Shadow finance of district and city party apparatus in the Bashkir ASSR during the Khrushchev thaw

The article reveals the schemes of illicit enrichment within BASSR party nomenclature at the time of Khrushchev Thaw on the basis of the first time introduced into scientific discourse archival material. The research reveals the paradoxical phenomenon of the CPSU, represented by its local apparatchiks, becoming an agent of capitalist philistine-consumerist sentiments at the onset of Khrushchev’s “liberalization”. The post-Stalinist party nomenclature gradually shifted away from domestic austerity in favour of commodity-consumptive individualism. This tendency was clearly manifested in the formation and consolidation of a hidden consumerism among members of the apparatus, which was not officially acknowledged in the first country of socialism. Materialism, interpreted during the Khrushchev Thaw as one of the vices of the capitalist world, tacitly became the new cultural and domestic rule of life for the party members of the Khrushchev era, who were affected by the material-consumer philistinism publicly condemned by Soviet propaganda through various party platforms.