Constructing the average worker’s family budget after Stalin

Abstract

The article looks at published “average” family budget studies in the Khrushchev era following the February 1956 Twentieth Party Congress and the Soviet government’s pledge to more fully meet the population’s material needs. Despite being portrayed as objective reflections of reality, harnessing the expert authority of statisticians and the power of numbers, as this article shows, these studies in fact featured highly idealized constructions of family composition and economic practices, as well as gendered assumptions about men’s and women’s contributions to the normative household budget. At the same time, published “average” family budget studies played an important pedagogical role during this time, helping to explain the benefits of shifts away from Stalin-era policies, such as encouraging Stakhanovite overproduction and bestowing routine retail price cuts on the population, and toward more abstract but, as it was argued, more tangibly beneficial policies like workers’ “invisible earnings” from the free or highly subsidized benefits of the Soviet welfare state.