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"Gorbachev Factor"
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Ultimately, the most crucial resource of Stalin’s industrialization
was the abundance and inexhaustibility of cheap labor. It was
provided by millions of trained workers, by millions of peasants
driven to towns by the collectivization, by millions of labor camp
inmates, and by 1.5 million of the former unemployed (unemployment
disappeared in 1930). Many were driven by enthusiasm, prepared to
sweat at construction sites around the clock virtually for free.
Young people, in particular, were deeply motivated by the idea that
it was possible to build a better and fairer society relatively
quickly, within their lifetime, by mounting a huge exhausting effort
and accepting hardships and self-sacrifice. |
This
was Soviet Russia’s period of great austerity, as reflected in a
number of popular stories characteristic of the popular mood that
people usually whispered in secret:
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An
Englishman, a Frenchman, and a Russian were arguing about the
nationality of Adam and Eve.
“They must have been English,” declares the Englishman. “Only a
gentleman would share his last apple with a woman.”
“They were undoubtedly French,” says the Frenchman. “Who else could
seduce a woman so easily?”
“I
think they were Russian,” says the Russian. “After all, who else
could walk around stark naked, feed on one apple between the two of
them, and think they were in paradise?”
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Soviet Russia |
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Images &
Video |
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