Social Developments Flashcards
Lenin: Employment
When he came to power in 1918, it was hard to ensure stable employment because:
-chaos from the October and February revolutions.
-when Russia pulled out of the war, there were many cuts made in industry.
However as a key feature of communism, Lenin wanted a society where all worked and were rewarded, so published The Declaration of the Rights of the Toiling and Exploited People in 1918, abolishing private ownership of land so everyone had to work in order to earn.
High unemployment in Russia effectively ended under War Communism, as labour was compulsory for all able-bodied men between the ages of 16 and 50. However this then returned under Collectisaton as the idea of compulsory employment was abandoned.
Evidence: - Unemployment was over 100,000 by 1918.
- In 1921, 5.5% of the labour force was unemployed, compared to 18% in 1924.
Lenin: Social Benefits
- Food rations were given out based on class. Workers received the most, middle class workers such as doctors got less, and upper class, former aristocrats and factory owners got only 25% of what workers received.
- Workers were given numerous benefits, even under the NEP. Trade Unions were given the right to pay and conditions with the 1922 Labour Law, resulting in a 1% wage rise from 1913 to 1926. 9 million workers were also covered by social insurance that gave them access to unemployment benefits and healthcare.
- Under War Communism, workers were entitles to numerous benefits, e.g. were allowed to travel for free on public transport and given communal dining hall access, in which 93% of workers in Moscow, 1920 were fed.
Lenin: Housing
- From 1918, workers began to take over property with force and killed many property owners. Lenin tried to take control of this situation by issuing a decree in August 1918 giving local soviets the power to take over property and redistribute it to the poor.
- During the Russian Civil War, many workers fled to the countryside, and Lenin order the empty houses they abandoned in the cities to be destroyed to provide timber for fuel.
- Under the NEP, 60-80% of housing was de-nationalised and redistribution was outlawed, private ownership was common once again.
Lenin: Women
Successes: - Divorces were available and easier to obtain for women, e.g. Lenin introduced ‘postcard divorces’, meaning that you could divorce your partner just by writing to them. HOWEVER between 1917 and 1928 70% of divorces were initiated by men, their new rights weren’t necessarily effective.
- Women’s education was improved, e.g. Women’s reading rooms were set up in cities and education schemes were established for women working in factories. By 1920, 28% of university students in Russia were women, compared to only 20% in Britain.
Lenin: Education
- Lenin’s central aim was to reduce illiteracy. In 1914 only 32% of the population could read and write but by 1919 he had published the Decree on Illiteracy requiring all illiterate people between 8 and 50 to learn to read and write.
- When he came to power in 1918, Lenin issued a decree outlining a series of education reforms. Unified labour schools were established, free education promised for all children 8-17, religious instruction banned along with corporal punishment, and education was made compulsory.
- Under the NEP, education initially suffered, as it was not seen as a worthwhile investment; during the first 18 months, the number of children in education halved. Some school closed and fees were introduced.
- Although education was considered a priority, in reality education did not really get any better. Reading rooms were set up offering 6 week courses, but uptake was poor as people prioritised their economic situations, and Lenin published 6.5 million textbooks containing simple rhymes about the alphabet, but this didn’t increase genuine literacy, only the number of people who could recognise letters.
Stalin: Employment
Full employment improved under Stalin, as he re-established the link between work and social benefits that had dissolved under the NEP.
- He ensured workers earned benefits by working by allowing workplaces to administer benefits.
- During WW2, there was a pressing demand for military resources that ensured full industrial employment.
- The Five Year Plan caused rapid industrialisation resulting in more employment.
(HOWEVER) - Full employment continued after WW2, despite the return of soldiers leading to an increase of 4.2 million in the industrial workforce between 1945 and 1950.
Stalin: Social Benefits
- Healthcare: Successes: There was a significant increase in the healthcare provision available to workers under Stalin, including mass vaccination campaigns dealing with smallpox, diphtheria, malaria and typhoid. Infant mortality declined by 50% between 1940 and 1950.
Weaknesses: Healthcare benefits were not consistent, e.g. a ‘Party First’ policy was operated for healthcare. As a result, all party officials in the Ukrainian city of Dnepropetrovsk were vaccinated against Typhus, yet 10,000 workers were reported to have the disease in the city in 1932 alone. - Working Conditions: Success: Stalin fundamentally changed working conditions in Russia by introducing the ‘continuous work week.’ This meant that workers were given one day off per week, but this changed per worker so that factories and mines could stay open 7 days a week. Many factories and collectivised farms opened canteens that provided meals for workers.
Failure: Working conditions deteriorated; lateness and damaging property were criminalised. Trade unions lost their right to negotiate conditions and pay and strikes were banned. - Food and Resources: Successes: During the 1930s, 30,000km of railway tracks were built, increasing public transport access to the extent that passenger traffic increased by 400% in this decade.
Weaknesses: A shortage of food and resources in the immediate aftermath of WW2 led to a decline on the standard of social benefits available, e.g. communal canteens began charging high prices, eating one meal per day in such a canteen cost half of a worker’s months wages by 1947.
Stalin: Housing
Successes: - There were some improvements to housing on collectivised farms; 4,500 farming villages were built between 1945 and 1950, leading to the renovation of 919,000 houses and 31,000 communal buildings.
Weaknesses: - Due to the trebling of the urban population, housing in the cities became an acute problem between 1929 and 1940, and there was a significant increase in demand. However, housing was not a priority after WW2, budgets were small and management inefficient so workers were often just reassigned and projects abandoned. E.g. 1948 building projects outside Moscow spent 40% of their budget but were suspended before a single house was finished.
- Kommunalka: Stalin divided up existing buildings into small communal apartments known as Kommunalka. Entire families shared a single room. They provided very poor living conditions, the living space was inadequate, with the average room only 4 square metres by 1940. E.g. There was a family of six living in an under stairs cupboard. There was also no investment in sanitation or utilities.
- Destruction caused by WW2 made the housing situation much worse, approx. 1/3 of housing was damaged or destroyed between 1941 and 1945.
Stalin: Women
Successes: Women began to be much more involved in the workplace;
- Due to the Five Year Plans, the number of women in the labour force greatly increased. In 1928, the last years of the NEP, only 3 millions women had worked in industry, but by 1940, this number increased to 13 million and 41% of workers in heavy industry were women.
- During the second world war, most men formed the Red Army, so 75% of the industrial workforce were female, and women even played a central role in the armed forces, e.g. female soldier national hero Lydia Litvyak who shot down 12 German planes.
Weaknesses: - There was significant discrimination to women in the workplace, e.g. women were only paid around 60% of the wages of their male counterparts for the same jobs.
- Historian Elizabeth Heinemann estimates that up to two million German women were raped by soldiers of the Red Army during WW2. In Berlin alone, 100,000 women were raped, and an estimated 10,000 of these died. Alfred Hitchcock also suggests that many of these women were victims of repeated rapes, some as many and sixty to seventy times.
- Women remained hugely underrepresented in the Communist Party with only 12% of party members female by 1928.
- Stalin reversed many women’s rights Lenin introduced, known as the Great Retreat, e.g. abortion was criminalised, contraception banned and lesbianism treated as an illness.
Stalin: Education
Successes: - Stalin launched a successful campaign against illiteracy in 1930 to eradicate illiteracy within 5 years. In this time, 90% adults attended a literacy course and approximately 68% of the people became literate.
- Primary education expanded significantly, e.g. by 1932, 96% of children aged 8-12 were in education, compared to only 60% in 1928.
- Secondary education expanded, e.g. by 1929, approximately 1.5 million children completed secondary education compare to 216,000 in 1929, however this was still only 7% of Russian children.
Weaknesses: - During the implementation of Collectivisation, teachers were often attacked as they were associated with the hated government. E.g. around 40% of teachers were attacked in 1930. Some were locked in schools that were set on fire and others had acid thrown on them.
- Stalin’s main objective regarding education was to prepare people for factory work, and so saw little need for secondary education and allowed the charging of fees at this level, severely limiting access to education.
- Discipline was a central focus of Stalin’s, a 1932 decree in discipline made attendance, punctuality and teachers setting homework a legal requirement. He even told students how they should sit/stand.
Khrushchev: Employment
Full employment continued in Russia under Khrushchev and remained a key feature of the economic model of centrally planned industry and agriculture.
Khrushchev: Social Benefits
Successes: - Living and working conditions were an ideological priority for Khrushchev e.g. he used the phrase “what sort of Communism is it that cannot produce sausage?” highlighting his regard for the importance of plentiful food.
- Increased the Soviet healthcare budget from 21.4 billion Roubles in 1950 to 44.0 billion Roubles in 1959, as a result Death rates and infant mortality decreased.
- The benefits that disappeared under Stalin such as free lunches an public transport reappeared.
- Between 1950 and 1965, the pensions budget quadrupled, partly because the number of pensioners had increased by 3.4 million but each individual pension increased.
Khrushchev: Housing
Successes: - Khrushchev’s insistence on raising living conditions led to increased investment in housing, consequently, the amount of urban housing more than doubled between 1950 and 1965.
- The building of communal housing was stopped Khrushchev designed a new style of apartment building, known as K-7 apartment blocks, which were pre-fabricated, cheap and quick to build, and gave people 10 times more living space than in Stalinist Kommunalka.
Khrushchev: Women
Successes: - Khrushchev reintroduced some of the women’s rights that disappeared under Stalin, e.g. abortion was legalised in 1955, paid maternity leave was increased from 77 to 112 days in 1956 and magazines highlighting inequalities faced by women were allowed to be published, such as Peasant Women.
- The proportion of female Communist Party members began to increase under Khrushchev, e.g. between 1956 and 1983 the number of women in the party increased by 7.3%.
Weaknesses: - Problems with women’s rights remained e.g. contraception was hard to acquire, wages were often lower and women were still expected to raise the children and do the housework, even if they had a career.
- Women working within the Virgin Lands Scheme were often forced to do the most demanding yet lowest paid jobs, many being milkmaids or haymakers, who earned 15% of what a male tractor driver earned. They were also subject to frequent sexual abuse, but women were often blamed by their managers and forced to marry their rapists.
Khrushchev: Education
Successes: - Khrushchev invested heavily in teacher training and recruitment. The number of teachers rose from 1.5 million in 1953 to 2.2 million in 1964. The level of education amongst teachers also improved in this period, with 40% of teachers university educated in 1964, compared to 19% in 1964.
- Khrushchev wanted to improve access to education, and to do this doubled the number of schools in towns and cities, abolished school fees in 1956 and set up a special fund to pay for poor student’s books and uniforms. As a result, the number of children that completed secondary school rose from 20% in 1953 to 75% in 1959.
Weaknesses: - Khrushchev's education reforms were very unpopular with parents, as they had a strong focus on practical training, and they wanted their children to have an academic education. Some Communist Party members also accused his reforms of being elitist and worried they could create a class based society. - Many of Khrushchev's education reforms were poorly implemented. Curriculum change was not implemented in 47% of schools and many teachers refused to relax discipline.
