This chapter looks at the construction of a communist community of public debt in the twentieth century. Despite emerging as some of public debt’s most vehement critics in the early years of that century, communist governments made relatively conventional use of public debt to fund economic initiatives, foster bonds within the socialist bloc, and gain political influence. As these regimes’ economies stagnated, they borrowed heavily from capitalist lenders and ran into economic troubles in the 1980s, but they did not repudiate their debt, as the Bolsheviks had in 1918. Instead, they accepted technical solutions to their economic woes, which, in turn, helped to erode their already tenuous popular legitimacy in Eastern Europe.
This article focuses on the Soviet government’s turn to positive incentives to play the state lottery in the late 1950s, after thirty years of coercing citizens to buy state lottery bonds under Stalin. Khrushchev discontinued the Stalinist bonds in April 1957 and, in their wake, introduced “cash-and-goods lotteries” featuring voluntary participation. The Khrushchev government identified a powerful positive incentive to buy tickets in the coveted consumer goods the lotteries offered as prizes. Citizens were no longer asked to sacrifice toward the state lottery, rather, they were encouraged to risk small sums toward potential consumer gain and the improvement of their living standards – a new way of conceptualizing Soviet citizens’ personal financial contributions to the state as the Soviet Union approached communist prosperity.
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