Frontmatter -- Contents -- Note on Currency and on Institutions -- Note on Translation and Transliteration -- Glossary of Key Terms -- Timeline of Important Events -- Introduction: The Ruble and Soviet Prosperity -- 1 Our Low-Price Guarantee -- 2 Income Redistribution without "Leveling" -- 3 Socialist Security -- 4 All Your Wages in Hand -- 5 Real Returns -- Conclusion: Prosperity Postponed -- Appendixes -- Notes -- Bibliography -- Acknowledgments -- Index
Zugriffsoptionen:
Die folgenden Links führen aus den jeweiligen lokalen Bibliotheken zum Volltext:
This article examines how price reductions became a late Stalinist economic doctrine. When rationing was abolished in 1935, Stalin linked reducing retail prices to economic and revolutionary progress. This progress was derailed by the war, which saw the return of rationing and its accompanying price distortions, as well as the explosion of private trade at exorbitant market prices. Aft er an unsuccessful attempt to compete with the market through state commercial trade at high prices, the government repeatedly reduced prices from 1944 onward in an eff ort to clear stockpiles of too-expensive items, regulate the currency supply, shift the population's spending from food to consumer goods, bring down market prices, and attack the private sector. Price reductions were presented as an expression of Stalin's care for workers' economic interests during the process of recovery and as a blow at those who had unfairly profi ted during the war. By the early 1950s, annual price reductions had become an explicit economic doctrine and a new Stalinist ritual and celebration, despite the persistence of serious shortages, especially of food, and growing evidence of the policy's shortcomings.
This article focuses on the Soviet government's turn to positive incentives to play the state lottery in the late 1950s, after thirty years of coercing citizens to buy state lottery bonds under Stalin. Khrushchev discontinued the Stalinist bonds in April 1957 and, in their wake, introduced "cash-and-goods lotteries" featuring voluntary participation. The Khrushchev government identified a powerful positive incentive to buy tickets in the coveted consumer goods the lotteries offered as prizes. Citizens were no longer asked to sacrifice toward the state lottery, rather, they were encouraged to risk small sums toward potential consumer gain and the improvement of their living standards – a new way of conceptualizing Soviet citizens' personal financial contributions to the state as the Soviet Union approached communist prosperity.
