Appendix D. Household budget data and consumption trends

This appendix, more than the others, is the primary reason for my decision to put some additional information on line. In researching A Social History of Soviet Trade, I compiled a number of tables and charts concerning consumption trends, based on the household budget surveys of the Soviet statistical agency (TsSU/TsUNKhU). Budget surveys are, in my view, the most important new quantitative source for the study of consumption since the first Western analyses of the Soviet standard of living were published in the 1950s and 1960s. They are familiar enough, since we have publications on budget surveys from the 1920s and the 1960s, but results were not published in the intervening decades. It turns out that the Statistical Agency not only continued to track citizens’ incomes and expenditures throughout the Stalin period, but greatly expanded and systematized its collection of consumption data over the years. These records are now publicly available in the TsSU archives, RGAE f. 1562; so too are surveys performed by the All-Union Central Council of Trade Unions (VTsSPS), though these were less systematic. In various ways, they illustrate the crisis/recovery pattern that I documented in my book, and also offer new data for economic historians to digest.

First, a caveat. As students of budget studies have concluded vis-à-vis other countries, they have their flaws. I would highlight two especially important sources of error: the Soviet government’s relatively undifferentiated approach to social class (especially after 1930) and problems connected to self-reporting. With regard to the latter, budget surveys asked people to record their incomes and outlays after the fact, and where the raw data for particular households has been preserved, the discrepancies between extremely precise figures for some budgetary items and suspiciously round figures for others are striking. With regard to the former, the Soviet statistical agency neglected to study several occupational groups, most of which numbered among the poor: kustar’ artisans, house servants, cab drivers, chimney sweeps, and other independently employed people, as well as members of manufacturing cooperatives and the unemployed. Ignoring these “marginal” groups (who added up to a significant percentage of the urban population), statisticians focussed overwhelmingly on the accepted social classes: workers, peasants, engineers and managers (ITR) and white-collar employees (sluzhashchie).

These flaws notwithstanding, I have concluded that since the sources of error did not change much from the time the surveys were initiated to the end of the Stalin period, household budget research can provide a reasonably accurate portrait of consumption trends on the part of the above-mentioned core urban occupational groups. In any event, I consider them more reliable than estimates based on purely theoretical models, which have hitherto been the norm in discussions of Soviet consumption.

The major subjects of these tables and graphs are long-term shifts in household expenditures; long-term shifts in consumption; the relationship between consumption and class; the changing role of the private sector (primarily the market) in both expenditures and consumption; and the changing role of occasional trade in working-class household incomes.

1. Workers’ annual per capita food consumption, 1919-1952

2. Peasants’ annual per capita food consumption, 1915-1950

3. Workers’ annual per capita cloth, clothing, and shoe consumption, 1924-1952

4. Cloth consumption by class, 1923-1952

5. Workers’ lodgings, 1923-1938

6. Working-class expenditures, 1922-1952

7. Private/market trade in working-class food expenditures vs. its role in retail sales, 1923-1956

8. Peasant purchases of manufactured goods in shops vs. from citizens, 1941-1951

9. Trade as a percentage of working-class household incomes, 1912-1949