Рre-war personal pensions for relatives of prominent citizens

Abstract

The article is devoted to the way of awarding a personal pension on the occasion of the loss of a breadwinner to the relatives of people outstanding in the sphere of culture, science and revolutionary movement in the period of 1920-1930. The main sources for analysis include the pension documents provided getting pension that are  kept in the State archive of the Russian Federation as well as the personal cases on the issue of granting pensions being in the process of consideration. Thus the archival documents turned out to have information concerning the pension support of L. Tolstoy’s, F. Dostoevsky’s, N. Chernyshevsky’s, M. Glinka’s, and F. Dzerzhinsky’s relatives and heritors.  The difficulties of the life in the early decennium of Soviet period are described in these documents. Special attention is paid to health problems in the applications, as personal pensions were assigned only to disabled or elderly citizen. The author underlines that the number of relatives of outstanding people was more numerous than the one of ordinary people getting personal pensions. It proved to include not only minor children, brothers, sisters, spouse and parents, but adult grandchildren, nephews and nieces. It should be mentioned that the heritors’ rights for getting pension were not always been proved.    The results of the investigation indicate that awarding personal pension for the loss of a breadwinner has become one of the ways to honor the memory of persons provided outstanding service to the Soviet Republic.

Keywords:

personal pension provision, services to the state, loss of breadwinner, descendants and relatives, application for pension, range of pension recipient, disability, dependency