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Actually, I forgot to mention the most disturbing (for the Soviet authorities) devlopment of "stiikhnost". Namely, the roughly one million Kholkoze peasants who abandonned their work post in the 30s and moved to the cities in search of jobs in industry. This was a very worrying development. The result was the presence in most major Soviet cities of an illegal migrant work force which would engage in criminal activities in orderto survive. The 1937 purges were directed as much against such "anti-social behaviour" as against "Trotskyite-Nazi traitors". Despite the stringent 1934 inner passport laws, tens of thousands of undocumented farm workers still fled the collectivized Kholkozes each year. Some resorted to traditional "Robin Hood" style banditry in the countryside, that the NKVD could never entirely eradicate right up to 1937. They would waylay trucks on deserted country roads or rob grain silos in the dead of night. According to reports, in some regions (Ukraine, the Urals, Western Siberia) Kholkozes suffered an average of 22 such raids annually. Once the grain had been stolen, those "bandits" would set the silos alight, together with MST Tractor repair stations (hated by Kholkozians because of the punitive fees they demanded in exchange for providing mechanization). In response, Stalin would "punish" the most badly-affected rural districts by closing all retail shops and increasing crop levies to 65%, even demanding the grain that was earmarked for sowing for the following harvest. Thus many extreme, but localized, famines broke out, with peasants dying in their thousands, all part of a brutal plan to enforce rural cooperation with the Moscow regime. This was not Stalin's paranoid fancies, this was what was happening all over the USSR. But extreme NKVD brutality actually produced extreme violence on the part of desperate peasants. In March 1934 alone (at the hight of the 1934 famines), 1 700 local police officers and Kholkoze officials were murdered in the USSR ! The number of peasants executed in reprisal is unknown. Stalin was at the helm of a country governed through fear and repression, and was acutely aware of that fact. He did not command the loyalty of Soviet citizens. This explains the purges, an effort to publicly attribute the shortcomings produced by the inner logic of the repressive regime to "Trotskyites". And instill an ever-present feeling of fear both within society and the Party. Demands for more consumer goods, for shorter working hours, for a reform of the convoluted wage system (workers in "strategic State industries" as well as members of the Security Forces were paid far more than other workers. This basic inequality in turn spawned an extensive black market, further undermining the trustworthiness of bureaucrats.) were met with summary executions and sentencing to the Gulag (most people were sentenced to 5 or 10 years hard labour, but having completed their sentence, saw their prison-term automatically extended by another 10 years by the local administration without trial). ________________________________________________ Send list submissions to: Marxism@lists.econ.utah.edu Set your options at: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
