The collapse of the Soviet welfare state

National Review, Nov 6, 1987 by Mikhail S. Bernstam

THE COLLAPSE OF THE SOVIET WELFARE STATE

THE RECENT CHANGES in the Soviet Union, for all their significance, are poorly understood in the West. I can see only one explanation that simultaneously accounts for all the economic, social, and political aspects of the Soviet reform: the new Gorbachev administration is renegotiating the social contract between the government and the people.

A crucial reason for the recent democratization drive was given in the General Secretary's speeches last July and August and later elaborated in the Soviet media. Significant popular dissatisfactions with living conditions and resentment of the ruling elite have accumulated in the Soviet Union--to the point where the leadership fears a possibly serious clash between the people and the government. To mitigate this discontent, the Soviets have begun to recognize publicly the extent of mass misery and the collapse of the Soviet welfare state, and have promised a caring hand. An institutional democratization, the establishment of legal guarantees against abuses of power, and a more open press should validate the Soviet leaders' promissory note for a new social contract.

After decades of silence, Soviet publications have begun churning out a cascade of statistics and stories of mass destitution and despair. By its own admission, the Evil Empire has produced more misery than even American conservatives had imagined. To take a minor example, President Reagan mentioned in his 1987 State of the Union address that one-third of Soviet families are without hot running water. According to the recent Soviet welfare book by N. M. Rimashevskaya, it is cold running water that one-third of Soviet families are without; as for hot running water, only one-third of Soviet families have it.

Poverty is particularly ubiquitous and debilitating among single mothers, one-earner families, familes with more than two children, the elderly, and the handicapped. The average Soviet wage or salary (net of taxes and union vacation deductions) was about $2,950 in 1986; the cash poverty line per person was $1,300 per year. Thus the average one-earner family with one child was below the poverty line, as was the average two-earner family with more than two children. Given lower wages paid to women, most female-headed families were poor. Single mothers give children away to orphanages where they are malnourished and abused. Moonlighting is prohibited in many occupations and for non-working mothers. So, as the prestigious Literaturnaya Gazeta revealed on October 1, 1986, mothers trying to make money to feed the children by sewing at home end up in the slammer. Deprivation is also a problem for the Soviet elderly, 79 per cent of whom live below the poverty line; the magazine Ogonek reported in June 1986 that many, in flight from hunger, commit suicide.

Young workers, newly arrived in a city, live in factory dormitories and barracks, five to twenty people per room. There are famlies of young workers who live for years in the dug mud-huts (Komsomolskaya Pravda, February 3, 1987). To jump the public-housing queue, young female workers produce illegitimate children, which entitles them to a room in the public-housing project. Twenty-seven per cent of births in the Russian Republic (the primary republic of the USSR) are to single monthers; the latest available illegitimacy ratio for the U.S. is 21 per cent for 1984. Pravda (December 13, 1985) cites a new colloquialism: "to get housing via a baby.' Leningrad Pravda (February 23, 1987) describes another common procedure:

"How did you get your housing?'

"Why do you think we had children?'

"And where are the children?'

"Why do you think there are orphanages?'

BUT REPORTS ALSO state that the orphanages are overcrowded and children are hungry (Sovietskaya Rossiya, January 30, 1987; Moskovskaya Pravda, February 3, 1987). Not all children are even fortunate enough to be in orphanages. Vagrant children and youths live in basements or railway cars. Abandoned children beg for food in public eateries; teenage girls become prostitutes; boys steal food from cargo trains and land in jail (Izvestia, December 12, 1986; Nedelia, November 24, 1986; Komsomolskaya Pravda, February 1, 1987; Literaturnaya Gazeta, February 4, 1987; Leningrad Pravda, January 23, 1987).

Even children of two full-time working parents are hungry latchkey children; often their only daily meal is a free school lunch; and after school they spend hours in the basements of housing projects, or even in manholes, sheltering from the cold, according to Literaturnaya Gazeta (February 4, 1987) and Leningrad Pravda, (January 23, 1987). This Leningrad Pravda story quotes a school principal: "The end of twentieth century, see, and here are children, many children, believe me, and they are hungry, unwashed, unclothed.' "In the morning,' says the Literaturnaya Gazeta story, "children wash themselves with tears of hunger. . . . The little, the most defenseless children from unfortunate families await public charity.' "Children suffer of malnutrition, lack sufficient clothing; many are seriously ill' (Leningrad Pravda, December 27, 1984). The Soviets explain much of the children's suffering as being a result of drinking parents and promiscuous single mothers. But alcoholism itself is often a symptom of poverty and lack of opportunities. The heavy drinking in the Soviet Union simply means that the satisfactions and opportunities available to the Soviet working classes today are comparable to those available to the heavy-drinking English working classes at the time of the Poor Laws. The magazine Ogonek (July 1986) questioned whether "destitution is a perennial feature of our life,' and Leningrad Pravda (February 1, 1987) described the USSR as the land where "pigs live better than people.'