Daily life in Kirov in the 1930s

Context is imperative for understanding and interpreting the popular suggestions to the draft Constitution. The social and economic realities of the Kirov region in the 1930s shaped how people thought about the issues raised by the draft Constitution and the types of suggestions that they formulated. The Kirov region, formerly called Viatka, was in a period of great transition in the 1930s from a region of independent peasants to an increasingly urbanized and industrialized region with collectivized agriculture. Renaming many of the streets (particularly those with religious names or tsarist names) in the provincial capital for revolutionary heroes and organizations ¹ beginning in 1918, as well as renaming the region and the capital city in honor of Sergei Mironovich Kirov (the Leningrad Party boss who had been born in the city of Urzhum) following his murder in 1934, illustrates one of the many forms this transition took from tsarist and backwards to Soviet and socialist. However, in the mid-1930s, this transition was by no means complete. Many traditional aspects of rural life as well as the traditions of independence and local self-governance that made the Viatka region unique endured even as the social and economic upheavals of the 1930s drastically changed people’s way of life. This makes the Viatka/Kirov region a unique and compelling case study. This overview of life in Kirov in the 1930s makes no pretense to be complete. Rather, its purpose is to provide some context for understanding the chaotic and sometimes painful transition of Viatka into Kirov and the impact it had on the daily lives and experiences of those who participated in the constitutional discussion.