2. The Soviet Caste System (1928-1952) Essentials of the Soviet Economy 18-The New Proletariat 20-Work Edicts 21-Forced Labor 23-Living Standards 23-The Caste System 24-Trade Unions 26-Workers Party?
2. The Soviet Caste System (1928-1952) "To imagine that an individual personality, even such a large one as Stalin, could change our politico-social order means to enter into profound...
...The ratio of highest to lowest paid workers was only 3 1/2-l...
...With the Revolution and Civil War, however, this fell below 50 per cent...
...Soviet taxation has helped create, and perpetuates, the new ruling caste...
...With the end of the Civil War and labor unrest, many Communists among them left the factories for jobs in the Party, Government and police, or for special training as technicians and supervisors...
...Individual workers who set production records were highly paid and widely publicized, and their records soon became the basis for new, higher norms...
...Austrian workers, who had earned 50 per cent more than Soviet ones before the war, earned twice as much in 1950...
...Although their practical labor policies hardly represent progress over those of 19th-century capitalists, Communist leaders still describe their party as "the vanguard of the working class...
...The Soviet Government calls these "socialist" measures...
...No change has been made, however, in the principle of State Labor Reserves —conscription of youth for industry—established by a decree of October 2, 1940...
...By 1928, three-fourths of Soviet factory workers had less than 6 square meters, and more than a fifth had less than 3 square meters...
...He demanded now what he had opposed since the Workers' Opposition was defeated: the return of free discussion and free elections in the unions...
...at the 19tth (1952), more than 58 per cent...
...A supplementary law of January 18, 1941 extended the definition of "idleness" to persons who "fail to comply with orders given by the management with regard to overtime work and to work to be done on days off...
...In Lenin's day, this claim was tenable...
...In July 1932, only 43.5 per cent of Party members were workers (though not necessarily production workers...
...With the outset of forced industrialization, job turnover rose rapidly...
...In October 1927, the Central Executive Committee of the Soviets launched a program to establish the seven-hour day throughout major industry in the year ahead...
...According to the Soviet Government, the Fourth Five Year Plan (1946-50) for new and restored housing was overfulfilled...
...Nor can the plant management spend day and night in the various sections...
...This was twice as long as the worker in Poland, Estonia and Latvia...
...He accused the Soviet authorities of violating collective agreements, and implied that they were attempting to depress wages still further...
...In setting ambitious goals for industrial production and construction, to be attained by raised labor productivity, Soviet planners provided Russian workers with only minimal food and housing, and rewarded their increased efforts with nominal wage gains...
...Altogether, at the end of the NEP, 9.5 million people were classified in the larger category of "non-agricultural workers and employes...
...In 1929 and 1930, the average industrial worker changed jobs every eight months...
...Several months later, the planning commissions were instructed to "incorporate the work performed by those deprived of liberty into the planned economy of the USSR...
...There have been various retreats and modifications along the way...
...Although they plunged agricultural output below 1913 levels, they made the USSR the world's second largest industrial producer...
...State-run and private enterprises existed side by side...
...They harnessed the trade unions to the Government, naming their officers and dictating their policies without even a rubberstamp trade-union congress for 17 years (1932-49...
...At the same time, as a result of food shortages, inflation and various other measures reducing real wages, many families required more than one breadwinner to survive...
...After 1934, such precise figures were not given, although occasionally candid statements pierced the veil...
...This tax is passed on to the consumer in the form of increased prices...
...the second, to participate "in devising a system of wages guided by the socialist principle of pay according to amount and quality of labor...
...Top industrial and Government executives also receive substantial monetary rewards, as well as priority rights to vacation resorts, better housing and scarce consumer items...
...At the same time, Stalin proclaimed a drive to bring the "industrial and technical intelligentsia" into the Party...
...One also cannot expect every brigade to report for work voluntarily several hours before the beginning of its shift and remain at work several hours after the end of the shift...
...Only vague estimates can be made of the Party's postwar social composition...
...Enlistment of the new "intelligentsia'' was accompanied by expansion of the Party apparatus of paid officials and functionaries...
...Perhaps 15,000 of these managed, in the vicissitudes of the war and postwar periods, to reach democratic countries...
...During the famines in 1931-32, more than 7 million peasants had come to work in industry, and millions more were pressed into forced labor on vast construction projects...
...The decree provided: "Workers and employes who, of their own will, leave state, cooperative and/or public enterprises shall be handed over to the courts and, by sentence of the People's Judges, condemned to imprisonment...
...And this was to a large extent true of 19th century capitalism before it began to change under the impact of labor unrest, socialist criticism and various reform and revolutionary movements...
...Undeniably, the Socialist movement had arisen largely in response to the harshness of just such processes, and had gained strength as they were accelerated...
...6. Creation—through tax, wage and status incentives—of a new elite of managers, administrators, engineers, technicians and officials...
...Others point out that, with the exception of collective farms, they were all characteristic of the massive accumulation of private capital which industrialized Britain...
...Punitive measures were provided for any youths leaving the school or job...
...By the end of 1934, only 9.3 per cent of a greatly reduced Communist party's members were workers...
...The base pay rate was often below subsistence level, rarely far above it...
...Lunch takes our workers from 15 to 22 minutes," boasted the canteen manager of a Moscow tool plant...
...4. Forced savings, extracted principally from farmers and unskilled workers, to finance plant expansion...
...From time to time, scattered items in the Soviet provincial press have boasted that 15 or 20 per cent of new members in a given district were workers by origin, but no national figures were announced at either of the two postwar party congresses...
...The decree of June 26, 1940 was, first of all, a national job freeze...
...According to these rules, the first function of the unions is to organize "socialist competition," increase labor productivity and lower production costs...
...In the state plan for 1931, for example, the Government (behind a screen of impressive percentages) asked the average worker for a 1700-ruble increase in production, while promising him only a 62-ruble raise in pay—and even this raise was vitiated at the time by a predictable inflation...
...And they gave these groups dominance in a revamped, upper-class Communist party, which itself held only one Congress between 1934 and 1952...
...its slave population was estimated at this time at three million or more...
...Under the New Economic Policy, Russia recovered from the ravages of world war, Civil War and "Military Communism...
...and in Stalin's last years from the Jewish community...
...This was Tomsky's last speech as a trade-union leader...
...The tax is low compared to other modern nations, and favors the upper-income brackets...
...His union adherents also perished...
...Weavers, spindlers, dyers register as unskilled workers, and they do not return to the textile industry but pass to the metal industry where unskilled work is paid considerably better than skilled work in the textile industry...
...43 per cent were full-time trade-union officials, and 72 per cent were members of the Communist party...
...Furthermore, "for idleness without acceptable cause, workers and employes of state, cooperative and public enterprises and/or institutions shall be handed over to the courts and, by sentence of the People's Judges, condemned to forced penal labor at their place of employment, up to a term of six months, and have withheld up to 25 per cent of their wages...
...And on June 19, 1947, the Labor Reserve System was formalized as follows: Boys 14-17 and girls 15-16 to be drafted for railroad and trade schools, boys and girls 16-18 for factory schools, boys up to 19 for mining, metallurgy, petroleum and other key industries...
...A large measure of this mass migration was planned...
...The Caste System: "Average" wage figures for Soviet labor are deceptive, especially in comparing recent conditions with those of the Twenties...
...a third of them, in fact, earned less than 120...
...On December 10, 1932, however, the Party Central Committee ordered a comprehensive purge, and in the next five years more than 1.5 million of the party's 3.5 million members and candidates were lopped off the rolls...
...During the same period, the urban population of Russia rose from 28 million to 56 million...
...1931, punitive measures against "refractory disorganizers of production...
...1932, the introduction of an internal passport system, forerunner of the work-book...
...In 1912, Russia had 1,166,000 department stores, wholesale units and retail stores...
...Those of working-class origin still formed 41 per cent of Party members in 1921 (28 per cent were peasants, 31 per cent employes and others...
...The original decree spoke of "10 or 15 minutes...
...In 1937, Stalin in a speech roughly calculated the Party's "generals," "officers" and "command staff" at 194,000—almost 10 per cent of the Party's members at the time...
...On June 2, 1929, he was replaced as trade-union chairman by Nikolai M. Shvernik, and at the 16th Party Congress (1930) Tomsky was dropped from the Party Politburo...
...They suspended any semblance of collective agreements between industry and labor for 15 years (1932-47...
...With the start of industrialization and collectivization, it began to rise...
...More often than not, 12 people crowd into a single apartment...
...in 1927, it was 122,700...
...A Kharkov Tractor Works manager observed that its workers "sometimes don't get around to eating their lunch...
...When many workers achieved premium rates, norms were raised...
...These laws of 1938 and 1940 remained unaltered during the war and for more than a decade thereafter, although their more stringent penalties were not universally applied in the later postwar period...
...No ruling class," he had said earlier, "has managed without its own intelligentsia...
...The data which follow on wages and living conditions, therefore, apply only to the remaining "free" workers—not to those who toiled, as one camp inmate put it, on "the dark side of the moon...
...In these conditions, the Soviet Government found it necessary to bind workers to their jobs...
...By 1937, there were 3.3 million women industrial workers, 40 per cent of the total...
...Only now begins the time when we shall be able to reap the fruits of our revolution in raising the standard of living by comparison with prewar conditions...
...The worker of 1927 had an average of 2.46 dependents...
...Nevertheless, the decree froze the previous monthly wage rates...
...hardened the penalties for absence (20 minutes' lateness constituted such absence*) ; and revised vacation and social insurance regulations to penalize workers who changed jobs...
...Under this decree, a million boys aged 14-17 were drafted annually for six months to two years in railroad, trade and factory schools—followed by four years at work ordered by the Soviet Government...
...A good index to the leadership group, however, is provided by the educational qualifications of Congress delegates...
...In proportion as capital accumulates, the lot of the laborer, be his payment high or low, must grow worse," Karl Marx argued in Capital...
...It established the existence of more than 250 major forced-labor camps, some with as many as 100,000 workers...
...The authors of the First Five Year Plan hoped there would be 14 million wage earners in Russia in 1932...
...Inequality of earnings increased during the war, and by 1949 the ratio between the highest-paid and lowest-paid workers was 50-1...
...Outside the factory, members of the Academy of Science received 5,000 rubles a month in addition to their regular salaries, while Stalin Prize Winners received up to 200,000 rubles...
...The average Soviet worker in 1950 had to work 19 minutes for a pound of bread (France: 9 minutes), two hours for a pound of sugar (Sweden: 9 minutes) , five hours for a pound of pork chops (Italy: two hours), six hours for a pound of butter (West Germany: two hours), and 22 hours for a pound of tea (Britain: 1 1/4 hours...
...This literally required insane exertion...
...Trade Unions: The vast process of social polarization carried out under Stalin could not occur without the complete emasculation of trade unions...
...Power over forced labor was given to the OGPU, renamed the NKVD in 1934...
...Its most violent phase was the collectivization of agriculture in the First Five Year Plan (1928-32...
...The Fourth Five Year Plan provided for 4.5 million graduates of these schools during 1946-50—more than 10 per cent of the number of the workers and employes planned for the national economy at the plan's completion...
...much of it stemmed from the widespread resistance to farm collectivization...
...Accordingly, while the struggle to succeed Lenin was going on, the unions under Tomsky's leadership helped Russian workers receive a decent share of the NEP recovery...
...3. "The primacy in production of the means of production"—i.e., the priority of capital goods and plant capacity over food, housing and consumer industry...
...Soviet statistics on "average" wages in a given factory lump the wages paid to the director and his staff, the local Party and trade-union functionaries, and specialist engineers and technicians with the wages of production workers skilled and unskilled...
...In 1930, piece-work was made the basis of the wage...
...Among these features are: 1. Reduction of the rural community and expansion of the urban work force...
...The wage scale," said Andreyev, "must be left entirely in the hands of industry...
...It became most repressive toward the workers in the late Thirties and Forties...
...Such labor was recruited throughout Soviet history from among actual or suspected political dissidents—in the early Thirties primarily from among farmers resisting collectivization...
...The section chiefs cannot, after all, work continuously day and night...
...The "average" wage at this time was officially 620 rubles a month...
...Great efforts are expended to make participation universal...
...These characterize what Stalin and present Soviet leaders have called "the Leninist line of our party...
...Today the basic factor in energizing and improving the entire work of the trade unions must be socialist competition and its offspring, the shock brigades...
...Largely thanks to this system, less than 10 per cent of Soviet savings-bank depositors in 1950 held more than two-thirds of the deposits...
...instead, there were 22 million—an increase of 130 per cent instead of the planned 50...
...The tax structure of the Soviet Union, therefore, like its wage system, acts to promote and maintain social inequity...
...In 1922, the Soviet Government announced its prison population as 57,200...
...The UN Commission confirmed the massive scale of Soviet forced labor in 1953...
...Ever since Stalin called a special conference of business executives in June 1931 to denounce "the leftist practice of wage equalization," the Soviet regime has been broadening the economic gap between the factory elite and managers, on the one hand, and the ordinary mass of workers, on the other...
...A purge of the "Right elements" followed and lasted almost a decade...
...workers' protesls compelled change to 20 minutes in January 1939...
...by 1935, he or she had only 1.59...
...Women and minors moved into the factories...
...workers are required to subscribe three or four weeks' wages...
...They substantially raised the salaries, increments, allowances and privileges of factory managers, engineers, administrators and officials, to compare favorably with the privileged classes of capitalist countries...
...almost four times as long as the worker in Denmark, Sweden and Britain...
...In November 1929, the Council of People's Commissars ordered that all persons "sentenced to deprivation of liberty for a period of more than two years be exiled to Corrective Labor Camps in distant parts of the USSR...
...Yet, in 1937 the average worker's real wage was still a fifth below the 1928 level...
...by 1937, this had been cut to 228,000 distribution stores...
...At Stalin's death, the disparity in real wages between the average Russian and the average American worker was twice as great as in 1913?an ironic sociological commentary on the Soviet Union's claim that it is a workers' state and on America's "capitalist" fetish...
...The June 26 decree, however, re-established a standard 48-hour work-week (six days of eight hours) ; thus, it added an average of seven hours to the work-week...
...In the textile industry, a Soviet economist noted in 1930, "workers quit and change their occupations when reporting to employment agencies...
...coal and iron miners changed jobs every four months during 1930...
...In March 1947, the Soviet Government resumed the practice of concluding "collective agreements" between unions and industry...
...The decrees of December 6 and 27, 1938 introduced compulsory work-books (a practice originated by Napoleon III and adopted in 1935 by Hitler) ; compelled workers to give a month's notice before leaving a job...
...Nevertheless, certain major features remain constant...
...In April 1949, the 10th All-Union Congress of Trade Unions, first since 1932, adopted the new union statutes and by-laws...
...Only three years after Stalin's death—in the midst of a new manpower shortage—have the first changes in these decrees appeared...
...the branch of this organization responsible was the GULAG—Main Administration for Corrective Labor Camps...
...Norwegian workers, whose real wages had been 2.8 times as high, now earned six times more...
...Ten years later, in 1938, the non-agricultural labor force had almost tripled...
...It forbade any worker to quit his job without the approval of his plant manager, and specified that such approval could be granted only for sickness, old age, or admission to special schools...
...The industrial profits tax provides another 10 per cent of Soviet income...
...these are primarily in the cultural and welfare fields?administration of medical aid, sanatoriums, libraries, factory cafeterias and housing, promotion of physical culture, etc...
...Young people and peasants replaced the veteran workers who left, and by 1928 the 3 million who worked in industry where already quite a different group from the workers of revolutionary days...
...They doubled the urban population of Russia within a single decade (1929-39), ereating a new city proletariat from among uprooted peasants, women and youth...
...Resolution of the Central Committee, Communist Party of the Soviet Union, June 30, 1956...
...the tax on light and textile industries, on the other hand, was 90 per cent and on the food industry 84.1 per cent...
...The period of most substantial industrial construction?929-33—saw workers' real wages cut in half...
...He blamed the growth of wildcat strikes in Soviet industry on union officials who paid little attention to workers' problems...
...This tax, too, ultimately acts to hold down labor's living standards, for it compels income from consumer industry to flow into heavy industry...
...They created a vast new army of forced laborers without legal status...
...Finally, about 10 per cent of the Soviet revenue derives from state loans —lottery bonds and the like...
...By the mid-Thirties, GULAG administered an empire larger than many European countries...
...It is too early to say that this era—at first described as "the building of socialism," later as "the building of communism" —has ended...
...V. V. Kuznetzov, then head of the trade unions (later Deputy Foreign Minister and Ambassador to Peking), made it plain that wages were outside the unions' scope: "As for wages, it is well known that rates of wages for workers, engineering-technical personnel and office employes are established only by Government decision...
...Soviet Premier Vyacheslav Molotov, 1932...
...5. Increased labor productivity at minimal cost to enterprise...
...The stiffest decrees came in 1938 and 1940...
...2. The Soviet Caste System (1928-1952) "To imagine that an individual personality, even such a large one as Stalin, could change our politico-social order means to enter into profound contradiction with the facts, with Marxism and with truth...
...in 1950, the Italian worker was 71 per cent more prosperous...
...occasionally, brief strikes helped the workers improve their conditions...
...it was in charge of all highway construction, numerous coal, copper and gold mines, and vast canal and dam-building projects...
...after World War II, from among soldiers, workers and ethnic groups who had had contact with the Germans during the war...
...Forced Labor: The Report of an Ad Hoc Commission of the United Nations (1951-53) confirmed in detail what had been first surmised early in the 1930s: that slave labor played a major role in Soviet construction and industrialization...
...Thus, while a worker earning 700 rubles a month retained 656, an Academician directing a laboratory, who earned 13,000, took home 11,360 rubles...
...For within a year the Stalin faction, which had triumphed over its intra-Party rivals, had launched Russia on a new era...
...Furthermore, the new housing that was built often lacked basic facilities...
...The Soviet Five Year Plans, according to their chief sponsors, hoped to achieve in a generation what had taken other countries a century...
...Last in the official list of union functions: "To appear in the name of workers and employes before state and social agencies on problems of labor, living conditions and culture...
...Trud, the state trade-union organ, emphasized that "the main stipulation of the contracted obligation must be an increased demand from every worker...
...They established piece-work as the basis of the wage system, and introduced the production race ("socialist compelition"), the speed-up, and the compulsory work-book throughout Soviet industry...
...Staging occasional strikes against private enterprise, they thus also helped set labor standards for state industries...
...Soviet economist Yuri Larin wrote in 1927: "Ten years after the Revolution, we have only reached the wage level which existed in 1913...
...Nevertheless, with all due allowances, recovery in the USSR was significantly slower for the worker than in other European nations...
...Although all of the Five Year Plans have projected ambitious housing programs, these were generally cut back and their resources diverted to heavy industry and transport...
...the tendency in later years has been toward their curtailment...
...In 1922, when the Party had 528,000 members, only 15,325 of them (one in 35) were reported as responsible Party officials...
...Nevertheless, it never reached its goal of a party 50-per-cent "workers at the bench...
...The New Proletariat: There had been 2.8 million industrial workers in Russia before World War I; only half that many in 1921...
...Discharges for lateness helped factories run on time...
...Innovators" play the same role in postwar Soviet industry that Stakhanovites did in the Thirties...
...Stalin and his associates directed the construction of a vast new industrial plant, much of it in the Urals, Siberia and Central Asia...
...At the 8th Congress of Trade Unions, on December 28, 1928, Tomsky spoke bitterly...
...Without strengthening labor discipline and without ruthless struggle against the violators of state and labor discipline—grabbers and loafers—there can be no real fulfillment of obligations laid down in the collective agreement...
...A comparison made in 1938 by the International Labor Office of Soviet real wages with the purchasing power of workers abroad presented this picture: In order to buy a liter of milk, an egg, and a kilogram each of bread, wheat flour, beef, butter, potatoes, sugar and macaroni, the Soviet worker had to work 24 hours and 55 minutes...
...Since 1930, the Soviet Government has been obtaining 60 per cent of its revenue from the so-called "turnover tax," a tax on goods at the point of production...
...numerous Soviet patients require—and pay for—better care than Government clinies will provide...
...Hand-picked Stakhanovite "brigades" set the pace for team efforts...
...In 1940, the profit tax in the oil industry was 35 per cent, in iron and steel 25 per cent...
...At that time, the highest-paid Soviet workers received more than 28 times as much as the lowest-paid ones...
...Elsewhere in the world, Chilean workers, who lived at Soviet standards in 1938, earned 164 per cent higher real wages in 1950...
...Critics of the Government now, he said, "were sure to be labeled Mensheviks or counter-revolutionaries...
...For such necessities, the tax often represents two-thirds or more of the price paid by the consumer...
...Only 40 per cent of the 1933-37 housing plan was fulfilled...
...Heavy industrial goods are largely exempt from the tax, and the steepest rates fall on basic necessities—bread, cotton cloth, etc...
...Workers' Party...
...Persons classified as workers formed 61.7 per cent of the Bolshevik membership in 1905...
...The human ravages of forced capital accumulation were, therefore, much greater than under the capitalism Marx knew...
...Even then, 40 per cent of Moscow dwelling units were considered overcrowded...
...Germany, the United States and other countries during the century between Waterloo and Sarajevo...
...Since the Soviet experience has been cited—and, in several cases after World War II, utilized—as a model for other countries, a number of its features merit special attention by the labor movement...
...All leading organs of the trade unions consist primarily of Communists who execute the Party line in the entire work of the trade unions...
...In the Twenties, the Party made a spirited effort to increase its proletarian base, adopting new rules in 1922 which discouraged the admission of non-workers...
...As for medical care, part-time private practice has persisted into the 1950s...
...piece-work norms were also increased...
...The decree which did so stressed strange aims for such agreements: greater output, substitution of piece rates for time rates, higher norms...
...After Tomsky's suicide, his political associates Rykov and Bukharin were executed as "agents of fascism...
...Section 6 of the decree called for criminal prosecution of any plant manager who failed to enforce it...
...A Congress resolution proclaimed: "The trade unions have now removed their bankrupt leaders and have begun a determined fight against the elements of 'trade unionism' and opportunism in the trade-union movement...
...Income taxes furnish less than 10 per cent of Soviet revenue...
...They replaced committee management of the factories (director, union representative, Party delegate) with one-man rule...
...When the First Five Year Plan was announced, the trade unions opposed its stress on heavy industry...
...These set production norms which the worker had to fulfill at a basic pay rate, then offered steadily higher rates for output above the norm...
...The year 1930 saw suspension of unemployment insurance, and changes in the pension rules which made the length of employment at one job decisive...
...Tomsky's followers were silenced by a Congress resolution which declared: "The Party rejects with determination such 'freedom' of criticism which the Right elements demand in order to defend their anti-Leninist political line...
...In 1950, when a kilogram of butter cost 40 rubles, all workers earning more than 150 rubles monthly were taxed, but only an 82-ruble tax was levied on a monthly income of 1,000 rubles...
...Full sick benefits, for example, were henceforth accorded only to union members who had spent six years at the same plant...
...a non-union man who had worked less than two years at one job received only a fourth of his lost wages...
...Such an arrangement remains in force...
...While most European workers had bettered their peak prewar living standards by 1951, Soviet labor, to judge by official statistics, did not match 1937 standards until 1954...
...A Soviet study of urban housing built in 1935 showed that 32 per cent had no water supply, 38 per cent had no sewage facilities, 92 per cent had no gas supply, and 54 per cent lacked central heating...
...By 1940, a Soviet law text explained: "Formally, the Soviet trade unions are not a Party organization, but in fact they are carrying out the directives of the Party...
...many more were transferred from distant camps to swell the factory force...
...It should be noted, however, that these equalilarian elements of Soviet life were without exception introduced in the 1920s...
...Even as he crushed the Workers' Opposition in 1921, Lenin had admitted that "our present government is such that the proletariat, organized to the last man, must protect itself against it...
...The Soviet distribution system itself furnishes little stimulus to mass consumption...
...As opposed to capitalist countries," Georgi Malenkov told the 19th Party Congress in October 1952, "all the national income in the Soviet Union goes to the working people...
...Tomsky and others argued that this would lower workers' living standards, and urged a parallel development of consumer industries...
...the last officially-announced figure was 242,000 in 1929...
...The top surtax—for all salaries above 1,000 rubles—was a flat 13 per cent...
...Accumulation of wealth at one pole is, therefore, at the same time accumulation of misery, agony of toil, slavery, ignorance, brutality, mental degradation at the opposite pole...
...Work Edicts: In order to speed industrial production, the Soviet regime relied to a large extent on forms of pressure and pace-setting which the international labor movement had long opposed...
...World War II caused great devastation in the Soviet Union...
...During the war, girls 16 to 18 were included in the factory draft...
...Their testimony, as well as other evidence, was gathered by the International Confederation of Free Trade Unions in the late Forties...
...small traders and artisans flourished: a free peasantry provided the country with food and fiber...
...The pressure of such work was described by the director of a Dnepropetrovsk factory after his plant had set a new record: "All this was achieved through exertion of a kind that cannot be stood uninterruptedly...
...At the 17th Congress (1934), about 10 per cent of the delegates were college graduates...
...the third, to "spread the work-experience of leading workers and employes, innovators in production and science...
...Refusing to alter working conditions or raise living standards, the Government issued a series of edicts designed to curb labor turnover, unemployment, absenteeism and lateness...
...Later, "progressive and premium" piece-work scales were devised...
...With Government stores often short in quantity, a high proportion of goods in the postwar period were sold in the black and grey markets at prices only the privileged could afford...
...Replacement of indirect taxes by a graduated income tax was also high on the petition of the workers massacred on Bloody Sunday, 1905...
...Italian workers under Mussolini in 1938 earned only 8 per cent more than those of the USSR...
...The Government's wage policy also funneled workers from older consumer industries to the new capital-goods plants—even at the cost of losing skilled manpower...
...In 1935, Stakhanovism—a speedup technique—made its debut...
...Every Soviet citizen is entitled to free medical care, primary education, and a substantial number of social services (such as day nurseries for the children of working mothers...
...Since Soviet production workers are conscripted from lower and labor-reserve schools, it seems clear that few of the Party's "generals," "officers" and "command staff," at least, are workers...
...Living Standards: In the mid-Thirties, the tempo of forced capital accumulation slackened somewhat...
...At the 18th Party Congress in 1939, Shvernik announced that only 4 per cent of the old membership of trade-union central committees had retained their posts...
...After 1934, the Party stopped revealing its social composition...
...In 1928, as in 1913, women had constituted about 28 per cent of the workers in industry—roughly 650,000 in all...
...At the same time, the tax pattern, like the state budget, limits the natural expansion of consumer goods and services which might be expected to result from labor's rising productivity, and which might place a livable floor under the stratified wage system...
...Nevertheless, the Soviet regime continues to pretend that it represents and serves Russia's workers...
...Those aspects of union activity of benefit to the workers were listed later...
...By that time, however, Tomsky's supporters were already being accused of the heresy of "Right deviationism...
...Between 1929 and 1940, most Soviet workers had regular shifts of five days on, one day off, with a work-day of seven hours...
...In the 1930s, the Soviet Government introduced tuition fees for secondary and higher education, abolished unemployment insurance, and revised pension and sickbenefit lews to curb job mobility...
...This was, in fact, the sunset of "liberal Communism...
...And into this average for Moscow—capital and showplace of the USSR—are reckoned the ample quarters reserved for the leading members of the Party, Government, industrial, Army and security apparatus, and the nation's outstanding artists, scientists and entertainers.* *Not all tendencies in Soviet life point toward "accumulation of wealth at one pole" and the "accumulation of misery, agony of toil, slavery, lgnorance, brutality, mental degradation at the opposite pole...
...Australian and American workers, who had been respectively three and four times more prosperous than Russians before the war, now earned seven times as much as Soviet workers...
...Engineers, bureaucrats, military officers, business executives, foremen, Stakhanovites and intellectuals were welcomed...
...The Soviet Government relies primarily on indirect, regressive taxes...
...2. Transformation of the farmers into state agricultural laborers...
...Nevertheless, the "average" Muscovite in 1950 had only 3.65 square meters of housing space (5 x 8 feet) —half that of his 1912 counterpart...
...The Soviet Government has never released any economic statistics about its forced labor population...
...Stalin later told Winston Churchill that forced industrialization and collectivization had cost Russia 10 million lives...
...It is necessary to oppose vehemently all those who believe that Socialism means production for use...
...An October 1934 study showed, however, that while 2 per cent of "wage earners and salaried workers" in Soviet industry earned more than 500 rubles a month, 79 per cent earned less than 240...
...Compulsory military service for such youths was deferred until the completion of their job assignments...
...In the housing field, conditions for the majority of workers are worse than in 1913...
...The gap between Soviet workers and those of other nations has, in fact, widened...
...were workers...
...In 1932 also, factory managers were authorized to discharge workers absent without valid reason...
...And we must use the workers' organizations for the protection of the workers against their government...
...Nikita Khrushchev, erstwhile miner, entered the Workers Faculty of Moscow University in 1924 to launch his Party career...
...During World War II, a considerable number of forced laborers were released to serve in the Soviet Army or to fulfill obligations of wartime treaties...
...Only 23 per cent of the delegates at this Congress, according to the Soviet Government...
...In 1912, the average housing space per person in Moscow was 7.4 square meters—a room, roughly, 8 x 10 feet...
...and six times as long as the worker in the United States...
...Listed in second place in the 10-point program of The Communist Manifesto was a "heavy progressive or graduated income tax...
Vol. 39 • December 1956 • No. 62
