The Lost Welfare State of Twentieth Century Russia

到勃列日涅夫时代，苏联在一定程度上将自己定义为一个广泛、创新和普遍的“全面”福利制度，其范围从发放养老金到组织休闲，其核心是对普遍权利的正式承认。然而，这些权利在概念上是模棱两可的，它们的实际实施也非常不完美。就影响范围、抱负和质量而言，由于其社会权利的特殊性，世界上第一个社会主义-共产主义社会似乎产生了一种独特的福利制度。然而，学者们在研究20世纪俄罗斯和苏联的福利制度时，倾向于强调的不是独特性，而是泛欧洲的共性，尤其是共同的官僚做法，这些做法似乎构成了所有现代社会的福利制度，而不考虑其意识形态基础。学者们也倾向于强调他们认为的苏联福利体系的无能和功能失调。这项研究不否认这些论点，但也不假设它们。相反，它始于这样一种假设，即20世纪俄罗斯的“福利国家”已经以两种不同的方式“消失”。首先，它缺乏详细的实证研究；因此，这项研究解决了一个令人惊讶的被忽视的领域。第二，“福利国家”似乎迷失了，因为它可能从未存在过。它要么是如此虚弱，以至于几乎没有资格成为一个福利国家，要么是如此广泛，以至于它变成了另一种类似的东西：一个全面的社会项目。在第一次世界大战之前，在斯大林时期，再到20世纪90年代，俄罗斯(或苏联)的福利与其他工业社会的福利相比格外不足。然而，在20世纪50年代至80年代，在我们最常与赫鲁晓夫和勃列日涅夫联系在一起的几年里，福利承担了一种特殊的影响，涉及到所有公民生活的许多方面。尽管其质量参差不齐，但它显然远远超出了当时自由民主国家的存在。这一假说将在整个20世纪得到研究。当然，资源和时间不利于在本世纪的每一个阶段对这一主题的每一个方面进行同样详细的论述。为了绕过这个问题，该项目隔离了四个区域，并在适当的情况下利用档案资料对它们进行了特别详细的探索。这些领域是1912年工人保险法的原因和结果；1936年和1977年宪法中社会权利的制度化；1956年和1964年的养老金改革(特别是他们在后斯大林社会中对风险含义的重新定义)；以及赫鲁晓夫和勃列日涅夫时代提供福利的有形场所的历史(如养老金办公室、城市微型地区和度假疗养院)。这些方面的每一个方面都将在一篇期刊文章中呈现，它们将共同构成我计划写的这本书中最精确的经验元素。这本书将利用这些案例研究，在已出版的原始材料中进行更广泛的研究，并在一系列二手资料中进行广泛阅读，以适当的欧洲背景来定位“二十世纪俄罗斯失去的福利国家”。这将是第一次将俄罗斯的例子置于一项全面研究的核心，该研究持续关注整个20世纪的国际比较。通过这些比较，通过明智地增加实证细节，这项研究将对20世纪俄罗斯和苏联以及更广泛地说20世纪欧洲的福利史做出重大贡献。

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.