Shadow incomes of the “underground rich” in the BASSR during the period of Khrushchev’s reforms

The authors of the article, in the context of one of the leading economic regions of the country - the BASSR, examines the manifestations of shadow profit, which began to spread under the conditions of Khrushchev’s de-Stalinization of the socialist state. The approval of the “second economy” during the “Khrushchev thaw” allows us to state that in the mid-1950s mechanisms were laid down that began to influence, if not to determine, the economic processes of the planned socialist economy. In the era of “Khrushchev’s reforms”, alternative economic activity became a fact of life in the BASSR, which could not but cause a negative reaction from the party and Soviet bodies in their desire to “root out” the enrichment of “shadow workers”. The measures taken in the form of party penalties, administrative punishment and criminal prosecution could not compete with the rationalized risk of “hucksters” secretly “profiting”. “Anti-socialist elements” consciously violated the law for the sake of obtaining shadow incomes, which made it possible to live comfortably in conditions of shortage of food, consumer goods and services. Epoch of N. S. Khrushchev laid the foundation for the interweaving of the shadow and planned socialist sectors of the economy, since such a quasi-tandem, until 1991, made it possible to compensate for the consumer uncompetitiveness of the socialist economy, the shortcomings of which were actively used by underground Soviet entrepreneurs for personal gain.