Soviet Society And Culture

Essays In Honor Of Vera S. Dunham

Terry L Thompson, Richard Sheldon, Edward J Brown, Michael P Sacks

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN:
  9780367303860
• eBook ISBN:
  9781000312720
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

Academic analysis has not always kept pace with the dramatic changes that have occurred in the USSR since Stalin's time, for objective study has often been overshadowed—especially in the 1980s—by publicity concerning the negative aspects of the "Evil Empire." Recently, however, because of reforms initiated by Gorbachev, the dynamics of the Soviet system have come into sharper focus. This book provides a wide-ranging, detailed view of economic, social, ideological, and literary aspects of the Soviet system leading up to the Gorbachev era. The essays include both historical and contemporary perspectives on the sources of stability (and stagnation) in the post-Stalin years. Examining the intricate fabric of Soviet society, the contributors provide insights into the social and cultural motivations for Gorbachev's "restructuring" policies. Their themes echo the work of Vera S. Dunham, who for more than four decades has focused on diverse aspects of Soviet society and culture, particularly on the noncoercive means of social control that have often been overlooked but that are a vital component of the Soviet system.

Part One
Trends in Soviet Society

The noncoercive aspects of social control in the Soviet Union have constituted a very strong leitmotif in Vera S. Dunham’s work throughout her career. Most evident in her pioneering work, In Stalin’s Time: Middleclass Values in Soviet Fiction, her focus on state-society interaction has also been apparent in numerous scholarly articles and lectures. Dunham has used the phrase “Big Deal” to describe one important use of positive social control under Stalin.

The Big Deal refers to the Soviet regime’s tacit alliance with the new “middle class” of engineers, administrators, and managers who were vital to the rebuilding effort after World War II. Rather than relying on coercion, as might be expected in the aftermath of the Great Purges of the 1930s, the regime tried a new tack. This amounted to an accommodation of the personal, materialistic longings of this group of people whose expertise and skills were in critical demand. The goal of the Big Deal was to gamer the support of these experts and administrators by offering the incentives they wanted most: housing, consumer goods, and leisure time. The conversion of these private aspirations to acceptable public values was the key component of the Big Deal.

Although Dunham’s analysis of the Big Deal has been confined to the postwar period, the use of accommodation by the regime to deal with the middle class was evident already in the mid- and late 1930s and extended well beyond the immediate postwar years. This characteristic of the Soviet system tends to go unnoticed, however, especially in studies of the Stalinist era. Recent references to the Soviet Union as the “Evil Empire” have also clouded the existence of other than the negative aspects of social control. However, as the revolutionary ethos recedes further into the background, the use of positive levers to attain many economic and social goals has become more important. Paradoxically, positive, materialistic levers have been used to bolster the political stability of a system whose very legitimacy is based upon a radical restructuring of society on moral and ethical grounds. A thorough examination of the implications of this paradox, an examination continued in the essays that follow, is Dunham’s primary contribution to the study of Soviet society.

1
The Little Deal: Brezhnev’s Contribution to Acquisitive Socialism

James R. Millar

Vera Dunham described the accommodation that emerged between regime and middle class under Stalin as the “Big Deal.”¹ The Big Deal represented a dilution of the idealistic, egalitarian goals of Marxian socialism by means of a tacit accommodation in practice to the materialistic, self-regarding behavior of the new Soviet middle class. For technocrats and skilled workers in preferred sectors, material incentives increasingly displaced moral incentives. For the middle class, privilege and perquisite replaced egalitarianism and self-denial. The accumulation of private, personal property not only became acceptable, it was now protected against public encroachment, and acquisitive impulses gained relative to altruistic ones. The rhetoric of Bolshevism continued, of course, glorifying self-sacrifice, collectivism, and egalitarianism, but these goals, like a particular kind of optical illusion, retreated farther and farther into the future with each new official pronouncement. One day collective farms would be elevated to full status as socialist enterprises. Private agricultural plots would disappear. Public distribution of consumer goods and services would be entirely socialized and thus depecuniarized. “Commodity production,” the “law of value,” and other relics of capitalism would eventually become otiose and disappear simultaneously with the appearance of the new Soviet man (and woman).² Meanwhile, however, the building of heavy industry, the prosecution of World War II, and the reconstruction of the postwar economy took precedence. Thus, private production, markets, differential wages, private wealth, and personal acquisitiveness had to be tolerated and even encouraged for the duration.

The economy under Stalin relied heavily upon powerful, noneconomic disincentives as well as upon material incentives. Success was rewarded materially as well as morally. Failure was unacceptable. Discipline and punishment provided counterpoint to privilege and perquisite, and they insured that acquisitiveness would not jeopardize the aims of the state, however it might militate against the early appearance of the new socialist citizen.

High rates of growth and a general rise in the material standard of living of the bulk of the Soviet population during the early years of Khrushchev’s rule created a strong sense of optimism.³ Egalitarianism was taken seriously by Khrushchev and his advisers, or so it would appear. Wage differentials were reduced for managerial staff and skilled workers, and the urban-rural gap narrowed too.⁴ These changes were masked in the early years by the general rise in material well-being. Everyone, or almost everyone, was experiencing real income increases, and the reduction in differentials did not appear to be at anyone else’s expense.

After increasing at an average annual rate of about 6 percent during the 1950s, the increase in GNP slowed to 5 percent in the 1960s and to 4 percent for 1970–1978. Since then growth has averaged less than 2 percent per year.⁵ This decline reflected the exhaustion of postwar slack, the diversion of investment to defense and to agriculture, where marginal capital productivity was low, and social policies and demographic trends that reduced the rate of growth of effective labor force.

Khrushchev had been inclined toward large-scale programs and reforms. The Virgin Lands Program, de-Stalinization, abolition of the Machine Tractor Stations and of the old four-channel agricultural procurement system, development of sovnarkhozy (regional economic councils), creation of parallel rural and urban party organs are principal examples. Except for the Kosygin reforms of industrial management in 1965, which had been conceived and designed in the Khrushchev years, the Brezhnev years did not witness large-scale institutional reform or further de-Stalinization. It was instead a period of institutional stability at the macrolevel.⁶ Reform and change were confined to the microlevel, mainly in the forms of increased political and economic freedom within close kinship and friendship networks and greater tolerance of petty private enterprise and trade. These represented the main components of Brezhnev’s “Little Deal.”

The Background of the Little Deal

The overthrow of Nikita Khrushchev ushered in a new era that was more conservative in at least three respects. The new regime elected to avoid risks associated with further de-Stalinization. It decided to avoid systemwide institutional reform. And it initiated and sustained a substantial increase in military spending.⁷ The steep rise in defense spending, which became the hallmark of the Brezhnev years, jeopardized continued rapid improvement in living standards and thus progress toward Khrushchev’s ambitious targets for production and consumption for 1980.

Consumerism of the Khrushchev period collided, therefore, with a new, ambitious defense policy, and the collision was all the greater because of the general slowdown in growth rates. This slowdown was partly a consequence of demographic changes that reduced the rate of growth of the labor force. It was also caused by an inefficient managerial system. Poor weather conditions and a failure of agriculture to respond to large investments with substantial total factor productivity increases were also important. The success of Khrushchev’s egalitarianism—the reduction in differentials within industry and between industry and agriculture—may have also had an unfavorable influence upon work incentives. Moreover, shortages of the most desirable consumer goods and the continued need for queuing also reduced the effectiveness of material incentives. In the absence of illegal middleman activity or privileged access, chronic disequilibrium in consumer goods markets has the effect of reducing the effectiveness of income differentials. Purchase requires queuing time as well as cash. Each household must, therefore, optimize in allocating members’ time between remunerable work and queuing, and any individual with pent-up demand is wise to slight his job in favor of slipping off to queue.

The Brezhnev regime did not repudiate consumerism as a principal goal, as increasingly heavy agricultural imports during the period testify. It did halt and begin to reverse the egalitarian results of Khrushchev’s wage reform.⁸ It also chose not to reverse the policy of retail price stability that had been established and repeatedly promised ever since Stalin’s death. Thus the resource crunch could not but be reflected in lengthened queues for desirable consumer goods and/or in decreased incentives to work hard or to work at all.

The problem of “deficit commodities” could not be resolved by 1980, as Khrushchev had hoped, by increasing output to absorb excess demand. Raising prices to equilibrium levels was ruled out too, apparently for political reasons. Under these circumstances, the temptation to individuals who were favorably situated with respect to deficit commodities (and services) to profit themselves and their families would certainly be overwhelming in the absence of severe, swift, and certain punishment for doing so. Ideological commitment to the collective, and to socialist goals in general, was no longer sufficient to avert favoritism, nepotism, or even outright corruption. Stalin’s system of discipline and punishment apparently could not be reestablished. Consequently, the very structure and functioning of the Soviet socialist economy, and the policies Soviet leadership believed could be invoked successfully, created the cracks, crevices and other interstices within which private economic activity could flourish to redistribute, and in some cases to augment, Soviet national product.

As the Brezhnev regime matured, existent, but little-noted, private nonagricultural enterprise gained new significance and augmented the flow of private goods and services, partly through the rynok (legal consumer goods market), but mainly through direct, unlicensed, floating free markets. Stalin’s compromise with the peasantry in the 1930s had been forced by violence and the threat of destabilization, and it had forced retention of at least one free market in the Soviet economy, the collective farm market (CFM). Despite several attempts to drive it out of existence, Khrushchev was forced to accept private plots and the CFM, too.⁹ His government accepted an increased flow of consumer goods through regulated state retail markets as well at the expense, proportionately speaking, of direct, nonmarket distribution.

The Brezhnev leadership struck a new but implicit bargain with the urban population: to tolerate the expansion of a wide variety of petty private economic activities—some legal, some in the penumb...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Tables
• Foreword
• Acknowledgments
• Part One Trends in Soviet Society
• Part Two Literary Perspectives
• Part Three The Language of Ideology
• Part Four Sources of Soviet Stability
• Glossary
• About the Contributors
• Index