Iarskaia-Smirnova Е. and Romanov P. The Rhetoric and Practice of Modernisation: Soviet Social Policy, 1917―1930s // Dual Mandate / ed. by Gisela Hauss and Dagmar Schulte. Opladen & Farmington Hills: Verlag Barbara Budrich, 2009. P. 150-164 Elena Iarskaia-Smirnova, Pavel Romanov The Rhetoric and Practice of Modernisation: Soviet Social Policy, 1917—1930s Free education, public heath care and social benefits that had been a fact of life for decades in the Soviet Union have now become an object of deep nostalgia for many people, especially the elderly. Social services 1 enveloped Soviet society, controlling the activity and thoughts of people for more than 70 years. These services were distributed not by a single occupational group such as social workers, but by different institutions and organisations in the domains of four ministries— Education, Health Care, Social Provision and Internal Affairs. Social care functions were also taken over by Communist Party organisations, Comsomol (Youth Communist Organisation) and trade unions. In early Soviet history, non-government organisations, too, played an active role in providing care for children, youth, women, the war-wounded and other vulnerable groups. Civic participation in community work was also high. Caring for those in need, this network of social services and professionals contributed to the development of a safety net for people, but at the same time, it was a means by which state control policies could be implemented. The state and its various agents carried out this double-faced task of care and control at all levels of social life, moving gradually from tough and selective schemes of social security and insurance to the “bright future” of a communist welfare state. The development of Soviet social policy followed the ideological formulae common in many industrial countries during the modernisation period. Our aim in this study was not to identify the shortcomings of the Soviet model but, following the idea of Christina Kiaer and Eric Naiman, to use the forms taken by everyday life and the modern subject in the Soviet Union as a way to call into question our own certainty about how these phenomena work (Kiaer/Naiman 2006: 3) According to Sheila Fitzpatrick, who combined anthropological and historical methods to describe the everyday life of “homo sovieticus”, the USSR was something like school, barracks and charity house rolled into one (Fitzpatrick 1999). Social care and social control practices were carried out by different professional and quasi-professional assistants—educators in youth and children’s cultural centres and clubs, activists in women’s organisations and trade unions, teachers at schools and 1 We use the term “social services” neutrally. In the first six months of socialism the term “social care” (sotsialnoe prizrenie) was used, but as early as April 1918 this was changed to sotsialnoe obespechenie (social provision). The term social work was not in use, as the communists denounced any similarity between their social services and “bourgeois” Western welfare. 1