Being unemployed was a crime punished by jail in the USSR. If you were, for example, a mother who wanted to stay home with your kids, that was not legal.
This was a crime easy to avoid because unless people did something extremely dissident (for example, applied to emigrate to Israel), nobody got fired.
People with higher education had to “pay” for their diplomas by way of accepting jobs they didn’t choose somewhere far away geographically. That’s how my parents met, by the way. They were both working in these assigned jobs away from their native towns. That’s how N’s parents met, too.
The Soviet system provided jobs for everybody and paid the same pittance for them. My father was a scientist with a PhD, my mother a school teacher, my grandma a lawyer, and my grandpa a pediatrician. And we never had enough to eat. The first time in my life I had my own clothes (not hand-me-downs) was in 1990. My cousin, whose mother was a math teacher and father a dentist, had to wear not only used clothes but used underwear, which caused him great shame since his hand-me-downs were from girls.
People in white-collar jobs were legendary for doing absolutely nothing whatsoever at work all day. I remember my parents’ acquaintance laughing that she was ready to retire from the place where she’d worked all her life and had no idea what its actual name was or what it was supposed to be doing. I’m sure she was exaggerating but not by much. People would come to these jobs, make tea, swap recipes, tell jokes, lounge around, read forbidden literature, knit, exercise, give each other makeovers. I’d love it when my father would take me to his job because it was like one large daycare for adults.
Obviously, people did other things, too, but I was too little to understand that. When people have no life purpose beyond buying things, nothing to occupy them, and no religion to constrain them, they tend to go really wild. My mother who had been brought up in a strict environment of a little village was perennially scandalized by the things her fellow teachers did behind the training equipment in the gym once school was out.
The idea of strict monogamy in marriage was not something I heard about until much later. My mother’s female friends ran absolutely wild, and it was all work-related because there was nowhere else to be. The stories I heard as they gossipped were very educational.
I never heard of anybody getting fired because, as I said, that was the purview of Jews trying to emigrate and we didn’t know any.
Clarissa's Blog 
“People with higher education had to “pay” for their diplomas by way of accepting jobs they didn’t choose somewhere far away geographically. That’s how my parents met, by the way. They were both working in these assigned jobs away from their native towns. That’s how N’s parents met, too.”
This actually sounds really good. So many academics are so out of touch, this would go a long way with grounding them in the real world.
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Are you out of your mind? I’m not from Soviet Union, but lived under the same system. It was BAD. Assigning jobs randomly hundreds of miles from where people grew up and forcing them to take them or else is not something to aspire to.
it is also unclear how this is going to punish academics, since the jobs were assigned to people who just graduated with their degrees. Once they went to their assigned job, many stayed there until they retired (my mother worked for the same company she was assigned to after graduation all her life, for example). It is not like there was some random job redistribution for everyone every five years or something. System was not moving people who were already established in their careers.
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There was a huge potential for corruption. People didn’t want to be pried away from their families and friends, so they tried to bribe or sleep their way into good appointments.
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Corruption and apathy. If you are guaranteed to have a job no matter what, what is the point of excelling at it, especially if it is something and somewhere you would not have picked for yourself? There is a reason for “they pretend to pay us and we pretend to work” cliche. My husband often remarked about some of my family that there was no effort to “get better” through their work. Definitely a leftover of the system…
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Well, anybody that ever ran a crew would know what would happen if everybody was essentially paid the same. Without any reward for increased production; nothing would improve, nobody would take responsibility, food and materiel levels would decline, families would break apart. I always wondered about the male alcoholics Clarissa talked about there, well that is exactly how one would create it.
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That’s exactly true. This is a system that rewards the greyest of mediocrities and punished talent and motivation. It’s a terrible thing. This is death to the human spirit, to whatever is best about human beings.
The USSR was terrible. A monstrosity of extraction proportions.
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“Soviet system provided jobs for everybody and paid the same pittance”
Very different system in Poland…. it mostly sucked real bad but not as bad as the CCCP. Some jobs were assigned others not and most people got jobs through connections (theirs or more likely their parents).
People treated office jobs (and some others) as headquarters for running side hustles without which there might not be enough food or clothes or….
There would be some work but not an impressive amount. There was a system where outsiders could be brought in for short periods to catch up work that should have been done by regular staff (and of course much regular staff had side hustles of catching up work in other places).
There were differential wages but they didn’t always make sense. Janitors were paid more than professors or doctors (partly because they had more opportunities for side hustles). Another weirdness… there was a principle that every workplace be run for the convenience of workers so stores were mostly only open when people were at work and closed when they got off work. Most solved this by spending a good portion of time outside the office (not like they could get fired….).
Money didn’t work as it did in the west (except for US dollars a parallel currency and to a lesser extent some other European currencies), you could have lots of money but be deprived of lots of things and hardly have any money and have them… the independent variables were connections and trading networks. I heard a story of a guy who happened across a shoe store just as a new shipment arrived… he bought as many pairs as possible and lived off that for over a year trading shoes for other things.
It was also pathetically easy to get sick leave… bring a bottle of liquor to your doctor and get your L4 (as they were called). In some cases being sick meant you would be paid more than if your healthy and on the job….
Oh… also, when a person was not at work there was no idea that somebody else should be able to to do their job. I knew of a case of a person (in charge of the xerox) took a six month leave and the xerox just sat unused the entire time.
It took a long time for these habits to slowly settle out of the workplace (still not completely gone… let’s say around 85% gone).
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Money did work in weird ways. A pair of boots cost twice my father’s monthly salary before taxes. And yes, there were taxes, and they were very high. Plus, you had to pay obligatory union dues, and even having a union where the state was the only employer was a joke. Plus, people were forced to subscribe to newspapers and magazines. Everybody has to purchase subscriptions. Plus, people has to donate to all sorts of international causes. Most of the food and all of the clothing had to be bought on the black market, and imagine what that took with these tiny salaries and the obligations already cutting down the salaries.
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“forced to subscribe to newspapers and magazines”
I hadn’t heard of that one… but it was common practice for movie theaters to require every person to buy several seats…
There were three markets (at least) in Poland.
Official state market – mostly cheap and affordable but never enough supply to come close to meeting demand
Black market – enough of most things but too expensive for most people
Private markets – most farms were not collectivized and farmers sold their goods directly in outdoor markets (pricey but cheaper than black market) there were also ‘prywaciarze’ (privateers?) who ran their own small stores (mostly things like clothes). They were hated by the government but tolerated and without them things would have been even more grim.
There was also secondary state markets…. Pewex (foreign currency stores). Unlike other countries in the region locals could and did shop there. The government mostly encouraged contacts between the diaspora and money sent to the country helped people get things that otherwise they wouldn’t have.
Poland also invented(?) “internal export” where Polish products that were hit or miss on the open market could always be found in Pewex…. for foreign currency. If you paid in one currency you might get change in another….
There were also ‘stores with yellow curtains’ which were for the well-connected only and usually much better stocked than regular stores.
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The movie seat thing is new to me.
This is fascinating stuff. We had this huge farmer’s market in Kharkiv which was called “Kolkhoz Market”. This was funny because it was the exact opposite. The market had excellent fruit, vegetables and meat, and they were good precisely because they didn’t come from any kolkhoz but from private growers. But it was mega expensive. We could buy apples there maybe once a month, and my mother would give me the stink eye whenever I tried to take one and eat it. They were supposed to be hoarded and stretched out for as long as possible before they rotted.
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