Join us to hear Kristy Ironside speak on "Between Postwar Fiscal and Social Dilemmas: The Tax on Bachelors, Single Persons and Citizens with Small Families of the USSR, 1941-1961."
The "tax on bachelors, single persons, and small families of the USSR" was decreed in November 1941 in anticipation of the war's devastating demographic impact and in response to the need for funds to pay for the war's enormous cost in both social and economic terms. The bachelor tax, which was levied upon the incomes of citizens who had less than three children with few exceptions until the 1950s, was widely viewed as unfair and problematic even within the Soviet government, yet it persisted until the collapse of the Soviet Union. This talk places the bachelor tax within the context of wartime and postwar contingencies and connects it to the Soviet government's ideological anxiety about direct taxation as a source of revenue as the country recovered from the war's damage and moved toward a state of 'communist prosperity'.
