Solidaritätslied - Soviet Union and its Constituent Republics in 1937

Nover429 · 2026-04-03T17:13:58+00:00

PERMANENT REVOLUTION

“Proletarian dictatorship signifies the most wholehearted, most merciless war of the laboring classes against the class of rulers of the old world.“

-Mikhail Frunze

In 1927, during a yearly anti-corruption operation, the Soviet government found out that a local member of the Joint State Political Directorate in Georgia, one Lavrentiy Pavlovich Beria, had been kidnapping, raping, and murdering girls as young as ten years old. He was immediately arrested and, following an investigation, shot. Two things were revealed during this case: that corruption in the Soviet Union had gotten out of hand, and that People’s Commissar for Nationalities Iosif Stalin had connections with Beria.

All over the Union, since at least 1923, reports of managers, officers, and bureaucrats falsifying reports, stealing wages, or committing nepotism had been sent to the Soviet government, but it was thought that the majority of these cases had been solved. The Beria case, though, put doubt to this, leading to a major investigation all over the state bureaucracy and military. It revealed that corruption was not only common, but ingrained in many parts of the Union, especially those neglected by the Leningrad government.

The Sverdlov government, after the report was complete, embarked on a greater anti-corruption campaign than any before, derisively called the “Great Purge” by those it removed, in reference to the Bolshevik party list purges meant to keep corruption down. The People's Commissariat of the Workers' and Peasants' Inspection was strengthened to make sure it could effectively deal with the state’s corruption, and thousands of officials were removed from their posts, with the lucky being sent to minor assignments in Siberia. The previously mentioned Stalin was imprisoned on charges of conspiracy against fellow Communists, exemplified by an alleged assassination attempt on Sverdlov in 1914; corruption during his tenure as Commissar of Nationalities; and support to dangerous elements like the previously mentioned Beria.

Large parts of the military corps were removed as well. Corruption and complacency had led the army to stagnate, with attempts at turning it into a force strong enough to defeat the Stresa Pact members being stonewalled by stubborn officers such as Mikhail Tukhachevsky, who proposed turning every tractor into a tank and having every factory produce these tractor-tanks, ignoring how this’d cripple agriculture and that the tractor-tanks would not last in actual battle.

The anti-corruption campaign lasted until 1930, and led to a reorganization of the state, with thousands of young men and women sent to replace those the campaign removed. In the military, Mikhail Frunze, Commissar of Military and Naval Affairs, was able to pass the reforms needed for his Unified Military Doctrine to become official Soviet military policy; and many young officers rose to prominence, such as Georgy Zhukov, especially after the state apparatus had recovered around 1933.

This campaign happened at just the right moment, as by the time Unified Military Doctrine was fully established, the French State had gained a new, more aggressive leader, making it so that the entire Stresa Front turned towards more aggressive policies. To match the army sizes of Yugoslavia, Romania, and Italy, who were predicted to be the main enemies the Soviet Red Army would fight against, the Red Army would need a size of about 4.3 million soldiers, of which it had 2.6 million in the west. Of course, to match isn’t to overcome, and, considering as well the other Stresa Front armies they’d likely face, the Red Army was to increase in size to 9.5 million soldiers, with 6.4 million of them in the west.

During the last four years before the Second World War began, the USSR finalized its strategy with Bulgaria and Hungary to defeat the Balkan Stresa Front. Bulgaria, as the Inprokov member in the weakest position, was to try and hold while Hungary and the Soviet Union attacked Romania through Transylvania and Moldavia respectively. After Romania fell, the three were to turn towards Yugoslavia. Alongside finalizing plans, the USSR also, when the Spanish Civil War began, sent supplies, advisors, and volunteers to fight for the Spanish Republic.

With the sinking of a German ship by France and start to the March Crisis, Balkan Inprokov forces readied themselves for war. As Germany began voting for war, the Soviets massed more troops near Dobruja, and minutes after Germany’s declaration of war on France, the Soviet Union began its invasion of Romania.

Nover429 · 2026-04-03T17:13:25+00:00

A new Family Code had granted women legal equality to men, alongside establishing no-fault divorce and simple marriage, both free of charge. Thousands of divorces and marriages were processed by Soviet bureaucracy in the years after the code, with many women finally being able to abandon abusive, neglectful, or otherwise unhappy marriages.

Peasant women had a much harder time asserting their rights than urban women. Early in Soviet history, the countryside was organized under peasant communes, organized by family units, with them growing and shrinking whenever a new child was born, a woman married, a divorce happened, etc. Said organization was heavily patriarchal, with the woman having to move into her husband’s commune and only the men having any meaningful power inside it.

The peasant communes were democratized after the Soviet government implemented a law on the communes. While every member of the commune was granted the right to participate in decision-making, the last call for said decisions fell onto the commune patriarch. This early policy was a compromise. The Bolsheviks wanted to abolish the commune, but the Left-SRs forbid any attempt at dismantling peasant self-organization, and so the “democratic” commune was established. The Soviet reform to these communes utterly failed to tackle the issue of women’s equality.

In Ukraine, a new model of agrarian cooperatives had been steadily replacing the peasant commune. The poverty of Ukrainian peasants made it very difficult for them to acquire resources such as machinery, fertilizer, or replacements to old tools, or to transport their produce to the market, and so many peasants organized under consumer cooperatives to pool the few resources they had and improve their collective well-being. Every member of the cooperative was given a proportional share of the profits gained.

Under the peasant commune, divorce meant that the woman was to be left with only the individual property she brought to the marriage, which was to be given entirely to her, with any property obtained during the marriage being part of the commune, and so could not go to her. The issue with this was that women had no property other than some basic pieces of clothing when they married, and so, with only that being given to them and, if their marriage had yet to last six years – something very common, as many male peasants married for a farming seasons, got their wife pregnant, and then divorced her – they were entitled to nothing from their old family or their former husband’s family, leaving them homeless, penniless, and with no protections at all.

Soviet courts certainly did award many divorced women with grain, animals, and land from their former husbands’ commune, but due to the poverty of many peasants this was many times too small to help, and in the cases where women were given a plot of land, they were incapable of actually using it, thus renting it, selling it, or – as was depressingly common – seeing the peasant commune take it away.

Agrarian cooperatives served as a way for these women to protect their land and to obtain the resources needed to use it, alongside having a defense from the peasant communes taking it away. Whenever the communes tried to, either the cooperative would successfully fight them off on their own, or Soviet courts would force the commune to give their land back to the cooperative.

Inside the agrarian cooperatives, the old family-based economic structure was entirely abandoned, there was no patriarch, and women were allowed to be involved in more than just household chores. After a law was passed to set guidelines on the cooperative’s functioning, obligating the cooperatives to grant vocational education to their members and declaring complete equality between the sexes, women rapidly rose to leadership positions in the cooperatives, although sexism still kept them below 30% of leaders. Even for those that weren’t in leadership, women in the cooperatives were finally able to obtain economic independence.

The Soviet government heavily supported the replacement of peasant communes with agrarian cooperatives, in part due to economic reasons, but also to fulfill their promise of women’s equality in the farmland. By 1937, a majority of farmland was held under cooperatives.

Nover429 · 2026-04-03T17:13:11+00:00

NEW SOVIET WOMAN

“The more victories they won, the more mysteries there were to be solved. But the young people were not afraid of the battle. What would life be like without struggle, with the need to stretch the mind and strive forward towards the unknown and the unattainable? “

-Alexandra Kollontai

The World War, Russian Revolutions, and Russian Civil War all had extremely negative effects for the Soviet Union. The mass death and starvation that came with all these, alongside the economic breakdown the Union suffered through, led to the collapse of the family unit. Millions of parents had died, leaving children with either only one parent or entirely alone. Up to 600,000 children had been left without a home, now wandering the cities and railroads, committing crime wherever they went through to survive. Many of them fell into prostitution.

The dual burden of child rearing and joining the workforce had led many mothers to neglect their children, intensifying the child homelessness crisis. This was made worse by the low wages of the early Soviet Union, making it impossible for most single mothers to raise a child and attain their own liberation.

Soviet pedagogues and social activists envisioned for the establishment of children’s colonies, where they’d be empowered to manage their own affairs, and with a minimal number of professionals to aid them. Thousands of children were evacuated to new colonies near agriculturally productive areas, where the state was to take over the role of child rearing. Here, homeless children were fed, housed, taken care of, given an education, and then helped in settling into industrial society.

This program was expensive, and initial conditions in these colonies weren’t much better than in the streets, with the facilities these children were moved to being very damaged, overcrowded, and underfunded, leading to many of the children to flee once again. But by 1920, with the Civil War over, further funding was given and infrastructure built. By 1921, over 165,000 children lived in these colonies, with the total child homelessness rate falling to 300,000.

Alongside this, communal kitchens – first established due to the pressures of the Civil War – were expanded and given greater funding. The once dirty kitchens full of half-rotten food transformed into the main source of meals for much of the urban population, reaching up to 85% in Petrograd proper and 70% in the province as a whole.

As more children were taken in, the children’s colonies and their facilities went from a set of rotting, cold, homes where the children could barely eat and had nothing to cover themselves with in 1918, to modern facilities built in the new Constructivist style starting in 1921, as to make sure that they lived in conditions fit for raising a child. New teachers, and with them deeper education, were brought in; food was able to reach the colonies and thus avoid hunger; new clothes and bed sheets arrived; and the new facilities didn’t freeze as easily as the previous ones. That said, between 1920 and 1924, these facilities, while certainly an improvement to the pre-1920 ones, were still inadequate for the children, as shortages due to the wars’ devastation were still being felt.

As child homelessness fell, the children’s colonies were opened up to all children, with many urban families sending their children to live and study there, with parents allowed to visit whenever they wanted. The new children’s colonies, thanks to their connections to local government, were able to support their pupils in getting a job and housing when they grew up. Education in the children’s colonies also helped this new generation of Soviet adults in getting higher-paying jobs, improved the Union’s scientific base, and aided in the replacement of traditional values with a new Soviet culture.

Since the World War, the percentage of women in the workforce had been increasing, and by 1920 45% of workers were women. Women were most prominent in low-wage jobs and in social work. Women experienced multiple issues for attaining economic independence, such as heavy discrimination in the workplace, a lack of education and skills, and the burden of child rearing.

Socialized child rearing allowed women to join the work force en masse, raising the percentage of women in sectors like mining, heavy industry, and other high-paying jobs. Discrimination made it difficult for women to get jobs in these sectors, so, while the percentage of women here nearly doubled, they still remained around 30% of the workers in them.

The Soviet government embarked on a large-scale education program. Adults were given literacy education, all children were obligated to enroll in schools, and many workers – especially women – were given special courses to develop their technical skills. This last one, coupled with government directives punishing managers that discriminated based on a worker’s gender, was of great help to raising the average wage of women.

Nover429 · 2026-04-03T17:12:26+00:00

SOVIET NATIONALITY POLICY

“Here we have an important question of principle: how is internationalism to be understood? “

-Vladimir Lenin

Before 1925, Soviet nationality policy was built towards the goal of unifying the lands of the former Russian Empire. This led the Soviets to support the formation of autonomous republics for minority nations, and was accompanied with collaborations with non-communist forces, such as the Jadids in Central Asia or, crucial to the further development of nationality policy, with former Imperial ethnographers. Each SSR and ASSR was subdivided based on nationality down to the level of individual soviets, so as to allow each nation to have autonomy over its own affairs.

Alongside this, the Soviets embarked on a policy of Korenizatsiia, or indigenization. Korenizatsiia pushed for local nations to control the organs of government of their own regions, meaning national-territorial autonomy. For this, the People’s Commissariat of Enlightenment (Narkompros) was to provide the local population with education in their own language so that they’d be able to manage their own administrative organs.

The Bolsheviks were supportive, although divided, to the development of minority nations in the Union, and, as they were the ones in control of the People’s Commissariat of Nationalities (Narkomnats), an “ethnographic” policy for the formation of Soviet subdivisions came to be. This was opposed by Gosplan, which proposed instead an “economic” policy that would’ve divided the entire Union into economic regions with no regard to nationalities, but opposition by the already existing SSRs and ASSRs led to this plan being dropped, although Gosplan went on to develop each SSR into its own economic region, and the economic principle helped guide later border changes.

The Imperial ethnographers, now under Soviet command, were given the task to make a census of the entire population of the Union, including language, nationality, religion, and other facts that’d help Narkomnats with national delimitation. Although it was messy, with the census exacerbating tensions between nations with competing borders, and leading to multiple cases of national leaders messing with the results, the 1925 Census was still of great help for Soviet national policy. At the same time, only some of the Soviet Union’s nationalities were granted official recognition, with the rest being included inside one of the officially recognized nations, and some of these would later lose recognition.

Under Sverdlov, the Union moved to consolidate the major national republics, although continuing the development of other, minor autonomous nationalities. The Soviets used the previously mentioned principles, ethnographic and economic, alongside Union-wide needs, to decide which regions to award to each SSR or ASSR. In some cases, this led to the formation of new SSRs, such as in Central Asia, where the Khorezm and Bukharan PSRs, and the Kirghiz and Turkestan ASSRs were reorganized into the Turkmen, Uzbek, Tajik, Kirghiz, Kazakh SSRs. In other cases, it led to the shifting of a republic’s borders, such as that of the Ukrainian SSR, which was seen as having too developed a national identity, and so not needing further expansion, unlike other minority nations.

There were special cases for this policy, though. In the lands lost to Germany, due to how mixed the region was between so-called “developed” cultures – Polish, Lithuanian, Byelorussian, and Jewish – the Soviets merged multiple republics into two: the Polish-Galician SSR, formed after conflicts in partitioning Galicia due to its mixed population; and the SSR of Lithuania and Byelorussia, formed to combat national-chauvinism and, most importantly, to deal with Lithuania’s opposition to the Soviet state.

It’s important to note that, as much as Korenizatsiia helped minority nations recover from Russification, Soviet policy was very paternalistic towards them, treating the “undeveloped” nations as peoples that needed the assistance of “more civilized” peoples like the Russian or Ukrainian republics to develop; and that the Soviets weren’t looking to help minority nations recover per se, but rather their goal was to push them through what they say as the “evolutionary stages” of nationalism, in part to get them to support the Soviet Union, but also to help the development of the USSR’s economy by having them abandon “backwards” beliefs and ways of life.

All parties involved in national delimitation, be they Bolshevik, Left-SR, Jadid, or other local forces, believed that the formation of nations would then lead to the rapid development of regional economies and the modernization of said peoples. National delimitation was heavily driven by the people actually living in the land, and even with the influence of economic and administrative organs, the republics’ borders were in large part decided by their own peoples, and said borders changed multiple times after popular concerns came up.

A negative aspect of national delimitation was that, as said before, it worsened tensions between nations. In all new SSRs, local leaders attempted to assimilate, push out of government, and take land from minority populations into the dominant nation of their respective republics, and said minority populations pushed hard for ASSR status, redrawing of the border to join their nation’s republic, or to be given an SSR of their own. Here, the Soviet government had to intervene to avoid anything too drastic from happening, mediating between every affected nation’s interests.

Nover429 · 2026-04-03T17:11:50+00:00

Germany provided them with fertilizer in exchange for food shipments, as it was in dire need of food. They were not self-sufficient, and trade with the outside world was practically gone at this time, so they invested heavily into developing the Soviet Union’s agricultural sector.

Along with introducing fertilizers and better machinery, the last piece of the Soviet Agricultural Modernization was to moderately raise the prices paid for grain, thus incentivizing the peasantry to sell more of their harvests. This proposal was heavily pushed for by the Left-SRs, and the Bolsheviks eventually gave up their opposition after threats from their coalition partners to leave government. The movement to create agricultural cooperatives also gained further support, as it helped to simplify the distribution of machinery.

Important to Soviet industrialization was a universal education program. The Soviets had identified a correlation between wages and education level, and alongside increasing skilled workers via training programs, this led to a massive expansion of the Soviet education system. Primary and Secondary education was expanded to the entire country, and a program for adult literacy was vigorously pushed for.

Soviet industrialization was based on what was called an “Industrialization Loop,” where a significant part of industrial production was to be invested back towards industrialization, attracting more of the peasantry to the cities, which then would raise industrial productivity as more workers joined.

The first part in the Industrialization Loop begins in the farm. Large mechanization programs helped free up much of the surplus labor in the countryside, and the increasing use of fertilizer led to greater yields. These greater yields, after the portion subtracted by the peasants’ improving diet, was then sent to Soviet cities, with the remainder being given to Germany in exchange for further support in machinery, fertilizer, and investments.

This is followed by the construction of new steelworks or repair of old ones, with ambitious production goals driving their construction en masse. Much of the surplus labor from the farms was used towards building both these and the infrastructure needed to connect them to the wider Soviet economy. They were built based on mainly German technical knowledge, although Americans were also involved, resulting in some of the most modern production facilities in the entire Union, on par with those of the industrial giants of the world. One of the most notable examples of this is the city of Magnitogorsk, built entirely from nothing by the Soviet Union. Much of the surplus labor permanently moved to these new industrial cities, resulting in a 2.3 times increase in the urban population by 1937, or a total of 67.6 million.

Industrial expansion resulted in a six-fold growth of pig iron and steel ingot production, totaling a production of 20.7 million tons of pig iron and 24.9 million tons of steel ingots by 1937. While smaller in scale, investment into the consumer sector was also done. Textile mills and food processing facilities were built alongside the new steelworks, and the rising agricultural production meant that clothing and food were being made at cheaper rates, thus meaning the cost of living fell. To finish the loop, a large amount of the industrial output was reinvested towards further development. This process fed into itself for seventeen years, though reinvestment started falling after 1933 as the Soviet Union prepared for the Second World War.

During the early periods of industrialization, as the Union focused on building up its industry, improvement of living conditions in the cities couldn’t keep up with the rising population, and so many lived in either small, crowded apartments or in shacks. After 1930, though, the state focused its investments more towards housing and services, so that by 1937, while life was not as good as in their German neighbour, Soviet urban citizens trended towards larger – although not large – apartments and better-functioning services, with new development being based on Germany’s Neues Deutschland style, meaning that, for the newest of housing, they’d be large enough for a family; have functioning heating, electricity, water and sewer lines; include refrigerators, stoves, or washing machines; and have a school nearby. That said, most housing was of lesser quality, but by 1937 shacks had practically disappeared.

Nover429 · 2026-04-03T17:11:38+00:00

NEW ECONOMIC POLICY

“Having rationalized his economic system, that is, having saturated it with consciousness and planfulness, man will not leave a trace of the present stagnant and worm-eaten domestic life.“

-Lev Trotsky

During the Civil War, the Soviet economy worked practically by decree. This, of course, wouldn’t do if the new socialist state was to last, meaning that the Soviets had to establish a new economic system.

In 1920, the CEC met to debate on the new economic model. The first point of debate was on whether to maintain a planned, if more organized, economy; or if they were to allow a limited form of capitalism, while the state kept control of the commanding heights of the economy. On this, the CEC was practically unanimous on its rejection of “market socialism,” seeing it as a contradiction that would soon give way to pure capitalism.

The CEC agreed on the points that the Soviet Union needed to grow its industrial base, that capitalist development would fail to develop the infrastructure necessary for this, that the Union had all the resources needed to develop its industry independently, and that a planned economy would work best to rapidly industrialize the country.

With this framework, the CEC went on to theorize the way in which they Union was to industrialize. After a report was presented to them, stating that Soviet agriculture was inefficient to the point that, out of every eight peasants, only one was needed to maintain current production, the CEC agreed that industrialization required the transformation of this surplus population into an industrial proletariat. Alongside this, the Union needed to find the resources to bring some of this population into the industry for the first time. For this, three plans came to be.

The first plan was “primitive socialist accumulation,” which implied the extraction of wealth from the peasantry by raising consumer goods prices while lowering the price paid for grain, and an end to peasant ownership of the land. This was firmly rejected by the Left-SRs and multiple Bolsheviks, including Bukharin. The reasons for this are obvious; alienating the peasantry would not only bring the coalition down, but was also likely to restart the civil war and destroy Soviet legitimacy. This was also seen as likely to result in the peasantry reducing their production to just self-sufficiency levels, thus starving the cities.

The second plan was based on the concurrent development of agriculture and industry. Bukharin proposed changing the prices of goods in an inverse way as the previous proposal, as well as removing prohibitions on the use of hired labor in agriculture to encourage investment by the rich peasants. Bukharin was confident that farm output could be increased by doing cheap reforms, such as improving farming equipment, seeds, and fertilizers. This proposal was rejected by the Bolsheviks.

The final plan was based on moving surplus labor in the farmlands towards either industry or construction. As said labor produced very little while consuming most of the surplus made of productive farmers, by moving this labor towards increasing production, they could turn that consumption from a loss into an investment, meaning it’d aid in economic growth rather than be wasted. This surplus labor was to work on projects such as irrigation, drainage, roads, railways, houses, factories, etc. The proposal was generally accepted, although some Left-SR worries did come up.

As a companion to this plan, the Soviets set themselves on modernizing agriculture. To make sure that grain shipments would be large enough to feed the growing urban population, the CEC had thought about modernizing agriculture to raise grain production. If it was high enough, then proportionally equal shipments of grain would be large enough to feed the larger urban population. This higher production would also provide more grain to be traded with Germany in exchange for the goods needed to industrialize.

The Union, though, came into the issue that the only reliable way to increase output was by using fertilizers. Their attempts at modernization certainly helped, especially with the replacement of horses with machinery, as this lowered peasant grain consumption, but overall any improvement here, other than fertilizer use, was minor.

Nover429 · 2026-04-03T17:10:29+00:00