The Little Deal
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Chasing Goods, Losing Faith
Subject essay: Lewis Siegelbaum and James von Geldern
The decade that Mikhail Gorbachev would later label zastoi ("stagnation") was not known by that name at the time. The term was coined only in the late 1980s, as part of the political case for dismantling the Soviet system. For many citizens the early 1970s felt instead like an era of quiet improvement after decades of upheaval. Grocery stores were better stocked than their parents had known, families moved into private apartments instead of crowded communal flats, and the state no longer demanded the constant displays of ideological fervor of earlier decades. That affection has outlasted the Soviet Union itself. Russians still gather every New Year to watch Eldar Riazanov's The Irony of Fate, and the gentle comedies Riazanov and Georgii Daneliia made in these years remain among the most beloved films the country ever produced, evidence that the era's warmth was real even where its promises were not.
The arrangement that sustained this mood has a different name. The economist James Millar called it the "Little Deal": a tacit understanding through which the Brezhnev regime offered citizens rising incomes, secure employment, expanding private consumption, and a tolerance of the small-scale acquisitive practices that filled the gaps in the planned economy, in exchange for political quiescence. Where Stalin's "Big Deal" had rewarded a rising managerial class with status and privilege, the Little Deal extended a quieter, broader bargain to ordinary people, licensing them to pursue private comfort so long as they made no claims on public life. The pessimism of the era was built into its terms. The deal delivered enough to be felt as a deal, and fell short by enough to be felt as a disappointment.
The Soviet economy functioned as what one scholar called a "dictatorship over needs," concentrating resources at the center and redistributing them by predetermined priorities, with little regard for consumer demand. Yet under this system living standards reached levels the country had never before experienced. The Ninth Five-Year Plan (1971–1975) promised a 42 percent rise in retail sales and the widespread availability of refrigerators, televisions, and washing machines for the new apartments. The promise was largely kept, with television ownership even surpassing its target. When the head of Soviet radio and television warned Leonid Brezhnev that the consumer pledges could not be met indefinitely, the General Secretary wondered aloud whether there might be a limit to people's wants. His chief economic adviser gave the answer that came to define the era: there was none.
Things became easier to obtain; confidence in the system did not. No five-year plan could legislate quality, and the verdict was delivered not in official statistics but in jokes and in the instinctive preference of anyone with the chance for a foreign-made product over its Soviet counterpart. Where the official economy fell short, the underground economy filled the gap, and here the Little Deal showed its real workings. Rather than reform the system, the regime reached an unspoken accommodation with its failures, tolerating the practices that compensated for chronic shortages: the favors exchanged through blat (personal connections), the goods diverted from state enterprises and sold na levo ("on the side"), the repairman who arrived after hours with parts unavailable in any store. It was a bargain that granted citizens room to bend the rules in small ways so long as they did not challenge the system in larger ones. A society that learns to obtain a winter coat through favors and side deals is unlikely to admire the system that made such maneuvers necessary, even as it comes to depend on them.
That bargain reshaped Soviet society in ways the planners never intended. Acquiring scarce goods became both a skill and a marker of status, and apartments filled with fashionable furniture, imported wall units, and hoarded delicacies that testified to the owner's resourcefulness and connections. The press coined a name for the supposed disease, veshchizm ("thing-worship"), warning in women's magazines that an obsession with possessions would erode socialist values, though those warnings often ran beside advertisements celebrating the very comforts they condemned. What officials denounced as moral decline could equally be seen as a form of modernization: citizens were adopting the habits of consumer society, valuing privacy, cultivating personal taste, and defining themselves through their homes and possessions, even without a capitalist marketplace. The state that had once scrutinized everything from furniture to the cut of a coat now, in a marked retreat from Khrushchev's intrusiveness, increasingly left such choices to the individual. This too was part of the deal: the surrender of the private sphere to the citizen was the regime's side of the bargain, and the withdrawal into that sphere was the citizen's.
The disenchantment that grew alongside this comfort had a distinct social base, emerging most clearly among the white-collar professionals whose ranks had swelled from 3.3 to 21.4 million between 1950 and 1974, an educated urban stratum taught by Khrushchev to expect ever-rising prosperity, only to watch each five-year plan deliver less than the last. Their response was rarely open protest. They withdrew instead into the private world the separate apartment had finally made possible, into the anekdoty that punctured every official claim to Soviet superiority, and into an imagined West pieced together from jeans, rock records, and half-understood brand names, alluring precisely because it remained beyond reach. The same films Russians now watch with such fondness register that mood too, their wistful heroes adrift in a world of identical apartments and small disappointments. Most of these people were not dissidents, and that was precisely the problem, for a regime can imprison its dissidents but not a population that has quietly ceased to believe. When Iurii Andropov surveyed the country he was about to inherit, he admitted in 1983 that "we have not yet properly studied the society in which we live and work." Ordinary citizens had studied it closely for years, and had stopped expecting socialism to fulfill its promises.
17 Moments in Soviet History - The Little Deal by Lewis Siegelbaum and James von Geldern is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.