ssive numbers of trained experts were needed for the rapid industrialization going on. High salaries and many special privileges were offered to the technical and managerial elite. Millions struggled in universities, institutes, and night schools for the all important specialized education. "In Soviet Russia there is no capital except education. If a person does not want to become a collective farmer or just a cleaning woman, the only means you have to get something is through education . . ." (McKay 931-932). Another change under Stalin was that there was an equality of rights for women. They were urged to work outside the home and to liberate themselves sexually. Divorces and abortions were also made very easy. "Young women were constantly told that they should be fully equal to men, that they could and should do anything men could do . . ." (McKay 932). Most women had to work outside the home because it took both the husband and wife working to support their family. But, the woman had a heavy burden of household chores in her off hours. Soviet men still considered the home and the children the wife's responsibilities (McKay 933). Along with some of these beneficial changes that Stalin made to society came some non-beneficial ones, specifically the purges. One of the first to be eliminated was Stalin's wife, Nadezhda Alliluyeva, who after being ridiculed by her husband at a party for the fifteenth anniversary of the revolution on November 8, 1932, apparently shot herself (Lewis 83-84; McKay 930). Then, at four o'clock in the afternoon of December 1, 1934, a young disillusioned Communist named Leonid V. Nikolaev shot Stalin's number-two man, Sergei Kirov, who had just been offered Stalin's job of General Secretary from the senior members of the Party (Marrin 116; Lewis 86; McKay 930; Treadgold 278). Stalin used Kirov's death to launch a reign of terror. Stalin blamed Kirov's death on foreign powers, the exiled Trotsky, and th...
