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Pyramid of the People. Half the people of the Soviet Union are Great Russians; the rest, a score of races, speak 200 different tongues and dialects. There are Tartar horsemen unchanged since Genghis Khan, primitive Yakhuts, Samoyed reindeer herders, Mongol tractor drivers and Cossack commissars. There are 20 million Moslems in the U.S.S.R. All of these diverse and frequently antagonistic peoples are ruled by the Soviet elite: some 50,000 ministers, managers, army officers and intellectuals, who are more removed from the people than were the Czar's nobility.
The Soviet rulers live in luxury, atop a social pyramid that is surprisingly stratified. Below them Vladimir Yurasov, a member of the Soviet Reparations Mission to East Germany who escaped, and reached the U.S. in 1951, has distinguished these main groups :
¶ Between 8 and 20 million "forced laborers," most of them at work on the massive "Stalin Projects" (Volga-Don Canal, Kuibyshev power station), and in atom plants in central Siberia. Supervised by GULAG, the industrial arm of the MVD (secret police), a minority of the slaves are political prisoners; many are Crimean Tartars and other minorities, shipped to Siberia en masse.
¶100 million peasants—about half the Soviet population. Tied to kolkhozes (collective farms), which they work as sharecroppers. Russia's muzhiks live in wooden and sod huts, eat the black bread of the poor, provide the Red army with its masses of infantrymen.
¶About 28 million "proletarians"—miners, factory workers, clerks and mechanics. A typical worker's home: one small bedsitting room (for a man, his wife and two children), with kitchen and toilet facilities shared with the next-door neighbor. The average worker's wage buys him an austerity diet of bread, fish and potatoes (fresh meat is a luxury), and such occasional relaxations as a ticket to a soccer match or a jugful of cheap vodka.
¶The new Soviet bourgeoisie—about 6,000,000 people (with their families, 20 million). Administrators, middle-drawer bureaucrats, technicians and army officers, these men are the backbone of Russian Communism. Many drive motorcycles, rarely automobiles, own radios but seldom TV sets. They are tough, ambitious, fiercely dedicated to the service of the state.
Within this social pyramid, the new middle class is most subject to change. Their expectations are rising: they want to get ahead. An experienced Western diplomat reports that he has seldom seen "so much drive for keeping up with the Joneses, so much materialistic thinking, so much Babbittry and seeking after 'culture' as there is in Moscow at present."
If the Kremlin's New Course succeeds even partially, it is this new bourgeois group that will benefit. Most of them are looking to Khrushchev, for he is one of them himself.