People’s Control and the Morality Quest of the Late Soviet Economy

Abstract “People’s Control” was a centrally controlled institution of economic and social regulation widespread in state socialist countries and, particularly, in the Soviet Union between 1965 and 1991. The ideology underpinning the institution, however, insisted on its vernacular nature and framed its actions in terms of a democratic approach to economic problems. The offices of people’s control proliferated as part of a system that covered the whole country, empowering controllers with an impressive array of rights codified in high-level legislation. Endorsed by the system as moral and honest citizens, controllers inspected factories, farms, grocery shops, and other production and management units to reveal acts of crime, fraud, and low-quality work. Controllers denoted these phenomena as deviations from “normal” economic behavior and explained them in terms of a purported lack of morality. This article examines the place of morality in the late Soviet Union through the lens of political regulation of socio-economic relationships. People’s control, it argues, exposed a particular notion of morality as a range of norms and obligations for revealing and struggling against what the state deemed improper individual economic behavior. It served as one political attempt to mobilize society and tackle growing problems of the planned economy, which came to be described in terms of deviation. In the end, however, the ambit of people’s control remained largely limited to nominal public criticism.