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Moving to Moscow: Patterns of Peasant In-Migration during the First Five-Year Plan

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 January 2017

David L. Hoffmann
David L. Hoffmann*
Affiliation:
Harvard Russian Research Center
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Extract

When an eighteen-year-old peasant named Evgenii Mikhailovich Kostin stepped off a train in Moscow in October 1931 he felt overwhelmed by milling throngs of unfamiliar people and frightened by the commotion of the city. Yet his adjustment to urban life proved much less traumatic than his initial impression had portended; relatives housed him, an acquaintance from his village found him a job, and friends showed him around Moscow. Kostin was one of at least 23 million Soviet peasants who moved permanently to cities between 1926 and 1939—marking what demographers estimate to be the most rapid urbanization in world history. In the First Five-Year Plan alone Moscow’s population increased nearly 60 percent (an added 1,349,500 people) to reach 3,663,300 by the end of 1932. Scholars have portrayed peasant in-migration to Soviet cities during the 1930s either as a phenomenon tightly regulated by the state or, alternatively, as chaos and upheaval; but, as this article will demonstrate, the process by which peasants found their way to Moscow during the First Five-Year Plan was neither controlled nor chaotic.

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Articles
Information
Slavic Review , Volume 50 , Issue 4 , Winter 1991 , pp. 847 - 857
Copyright
Copyright © Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies, Inc. 1991

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References

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31. A distinction with regard to in-migration during the 1930s should be made between old industrial centers, such as Moscow, and newly established cities, such as Magnitogorsk, Prokop’evsk, Karaganda, Kirovsk, and Komsomol’sk. The traditions and networks that had guided peasants to Moscow for generations and continued to do so in the 1930s did not exist for these new sites. See Arutiunian, lu. V., “Kollektivizatsiia sel’skogo khoziaistva i vysvobozhdenie rabochei sily dlia promyshlennosti,” Formirovanie i razvitie sovetskogo rabochego klassa (1917-1961 gg.) (Moscow: Nauka, 1964), 114–115 Google Scholar.

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33. Administrativno-territorial’noe delenie Soiuza SSR (Moscow: NKVD RSFSR, 1929) 32.

34. Vsesoiuznaia perepis’ naseleniia 1926 g. 36:216-221; see also Chase, Workers, Society, and the Soviet State, 79. The 1902 census showed slightly higher percentages arriving from the territory that was to become Moscow oblast (59 percent) and from the central industrial region as a whole (75 percent) (Perepis’ Moskvy 1902 g. 2:24-27). These percentages should not be taken as exact, for the reordering of data to establish comparable units involves some approximation; nonetheless, these figures provide a generaljjasis for establishing continuity in migration trends.

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37. Rybakovskii, L. L., ed., Naselenie SSSR za 70 let (Moscow: Nauka, 1988), 51 Google Scholar. Famine regions and rural areas immediately surrounding other industrial centers (especially the Donbass) also experienced significant depopulation.

38. See Lee, “Theory of Migration,” 48.

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42. TsGAOR f. 5475, op. 13, d. 276, 1. 14; TsGANKh f. 7446, op. 8, d. 88, 1. 134; Sovetskoe kraevedenie 1932, no. 4, 35-36.

43. One peasant in Riazan province had a brother-in-law living in Moscow who not only encouraged him to move there, but also promised him a job in the same factory shop where the brother-in-law was already working; interview with Aleksandr Maksimovich Korneev, Hammer and Sickle Plant, Moscow (24 April 1989). Another peasant followed her husband to the city after he had found a job, and she soon began work in the same factory; Harvard Project #107 AD. A sixteen-year-old peasant planning to study in the city moved in with his uncle there and soon joined him in transportation work; Molodaia gvardiia transporta (Moscow: Gudok, 1936), 187-193.

44. AAN (Arkhiv Akademii Nauk) f. 359, op. 2, d. 499,1. 2; d. 507,11. 26-27; TsGAORgM f. 168, op. 3, d. 7, 1. 29; Rabochaia Moskva 29 October 1931, 3; TsGAOR f. 5515, op. 15, d. 410,1. 55.

45. See for example, Gudov, Ivan, Sud’ba Rabochego (Moscow: Politizdat, 1974), 5, 35Google Scholar. Another peasant became intrigued when a fellow villager urged him to join construction work on the Moscow metro; after finding out what a metro was, he followed his friend to begin work there; Istorila metro Moskvy, 231.

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47. TsGAMO f. 4867, op. 1, d. 156, 11. 24-26; Za novoi byt 1929 no. 9-10, 4; Moskovskaia promyshlennaia kooperatsiia 1931 no. 7, 12.

48. Rabochii klass—vedushchaia, 201.

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