Stalinism and alcoholism in the Soviet Union (supplement to Part 7)

Poverty and alcoholism in Yalçın Küçük’s “excessively trouble-free country”

Note: This essay should be read as a supplementary piece to the earlier blog post entitled Mistaking alcoholism for a sign of prosperity: Yalçın Küçük’s fantasies. There, we examined Küçük’s approach to the alcohol problem in the Soviet Union: he presented it not as a symptom and catalyst of economic and social crisis, but rather as a by-product of an “excessively trouble-free” society. Here, we seek to give the same discussion a somewhat more concrete form through Mervyn Matthews’s pioneering study of poverty in the Soviet Union.

In portraying the Soviet Union under Brezhnev as having become an “excessively trouble-free country” - a society in which “disposable incomes had outstripped the possibilities of consumption” - Yalçın Küçük either did not know of an important study dealing with that same period, or chose to ignore it. We are referring to the British Sovietologist Mervyn Matthews’s book, published in 1986, Poverty in the Soviet Union: The Life-styles of the Underprivileged in Recent Years. [*]

Matthews’s book does not approach poverty in the Soviet Union merely in terms of low wages or income inequality. Rather, it shows that poverty in Soviet society must be understood together with the qualitative forms of deprivation that permeated the entire fabric of everyday life: inadequate and unbalanced diets, poor-quality food, chronic shortages of consumer goods, interminable queues, substandard housing conditions, overcrowded living spaces, problems of access to health care, the vulnerability of the elderly and of dependants, and the time swallowed up by queues and the daily struggle to obtain basic supplies.

This picture points to a Soviet reality very different from Küçük’s fantasy of an “excessively trouble-free country”. Possessing roubles in the Soviet Union did not necessarily mean having access to the goods and services one wanted. Low prices might have appeared to provide a guarantee on paper; yet when the shelves were empty, when the goods and services available were of poor quality, and when access to decent food, adequate housing, durable consumer goods or reliable health care depended on personal connections, status, waiting lists, the black market and bureaucratic privilege, that guarantee remained largely formal.

Another important aspect of Matthews’s study is that it shows how the Stalinist regime regarded even the word “poverty” as ideologically dangerous. Rather than openly acknowledging the existence of poverty in the Soviet Union, official discourse hid behind indirect expressions such as “the inadequately provided for” or “those whose needs were not adequately met”. This terminological sleight of hand was not merely a matter of statistical camouflage; it was an attempt to render invisible the fact that a regime claiming to be “socialist”, and even to have reached the stage of “mature socialism”, had left millions of people below an acceptable standard of living.

It is particularly significant for the purposes of this series that Matthews devoted a separate section of his book to alcoholism. In his view, alcoholism was both one of the causes of Soviet poverty and one of its most destructive consequences. In low-income households, alcohol drained already limited family budgets, with devastating effects on nutrition, clothing, childcare and the costs of everyday life. At the same time, through absenteeism, productivity losses, workplace accidents, domestic violence and health problems, it helped to reproduce poverty.

Thus, in Soviet society, alcoholism was not, as Küçük claimed, a secondary malaise arising from the failure to channel “free time” into “communisant” channels. It was a symptom of a structural crisis intertwined with poverty, bureaucratic alienation, chronic shortages of consumer goods, the housing crisis, low wages, the privileged nomenklatura system and the constrictions of everyday life. The fact that the state, while condemning alcoholism and conducting propaganda against it, at the same time derived a considerable share of its consolidated budget revenues from alcohol sales revealed, with stark clarity, the contradiction and hypocrisy of the Stalinist regime.

Matthews’s study had been published five years before Küçük’s book. This means that Yalçın Küçük was either unaware of this pioneering work on Soviet poverty - a serious shortcoming for someone making such sweeping judgements about the Soviet Union - or he was aware of it and deliberately chose to ignore it.

By way of conclusion, it is worth returning to the Moscow scene we recounted in another blog post on the political memoirs of Feridun Gürgöz, formerly a leading member of the Stalinist Communist Party of Turkey (TKP). [**] In the summer of 1987, Gürgöz, together with TKP members Cemal Kıral and Mehmet Bozışık, visited a retired Russian woman worker in Moscow. Living in the city centre, in a damp-smelling apartment block, in a tiny room in a communal flat, this elderly woman received a pension of only 60 roubles a month. Her furnishings were extremely meagre; the kitchen was shared; even the simple loudspeaker in the room reminded Gürgöz of his impoverished childhood in Istanbul in the 1950s. The woman offered her guests whatever she had - a few tomatoes, a few cherries and some tea - but faced with such poverty, Gürgöz could not bring himself to take any of the tomatoes or cherries.

This heart-rending scene is particularly important because it reminds us that the picture Matthews drew in his book was not merely a matter of dry statistics.

[*] Mervyn Matthews, Poverty in the Soviet Union: The Life-styles of the Underprivileged in Recent Years, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1986.

[**] Feridun Gürgöz, Saat Geri Dönmüyor, Tüstav Yayınları, Istanbul, April 2007.