"Social Parasites: How tramps idle youth, and busy entrepeneurs impeded the Soviet march to communism"
Sheila Fitzpatrick (2006)
About the Soviet ‘anti-parasite’ law of 1957.
The law cited two major forms of parasitism:” people who have jobs only “for the sake of appearances” since they actually live off non-labor income; and people “who carry out no useful work either in the society or in the family but engage in vagrancy and begging and often commit crimes” .
The concept at the heart of the anti-parasite law was : “He who does not work, does not eat.” But “work” had a specific meaning in Soviet discourse of the Khrushchev period : it meant employment in a Soviet institution, either as a wage- and salary-earner in a state institution or as collective farmer or cooperative artisan. (..) Those citizens who did not hold jobs and have a workplace -- even for fully-legitimate reasons, like pensioners, or quasi-legitimate ones, like housewives -- were in practice treated as second-class citizens. Working for oneself outside the state and cooperative structure did not count as work, for it implied a lack of commitment to the common project of building socialism/communism(..)
Artisans and craftsmen (outside cooperatives) were always an object of suspicion : these were difficult categories for Soviet authorities, who tended to regard non-factory production as both outmoded and potentially capitalist.(..)
Men living off wives, mistresses, and parents while making drinking a full-time occupation make frequent appearances in the anti-parasite reports from the localities,(..)
It was very striking, too, just how many kinds of parasites there were when one looked closely, (..): it was as if a “second society” of parasites coexisted with the “first” society of toilers (or, even worse, that every toiler was a potential parasite). The discussions surrounding the anti-parasite law gave a vivid and informative picture of the great variety of stratagems and social niches developed by individual citizens, reminding one of Fred Starr’s observation that the great thing one learned as a foreign student in Russia in the 1960s was that everything that mattered went on not in the formal structures of the society but in the interstices between.
https://journals.openedition.org/monderusse/9607
(the soviet
anti-parasite law has recent;y been reactivated in Belarus
