di Sophie Hohmann, 71/3

The history of social security in the Soviet Union between 1917 and 1939 has been poorly studied in the West. This book was written within the context of the deep transformation of the Russian society into a Soviet society, whose ideology led to new institutions and to new complex procedures.
These new organizations had specific meanings depending on the context in which they evolved: the October Revolution, followed by the Civil War, the famines which enveloped whole populations in a cruel individual and collective tragedy, and great poverty.
This new publication is a French translation and a remake of the original Italian-language Un Welfare State senza benessere. Insegnanti, impiegati, operai e contadini nel sistema di previdenza sociale dell'Unione Sovietica (1917- 1939), (2008). It is a rich and original reconstitution of a multidimensional history of social security, its institutional architecture, and its financing, presented through various lenses of its central aspects: legal, institutional, and social. The book is richly documented with archive materials from the Soviet era, with other books and documents, and analyses of Soviet journals and newspapers. It is organized around five chapters, following a chronological order, starting with the origin of social security in Tsarist Russia and ending with the new system put in place in the Soviet Union just before the onset of World War II. It illustrates, particularly through numerous personal documents (request letters and complaints from men and women), how the Soviet state failed for a long time to guarantee the living conditions and the security promised by the October Revolution.
The first chapter reports the beginning of social insurances, following the Bismarkian model, in Tsarist Russia. The second chapter presents tbe reform of insurance schemes at the time of the October Revolution. Chapter 3 details the setup of new funds and the development of retirement benefits and disability pensions in the 1920s. The author analyzes in detail at the micro-level the social benefits in the AMO automobile plant in Moscow. Chapter 4 deals with the planning of social security during the "Greal Curve" period (1929, collectivization, the First Five-Year Plan), the difficulties and the administrative paradoxes in the face of growing popular discontent following the deterioration of living conditions, the promises not fulfilled, and tbe worsening of the social debt. This happened in the context of massive industrialization, when the reforms of social security were devoted to workers only. Chapter 5 presents the dissolution of local insurance schemes, and the transition of social security under the control of workers unions at the beginning of the 1930s. In this chapter, the ZIS automobile plant in Moscow is presented as an example of these transformations at micro-level. The Stalin school is also presented (pp. 261--66); however, for me, this section is not really relevant since it does not discuss the sodal security of the teaching personnel, which would have been its justification in this part.
From a methodological perspective, the author follows a comprehensive approach, combining ethnography and sociology. She combines tbe use of microhistory (social security in plants) and macrohistory (laws and institutions), which makes the exercise very convincing. This original approach enables comprehension at a very fine level of local realities, and above all of the interactions between the various social actors. Likewise, the consequences of social policies could be seen at the level of those who think up and organize these policies, as well as at the level of individuals, their life histories, and their needs. In this respect, the importance of the writing of Soviet history is underlined through tbe description of social protests and of personal requests coming from various social strata of tbe population who wanted an improvement of their living conditions. Daily life and its sociocultural and economic aspects is always important in the field of Sovietology, and this approach is at the heart of this work. The analysis of the available materials both at micro- and macro- level enables one to grasp the major discrepancies between the official discourse and the concerns of the population with respect to the reality of daily life and of the administration's unfulfilled promises. This shows the paradoxes and the lack of coherence of tbe bureaucratic Soviet establishment, which was caught in a theoretical mindset bearing little relation to the reality endured by Soviet citizens. Finally, the author shows that the emergence of Stalinian totalitarism solidified the discriminatory and non-egalitarian character of the Soviet social security system.;