Петренко Максим Степанович

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

The socialist society in the USSR was initially built on the ideological conviction of its architects in the possibility and necessity of creating a World Soviet Republic. The article is devoted to the analysis of the conceptual principles of the socialist global project, as well as the problem of the relationship between the concepts of their international and transnational embodiment in the communist ideas of the Bolsheviks. The task is to rethink socialist society, to see it as transnational rather than international. The justification for using the concept of “transnationalism” is substantiated by the organic connection of the projected socialist society with the capitalist world of transnational corporations and the general global orientation of communism. It is shown that the Communist International was built on transnational principles and that the Bolsheviks' recognition of the national equality of peoples was only a way to achieve the goal of a world without national borders. The problem of limiting the transnational socialist project to the framework of the national state is considered. The contradictions between the national interests facing the USSR in the international arena and those of the international workers' and communist movement, defended by the same state, were bound to lead to the collapse of the transnational project. Particular attention is paid to the problem of the Soviet people and Soviet identity. It is argued that the Soviet people managed to form certain supranational features, partially bringing transnational principles to life. However, it was the Russian people, with their readiness for self-denial, who played the decisive role. Although the transnationality of the Soviet people had ground and swallowed up the Russian national identity, it was built and developed primarily on a Russian basis