166 Chapter 4
The postwar years reveal the emergence, in work and leisure, of the new
Soviet middle class, the intelligentsia. Whether educated in the Stalinist
1930s or in the postwar years of expanding educational opportunities, this
group combined its expertise and sense of entitlement to plan different kinds
of economic arrangements and to demand them as consumers. The intel-
ligentsia had been quietly consolidating its right to rest in the 1930s in the
shadow of the industrial proletariat, who continued to receive offi cial but
ineffectual priority. After 1945 and especially after 1950, educated citizens
who worked with their minds and not with their hands emerged as the new
leading stratum of Soviet society.