‘Democratization’ also meant a higher standard of living for ordinary citizens—a rather unexpected policy, given Khrushchev’s earlier criticism of Malenkov for ‘consumerism’. There was much social inequity to overcome: because of Stalinist wage differentials, the ‘decile coefficient’ (the official standard for income distribution, measured as the difference between the ninth and first deciles) was 7.2 in 1946—far higher than that in capitalist countries (the comparable figure for Great Britain in the 1960s was 3.6). Resentment against the privileged informed this anonymous letter to the Komsomol in December 1956: ‘Please explain why they babble (if one may so speak) about the well-being of the people, but there is really nothing of the sort; things are getting worse—and worse for us than in any capitalist country’. The letter derided the endless radio propaganda about progress towards communism: ‘You [party élites] of course have communism; we have starvationism, inflationism, and exploitationism of the simple working people’. A letter from eleven workers in Lithuania ridiculed state propaganda ‘that people live badly under the capitalists’ and declared that the common people live worse in the USSR, that ‘this is not socialism, but just a bordello (
Khrushchev took important steps to improve popular well-being. One was a revolution in labour policy: he decriminalized absenteeism and turnover, made drastic reductions in wage differentials, and established a minimum wage. After fixing a ‘poverty line’, the regime reduced the number below this limit from 100 million in 1958 to only 30 million a decade later. As a result, the decile coefficient dropped from the Stalinist 7.2 (1946) to 4.9 (1956) and then to 3.3 (1964). Considerable improvements were made among the lowest-paid segments of society—rural labour: between 1960 and 1965, the average income of kolkhozniki rose from 70 to 80 per cent of the average-paid state employees. Although the kolkhoznik remained a second-class citizen (without pensions, sickness benefits, or even a passport), his material condition had improved significantly.
Khrushchev also increased social services, housing, and educational opportunities. Expenditure on social services increased by only 3 per cent in 1950–5, but rose by 8 per cent in 1956–65. As a result, the housing stock doubled between 1955 and 1964; although built mostly as the notorious ‘Khrushchev barracks’ (with low ceilings, tiny rooms, and shoddy construction), it was a serious response to the housing shortage and rapid urbanization. Notwithstanding the ideological antipathy towards ‘private ownership’, in 1955 the regime launched a programme to construct privately owned flats from personal savings (with a down-payment of 15–30 per cent and a mortgage with 0.5 per cent interest rate). The Khrushchev regime also ‘democratized’ the educational system: dismayed that 80 per cent of all university students were coming from the intelligentsia, in 1958 Khrushchev abolished school and university tuition fees and dramatically restructured secondary schooling to force all children into the labour force for two years to learn a trade.
Although decentralization abetted the special interests of individual nationalities, Khrushchev detested ‘petty-bourgeois nationalism’. That attitude clearly informed school language policy where Moscow took steps to promote Russian language instruction. This policy elicited considerable opposition from minority nationalities; a Belorussian complained in 1956 that his ‘language has now been expelled from all state and Soviet institutions and institutions of higher learning in the republic’. The main objective was not simply closer ties (
Twenty-Second Party Congress (October 1961)
