BLAT (FAVORS) AS A FACTOR IN MAKING STATUS GROUPS IN THE USSR IN THE 1970S-1980S

Abstract

The article analyzes informal relations in the USSR, which developed under conditions of scarcity and the resulting restriction of access to a number of goods and services for the majority of the population. A specific form of such informal relations was blat (favors), a social phenomenon that became widespread in Soviet society. Blat is a special form of personal ties, involving assistance in acquiring scarce goods and services, help in finding attractive jobs and solving other problems. Along with the economic side of blat, the article emphasizes the socio-group aspect of this phenomenon. Privatization of public space, personification of socio-economic relations contributed to making semi-elite social groups claiming a special status in the society of universal socialist equality, which burdened a significant part of the population in the last decades of the USSR. The article questions the decisive importance of consumer sentiment in the phenomenon of blat. It also rejects the assumptions about the decisive role of scarcity and human insecurity in developing such informal relations. The scarcity was not the cause, but the catalyst of the social differentiation of the population and emerging specific social groups close in importance to class groups that developed in Soviet society. It seems that the needs of social ranking were a decisive factor in the issue of group formation. In the conditions of blurred social boundaries and amorphous status groups, the importance of markers of prestigious consumption increased, which testified to the possession of social capital, a wide range of opportunities and personal ties that opened access to a number of scarce goods and services. The article concludes that blat became an important factor in the localization of social space at the level of semi-closed small groups, which stimulated the social stratification of Soviet society not so much on the economic as on the status basis