The Consumer in the Ninth Five Year Plan

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Subject essay: Lewis Siegelbaum

The Soviet economy functioned essentially as a “dictatorship over needs.” The center appropriated resources and redistributed them according to priorities set in ministries, planning offices, and party congresses, only dimly registering consumer tastes and preferences, if they registered them at all. In advanced capitalist societies, goods chased people. In the Soviet Union, people chased goods.

That chase was one of the defining rituals of late socialism. It sent goods-starved rural residents on foraging trips to larger cities. It produced long lines that seemed to spring up from nowhere on the basis of a whispered rumor that a “deficit” item had appeared. It drew friends, relatives, and workmates into networks of blat, the exchange of favors, information, and access. It encouraged employees to siphon off goods from the state for sale na levo, “on the side.” It also supported a wide range of semi-legal and illegal operations, from small favors at the counter to organized black-market schemes, all of which consumed time, ingenuity, and risk.

The Ninth Five-Year Plan (1971–75) illustrated the Brezhnev administration’s attempt to manage the contradiction between an increasingly urbanized, educated, and culturally sophisticated society and the centralized determination of need. As outlined by Aleksei Kosygin in his report on the directives of the Twenty-Fourth Party Congress, sales of goods to the population were to rise by 42 percent. Ownership of refrigerators was to increase from 32 per 100 families to 64, televisions from 51 to 72, and washing machines from 52 to 72. These were not trivial promises. Refrigerators changed the rhythm of provisioning. Televisions carried Soviet citizens into a common cultural world of evening broadcasts, variety shows, hockey matches, and imported films. Washing machines promised relief from one of the most time-consuming forms of household labor, especially for women.

The plan therefore spoke to genuine aspirations. By the early 1970s, the Soviet consumer no longer asked only for bread, boots, and coal. Urban families wanted reliable appliances, attractive clothing, furniture that did not look temporary, children’s goods, books, records, cosmetics, spare parts, vacation travel, and decent repair service. They wanted not merely more, but better. The problem was that Soviet industry remained much better at producing tons, meters, and units than at satisfying taste. A factory could fulfill the plan and still produce coats no one wanted to wear, shoes that hurt, refrigerators that broke, or furniture available only after months of waiting.

Official sources indicate that during the Ninth Five-Year Plan total sales of goods rose by an annual average of 2.8 percent, compared to 5.4 percent during the previous five-year plan period. By 1975, television ownership exceeded what the plan had envisioned, while refrigerator and washing-machine ownership fell somewhat short. But the numbers measured ownership more easily than satisfaction. Quality, reliability, choice, repair, delivery, and simple courtesy in service were harder to quantify. Soviet jokes from the 1970s made up the unofficial statistical record. So did the prestige of imported goods: East German furniture, Czech shoes, Finnish boots, Japanese tape recorders, American jeans, Polish cosmetics, and almost anything that arrived in a package with foreign lettering.

Culture registered this world with unusual sharpness. Comedy, satire, and everyday anecdote turned the consumer economy into a theater of absurdity. A queue could be a place of rumor, discipline, resentment, and community all at once. The sales clerk, the warehouse manager, the repairman, the taxi driver, and the friend “who could get things” became recognizable social types. The language of shortage entered ordinary speech: deficit, dostat’, blat, na levo. To “buy” something was often less important than to “get” it. What one possessed could reveal not only income, but access.

The gap between rising expectations and state provision, already visible in the experimental reforms of the 1960s, widened in the 1970s. The Brezhnev leadership did not ignore the consumer. On the contrary, it made consumer welfare one of the foundations of political stability. But each promise sharpened the public’s sense of what the system could not reliably deliver. The result was not open revolt, but a quieter corrosion: cynicism about “mature socialism,” admiration for foreign goods, dependence on personal connections, and an expanding moral gray zone between legality and necessity.

By the end of the Ninth Five-Year Plan, the Soviet consumer economy had become both more prosperous and more compromised. More families owned televisions, refrigerators, and washing machines than ever before. More citizens also knew that the official store was only one part of the system of distribution. Behind the plan stood the queue; behind the queue, blat; behind blat, the side deal. What looked in 1973 like the problem of satisfying the Soviet consumer was already pointing toward something larger: the underground economy that would become one of the defining features of late socialism.

17 Moments in Soviet History - The Consumer in the Ninth Five Year Plan, by Lewis Siegelbaum is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.