IB History Social Policies Notes

Stalin's Social Policies Expanded Education and Women's Roles While Reversing Personal Freedoms

Education and Literacy

1. Adult literacy campaigns transformed a largely illiterate population. Literacy rose from around 56% in 1926 to roughly 81-87% by 1939, and primary school enrollment became near-universal.
2. Technical and higher education expanded dramatically to supply the engineers and managers the Five-Year Plans needed.
3. Education served ideology as much as it served literacy. Curricula were rewritten to match the official Stalinist version of history, and disciplines that contradicted party doctrine were suppressed: biologists who rejected Trofim Lysenko's pseudo-scientific theories of heredity risked their careers.

Women in Stalin's USSR

1. Women entered the workforce and professions in unprecedented numbers. By 1940, women made up around 38% of industrial workers and roughly 75% of medical doctors, a scale of female participation without precedent in Soviet history.
2. Family policy reversed the liberalization of the 1920s. The 1926 family code, which had legalized easy divorce and abortion, was tightened from the mid-1930s: divorce became difficult after 1936, and abortion was re-criminalized the same year.
3. The state combined feminist rhetoric about equality with pronatalist policy that rewarded large families, producing what historians call the "double burden": women were expected to work full-time and still carry responsibility for housework and childcare.

National Minorities

1. Early Soviet nationalities policy promoted local languages and cultures, then Stalin reversed course. "Korenizatsiya" (indigenization) policies through the 1920s had encouraged education and administration in local languages across the USSR's many nationalities.
2. From the 1930s, national elites who asserted local identity too strongly were purged as "bourgeois nationalists." Purges fell especially hard on Ukrainian, Central Asian, and Caucasian party and cultural leaders, and Russian language and culture were increasingly promoted as unifying within the Soviet Union.
   1. In 1937, the state deported around 172,000 ethnic Koreans from the Soviet Far East to Central Asia on unfounded claims that Japan could use them for espionage, an early example of the wholesale ethnic deportations later applied to other national groups.

Youth and Political Socialization: The Komsomol and Young Pioneers

1. The Komsomol organised young people aged 14 to 28 and prepared selected members for party careers, involving them in literacy campaigns, collectivization drives, and industrial projects, while the Young Pioneers introduced younger children to collective discipline and loyalty to Communist leaders through ceremonies, uniforms, and songs.
   1. Not every young person embraced this system. Some found genuine opportunity in education and skilled employment, while others resisted through absenteeism, religious practice, or informal youth cultures.

Religion and Cultural Control

1. The Soviet state treated organised religion as a rival authority. The League of Militant Godless ran lectures, exhibitions, and campaigns promoting atheism, while authorities closed or converted many churches, mosques, and synagogues, and clergy faced arrest, exile, and loss of property.
   1. The 1936 Constitution formally promised freedom of worship, but state pressure made that promise unreliable in practice, and religious belief survived mainly in private, within families and local communities.

1. Cultural policy tightened after the experimental atmosphere of the 1920s. Socialist realism required writers and artists to present Soviet development in an optimistic form, and the state rewarded cultural figures who followed official expectations while censoring or punishing those who did not.

Urban Life and Living Standards

1. Industrialization moved millions into towns faster than the state could build housing, so many urban families lived in communal apartments sharing kitchens and bathrooms between several households, while new industrial centres often relied on barracks and overcrowded temporary shelters.
   1. Food rationing operated from 1929 to 1935, and real wages fell during the early Five-Year Plans as prices rose faster than pay, while officials and specialists used privileged distribution systems that ordinary workers could not access.

1. Public health and medical provision expanded significantly under the Five-Year Plans, though overcrowding and poor sanitation continued to spread disease in the fastest-growing industrial towns.

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