SOCIOLOGISTS AND LIVING STANDARDS (1972–80)
While the managers of the state-run economy were seeking ways to remedy a labour shortage and a drop in labour productivity, sociologists, and particularly experts in economic sociology, were confirming the significance of the shadow economy and arriving at some startling conclusions. Despite the bad news announced by the planning authorities and clear signs of a system in decline, living standards actually rose during the years of stagnation. The population’s reaction and adaptation to changing economic conditions produced new patterns of behaviour and new values, which official statistical data were incapable of assimilating.
The data used by the sociologists derived from two sources: their own studies conducted in the Siberian city of Rubtsovsk (Altai region) in 1972 and repeated in 1980 and 1990; and those carried out among the rural population in the Novosibirsk area in 1975–6 and 1986–7.[4] The development indicators in Rubtsovsk approximated to the general Russian average for the 1970s and ’80s, while those of the Novosibirsk area (one of the most important in Western Siberia) were close to the Russian inter-regional average. Thus, the data collected in these studies, conducted by the Moscow and Novosibirsk academies of science, may be regarded as faithfully reflecting the national situation.
From them we learn that the housing situation had improved; that the purchase of consumer durables had increased appreciably; that there were more recreational facilities for city dwellers; and that many families had a private plot near their residence or in the neighbouring countryside (even though demand still outstripped supply). A third of the population had access to collective vegetable gardens. During the twenty years under study, in line with increased house construction, many garages, garden sheds and various types of summer houses had been built. On the whole, the least well-off sections of the population had seen their incomes rise, attesting to a general trend towards decent minimum living standards. The most marked differences, as measured by key indicators like housing, incomes and personal means of transport, had decreased significantly.
These findings provide an explanation for the paradox of nostalgia among the population of post-communist Russia for the Brezhnevite ‘good old days’. The ‘miracle’ of improving living standards in a declining economy was based on the existence of untapped labour energy that was not mobilized by the state-run economy, of underemployed resources, and an abundance of other resources that had yet to be squandered (the country remained fabulously wealthy). However, as the authors of the study confirm, improved living standards in the 1970s and ’80s came at a very high price. While economists and the leadership were seeking to raise output and labour productivity, to reduce waste and use resources more rationally, the latter were being systematically plundered.
Everyday life in the 1970s and ’80s would sooner or later reflect the decline of the state economy, in the form of an increased unpaid personal workload on private plots or at home. Many people had to find a second job; many others said they would like to. A similar increase in the workload also occurred in the countryside, with men and women investing more time in their private plots or home-based work – the main source of additional income – which enabled them to support relatives in town and exchange agricultural products against manufactured products.
The same trend of greater worker workloads and lower monetary incomes could already be observed in the years 1972–80. Following the collapse of the USSR, in the 1990s the role of the private plot or garden became indispensable, taking up much of many people’s working time. The garden, a place of leisure in developed urban societies, reverted to its pre-industrial function. A similar regression was evident in many spheres of existence, where survival strategies led to the devaluation of one of the most obvious successes of previous decades: the improvement in educational standards, which became less and less useful (a trend already apparent at the end of the 1970s). This was attested by the falling numbers of those taking after-work courses. The authors deplore the decline in what they call the economic and cultural function of higher education and higher professional qualifications, in favour of a pragmatic search for material benefits. The reduction in the time given over to leisure activities is explained by the need to work more in order to make ends meet, as a result of the failures of the state economy in the 1970s and ’80s.
In conclusion, improved living standards in the regime’s final years, though genuine, were no ‘miracle’. They were more of a mirage, like cheeks that glow after they have been pinched – the prelude to a slow decline that would witness the ruin of many past achievements.
PRIVATIZING THE STATE?
In order to make do, the population of the USSR had to increase its workload. By contrast, its ruling networks, especially at the upper level of the nomenklatura, saw their material well-being improve – by expanding existing income streams – without being obliged to work harder or change their leisure habits. We must therefore turn our attention to them once again.
Our examination of the shadow economy deepened our understanding of the processes at work within the ranks of state officials, particularly with the snaby-sbyty – the procurement and sales networks that supplied production units with what the state should have provided in the first place. Despite being officially frowned on, such semi-legal activities rapidly became indispensable, because they played a vital role for the enterprises they supplied. The availability of partially or completely concealed reserves of materials, financial resources or even manpower; the increase in bargaining and lobbying; the vast scope for activity on the borderline between the shadow economy and the black market – all this indicates the emergence of a model, even a system, which was at once indispensable and parasitic (like a body that produces beneficial pathologies). In the behaviour of enterprise managers, we witness a progressive blurring of the boundary between state and private property. Another boundary was blurred concurrently: between the official incomes and privileges allocated to top officials on the one hand, and the considerable room the latter enjoyed for increasing them by exploiting their position in the state hierarchy, on the other. And this avenue led to something even more significant in the behaviour of some heads of institutions or enterprises. It is one thing to strive to extract ever more perks from the state. It is quite another no longer to be content with such perks and to seek to accumulate wealth. Networks for that very purpose now existed within the state sector – in the various forms of the shadow economy – but also outside the state sector – in the form of the ‘black market’, itself spawning the mafia connections that flourished as never before under Brezhnev.
A longer-term historical perspective enables us at this point to discern broader political transformations – to distinguish successive stages in the bureaucracy’s position in the system and their consequences for the whole regime. Once the administrative class had been liberated from the rigours and horrors of Stalinism, it attained a higher status and became co-ruler of the state. But it did not stop there: the senior ranks of the bureaucracy actually began to appropriate the state as the collective representative of its interests and were highly conscious of the fact. The heads of ministries or other agencies referred to themselves as ‘those in charge of the state’.
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T. I. Zaslavskaya and Z. I. Kalugina, otvet. red.,