8 - The Soviet Social

Summary

This chapter considers the Soviet conception and implementation of a highly distinctive scheme of social rights from its foundation in the 1920s through the 1960s to the 1980s. The state which ostensibly took those rights to their highest degree of realisation in the twentieth century presents a particularly instructive history, but one that destabilises and confounds received categories and trajectories. As heirs to the emancipatory ambitions of eighteenth-century Jacobins and nineteenth-century labour movements, the Bolsheviks pursued a highly distinctive mode of conceptualising and implementing social and economic protection. Fraught and contradictory, it encompassed sweeping labour protection and ruthless labour repression. Its unmatched scope and depth of social provision was marred by problematic enforcement, backstopping and justiciability, the state conceiving itself as having transcended both the market and social classes. The Soviet Constitution eschewed ‘class-abatement’ (which T. H. Marshall espoused) as the objective of social welfare, while also rejecting the notion that social rights should be actionable (contra the Weimar jurists’ ‘social rule of law’).