A Tacit Social Contract

The post-Stalin leaders did have a strategy for regaining their own population's trust: fulfilling some of their ideology's promises of material plenty. They launched a huge program of domestic housing construction, which nearly doubled the provision between 1955 and 1964, and continued at the same rate in the following decade too.

Education was greatly expanded and the fees Stalin had imposed for its upper levels were abolished. The number of students enrolled in higher education increased threefold between 1950 and the mid-1960s. Between 1939 and 1965 the proportion of the population with secondary or higher education had risen five­fold, from 15.9 million to 79.8 million, and by 1975 to 121.5 million. Health care, at least as measured by the number of doctors, improved greatly between the 1950s and 1970s; by 1976 there were five times as many doctors per head of population as in 1939. Life expectancy had risen from 47 to 70 years, though it leveled off there­after.^[2749] The availability of pensions also increased dramatically, not least because from 1964 they were awarded to the rural as well as the urban population. The consumer goods industry for a time expanded faster than heavy industry, enabling people to buy better clothes, furniture, and household goods. Altogether, by the early 1960s life was beginning to become easier, more comfortable, and more varied for many Soviet citizens as a direct result of party-sponsored programs.^[2750]

The key to retaining the population’s confidence was to continue these programs and to guarantee the supply of cheap food, especially for urban workers.

This was the inception of a tacit “social contract” between regime and workers, which preserved social peace until the 1980s: the workers accepted being poorly paid and having few rights in return for being guaranteed cheap food, housing, education, and health care. To finance that deal, the state instituted a subsidy to keep urban food prices low. That subsidy mounted steadily until by 1980 it formed 11 percent of state expenditure. The regime’s fear of working-class unrest was peri­odically reawakened by workers’ risings in Poland in 1970, 1976, and 1980, the first and last of which toppled the current party leaders there.^[2752]

This social contract generated its own expectations. Citizens had gradually come to assume that some of the necessities of the modern world—housing, education, medical care—were a right and should be provided free of charge or at very low cost.

Actual provision of social welfare always fell short of perfection, but the ideal was proclaimed and was partly fulfilled. From news of the outside world, how­ever, Soviet citizens came to believe that provision was better in the so-called cap­italist countries, which they also considered more prosperous generally. Ordinary people also bitterly resented the privileges of the nomenklatura elite, who had ac­cess to superior goods and services at reduced prices in closed “distributors.” By the later decades, as more Soviet citizens traveled abroad or listened to Russian- language radio broadcasts from the West, many of them came to believe that life in the West, and especially in the United States, was both freer and materially more secure. This conviction was, however, also partly a product of Soviet propaganda, which took the United States as a model, to be reached and overtaken, according to Khrushchev, by 1980.^[2753]