Anthropological dimension of the late Soviet economy: director, planner, worker in ethnographic studies from the 1950s to the 1980s

The anthropological understanding of the Soviet economy began during its existence, drawing from various sciences, including ethnography. The relationship between Soviet ethnography and economic anthropology remains a topic of debate, as there was no consensus on this issue within Soviet science itself. Ethnographic science, for ideological and methodological reasons, did not associate itself with Western anthropology. There was a conscious distancing of ethnography from academic economics, which made it difficult to form economic anthropology in the modern sense. At the same time, from the 1950s to the 1980s, the ethnographers succeeded in uncovering a number of important issues, for example the multi-structural nature of the Soviet economy and the functioning of archaic production practices and relations within the planned economy. Much attention was paid to the consumer behavior of citizens in different parts of the country and the changes in everyday life. Collective values, intended to be strengthened on the path towards communism, were also a focal point. The studies covered the diversity of economic practices, but encountered challenges due to the absence of a language for describing strategies and tactics of economic behavior in Soviet reality. Instead, people used euphemisms, adapted ideologemes, figures of silence relating to certain production and consumption practices that were not entirely legal. The issues of planning, motivation, exchange, perception of economic reality, and informal relations, important for economic anthropology, remained largely unexplored. Moreover, there was a giant bias towards rural residents and archaic practices.