“Middle-class Values” and Soviet Life in the 1930s

This chapter deals with the new privileged elite of the Stalin period— Vera Dunham middle class and Djilas’s “new class”—and its place in the emerging Soviet value system. It focuses on the problems of accommodating elite privilege and status within a Soviet framework and the process of assimilating middle-class values. In 1938, some local party and Soviet leaders are so incensed by the grotesquely ill-fitting suits delivered to them by the “Sixteenth Party Congress” tailoring artel that they parade them before a meeting of the Bashkir Soviet, provoking general hilarity and public censure of the tailors. The change in Soviet attitudes to wives is part of the broader readjustment of values in the 1930s that Timasheff labeled the “Great Retreat.” If peasant husbands stand in the path of their wives’ progress, the wives are justified in divorcing them, though divorce in higher strata of Soviet society is already frowned upon.