"I Beg You Not to Reject My Plea": The Late Stalinist Welfare State and the Politics of One-Time Monetary Aid, 1946–1953

This article examines the Reception of the Chairman of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet's practice of distributing small sums of money to needy in-person petitioners who requested "material assistance" after the Second World War and during the tenure of Nikolai Shvernik (1946–1953). The Reception's one-time monetary aid illustrates the late Stalinist welfare state's paternalistic and exclusionary tendencies. Though this aid was portrayed as an example of state "care," the Reception heavily scrutinized requests for money, on the lookout for fraudsters who lied about the reasons why they needed it and who falsely presented themselves as members of state-recognized needy social groups, including war veterans, single mothers, and relatives of the war dead. After mid-May of 1947, the Reception implemented a "hard line" to weed out these "charlatans" and help the "truly needy"; thereafter, money was to be distributed only in the most urgent and exceptional cases. In reality, as this article shows, almost half of its one-time monetary aid went to disabled war veterans and single mothers, petitioners whose circumstances were far from exceptional and who were often poor candidates for accomplishing the state's postwar imperative to settle down and return to "socially useful labor." The Reception sometimes even gave money to so-called charlatans out of pity, a tacit acknowledgement of the precarious circumstances petitioners usually lived in and of the great difficulties involved in accomplishing the rapid shift to normalcy that was demanded of Soviet citizens.