Money, Property and Labor: Notions of Personal Wealth and Social Justice in the Soviet Union after Stalin, 1956-1991

Abstract

This dissertation explores the role of personal wealth in the later years of the Soviet Union. It examines how individuals enriched themselves, as well as the meaning of financial affluence in a country that proclaimed itself egalitarian, eradicated private property and criminally prosecuted private enterprise. It is usually believed that the only privileged group in the Soviet Union was the nomenklatura, the high-ranking state and Communist party officials, as well as academic and cultural elite, who were rewarded materially for their loyalty and service. I suggest that in the period from the 1960s to the 1980s there emerged another elite group in the Soviet Union, those who earned their high status not by political loyalty, but by their illegal wealth. It included individuals, ranging from state service sector workers to underground manufacturers, who used consumer shortages of the planned economy to their own benefit and grew rich. I argue that urbanization, growth of disposable income and development of mass consumption in that period not only led to the relative well-being of the Soviet society, as is usually suggested, but also created new forms of inequality. I study how this wealth was created, how the new elite coexisted with the old one and finally, what were the attitudes towards the newly wealthy among officials, experts and broader population. This dissertation traces how Soviet leaders, experts and ordinary people interpreted personal wealth and problematized honest labor and deserved income. It seeks to challenge the existing narrative of the Brezhnev’s Soviet Union as the time of cynicism and disbelief in socialism by looking at the ideas about social justice. Drawing on discussions regarding profiteering, retail price policies, or private car ownership, my dissertation explores how people in the 1960s-1980s tried to find the meaning of true socialism.