The Soviet workers who were given the old-age pensions in 1939 were college professors. This was still the pre-WW2 mentality where people of intellectual professions were a higher social class. It was unthinkable, for instance, that a woman with higher education should do her own laundry or wash the floors in her living quarters. It was a matter of course that uneducated women would serve her.
And the very last people to get old-age pensions were peasants, i.e. collective farm workers. Farmers were considered the most retrograde class under Soviet doctrine. They were always the last to get any of the rights that other Soviet citizens had. For instance, while everybody else had their own passport in possession since the 1930s, the farm workers still had to beg and bribe to lay hands on their passports well into the 1960s.
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