The Brezhnev regime's subsidies for basic foodstuffs, housing and welfare provision eliminated another long-standing source ofworry for ordinary Soviet citizens. After Khrushchev's 1962 price hikes touched off riots in Novocherkassk that were put down by military force, the prices of such staples as baked goods and dairy products were left unchanged for more than two decades.[167]Health care, public transportation, education and a variety of recreational and vacation facilities were available at nominal cost to most Soviet citizens. Rent and domestic utilities, too, were provided practically free of charge to most Soviet workers. Of course, such artificially low prices inevitably led to massive shortages and queues for a wide range of products. Everyday goods such as underwear or toilet paper sometimes disappeared for months at a time. Meanwhile, luxuries such as automobiles remained far beyond the means of typical Soviet families. Still, for a Soviet population whose parents and grandparents made up an impoverished peasantry just a generation earlier, the cheap consumer and welfare goods of the Brezhnev era were a genuine achievement.
Moreover, Brezhnev's de facto toleration of a vast, informal 'second economy' during the 1970s helped further ameliorate the rigidities of the Soviet planning system.[168] The free market for agricultural products grown on peasants' private plots, officially legalised under Stalin, continued to supply the majority of fresh fruits and vegetables consumed by Soviet citizens. Technically illegal 'free markets', however, existed for almost all other consumer goods as well. Workers in Soviet retail stores sold the choicest items from their inventories after official store hours at inflated prices or bartered them for other hard-to-obtain products. Soviet youth, especially those who had learned some English or German, bargained with Western tourists for otherwise unattainable designer blue jeans, popular cassette tapes and portable appliances. Special stores open only to the Soviet elite sold a wider variety of consumer products; these supplies, too, often found their way onto the black market. Although cheap vodka sold by the state alcohol monopoly was one of the mainstays of the official Brezhnev economy, myriad forms of samogon (moonshine) were always available in the informal sector as well. The importance of personal connections - or blat, in the Soviet slang - for success in the second economy could be exasperating, even humiliating, for less well- positioned consumers. Yet such informal economic networks also played an important role in humanising life under orthodox Leninist dictatorship.
A fourth component of the Brezhnev social contract was a limited form of social mobility - one hardly comparable to the massive promotions of Soviet workers during the Stalinist 1930s, yet still important in channelling the energies of Soviet citizens in officially approved directions.[169] With the routinisation of the Stalinist socio-economic system in the 1970s, a kind oflocational hierarchy had emerged in Soviet society, and ambitious young people did their best to climb it. At the bottom of this hierarchy were the kolkhozy and sovkhozy; Soviet villages often still resembled Russian villages of the nineteenth century, with unpaved roads, few modern conveniences and only rudimentary welfare services. Unsurprisingly, young and energetic individuals did their utmost to escape agricultural employment; as a result, Soviet collective farms were left with an ageing, largely unskilled population.[170] Somewhat better life chances were available in 'open cities', that is, those with few or no residency controls. Here, a wider variety of consumer goods was available, greater educational opportunities existed and everyday life was a little less boring. Higher up the locational hierarchy were the 'closed cities' - those where political, scientific and/or military activities supposedly demanded a higher degree of control over residency and where, not coincidentally, one found the greatest variety of consumer goods and most exciting cultural opportunities. Access to such cities, for those outside the elite, depended upon proven loyalty to the CPSU, high levels of educational attainment, marriage to a city resident and/or good personal connections with, or bribes of, Communist Party officials. At the very apex of the residential hierarchy stood Leningrad and especially Moscow, where the standard of living was famously and dramatically better than anywhere else in the USSR, and where dependable access to foreign tourists meant an even greater range of consumer products on the black market. Desire to live in Moscow was so great, in fact, that a substantial population of workers allowed into the city on temporary work permits - the so-called limitchiki - stayed there as illegal migrants, working in the shadow economy and constantly trying to avoid expulsion. Thus, the Brezhnev economy, though intensely frustrating for skilled workers assigned to jobs that were often poorly compensated and outside their areas of specialisation, still offered opportunities to 'work the system' so as to ascend the residential hierarchy. Those who had managed to attain 'higher' spots in this hierarchy had a substantial incentive not to challenge the system that maintained it.
The final element of the Brezhnev social contract involved the institution- alisation of what Terry Martin has called the 'affirmative action empire' - that is, the creation of opportunities for career advancement and limited cultural expression by non-Russian minorities within the USSR.[171] As scholars such as Ronald Suny, Rogers Brubaker and Yuri Slezkine have shown, Soviet nationalities policy in the Brezhnev era, while officially still committed to the creation of a supranational 'Soviet man', nevertheless inadvertently reinforced national and ethnic identities in the Soviet republics and in other administrative units formally designated for titular ethnic groups.[172] Of course, it would be a mistake to overstate the degree of freedom for national self-expression in a regime that brutally suppressed all forms of independent political organisation. Russian (and to a lesser extent Ukrainian) dominance over the USSR as a whole was ensured through such policies as appointing ethnic Russians as the 'second secretaries' of every Soviet republic, requiring Russian-language education for all elite positions and forcing non-Russians in the Soviet army to serve outside their home republics.[173] Still, Soviet federalism under Brezhnev, however circumscribed, had significant cultural effects. Each of the Soviet republics had the right to provide education in the titular language and - with the important exception of the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic (RSFSR) itself- its own Academy of Sciences and its own republican party and state bureaucracies. National identities were inscribed as well on the obligatory Soviet passport, which essentialised and made hereditary the official ethnic identities established and enforced under Leninist rule. Propaganda endeavouring to show the 'friendship of the peoples' of the USSR highlighted the regime's support for 'indigenous' folk music and art, museums of (regime- approved) republican history and ethnography and official national literatures. At the same time, the 'trust in cadres' strategy allowed powerful ethnic networks to become politically entrenched in such places as Kazakhstan under Kunaev, Ukraine under Shcherbitskii, Uzbekistan under Sharaf Rashidov and Azerbaijan under Heidar Aliev.[174] Taken as a whole, such policies fostered nationalist subcultures that would later, under Gorbachev, generate significant resistance to Soviet rule.
167
Samuel H. Baron,
168
Gregory Grossman, 'The "Second Economy" of the USSR',
170
Alexander Yanov
171
Terry Martin,
172
Ronald Grigor Suny,
173
Seweryn Bialer,
174
John P. Willerton,