Perestroika and the future of socialism - part 1 - social and political in the Soviet Union

Two features of this tremendous transformation of Soviet society have been the growth of cities and the spread of mass education, each an integral part of the rapid industrialization and related social programs adopted by the centrally planned economy. At the time of the Revolution, about 18 percent of the country's population lived in 800 cities and towns. Since then, many of the older cities have expanded and thousands of new cities and urban settlements have been created. By now two-thirds of the people live in urban centers, a far cry from the pre-revolutionary agrarian society in which over 80 percent of the population lived in the countryside.(*1)

Urbanization is, of course, an outstanding trait of all industrialized societies, along with the slums and ghettos still found in leading cities of countries with a very long history of urbanization. Especially noteworthy about the transformation in the Soviet Union is its unprecedented speed. That would have been remarkable enough if the process had been evenly spread over the 72 years since the Revolution. But that period included foreign intervention, the civil war of the 1920s, and the Second World War when city life regressed, to be followed by years devoted mainly to cleaning up the rubble and rebuilding. Thus urbanization was largely concentrated in roughly forty years, the 1930s and 1950 to 1980. Meeting the requirements of the burgeoning population was no easy matter: shelter, schools, hospitals, retail establishments, transportation facilities, and much more had to be built. But the investment for all this was not forthcoming to the extent really needed because at the same time productive resources were absorbed by the equally unprecedented rate of industrialization. The consequent strains of city life have long been a source of popular dissatisfaction, only to become more so as the gap between promise and achievement widened during the stagnation during the Brezhnev era.

The extraordinary industrial growth brought about not only a concentration of population but also major changes in social structure. What was outstanding, of course, was the formation of a vastly enlarged working class that replaced the peasantry as the largest sector of the population. Moreover, it was a class that changed considerably over the years. At first it grew as a result of migration from rural areas, notably stimulated by the collectivization drive in agriculture. The peasants who then flocked to the cities for jobs in industry and construction were strangers to factory discipline and were by and large illiterate and unschooled. Recall that prior to the Revolution only about a quarter of the rural population was literate. The revolutionary government's devotion to education paid off quickly in a sharp increase in literacy and in the creation of a corps of technicians and engineers. Still, by 1939 only 12 percent of the gainfully employed had more than an elementary school education. That changed dramatically after the Second World War. By 1987 almost 89 percent of the gainfully employed had been to high school: of these three-fourths graduated from specialized or general education high schools.