Though the Komsomol was open to both sexes, male members outnumbered females eight to one throughout the 1920s. This was in part the result of the traditional exclusion of women from Russian politics, and parental or spousal forbiddance. In the eyes of many Soviet citizens, the Komsomol represented atheism, hooliganism, and sexual depravity, and men did not want their daughters and wives to have any part of it. For the most part, however, the Komsomol itself was to blame. Many cells, which were dominated by boys, disregarded girls despite leaders' insistence that they devote special attention to them. Girls were faced with boys' constant discouragement, discrimination, and harassment. As one girl put it: "To hell with the Komsomol! I'm not allowed to go to the cell. Every guy swarms around me and plays nasty tricks."

The Komsomol gender problem, however, cannot be simply reduced to sexism, indifference and harassment. The difficulty was also that the ethos of a young communist was coded masculine. Even if a girl negotiated boys' torments, her very femininity precluded her from becoming a true communist. In order to craft a "new everyday life" in the 1920s, young male communists denied all signs of the feminine in mannerism, dress, and emotions. The most visible symbols were the leather jacket; knee high leather boots, a Sam Brown belt, and a pistol. Indeed, one commentator noted that the "chador" of the so-called "pure blooded proletarian" included a whole assembly of fashion and attitude. Komsomols went around in dilapidated boots with permanently stuck on black dirt, a long, worn out leather jacket, living on dry crusts, and denying themselves rest, entertainment, and often food." Emotions like sentimentality were rejected for a cold, hard demeanor. The ideal communist, according to a certain Nikolai Kartsev, was "serious, businesslike, showed disdain for all dancing and any gallantry, only sang revolutionary songs, dispersed in secluded pairs [having sex], didn't attend village parties, and only hung out with "non-party" guys for political discussions and not for fun."

Despite his supposed stoic conduct, the young communist was also bombastic, pigheaded, and lived by his own rules. Swearing was a mark of proletarian stock and manliness. Often Komsomol speech was an "odorous assortment" borrowed from both the factory and criminal lexicons. The ability to spit out a string of curses was a feat of admiration and respect, a test of manhood, and a means of male bonding. By swearing, young men created a toxic environment for girls. Young communist speech was so offensive that sometimes girls avoided meetings to avoid the embarrassment of overheated conversations.

The Komsomol club was a breeding ground for masculine behavior. Clubs were filthy, girls were treated rudely, and drinking, card playing, pranks, and fighting were common forms of entertainment and bonding. Drink made some guys hotheaded, uncontrollable. The Komsomol style as an expression of masculinity was best seen in how girls who adopted it were treated. Girls struggling to fit in cast off their dresses, makeup, and other forms of feminine beauty for a more masculine style as statements of their revolutionary authenticity. However, to komsomol males, this gender bending was anathema. Even Nikolai Semashko, the People's Commissar of Health, decried these masculine-women with "disheveled, frequently dirty hair, a cigarette between her lips (like a man), deliberately gruff manners (like a man) deliberately rude voice (like a man), etc." as violations of nature itself. Girls were at pains to find a middle ground. On the one hand outward displays of femininity were considered ideologically taboo and threatened to distract sexually charged boys from Komsomol business. On the other, girls' efforts to erase their femininity were met with scorn.

On June 2, 1962 several thousand workers from the Novocherkassk Electric Locomotive Works (NEVZ) and supporters marched to the Communist Party's headquarters in the center of the city to protest nation-wide price increases for meat and dairy products that had been announced two days earlier. Failing to heed a warning from the general in charge of troops stationed in and around the building, the crowd was dispersed by gunfire. A total of twenty-four people died and dozens were wounded. Subsequently, 114 persons were convicted on charges of causing "mass disorders" and committing "banditry," and seven were sentenced to death and executed.

As the KGB reported at the time, numerous individuals throughout the country expressed their disgruntlement with the price increases, called for strikes, and produced leaflets denouncing the decision. Why only at the NEVZ did workers walk off their jobs, seize the factory's administration building, and engage in other acts of civil disobedience? Part of the answer lay in a recently implemented upward revision of work norms and the factory's participation in a socialist competition campaign, both of which presupposed greater effort on the part of workers. It also would appear that the particularly insensitive factory director -- who reportedly uttered to a protesting worker the Marie Antoinette-like phrase, "If there isn't enough money for meat and sausage, let them eat pirozhki with liver" -- added fuel to the flames.

Whatever the provocation, the fact that the protest culminated in a massacre can be attributed to the indecision and disagreements among the four Politbiuro members who flew to Novocherkassk, and, ultimately, to fears among the authorities that the protesters were gaining the upper hand. In the aftermath of the shooting, the authorities did their best to cover up what had happened, but information of varying accuracy soon leaked out of the USSR and was relayed back to the country via Radio Liberty broadcasts. The first article devoted to the Novocherkassk events that was published by a Soviet newspaper appeared in June 1988, and it was followed by dozens of exposes. Since 1991, documentary films, articles, and books have appeared, and the entire affair was subjected to an official investigation by the Chief Military Procuracy. A monument has been erected on the site.

The swift German advance of 1941 forced millions of Soviet citizens to evacuate from the western borders of the country to regions in the east and south, with the Urals, Western Siberia and Central Asia serving as the country's three primary receiving areas. The first wave of the evacuation began in late June 1941 and lasted through the end of December, and the second wave took place during the summer and fall of 1942. Historians have debated the size of the wartime civilian evacuation for decades due to the paucity of demographic records, and current estimates range from 17 to 25 million evacuees. Thousands of organizations were also evacuated to safer regions during 1941 and 1942, including 1,523 large enterprises involved in defense production. A major goal of the evacuation effort was to defend and develop the Soviet military capability, so defense workers and factories were evacuated with the highest priority. The Soviet wartime evacuation of civilians and industry was hampered by a lack of pre-war planning, however, because Stalin feared that this type of planning might encourage defeatism.

After the war started, Stalin's State Defense Committee created a series of ad hoc committees to direct the evacuation process, such as the Evacuation Council, the Civilian Evacuation, and the Evacuation Commission. These ad hoc committees worked with all-Union ministries and the State Defense Committee to oversee the evacuation effort on the national level, and they sent plenipotentiaries to evacuating and receiving areas to support local government and industry leaders. In spite of these measures, panic and confusion marred the evacuation of civilians and institutions along the front, with orders to leave arriving too late and officials fleeing instead of managing the evacuation effort. Millions of frightened civilians, both those with evacuation orders and those too scared to stay home, overwhelmed train stations and receiving areas throughout 1941 and 1942.

With huge numbers of evacuees suddenly arriving in the receiving areas, local leaders tried to increase the availability of housing, cafeterias, medical clinics, and day-care centers, but they were not given enough resources to serve the entire evacuated population. There was a significant difference in the administration of non-industrial evacuees and of industrial evacuees. Resources to support non-industrial evacuees (mostly women, children and the elderly) were inadequate throughout the duration of the war. After traveling in crowded cars with little food or water, these evacuees often had to remain in railroad stations for days or even weeks, waiting for a housing assignment or further travel instructions. In contrast, industrial evacuees received larger food rations, higher quality housing, and better medical care.

From 1941 to 1943, the Soviet economy was completely mobilized for military production, leaving the evacuation and resettlement effort without enough personnel or funding to provide adequate services to the evacuees. Many evacuees became ill and died due to malnutrition and exposure. Sickness among the evacuees contributed to widespread epidemics that lasted for years. And yet, while the toll in human lives was extremely high, the massive relocation of industries and workers in 1941 and 1942 resulted in substantial defense production, crucial to the Soviet victory of 1945. As stated by G.A. Kumanev, a leading Russian military historian, the evacuation's "main goal - to save millions of Soviet citizens, a major amount of industrial and agricultural resources, and other material riches - was achieved."

On October 4, 1957 Sputnik I, the first earth-orbiting artificial satellite, was launched from the Baikonur cosmodrome in the Karaganda region of Kazakhstan. The Soviet space program, under the direction of its Chief Designer, Sergei Kurchatov, thereby achieved a major victory in its competition -- the "space race" -- with the United States.

Sputnik I weighed 184 pounds, or six times more than the Vanguard satellite that the United States tried but failed to put into orbit in December 1957. One month after the launching of Sputnik I, on November 3, 1957, Sputnik II, a satellite weighing 1,120 pounds and containing the dog "Laika" was sent into orbit. Because the alloys capable of resisting the intense heat produced by the thrust of the rocket necessary to launch such satellites were unavailable to Kurchatov, he designed a four-chamber cluster of rockets, adapted from his work on the Soviet ICBM (intercontinental ballistic missile) system. When Iurii Gagarin was sent into space in 1961, a giant "cluster of clusters" rocket with a total of twenty engines was used.

These achievements astounded the international scientific community and earned the Soviet Union considerable prestige. They also had significant military implications, since a missile that could launch satellites into orbit could also deliver nuclear warheads to targets in the United States. The United States Congress responded to this perceived Soviet technological superiority by passing the National Defense Education Act in 1958. It called for spending some five billion dollars on higher education in the sciences, foreign languages, and the humanities. Despite intelligence reports that the Soviet Union was not undertaking significant ICBM deployment, the Pentagon insisted on, and received, a massive increase in spending on missile development.

Cars and communism did not get along very well, at least not in the Soviet Union's formative decades. Few and far between at the time of the October Revolution, private automobiles got scarcer still during the tumult of civil war and for some time thereafter. Then in May 1929, the Soviet government signed a technical assistance agreement with the Ford Motor Company to build an integrated automobile factory near Nizhni Novgorod (later, Gor'kii). However, the resultant Gor'kii Automobile Factory (GAZ), was celebrated more for its vastness ("the largest factory in Europe"), and the wonder of its assembly line than for its products, chiefly the Ford-derived Model A car and 1.5 ton Model AA truck. The production of trucks - vital for military purposes and the delivery of goods within the burgeoning cities - vastly outpaced car production. The party and government elite might have cars and drivers at their disposal, but very few people actually owned a motor vehicle.

Only after World War II did Stalin make a slight concession to the comrades. He approved the production of two new models - the Pobeda (Victory), a swoop-back sedan produced by GAZ, and the Moskvich (Muscovite), a replica of the pre-war German Opel Kadett produced by the Moscow Small Car Factory - and set aside a certain proportion of each for purchase by individuals. Priced at 16,000 and 9,000 rubles respectively, the cars were way beyond the means of the average worker whose wage stood at about 600 rubles per month. But so few were produced - only a little more than six thousand in 1946 and less than ten thousand in 1947 - that demand significantly exceeded supply. Trade unions organized waiting lists that could mean the deferment of one's dreams of owning a car for upwards of six years. By the time it was phased out in 1958, just under 236,000 Pobedas had been produced by GAZ. Built to withstand the roughest of driving conditions, the car was exported to other Soviet bloc countries (including China) and to Finland as well. The Moskvich, an inferior product in just about every respect, went through periodic modifications in subsequent decades. Except for the even more diminutive Zaporozhets that began production in the late 1950s, it remained the most "proletarian" of Soviet cars.

Meanwhile, at the opposite end of the prestige spectrum, Moscow's Stalin Factory (ZIS) was turning out the ZIS-110, a limited edition limousine patterned after a pre-war American Packard. With a 600 cc eight-cylinder engine, the most powerful installed in a Soviet car up to that point, the ZIS-110 was capable of speeds of up to 140 km/hr. More than any other, it represented the Soviet state on wheels. Its components came from a broad range of enterprises - 73 in all - scattered throughout the country. These included processing plants that supplied cork padding for interior panels and - fittingly for a product at this point in Soviet history - the Gulag-run Sokol'niki labor camp that furnished some of the leather upholstery. When it came to distributing the finished product, Moscow received favored treatment as it did in so many other respects. Of the 71 vehicles assigned by the middle of 1946, 38 remained in the Soviet capital. Kiev got seven, Leningrad three, and Minsk, Riga, Tallinn, Kishinev, Kaunas, and Petrozavodsk received four each. Between 1945 and 1958 ZIS sent forth a total of 2083 units, including small numbers of armor-plated (ZIS-115) and convertible (ZIS-110B) versions. The armor-plated model, completed in 1947, went into production just after the American atomic bomb blasts at Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The car did not have to endure that punishment, but it truly was a "bunker on wheels," a real colossus. With added layers of steel and seven-centimeter thick plexiglass windows, it weighed in at more than seven tons and required special wheels and tires to bear the additional weight. ZIS only made a few dozen, most of which it dispatched directly to the Kremlin. Stalin reputedly had five of them at his disposal, using a different one every day as a safety precaution.