The Lost Welfare State of Twentieth Century Russia

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By the Brezhnev era, the Soviet Union partly defined itself by a 'total' welfare system that was extensive, innovative and pervasive, whose span ranged from the distribution of pensions to the organization of leisure, and at whose heart was a formal recognition of universal rights. Yet these rights were conceptually ambiguous, and their practical delivery was highly imperfect. In terms of reach, ambition and quality, and because of the particularity of its social rights, the world's first socialist-communist society seems to have generated a unique welfare system.Yet to the extent that scholars have researched welfare in twentieth century Russia and the USSR, they have tended to emphasize not uniqueness but pan-European commonality, drawing particular attention to the shared bureaucratic practices that seem to structure welfare systems in all modern societies regardless of their ideological foundation. Scholars have also tended to emphasize what they see as the Soviet welfare system's incapacity and dysfunction. This research does not reject these arguments, but it does not assume them either. Instead, it starts from the hypothesis that twentieth-century Russia's 'welfare state' has been 'lost' in two different ways. First, it lacks detailed empirical study; this research thus addresses a surprisingly neglected area.Second, the 'welfare state' seems lost because it might never have existed. It was either so feeble that it barely qualified as a welfare state, or so extensive that it became something else in kind: a total social project. Before the First World War, during the Stalin period, and again in the 1990s, Russian (or Soviet) welfare was exceptionally inadequate compared with welfare in other industrial societies. Yet between the 1950s and 1980s, in the years we most associate with Khrushchev and Brezhnev, welfare assumed an exceptional reach, concerning itself with many aspects of the lives of all citizens. Notwithstanding its patchy qualities, it apparently went far beyond what existed in liberal democracies at that time.This hypothesis will be investigated across the span of the whole twentieth century. Of course, resources and time conspire against the writing of an equally detailed treatment of every aspect of this subject in every part of the century. To circumvent this problem, the project isolates four areas and explores them in particular detail, using archival sources where appropriate. These areas are the causes and consequences of the workers' insurance law of 1912; the institutionalization of social rights in the constitutions of 1936 and 1977; the pensions reforms of 1956 and 1964 (and especially their redefinition of the meaning of risk in post-Stalin society); and the history of the physical places in which welfare was delivered during the Khrushchev and Brezhnev years (such as pensions offices, urban microdistricts, and vacation sanatoria). Each of these aspects will be presented in a journal article, and together they will form the most precise empirical element in the book I plan to write.The book will draw on these case studies, on more general research in published primary materials, and in extensive reading in a range of secondary sources, to position 'the lost welfare state of twentieth century Russia' in its proper European context. This will be the first time that the Russian example has been placed at the heart of a full-length study that pays sustained attention to international comparisons across the whole of the twentieth century. Through these comparisons, and through the judicious accretion of empirical detail, this study will make a major contribution to the history of welfare in twentieth century Russia and the USSR and, more generally, in twentieth century Europe.