Gendered Division of Labor and Concepts of ‘Feminine’ and ‘Masculine’ Among SpecialSettlers in the Soviet Union, 1941-1956.

By Irina Mukhina, PhDDepartment of History, Boston College

irina.mukhina@verizon.netTo be presented at the XIVth International Economic History Congress,

Helsinki, Finland, 21-25 August, 2006Session 14: Technology, Gender and the Division of Labor

In 1941-1942, almost the entire German population of the Soviet Union, numbering over1.2 million people, was resettled to the east, predominantly in Siberia and Kazakhstan.1 The firstmass transfer of Germans began with the resettlement of Germans from Crimea in the summer of1941 in the immediate wake of the German invasion of the USSR (Pohl, 1997: 74-75). But theorders for the largest dislocation of ethnic Germans were issued on 28 August 1941, when theSoviet government decided to “resettle all Germans from the Republic of the Volga Germans andfrom Saratov and Stalingrad regions numbering overall 479,841 individuals…without exception,both townsmen and the rural population.”2 Ethnic Germans were deported for reasons other thanwhy the Soviet government exiled many other national minorities like Chechens, namelycollaboration with Nazis. As most Germans lived deep in the interior of the nation, the exile ofGermans was a preventative rather than punitive measure. The Supreme Soviet exiled theGerman population to prevent them from potentially collaborating with the Nazis (Pohl, 1997:74-75). While in exile, ethnic Germans were forced to live to the so-called special settlements inSiberia and Kazakhstan until 1956. In these settlements, they were deprived of their right tofreedom of employment, among many other rights. Moreover, during the war, ethnic Germans ofthe Soviet Union were forced into labor armies, and these Germans returned to specialsettlements only at the war’s end.

The goal of my work is analyze the patterns of forced labor and gendered division oflabor in special settlements and labor armies during the World War II and thereafter on theexample of deported ethnic Germans of the Soviet Union. I argue that the gendered patterns offorced labor were very different from the overall circumstances of the Soviet labor experiencesduring the same years. I want to illuminate the primary role that the authorities played ingendering the division of labor along the technological lines among German special settlers.These authorities believed that only men were capable of learning the functioning and operationof machinery, and documents show the exact mechanisms of such a division. Various stereotypeswent to work to men’s advantage, and such factors as “feminine emotionality” and “simple factthat men are more capable to deal with machines” were cited by authorities in charge. However,during the war years these authorities had to face two challenges to the stereotypes they shared -abnormal gender imbalances and the fact that machinery was diverted to war-related industries to

1 The 1939 census has 1,423,534 ethnic Germans residing in the Soviet Union (Vsesoiuznaia perepis’naseleniia 1939 goda. Osnovnye itogi, Moscow, 1992, pp. 59-65). This number can also be found inGARF, fond 9479, opis 1, delo 372, l. 205. However, approximately 949,829 (the exact numbers arecontradictory in various documents) were deported in 1941, and this number swelled to a little over 1.2million in the next few years. Pohl, 1997: 73. Other sources demonstrate that in the second half of 1947,only 905,184 Germans are listed in the records of special settlements, of whom there were 199,522 men,351,008 women, and 354,654 children. GARF, fond 9479, opis 1, delo 98, l. 364, 2nd half of 1947.2 TsSKhD, fond 3, opis 58, delo 178, 1-5, as published in Bugai, 1998: 19-22.

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support the war effort. Regardless of nation-wide “feminization of machinery”’ that took place inthe Soviet Union during the war, authorities in charge of special settlements decided that it was“men’s job” to maintain a few remaining tractors and other machines while women could workmanually. This attitude brought upon massive occupational change among German womencompared to pre-war and pre-deportation years. The harsh manual labor among women whichsuch an attitude assured resulted in serious physiological and psychological changes amongwomen. German settler-women came to believe that they were denied the access to technologyregardless of the obvious lack of men not because of their inability to learn the skills. Rather,they came to believe that their placement in jobs involving harsh physical labor which broughtupon many physiological changes was aimed at their “masculinization” for the sake of economicproduction.

To carry out this project, I have utilized many newly-discovered and hitherto unavailabledocuments located in Moscow and Central Asian archives where I worked during my extensiveresearch trips in 2004 and 2005. I have also personally collected or have come across andanalyzed about a hundred of published and unpublished interviews and memoirs of ethnicGerman women.3 Finally, I have relied extensively on ethnographical and sociological studiesand applied various theories of social sciences to my research.

Although the campaigns for “women’s liberation” started in the early days of the Sovietregime, in the 1920s a fight for the emancipation of a Soviet woman emphasized the value ofdeveloping women’s independence from the domestic sphere and initiative in the workplacerather than women’s greater access to machinery. Zhenotdel, or Soviet department for work withwomen which existed in the 1920s, attempted to spread the ideas of emancipation by publishingjournals and magazines, organizing evening education classes for women and holding regulardelegate conferences and various talks with “progressive” women. Since Zhenotdel mainlyaimed at liberating women from domestic chores and patriarchal abuse, its delegates primarilyadvocated the establishment of greater number of daycares and common eating and medicalfacilities and having them of higher quality than existed before. Of course, the greater women’sparticipation in the workforce was also on the agenda. The Zhenotdel workers often went to theextremes in their efforts, and they even helped to establish a few collective farms in the SovietUnion which were run and operated entirely and exclusively by women and in “women only”communities. Even though none of these farms survived into the 1930s, there existence ismemorable. The Soviet government supported all these initiatives by, for example, signing intolaws various decrees on divorce, abortion, and against discrimination of the basis of sex inemployment, making various procedures like divorce easily attainable for women. Althoughthese changes and campaigns brought some limited changes to women’s lives (region ofresidence often determined the degree of change), in the 1920s, the most significant results thatwere achieved in the sphere of women’s life were not related to the mechanization of theagricultural and industrial production and women’s greater access to machinery but rather tosocial welfare system.

In the 1930s, however, the Soviet government realized a great potential of women’s forcein its collectivization campaigns. The Soviet government reasoned that women were more likelythan men to embrace collectivization if it brought some positive changes into their lives andallowed for greater freedom of employment for women, especially the freedom of skilled femaleemployment. Various training programs were organized which aimed at giving women moreadvanced skills and knowledge of technology and machinery. The Soviet state attempted to make

3 See the reference list at the end of this paper.

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women into more skilled agricultural workers and launched its campaigns for more women astractor drivers and managers of the collective and state farms. These efforts were not withouttheir share of success. If in 1930 there were very few women who worked with machinery, by1938, the Soviet government counted 57,500 female tractor drivers nationwide (Clements, 1994:70-71). The Soviet government also favored women over men in making them public herofigures in agricultural and industrial production and overproduction, and rewarded women hero-workers with far greater benefits than similar workers among men.

Of course, even if these campaigns were the foundation of women’s greater access tomachinery, especially in the agricultural sector, they were not able to overcome the variousprejudices about “female” involvement in “male” jobs in the short few years that thesecampaigns existed. There was a wide-spread and popular resentment against women working ina predominantly male company, and not once did women complain of their husbands’unprovoked jealousy. Many jobs (like a tractor driver) required an absence from home overnightor even a few days in a row, and men resented the lack of attention and care during these days.These sentiments were very pronounced in Muslim communities of the Soviet Union. Numerousofficials also refused (even if often unofficially) to hire women because of potential pregnancies,physical challenges of the jobs, and various demands of the motherhood that could distract awoman. In addition, some men were simply envious of the fact that women made the same ormore money in skilled occupations than did these men. As a result, men often harassed womenwith mechanical skills into quitting their jobs and going into manual labor, and in the late 1930salmost all better-paying jobs of running machinery and managing the farms were held by men.At the same time, women constituted ninety-nine percent of milkmaids, ninety-four percent ofworkers of poultry-yards, and ninety-one percent of pig growers, all of which required onlymanual labor. On the other hand, women constituted only seventeen percent of workers whoneeded some rudimentary skills to perform their jobs, like vet aids (vettekhniki) and livestockreproduction assistants (fel’dshery) (Denisova, 2003: 114).

Yet the onset of World War II brought substantial changes to this situation. Inevitably,most able-bodied men left industrial and agricultural production to join the ranks of the RedArmy to fight the invading German forces. As a result, during the war years the Sovietenterprises had to rely on predominantly female labor resources. Thus, for example, as ofJanuary 1, 1941, only 4.4 million able-bodied males worked in the Soviet kolkhozy, as comparedto 17.5 million able-bodied females, making it a ratio of one male to four females. Theproportion was somewhat better off in the industrial sector, where women neverthelessconstituted on average 55 percent of the workforce (Barber, Harrison, 1991: 216-217). Even ifsome of these men came back after the war, many millions of them did not.

The Soviet government realized well that most skilled workers prior to the onset of thewar were males and that the majority of them left the producing sector in order to fight at thefront lines. Hence the Soviet government promoted the increase of skilled production byestablishing various training schools for teaching women and youth to operate industrial andagricultural machinery. As a result of such measures, by 1945 these training and vocationalschools produced 2.5 million skilled workers with knowledge of machinery and technology, ofwhom 76% were women (Riad’kovskii, Khodiakov, 2001: 102).

The great accessibility of the training schools and the lack of readily-available men led tothe “natural” processes of “feminization of machinery” in all non-occupied and producing areasof the Soviet Union during the war. Since the “feminization of machinery” is a well-establishedfact for the Soviet war-time production and is a common occurrence in any country activelyinvolved in war, there is no need to go in detail on this point. The example given in Table 1 isrevealing in this respect. Similar tendencies toward the greater participation of women in

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technological production were evident in all sectors of the Soviet economy during the WorldWar II.________________________________________________________________________Table 1. Women Tractor-Drivers in 1930-1948.

Year Overall Nos. Women, Nos. Women, %1930 360,000 2,000-3,000 5.5-8.31935 495,000 19,000 3.81937 588,900 43,900 6.41938 685,000 57,500 8.31939 690,000 24,000 3.51940 812,000 64,000 7.91943 * * 54-571948 612,475 36,136 5.9Source: Aratiunian, 1960: 16, 38, 59-60, 68-69; Malukhina, 1938: 32. * - numbers changed too rapidly during the war years to be reported for the entire year. Yet the overall percentageremained correct for the duration of the war. The overall number of women can be estimated at 350,000 and wasreported at 254,000 in 1946.

Before we can talk about employment patterns among special settlers of German originduring the war years and their access to technology, we need to realize that there existed severalfactors which affected the labour patterns among German special settlers in exile. Among many,two factors were of primary importance, and they need to be addressed prior to the furtherdiscussion of labor patterns among ethnic Germans of the Soviet Union. First, the practice ofdeportations in 1941 and thereafter which brought many Germans to special settlements was ahighly gendered experience, an experience which undeniably affected labor patterns amongspecial settlers. Secondly, as a result of deportation and exile, ethnic Germans in specialsettlements had to face abnormal gender imbalances that by far exceeded the gender imbalanceswhich existed elsewhere in the war-torn and post-war Soviet Union.

Thus, while the deportations of 1941 and thereafter affected both men and women, theirroads were often different, or at least separate. In many cases, women were deported in differentwagons from men, or while their fathers, husbands, and sons were away. Thus, a newspaperentitled “Tevija,” which was published in Latvia during the Nazi occupation, printed onSeptember 20, 1941 a “secret” order from Stalin which read:

After the house search, tell everyone who is scheduled to be deported that, according tothe government’s decision, they are being sent to other regions of the USSR. Transportthe entire family in one car until the train station, but at the station, heads of the families[read: men] must be loaded in a separate train car prepared especially for them…. Theirfamilies are deported for special settlements in the far away regions of the Union.[Family members] must not know about the forthcoming separation with the head of thefamily. (Vol’ter, 1998: 62-63)

While historians now question the authenticity of this document, it is doubtless that this policywas used for the deportation of Latvian and Polish families and oftentimes, although notexclusively, for the deportation of ethnic Germans. While the massive disproportion of women tomen among ethnic Germans of the Soviet Union could be explained by a number of other

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reasons which will be discussed later, this official order for family separations was one of themain factors which led to the phenomenon of “female echelons” going to Siberia and the CentralAsia.

Lack of organization had made the journeys of these ethnic German women intolerable,often killing a great number of children and elderly and sick women. As an immediate result ofpoor preparation for deportation and its execution, Germans suffered a massive human loss tostarvation and disease. The overall number of deaths during the deportations and immediatelythereafter was rarely reported, especially when it came to the actual process of deportation, andvaried significantly when they were mentioned. However, a sample document reveals an extentof such loss. In the first half of 1942, out of 43,856 settlers of Bogoslovskii raion, 5,181 diedwithin this six-month period, reaching a death rate of 11.81% percent in half a year. Thispercentage reached 17.6% percent in some smaller locations.4 These numbers appear to beroughly correct for all settlements, varying from seven to seventeen percent in the said period.Overall, we can calculate an appropriate loss of life over the few years following the deportation.Although many historical works estimate the death rate at about ten percent or even lower(Bougai, 1992: 84-85), various documents suggest that over the course of five to seven yearssince the deportation, almost one fifth of all ethnic Germans in the Soviet Union died.

Besides a dramatic decline in the overall ethnic German population of the Soviet Unioncombined with a severe psychological trauma, ethnic German women had to face abnormalgender imbalances in deportation and exile. Even prior to the deportation, men were often inshort supply among ethnic Germans. In early 1941, in the Republic of Volga Germans, thenumber of men was 1.4 times less than the number of women (Vol’ter, 1998: 55). In other areasthe difference reached a ratio of 1 man to every 2.5 women, reaching an astonishing 1 to 5.9 ratiofor occasional rural areas (Walth, 2000: 104-5). Historian Karl Stumpp attributed thesedifferences to the earlier persecutions and referred to the above-mentioned decree on 1941:

Those men who were banished in the years 1937-38 were never again allowed to write totheir wives, who had to live or must still live with uncertainty as to whether theirhusbands are alive or have succumbed to physical and psychological stresses. In themeanwhile, a secret order, relative to the banishment of the Volga-Germans (1941), hasbecome public, according to which the men were to be separated from their families andbanished into distant areas (Stumpp, O.j.: 93).

Besides separation and exile, higher death rates among men during famines than among women;repressions of earlier years (dekulakization campaigns and various political repressions);causalities of World War I; and overall lower life expectancy for men than women were justsome other factors which could explain this misbalance.

Although the overall Soviet gender imbalances were great, as a direct result of thedeportation the gender imbalance was much greater among ethnic German women than amongother ethnic groups in the Soviet Union. Though many historians previously relied on anassumption that there existed a demographic and gender imbalance in the entire war-torn SovietUnion due to predominantly male conscription into the Red Army and heavily male casualties inWorld War II,5 historians now argue that the gender imbalance was not as great as had beenpreviously estimated.6 It is entirely correct to say, they acknowledge, that the losses of the Red

4 GARF, fond 9414, opis 1, delo 1157, ll. 149-150.5 For accounts of women in the Soviet Union, Bridger, 1989; Edmondson, 1991; Massell, 1974;Denisova, 2003.6 These works are too numerous to list them all; refer, for example, to Sokolov, 1996.

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Army were predominantly male. Only 490,000 to 530,000 women fought actively during the waryears as compared roughly to twenty-five million men (Krivosheev, 1993: 329; Militaryeffectiveness, 1988: 263). Although many of these women died in action, their proportion wasstill relatively small to the male causalities of the Red Army, estimated at 8.5 million dead.However, the civilian casualties, estimated at roughly seventeen million, turned out to bepredominantly female (often simply because there were no males left) and outstripped malecausalities by at least forty percent.7 Hence, based on extensive calculations of various data forthe overall war-time casualties, immediately after the World War II after the massdemobilization of the Red Army, the overall Soviet disproportion of males to females wasroughly 80-88 males per every hundred females of marriageable age (18-45).8

This gender imbalance in the war-torn and post-war Soviet Union was significant enoughto affect the gender balance of labor resources in the post-war Soviet Union. But the genderimbalance was much more pronounced among the deportees. Though there are manyexplanations as to why this gender imbalanced increased after deportation, it can partially beexplained by a greater success rate of escapes among men than among women; the fact that menwere more prone than women to end up in the Gulag prisons and subsequently die there (as wasstrikingly obvious in the case of urgently demobilized Germans); and a greater number of maleintermarriages to non-settler women than vice versa (as we will discuss later). Anyhow, in 1947,special settlement officials reported 905,184 ethnic Germans, of whom 199,522 were men,351,008 were women, and 354,654, children.9 The analysis of any individual settlementdemonstrates that this one-to-two ratio was almost universal. Thus, Kostroma settlement counted1,656 men to 3,387 women and 3,466 children.10 But even this ratio and these statistics weremisleading and did not tell the entire story, as many of these “men” were but children whoreached the age of sixteen during and immediately after the deportation. For example, AlexanderSchadt cites that in Novosibirsk area of early 1940s, there were 6,039 men and 11,074 women ofGerman ethnicity eligible for the mobilization. Upon closer look, however, it became obviousthat of those 6,039 men, 4,133 were fifteen to seventeen and over fifty five years of age, and only1,906 were men aged eighteen to fifty-five, most of whom were crippled and disabled.11 Lateron, the lack of men among special settlers also became evident in the pattern of employment andlabor mobilization. For example, Novosibirsk factories No. 564 and No. 65 were staffedexclusively by women, and only factory No. 69 and trest “Sibstankostroi” and gorstroitrestemployed both men and women.12 Though often this division was a result of a conscientiouspolicy on the part of factory managers, it also reflected a short supply of male workers. Hence,besides sheer drama and trauma of the loss of loved-ones and resettlement, the availability ofethnic German men for ethnic German women was extremely limited.

The great demographic imbalance that existed among ethnic Germans and the overallsituation of the war-torn country made it reasonable to assume that the German women in exile,

7 It needs to be noted that there is still no agreement on the exact death toll among military personnel andcivilian population of the Soviet Union. These numbers are the latest estimates which are considered bymany to be most accurate. Refer, for example, to Freeze, 1997: 334.8 Although Krivosheev never calculates this number of male-female ratio, his statistics lead to suchconclusions. Refer to the above mentioned work.9 GARF, 9479, opis1, delo 98, l. 364, 2nd half of 1947.10 GARF, fond 9479, delo 89, ll. 364, 1/IV, 1947.11 GANO, fond 1020, opis 5, delo 39, l. 20.12 MVD Archive of Novosibirsk region, fond 5, opis 9, por. 1, delo 9, ll. 108-110, tom 2, ll. 182-183, asprinted in Nakazannii narod, 1999, pp. 176-180.

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like their fellow Soviet women elsewhere, had a far greater access to machinery during the waryears and thereafter than ever before. Or even more so, it would have seen reasonable to assumethat this great demographic imbalance had to lead to even greater involvement of ethnic Germanwomen in exile in technological production and even greater access to mechanization than in theoverall Soviet population. However, this was not at all the case, and it needs to be seen whythese women were affectively denied any access to machinery even when there was a deficit ofmen to perform and supervise mechanical labor.

While there were numerous reasons for the unusual labor patterns among the ethnicGerman population during the war years, two of them stand out as the most important. Firstly,labor regulations which were applied to ethnic Germans in the exile were unlike any otherpatterns of employment that existed at the time. The labor armies, to which these Germans weremobilized, were labeled “the other Gulag” or the “invisible Gulag.” Such forced labormobilization implied an uneven gender distribution in various sectors of employment and anuneven access to technology divided along the gendered lines. Secondly, women’s perceivedemotionality, which they speculated on and used so readily to escape labor mobilization, turnedout to work to their disadvantage. Many officials internalized this rhetoric and used it to denyaccess to machinery in production to women due to their “inability to use machinery as a resultof their emotionality, femininity, and weakness.”13

Thus, during the war years, many Germans, who had been deported only recently in1941-42, were forced into labor armies to work for the Soviet war effort. Curiously, this form oflabor obligation14 has become known in recent historiography as “trudarmee,” although thecorrect transliteration should appear as “trudovaia armiia.” The term itself made its appearanceduring the Russian Civil War and meant really existing “revolutionary armies of labor.”15 Duringthe World War II, however, the term “trudarmee” was not mentioned in any official documents,which instead referred to “labor obligations,” “labor regulations,” or “labor reserves.” It wasGerman deportees themselves who used this term to describe their obligatory labor conscription,in contrast to other civilians working to support the Soviet war effort. Only in the late 1980s didhistorians began to note that deported Germans served “in the so-called labor army” during thewar years.16 Although the problem of Germans in the trudarmee is still in need of a majormonograph,17 the term had become deeply imbedded in the historiography of the deportations.

Thus, the official decree of January 10, 1942, stipulated the labor mobilization of allGerman men ages 17 to 50, who were to be sent in roughly equal proportions to cut timber andbuild railroads.18 Shortly thereafter, on October 7, 1942, the Soviet Ministry of Defense issued adecree signed by Stalin about the further mobilization of Germans which stipulated that “all menages 15-16 and 51-55 inclusive” were to be mobilized, along with “all German women betweenages sixteen and forty-five. German women [who are] pregnant and have children under three

13 From the author’s collection of interviews; similar statements appear throughout GARF, fond 9479.14 Historians are very careful to avoid using the term “forced labor” as applicable to this form of laborobligations. Whereas this labor mobilization was in many ways forced onto ethnic Germans of the SovietUnion, the term “forced labor” implies too much of a parallel to the Nazi practices and might thus beincorrectly perceived.15 General information on the origins of “trudarmee” is based on Goncharov, 2001: 154-162.16 See, for example, Cheshko, 1988: 12.17 See, for example, Gerber, 97-116.18 RGASPI (formerly RTsKhIDNI), fond 644, opis 1, delo 19, ll. 49-50.

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years of age are to be exempt from the requirement.”19 Also spared were “Russian women,whose husbands and children are Germans.”20

As a result of both decrees of 1942 on labor mobilization, a total of 120,000 Germanswere designed to go the various construction projects. Of these Germans, 45,000 were supposedto cut timber, 35,000 were expected to build two factories in the Urals, and 40,000 werescheduled to work on building railroads. In addition, 20,500 Germans had to work in coal miningindustries, over fifty thousand Germans were to be employed in oil mining industries, andanother several thousand Germans had to go to the forest, paper and cellulose productionindustries and iron ore mining enterprises.21 Although the most massive wave of labormobilization took place in 1942, such mobilization continued well into 1945. As a result, duringthe war years and until January 1945, a total of 316,000 ethnic Germans served in labor armies.Over 182,000 were forced to work on building projects, and over 133,000 in various industries ofthe Soviet Union, especially mining.22

Due to various laws and lack of passports, Germans were assigned jobs irregardless oftheir wishes and often also irregardless of their qualifications. Pre-deportation statistics show thatGerman minorities in the Soviet Union were among best educated peoples of the Soviet Union.Historian Igenborg Fleischhauer cites that at the end of 1920s, 42 percent of Germans residing inthe Volga German Republic were employed in non-agricultural jobs. These Germans includedindustrial workers of various types (textiles, etc.), liberal professionals, industrialists, contractors,and Germans serving in the army (Fleischhauer, Pinkus, 1986: 48). By the end of 1930s, theVolga Germans Republic possessed seventeen institutions of professional and higher learning,including agricultural and pedagogical institutes.23 Even in agricultural sector, many Germanshad positions and training above that of an average collective farm worker. Germans were said topossess valuable skills and qualifications in massive numbers. G. Luft notes that among Germansin the Volga region working in the agricultural sector (the overall number is unspecified), therewere 12,744 tractor drivers and mechanics, 927 drivers, 1,137 agronomists and veterinarians, andmany others. Overall, there were more than 20,000 Germans with some professionalqualification employed in agricultural production, and this number was consideredextraordinarily high by the standards of the time (Luft, 1998: 57-9). The overwhelming majorityof these educated, skilled and professional Germans, however, were employed after thedeportation (irregardless of their skills and qualifications) in the agricultural sector in jobs thatrequired no skills or qualifications or in the industrial sectors in jobs which required the leastlevel of training (for more info, refer to Appendix).24

Besides the actual hardships of labor service itself, which claimed lives of many Germanwomen, labor mobilization also turned out to be a brutal process that separated mothers fromtheir children. While the few men who left their families in 1942 to work in trudarmee left theirchildren with their wives, German women subjected to labor mobilization had very few relativeswho were subject to mobilization and who were willing to take additional mouths to feed intotheir households. Although Table 2 is limited to German deportees in the Altai region of WestSiberia, it is nevertheless very indicative in terms of family separations since a similar situation

19 RGASPI (formerly RTsKhIDNI), fond 644, opis 1, delo 36, l. 175, as published in Istoriia rossiiskikhnemtsev v dokumentakh (1763-1992 gg): 172-173.20 GARF, fond 9479, opis 1, delo 112, l.68.21 RGASPI (formerly RTsKhIDNI), fond 644, opis 1, delo 19, ll. 49-50.22 GARF, fond 9479, opis 1, delo 110, ll. 39, 11, 121, 123, and GARF, fond 9414, opis 1, delo 1169, l. 38.23 GARF document, dated 1 October 1939, published in German, 1996: 254.24 GARF, fond 9479, opis 1, delo 185, l. 108.

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existed elsewhere outside the Altai (German, 1998: 120; Paletskikh, 1995: 20). For example, inSverdlovsk krai, approximately 53,000 women were registered in trudarmee, leaving behind6,436 children of whom 2,900 became orphans and were sent to local orphanages. The labordraft also left 467 elderly and disabled Germans homeless and starving without an able-bodiedadult to support and care for them.25 The statistics of separation are even more dramatic for theAltai region, as Table 2 demonstrates. 13,129 German women left as many as 6,310 childrenbehind, leaving almost a half of these children in orphanages. The most unfortunate fate, asGermans later remembered, awaited those children who were adopted by Russian families,especially when Russian families adopted German children involuntarily under the pressure fromcollective farm officials.

Table 2. Patterns of Labor Mobilization among Ethnic Germans on the example of ethnicGermans in Altai region. Statistics are given for November 1942.

Requirement lifted b/cof:

Previouslyeligible formobilization*

Showed up** Nos. mobilized

Family health

Children left behind bymobilized women***

men women men women men women womenonly

men women in thefamily

Withrelatives

Withkolkhoz

8,627 24,055 6,751(78%)

22,703(94%)

5,689(66% oforiginalnos.)

13,129(55%)

4,343(19%)

1,246(18%)

1,608(7%)

2,096 1,425 2,789

Source: GAAK, fond 1, opis 18, delo 155, l. 343, as cited in Dissertatsiia, fn. 283.

* - this is an overall number for adult males and females in this particular area** - many women and men attempted to escape in order to avoid labor mobilization or never showed up and had tobe forced into labor mobilization at a later date*** - This number shows how many children were left with the immediate family (in most cases it meant themobilization of the father, then children remained with the mother); how many ended up staying with the relatives;and how many became a responsibility of the collective farm, the majority of which were forcefully orphaned andsent to orphanages.

Furthermore, during labor mobilization German women deportees were intentionallyseparated from the few men left among them. German men and women worked separately inlabor army. Let’s take a look at a sample of the gender distribution in employment of Germanmale and female deportees mobilized for labor service. Though overall gender imbalance wasnever as high as this table might suggest (on average, one-to-two male-female ratio was mosttypical), this table demonstrate the deliberate attempts on the part of various Soviet official toemploy men and women separately. Table 3 is a random sample of Germans working in variousSoviet factories in the Molotov region, which is located on the east side of Ural Mountains notfar from Magnitogorsk. Statistics are given for 1943.

25 GARF, fond 9479, opis 1, delo 157, ll. 206-210. Kriger, “Svideteli prestuplenii: pis’ma rossiiskihnemtsev,” p. 234, in Nemtsy na Urale i v Sibiri (XVI-XX vv.). Materialy nauchnoi konferentsii“Germaniia – Rossiia: istoricheskii opyt mezhregional’nogo vzaimodeistviia XVI-XX vv.’ (Ekaterinburg:“Volot,” 2001).

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Table 3. Sex-based distribution among German deportees mobilized to work in variousfactories, on the example of Molotov region.

Molotov region men womenBuilding company No. 3 0 1,400Stroimontazhnaia company 7 900Oil refineries 0 120“Oil exploration” firm [quotation marks in text] 5 50Ugokamsk factory 0 570Krasnokamsk construction company 33 410Kuketsks state farm 2 400Kungursk Machine Factory 0 230Molotov Oil Refinary 10 2,380Pavlovsk Factory 0 170Factory No.5 0 120Overall: 57 6,750

Source: GARF, fond 9479, opis 1, delo 135, ll. 2-128.

Similar statistics existed for other enterprises. The exact number of Germans who worked inlabor armies was reported for 296 factories. Eighty-six of these 296 reports utilized a gender-neutral language and gave the total numbers of German deportees rather than gender-specificstatistics. In the other 210 enterprises which provided gender-specific information, 135 had a sexratio of 1 to 10 or more (when either men or women were prevailing), and 77 of these enterpriseshad no representatives of the opposite sex. Only thirteen out of these 210 factories had less than1 to 3 sex ratio, with the rest falling in between 1 to 3 and 1 to 10 ratio.26

Moreover, these gender differences were specific to particular localities and changedfrom place to place. Thus, for example, Cheliabinsk was a place of mobilization for Germanmales, while Molotov and Krasnoyarsk raions and Bashkirskaia ASSR mobilized Germanwomen deportees. Numerically, Cheliabinsk used labor of 14,015 German male deportees andonly 1,742 German women deportees, whereas Bashkirskaia ASSR employed 6,600 Germanwomen and only 355 German men. The analysis by gender of all German deportees mobilizedfor labor service in all reported economic sectors confirm these regional differences.27

Unlike men, women attempted to use their “social vulnerability”28 to escape labormobilization. The concept of “social vulnerability” as used by women in various circumstances,including German women deportees, implies the speculation for personal gain on the popularstereotype that women were “weak” and “socially vulnerable” as compared to men, irregardlessof whether this stereotype was upheld by the reality of life. In case of German women in exile,most often these women lowered the age of their children and argued that they were toophysically weak to survive in the harsh conditions of the trudarmee and/or that they were soleproviders for their families. They further threatened authorities that their “female emotionality”

26 GARF, fond 9479, opis 1, delo 135, ll. 2-128.27 Ibid.28 The concept of social vulnerability as used by women was studied in depth by Dr. Schrover ofUniversity of Amsterdam. One of Dr. Schrover's latest research papers on this topic, “Differences thatMake All the Difference,” was presented at the Fifth European Social Science History Conference, heldin Berlin, Germany, on March 24-27, 2004.

11

merged with their distress over mobilization and separation from their children might lead themto commit suicide and/or kill their children.29 Approximately twenty percent of German womendeportees were allowed to remain with their children as a result of such tactics,30 although thisdid not spare many women who were crippled by various sicknesses or pregnant (German, 1996:143).

Although the tactics of social vulnerability worked only to a limited extent, local officialsthemselves unintentionally adopted similar discourse and utilized it sporadically in their dailyinteractions with German special setters and in their reports. Throughout the existence of thespecial settlements, local NKVD and collective farm officials often domesticated and de-politicized women. For example, when several deportees refused to contribute their meagerincome to the Soviet government obligations (zaem) in the 1940s,31 officials sought to persuadethe “rebellious” Germans to sign up for these obligations. In dealing with men, officials tendedto use threats of reprisals and other measures to force contributions from them. Most often, menwere threatened that they would be registered as “loafers” and made to work extra hours or that25% of their income would be mandatory extracted from their pays because of their “poor workhabits.” But in working with women, the same officials tended to offer consumer goods in shortsupply to women deportees in exchange for their agreement to contribute money to the “loan.”These officials repeatedly promised German women deportees that if these women contributed,they would receive documents allowing them to purchase dresses or shoes.32

The “female emotionality” perception resulted in curious patterns of employment amongspecial settlers of German origin. Although Moscow and local officials, who regulated allaspects of employment of special settlers including their access to machinery, realized only toowell that there were very few men capable of operation such machinery, they neverthelesscontinued to argue that only men were capable of skilled labor and that women had to go to jobswhich relied extensively on manual labor. They explained this reasoning by relying on the samerhetoric of female emotionality and social vulnerability that was previously used by womenthemselves. This argument was a striking contrast to the overall war-time situation in the SovietUnion and the wide-spread “feminization of machinery.”33

Numerous examples demonstrate well that when the work which had to be performedwas mostly manual, the official resolutions required to have many more women than menworking in these jobs. For example, when it came to cutting timber in three various parts ofAmur region, the resolution required to have (and it was fully implemented) 419 women andonly 182 men.34 Men were supposed to use the few pieces of machinery left for timber

29 Various memoirs of German women.30 GARF, fond 9479, opis 1, dela 111-150.31 During the World War II, the Soviet government practiced the issuance of “State military obligations”(gosudarstvennye veonnye zaimy). In 1942-1945, the Soviet Union issued four rounds of obligations topromote people’s financial investment into the war effort. In theory, these obligations were voluntaryinvestments with guaranteed returns after the war’s end. Yet in practice, these obligations were rarelyvoluntarily and were rarely compensated for. Germans were reluctant to invest in these obligationsbecause many holders of such obligations were practically forced into donating them to the defenseindustry before collecting any returns from these obligations. Soviet government argued that suchdonations were the “true expressions of patriotism” as they allowed for additional funding for the militaryexpenditure of the Soviet Union.32 Archive of MVD of Novosibirsk oblast’, fond 5, opis 9, por. 1, delo 9, ll. 108-110, tom 2, ll. 182-183,as printed in Nakazannii Narod, 1999, pp. 176-180.33 Refer to numerous documents in GARF, fond 9479, opis 1, delo 135.34 GARF, fond 9479, opis 1, delo 189, ll. 182.

12

production, and no women were allowed to do likewise.35 Yet when the jobs were considered tobe “masculine,” for example related to machinery and technical equipment, officials sent by farmore men than women to staff these positions. For example, Kuibyshev Motor Factoryemployed nineteen German special settler men and not a single woman.36 Moreover, eventhough women were allowed to work in coat mining and other mining enterprises as of 1935,37

Amur Mining Factory only wanted to have men as it used some primitive machinery in themining process and hence employed 1,071 German men and only twenty one German women.38

In a different example, over 3,700 women of special settlement contingent wereemployed in mining ore and various minerals in Leninogorsk region of Kazakhstan during thewar years. Their work was essential for the survival of ore-mining industry since theoverwhelming majority of able-bodied men were serving in the Red Army. Yet out of thisnumber, only 100 women were selected as potentially capable of operating machinery, whereasall remaining machinery was entrusted to few men who were left behind, often aged and crippledmen (Kunaev, 1994: 59-60). By default, men were considered more capable of working thesemachines, and women were effectively denied an access to technological progress. Moreover, in1941-42, Kazakhstan had regular regional meetings (conferences) for “technical intelligentsia ofthe Republic,” including skilled workers among the special settlers. Although officially, anyonewith advanced training in engineering and/or skills in operating machinery was welcome toattend, women were denied access to these conferences and hence they were staffed exclusivelyby men (Kunaev, 1994: 61-65).

In yet another example, out of eighty-eight German special settlers who were sent towork for Forest Industry, there were four men and eighty-four women. All men operated electricsaws and tractors to carry timber to a different location for shipment, while all women usedmanual axes and saws to cut timber and clear the branches off the tree trunk.39 Example offishing industry (Narym case) is equally telling. In this industry, German men were entrusted towork on boats while many German women were sent to cut timber and were engaged in manualtimber processing (like clearing trunks of branches and chopping wood to pieces that could beeasily transported).40 Many more German women settlers in the same district were sent to workin collective farms infamous for their “low production quotas.” These collective farms, however,used German labor for jobs other than agricultural work. Most popular were jobs related to woodchemistry like the production of rosin to be later used in paper and soap production and theproduction of specific goods like bakhily (covers for shoes),41 skis, etc.42 Examples of this natureare more than abundant for all regions of the Soviet Union where the special settlers resided.Unfortunately, it is currently impossible to give exact female to male ratio for each industry ofthe Soviet Union according to the access of machinery due to the lack of complete informationand sporadic nature of many documents (for the overall numbers of German workers, refer to

35 This information on the type of work women and men performed is also abundant in memoirs andvarious interviews.36 GARF, fond 9479, opis 1, delo 189, ll. 182f&b.37 Soviet order “On Employment of Women in Mining” was signed into law in 1935. Denisova, p. 326.38 GARF, fond 9479, opis 1, delo 189, ll. 182b.39 GARF, fond 9479, opis 1, delo 256, l. 37.40 GANO, fond p-4, opis 34, delo 182, l. 131.41 The term “bakhily” refers to all types of shoe coverings but most often they are used as plastic covers inmedical facilities and “slippers” in museums around the world. There exists a great variety of other formsof bakhily.42 GANO, fond p-4, opis 34, delo 182, ll. 129-131.

13

Appendix). Nevertheless, these above-mentioned and numerous other examples clearlydemonstrate that the authorities intentionally denied women any access to machinery and totechnological training solely of the basis of their gender.

It is also fair to add that Soviet ideology and the overall attitude to German workersduring the World War II played a significant role as well. Thus, even the few tools that localofficials felt comfortable German women could use were often inaccessible to these women forideological reasons. For example, when a group of newly-labor mobilized Germans women weresent to work to a preexisting place of cutting timber, local officials were required “in the threeday period from the moment of receiving this order to remove from the territory [wheremobilized German women will work] all technical equipment, storage sheds for various tools,electrical tools, electrical timber cutting devises, etc.”43 Moscow was concerned that Germanscould use these tools for means other than work (to rebel, commit crime, self-inflict wounds inorder to return home, destroy equipment to delay work, etc.). There is no evidence to support theview that Germans were rebellious or disobedient in any greater degree than any other group ofthe Soviet free and exiled population. Quite to the contrary, local officials often thought thatGerman women and men worked harder than anyone else. Yet being a German in the war-tornSoviet Union carried a particular stigma to it, and these unfortunate women were denied even alimited excess to technological advantages for purely ideological reasons. Central and localofficials also added that women were too emotionally unstable to be predictable withmachinery.44 Furthermore, Moscow argued that other, “free” workers were more deserving touse this machinery than were demobilized and deported Germans.45 Yet what matters the mostfor our purposes is that even when machinery and technology was available, it was denied towomen and conscientiously distributed along the gender lines by the Soviet officials.

Inevitably, such labor conscription resulted in a massive occupation change amongGerman women of the Soviet Union. While officially the regime of labor armies ended with theSoviet victory over Nazi Germany, these labor regulations were still applied to many Germansfor years to come. Those women who returned to special settlements from their locations wherethey worked during the war, experienced a major occupational change compared to the pre-waryears. During and after the war, most of them were used in timber falling and other heavy labor.They quickly found that any other employment was not available to them. A typical report notedthat a settlement possessed “specialists (professionals with secondary and post-secondaryeducation) – forty-eight people, of which only fourteen [were] employed according to theireducational qualifications. [There were also] 131 skilled workers (tractor drivers, combiners,carpenters, etc.), of which only sixty-nine were employed according to their qualifications.”46 Allthese professionally and vocationally trained individuals had received their training beforedeportation. While it is still difficult to estimate how many women processed any commercialskills or worked prior to the deportation, for many women the change was either from domesticduties to hard labor or at least from “feminine” tasks such weaving and spinning to timberfalling.47

43 “Top Secret” document from GARF, fond 9749, as published in Vol’ter, 1998: 128-129.44 GARF, fond 9479, opis 1, delo 135, ll. 144, delo 355, l. 141.45 GARF, fond 9479, opis 1, delo 256, l. 117.46 GARF, fond 9479, opis 1, delo 355, l. 89; similar statistics re-appear for various settlements in variouslocations throughout fond 9479, opis 1, dela 315 to 367.47 A majority of ethnic German interviewers and memoir writers remembered that their mothers took careof their homes and never officially worked. For upper class Germans, domestic affairs included thesupervision of servants and occasionally small things around family business. For others, domestic labor

14

Women’s perception of this denial to use machinery was often different from that of localand central officials. As a direct result of harsh physical labor and inability to facilitate it throughthe use of machinery, many women suffered from less visible but oftentimes more painfulchanges to their physical bodies.48 Nowadays historians of gender like Joan W. Scott condemnthe discourse of the body as a common denominator of “women’s experience” and argue that thisconcept tends to overemphasize the male/female dichotomy and fails to explain how genderconstruction was involved in the discourse of power (Clark, 1998: 1-31). However, the story of“a woman” would not be complete without a story of the “body,” especially since the failure toaddress the physiological changes among deported women is truly stunning. Though some ofthese ideas were new to the peasant communities of Germans and were different from manypresent-day standards, German women almost universally in their testimonies mentioned that inwhat they called “traditional” society, the image of a woman and her internalized self-perceptionis influenced greatly by her looks, by how much she complies with the idea of “feminine” and“beautiful.”49 Moreover, the basic ideas of being, physiologically, a woman to this day impliesthe functioning of the body in ways dissimilar to the functioning of the male body, which isusually measured, on everyday bases, by such outward signs as breasts and menstruation. Yetwhat psychological consequences and the consequences in terms of gender roles might resultfrom the lack of such signs?

Ethnic German women faced a serious challenge to their notions of femininity andwomanhood when they experienced amenorrhea. The inability of a female body to functionaccording to its monthly cycles under the strenuous labor and living condition and generalmalnutrition and starvation was not in any way a new phenomenon. To the present day, suchchanges were recorded in many places around the world resulting from a great variety of lifecircumstances. Moreover, although women in exile might not have realized it at the time (andmost likely they did not for the lack of contact with the outside world), many women in theSoviet Union, not just deportees, ceased to menstruate during the harsh years of World War II,and for many young women the menarche was “naturally” postponed (although we might neverhave exact statistics on just how many women were affected by this syndrome). Yet ethnicGerman women in exile thought that they were the ones who for the first time faced thisabnormal phenomenon. One of the women later remembered that a “kindly German nurse‘consoled’ us with the following words, when we expressed sorrow about this condition: ‘Whereare you supposed to find extra blood to give up?’” (Däs, 2001: 70) The overall sense of sorrowover this condition was expressed by all women who found the courage to talk openly about suchintimate matters.50

The sorrow these women expressed in not surprising for many reasons. Manypsychological and medical studies reveal that women perceive their menstrual period as a “mark

usually implied a wide variety of works from cleaning to garden planting and harvesting, yet alwayswithin the framework of domesticity. As for many village women, the usual source of extra income forpeasant Germans was in the sale of chicken eggs and other similar activities.48 This section and the sentiments of German women about their identity as women is based directly on anextensive oral history evidence, collected by interviewing a large number of former deportees whocurrently reside in the post-Soviet countries or in immigration in Germany, Canada, and the US.49 The implied message of this statement was that “contemporary” women are “no longer women,” to citeone of the respondents. “Contemporary” (21st century) women, as many former deportees argued, caremore about their careers and material goods than about “femininity.”50 I can estimate the number of women who stopped menstruating at somewhere between 60 and 80percent. Unfortunately, because of the intimacy of these matters and the death of many women, it isimpossible at the moment to calculate a more precise number.

15

of womanhood.” One such study argues, for example, that “the primary positive feeling manywomen have about menstruation is that it defines them as a woman... Sometimes the definingcharacteristic is closely linked with being able to have babies... But other times the definingcharacteristic is equally important apart from the potential to reproduce...Over and over again,women found different ways of saying, ‘…it's part of myself, part of what makes me a woman...it's so integral... it's supposed to happen.’”(Martin, 1992: 54) Another study further asserted, “forwomen and even society at large, only a menstruating woman is seen as ‘normal’” (Angier,1999: 95).51

These studies further show that regardless of whether menstruation caused joy, pride,pain, or embarrassment among young women, menarche signifies the moment of becoming “awoman” and allows for the construction of friendship ties to other women. Moreover,menstruation and resulting ability to reproduce serve as main points of identification for womenallowing for and constructing a greater community of “we”, women, and “they”, men. But thisbasic and biological right to self-identification and expression of femininity and womanhood waseffectively denied to a great number of German women in exile. Many German women came tobelieve that the “manly” labor of timber falling that these women had to perform and a “manly”life of complete self-reliance that they were forced to live had made their bodies, by the lackmenstruation, also “manlier.” The basic outward attribute of being a woman had ceased to existbecause of the harsh condition of deportation and exile, and this “masculinizing” markpsychologically alienated deported women from the greater community of “Soviet women.”

The outward attributes of “femininity” were further challenged by these women’sunderstanding that they were aging prematurely and losing their beauty and attractiveness as aresult of deportation and hard labor. Besides complaining about their “wrinkly faces” and “uglyhands,” these women believed that the experiences to which they were subjected by the Sovietgovernment and the resulting premature aging altered them in a way as to make them no longerattractive and potential “spousal” material. Several women perceived their own destiny and thedestiny of their mothers, sisters, daughters, and female friends with the following sentiment:

Work, misery, hunger, and loss of rights had made many a once-attractive woman oldand wrinkled. This disenchanted many a husband who had over the years kept himselfaloof from strange women, but now, having returned to his family, no longer wanted toaccept his emaciated, worn-out, misery-branded wife as his spouse, left his wife andfamily in the lurch, and took a Russian woman ‘to wife’! (Bachmann, 1983: 79)

Even some men later remembered that women who looked “ugly” and well over fifty years ofage were actually under thirty-five (Vol’ter, 1998: 201). German women later remembered thatethnic German men intermarried in massive numbers with ethnic Russians and other nationalitieswhile only an insignificant number of ethnic German women did likewise. They cited prematureaging as the most common explanation of this phenomenon. As a matter of fact, documentsconfirm the fact of many intermarriages among German men and local women, although theirreasoning is different. Documents and memoir literature attest to the fact that the lack ofintermarriages with deportees women can be partially explained by the regulations of thedeportations. According to the MVD-issued order of February 19, 1949, “About Organization ofPersonal Control of Deportees and Special Settlers According to the New System”, all settlerswere registered in family (posemeinye) books which reflected their marital status andinformation on the number and residence of their children. These family books were meant to

51 See also Elson, 2000; Shuttle and Redgrove, 1978.

16

provide a better control over the settlers and showed a curious division among male and femalesettlers. None of the spouses and family members of settlers who were non-German localresidents and who were not subject to the “special conditions” of deportees were registered inthese books. But it was clearly stated that the female settlers who intermarried with non-settlement men were to remain registered as deportees, while settler men who intermarried withindigenous and non-settlement women often semi- or even unofficially “disappeared” from theregistration books (Belkovets, 1999: 161). Furthermore, the virtual absence of intermarriagesbetween local men and German deportees women was very pronounced in Central Asia, thoughthis was less so in the ethnically Russian parts of Asia (like Siberia). Not only did the officialsystem work to deportees’ disadvantage, but also the cultural and linguistic barriers separatedCentral Asian men and German women. These barriers were simply too great to allow anysignificant amount of intermarriages between local men and deportee women.52 Though thesebarriers existed for intermarriages with German men as well, some indigenous women welcomedthe less subordinate, compared to local Central Asian, family model practiced by German men.

Of course, recent studies have shown that, objectively, many rural non-settler women inthe Soviet Union also aged prematurely by the standards of urbanized and still urbanizing Sovietsociety (Denisova, 2003: throughout). But what matters for our purposes is that the ethnicGerman women in exile believed that they were punished and suffered much more than any“free” woman. Disgust with one’s body and the sense of womanhood betrayed for the sake ofeconomic production became a predominant theme of life for the settler women. Let me repeatthat these women repeatedly mentioned that they believed that their bodies were being“masculinized” for the economy sake and that they were denied the access to technology andmachinery in order to realize the Soviet goals and its production quotas.53

What can we conclude from the peculiar experiences of female ethnic German exilees inSoviet labor armies and special settlements? Their case became yet another example of theSoviet regime’s inability to function according to its own plan. These women were separatedfrom their husbands and children to be horded into labor armies and work for the war effort andlater Soviet reconstruction projects. Yet the perverse logic of the Soviet decrees and blindobedience and possibly fear of reprisal on the part of local officials disallowed these women towork productively with the use of technology even when it was readily available. Of course,their experiences were more of an exception rather a rule in the Soviet phenomenon of“feminization of machinery” during the war years. But these experiences are neverthelessimportant in exposing not only the failures of the Soviet economic production but stereotypesabout gendered division of labor that persisted in the Soviet Union despites its many year ofgender equality propaganda. It is these persistent stereotypes that explain the rapid reversal ofwar trends on feminization of production in the after-war years and a survival of a “double shift”mode of life that dominated the experience of women throughout the Soviet years.

52 Initial encounters of German deportees with ethnic and cultural “other” were very similar toexperiences of Polish deportees in Central Asia, discussed at length and in great detail in Jolluck, 2002:220-245.53 With normalization of life and the coming of relatively more abundant years, many young womenbegan to menstruate again and were able to conceive, carry, and give birth to numerous children. Manywomen, in fact, measured the return of their life to normality by the reappearance of menstruation.

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Appendix.Number of German Special Settlers in Various Sectors of Employment, by Industry.The document, on which this table is based, is undated but must have been compiled sometime in1946. The numbers are not all-inclusive but very indicative. Subsequent GARF documents revealthat most Germans employed in “prestigious” high-tech industries (military, foreign commerce,education) were in the majority of cases employed in janitorial and similar positions.

No. Name of Narkom(industry)

Nosemployed

1. Collective farms 147,8292 Coal mining 1,3583 State farms 20,3864 Timber cutting 9,4705 Non-ferrous metallurgy 3,3856 Local industry (non-

specific)12,396

7 Ferrous metallurgy 5678 Fishing industry 7,5759 Railroad construction 2,97610 Oil mining 1611 Paper production --12 Food production 2,69613 NKVD (informers) 2,87914 Light industry 529

15 Electric power stations 121

16 Retail 1,991

17 Building Industry 389

18 Chemical industry 255

19 Ammunition industry 600

20 Health and Medicine relatedindustries

1,125

21 Production of buildingmaterials

680

22 Education 916

23 Inland water transportation 1,328

24 Textile industry 672

25 Infrastructure-related(communal) industries

281

26 Electric power supplyindustries

931

27 Tank production --

28 Meat and milk industry 3,542

29 Armament industry 466

30 Agency for collectingunorganized production*

961

31 Aviation industry 449

32 Heavy industry 391

33 Mine and mortar industry 138

34 Foreign Commerce 82

35 Rubber industries 226

36 Defense industries 681

37 Industry for production ofmid-size machinery

569

38 Water supply industries 135

39 Automobile production 61

40 Social welfare 4

41 Fuel 97

42 Narkom of Finances 47

43 Machinery production --

44 Communications 79

45 Shipbuilding 324

46 Lathe production 109

47 Civilian construction 9

48 State Security Agency --

49 Navy --

50 Department of Justice 5

51 Lather production --

52 Central Administration forIndustry

170

53 Central Admin. forPurchasing and Supply

--

54 Central Administration forTimber Production

53

55 Central Admin. forNorthern Sea ShippingRoutes

--

56 Central Administration forHydrolysis Industry

--

57 Central Administration forRailroad Building

65

58 Gas Industry --

59 Central Administration forLabor Reserves

--

18

60 Committee for UnorganizedProduction**

--

61 Committee for Arts 21

62 Union of Cooperation forInvalids***

--

63 Central Union of ConsumerSocieties

--

64 Soviet state institutions(administrative and

6,820

educational)

65 Private entrepreneurs --

66 Auto transportation --

Total: 237,468

Source: complied based on GARF, fond 9479, opis 1, delo 257, ll. 94-97.* This agency (Narkomzag) was created to collect non-traditional surplus from population which included but werenot limited to: mushrooms, hunt-related products (skins and meat), berries, etc.** It is not clear what was the difference in terms of responsibilities between the Narkomzag and this Committee.*** This union created artelli which employed exclusively invalids.

19

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