Figure 1.--This is another photograph taken by a German soldier, we think in 1941. The children are barefoot, but dressed reasonably well. Notice the hovels, however, in which they are living. |
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Living conditions in the Soviet Union are difficult to assess. Soviet statistics are suspect because they were politicized. Managers who reported poor results might well be arrested and shipped off o the Gulag. And the Government wanted positive statistics to prove that Communism was amore efficent economic system. Soviet propaganda in the 1930s painted a picture of happy and well-fed peasants and workers. Photographic images were carefully chosen to convey a positive image. This impressed some Americans suffering through the Depression. Some Americans saw the Soviet model as aay of avoiding the boom-and-bust cycles of capitalist societies. Unknown at the time was the level of abject poverty that existed in the Soviet Union. There are two sources of imagery that provide reliable information about living conditions without an ideological filter. German soldiers as they cut a wide swaith through the Soviet Union in 1941 brought back images of terrible rural poverty. This was not poverty they created because of their terrible depredations, but poverty they encountered. It is well known that Soviet agricultural policies were disasterous, but we have been shocked by the level of rural poverty that existed in the Soviet Union. We are not entirely sure just how to interpret these images. We see many people wearing rags and living in hovels. It us very different from the image of the country projected by the Soviet propaganda machine. Conditions for workers in the cities by contrast seem much better. The German photographs provide a very narrow chronological window, mostly 1941-42. By 1942 the Germans soldiers were taking fewer images of Soviet peasants and had been driven out of much of Russia proper, although they did reseize the Ukraine. Another good source of information are the family snapshots taken by Soviet citizens.
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