers. These measures forced peasants to sell the products of their private plots at lower prices in urban markets. The consequences of these policies apparently escaped Stalin’s awareness. Mikoyan, whose duties placed him in charge of certain commercial matters, offers the following account:
I told him [Stalin] that we could not lower the prices on meat and butter, on white bread, first of all because they were in short supply and second because it would affect the procurement prices, which would have a negative effect on the production of these products, and when these goods are in short supply and with this reduction in prices there would be huge lines, which would lead to profiteering; after all, workers cannot go to the store during the day, so the profiteers would buy up all the goods.… But Stalin insisted, saying that this was necessary in the interests of the intelligentsia.13
Mikoyan here nicely sums up the predictable effect of the politically motivated price reduction: shortages, lines, and a shadow market. But these were of little concern to Stalin. His focus was on the regime’s bulwark, the privileged segment of society in major cities. The government’s preferential distribution of resources made even the average urbanite many times better off than the rural population. One symptom of this inequality was the number of young rural women streaming into cities to work as housekeepers for urban families for no more than bread and shelter. Clearly, the urban minority and the rural majority had starkly divergent perceptions of reality. It was the urbanite viewpoint that found voice in memoirs and diaries and has disproportionately influenced contemporary understandings of day-to-day life under Stalin.