5 explicit anti-social choice by the poor ("the poor do not want to work" hence "they do not want to contribute to the building of the new society" hence “they are anti-social elements, parasites").° Communist view was not unreasonable: if perfect society is here, and its virtues are self-evident, only the ill-disposed and wicked people can refuse to participate in such an endeavor. Communist authorities therefore evinced little sympathy for some poor; they encouraged the stigma in which other citizens anyway tended to hold them. And, to make the plight of the poor worse, Communist authorities discouraged non-government organizations, in particular the Church, to help them, because they distrusted all non-governmental initiatives and viewed them as a politically motivated ploys to acquire influence by helping the disenfranchised. The negative attitude toward the poor had several practical consequences. Social assistance systems were rather rudimentary:’° practices differed from one social assistance office to the next; little effort was made to improve income-testing, on which, at least in theory, some of the benefits depended; social workers were few in numbers, demoralized and badly paid. The authorities thus lacked experience in identifying the needy and in delivering social aid. The "social minimum" lines were defined mostly by the "armchair" economists and nutritionists and were unrelated to any social policy.'' They were "socially desirable" levels of consumption —kind of "how people should be living under Communism"— and were targets rather than any realistic, much less guaranteed, minimums. In conclusion, anti-poverty policy was haphazard and not at all integrated into the overall economic and social policy: it was viewed as a "foreign body" in an otherwise perfect system.’ Finally, in a personal observation, rereading some of the papers and books published before the end of Communism, and quite obviously written by Party hacks, I was struck by two things: first, self-congratulory description of the size of social spending—clearly viewed as one Carr (1966, p.114) quotes Lenin's article from January 1918 where he writes that "he that does not work, neither shall he eat" as "the practical credo of socialism". Workers who “slack at their work" were included among the categories of misdemeanants "who deserved to be put in prison".

‘Although this was not true for all the countries: former Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia, as well as Hungary had relatively well-developed systems. For an excellent review of poverty measurement and social assistance policies before the transition see Sipos (1992) and Sipos (1994).

“Although there too, like in some other areas (macroeconomics and growth), the Soviet Union was among the pioneers. The first workers’ social minima were calculated in 1921 in the then Soviet Russia (see Sipos, 1992a); after the Second World War, the first Soviet annual household budget survey dates from 1951 and has continued uninterrupted since. By contrast, the first regular annual US household survey was done in 1979. The Soviet data were of the panel type. Because the survey results were secret, they were never disseminated and very little work was done on the data. Most of the data are still existent (although in non-electronic form) and probably represent a golden mine for some future student of economic history of the Soviet Union.

"24 Hungarian commentator noted in the midst of the perestroika in 1988: "Institutional assistance for the poor has still not been put on the public agenda in the Soviet Union. After all, the fact that a substantial portion of the citizens live under seriously deprived conditions remains to this day a taboo topic. In a country where until very recently it had not been acknowledged that there were drug addicts and homosexuals, and where it was forbidden to entertain the possibility that anybody could be unhappy, it is hardly surprising that official policy makers were reluctant to take note of poverty" (quoted from Hollander, 1991, p. 15).