Thus the tenets of Bolshevism were disseminated to everyone willing to read them.39 The Soviet proletariat was advertised as the vanguard of world socialism, as the embodiment of the great social virtues, as the class destined to remake history for all time. Posters depicted factory labourers wielding hammers and looking out to a horizon suffused by a red dawn. On everything from newspaper mastheads to household crockery the slogan was repeated: ‘Workers of the world, unite!’
Bolshevik leaders, unlike tsars, strove to identify themselves with ordinary people. Lenin and head of state Mikhail Kalinin were renowned for having the common touch. As it happens, Kalinin — who came from a family of poor peasants in Tver province — had an eye for young middle-class ballerinas. But such information did not appear in Pravda: central party leaders tried to present themselves as ordinary blokes with unflamboyant tastes. This was very obvious even in the way they clothed themselves. Perhaps it was Stalin who best expressed the party’s mood in the 1920s by wearing a simple, grey tunic: he thereby managed to look not only non-bourgeois but also a modest but militant member of a political collective. The etiquette and material tastes of the pre-revolutionary rich were repudiated. Any interest in fine clothes, furniture or interior décor was treated as downright reactionary. A roughness of comportment, speech and dress was fostered.
In fact these leaders were emphasizing what appealed to them in working-class culture and discarding the rest. Much as they extolled the virtues of the industrial worker, they also wanted to reform him or her. Ever since 1902, when Lenin had written his booklet What Is To Be Done?, Bolshevik theory had stressed that the working class would not become socialist by its own devices. The party had to explain and indoctrinate and guide.
The authorities emphasized the need not only for literacy and numeracy but also for punctuality, conscientiousness at work and personal hygiene. The desirability of individual self-improvement was stressed; but so, too, was the goal of getting citizens to subordinate their personal interests to those of the general good as defined by the party. A transformation in social attitudes was deemed crucial. This would involve breaking people’s adherence to the way they thought and acted not only in public life but also within the intimacy of the family, where attitudes of a ‘reactionary’ nature were inculcated and consolidated. Official spokesmen urged wives to refuse to give automatic obedience to husbands, and children were encouraged to challenge the authority of their fathers and mothers. Communal kitchens and factory cafeterias were established so that domestic chores might not get in the way of fulfilment of public duties. Divorce and abortion were available on demand.40
Social inhibitions indeed became looser in the 1920s. Yet the Great War and the Civil War played a more decisive role in this process than Bolshevik propaganda. For the popular suspicion of the regime remained acute. A particular source of grievance was the fact that it took until the late 1920s for average wages to be raised to the average amount paid before 1914. This was unimpressive to a generation of the working class which had felt exploited by their employers under Nicholas II. Strikes were frequent under the NEP. The exact number of workers who laid down tools is as yet unascertained, but undoubtedly it was more than the 20,100 claimed by governmental statisticians for 1927.41
Not that the Politburo was greatly disconcerted by the labour movement. Conflicts tended to be small in scale and short in duration; the raging conflicts of 1920–21 did not recur. The long-standing policy of favouring skilled workers for promotion to administrative posts in politics and industry had the effect of removing many of those who might have made the labour movement more troublesome; and although wages were no higher than before 1914, the state had at least increased rudimentary provision for health care and unemployment benefit.42 Above all, the party and the trade unions had offices in all factories and were usually able to see off trouble before it got out of hand; and the resolution of disputes was facilitated by arbitration commissions located in the workplace. The OGPU, too, inserted itself into the process. Once a strike had been brought to an end, the Chekists would advise the management about whom to sack in due course so that industrial conflict might not recur. Sometimes strike leaders were quietly arrested.
Obviously the party leaders could not be complacent about the situation. They could never be entirely sure that a little outbreak of discontent in some factory or other would not explode into a protest movement such as had overwhelmed the monarchy in February 1917. Through the 1920s the Politburo was fumbling for ways to understand the working class in whose name it ruled the USSR.
Workers were not the only group to cause perplexity: the whole society baffled the authorities. The NEP had reintroduced a degree of capitalism; but it was a capitalism different from any previous capitalism in Russia or the external world. Bankers, big industrialists, stockbrokers and landlords were a thing of the past. Foreign entrepreneurs were few, and those few kept out of public view. The main beneficiaries of the NEP in the towns did not conform to the stereotype of a traditional high bourgeoisie; they were more like British spivs after 1945. As a group they were called ‘nepmen’ and were quintessentially traders in scarce goods. They trudged into the villages and bought up vegetables, ceramic pots and knitted scarves. They went round urban workshops and did deals to obtain chairs, buckles, nails and hand tools. And they sold these products wherever there were markets.
It was officially recognized that if the market was to function, there had to be rules. Legal procedures ceased to be mocked as blatantly as in the Civil War. A Procuracy was established in 1922 and among its purposes was the supervision of private commercial transactions. More generally, people were encouraged to assert their rights by recourse to the courts.43
But arbitrary rule remained the norm in practice. The local authorities harassed the traders, small-scale manufacturers and stall-holders: frequently there were closures of perfectly legal enterprises and arrests of their owners.44 Lenin had anyway insisted that the Civil Code should enable the authorities to use sanctions including even terror.45 This had the predictable effect of inducing the nepmen to enjoy their profits while they could. The dishonest, fur-coated rouble millionaire with a bejewelled woman of ill-repute on either arm was not an excessive caricature of reality in the 1920s. Yet if many nepmen had criminal links, the fault was not entirely theirs; for the regime imposed commercial conditions which compelled all traders to be furtive. Without the nepmen, the gaps in the supply of products would not have been plugged; with them, however, the Bolsheviks were able to claim that capitalist entrepreneurship was an occupation for speculators, sharpsters and pimps.