How did the very basics of Soviet Communism work at all?

Some professions take more labor and are harder, or require more talent, than others. Does this mean doctors were actually paid the same as bakers in Communist Russia?

For that matter, how did money work? Assuming you were a valued citizen in good standing, were you paid a monthly amount for your labors, or were you given a set of ration cards to obtain what you needed, or what?

Old photographs of the Soviet era showed that they did have tv sets, small homes or apartments, etc. How did all that actually work? What if your tv broke? Could you get it repaired? (aka did the State give you a ration card good for “1 working tv”, or did they give you a certain amount of rubles every month)

How did the Soviets treat petty disobedience? So, ok, you wouldn’t want to speak out against the State. But what about underage drinking, smoking behind the high school, graffiti, sneaking in somewhere, and other petty crimes? Were they treated seriously or was it a “comrades be comrades” kind of thing?

Was any kind of small scale entrepreneurial activity allowed? Could you fix your neighbor’s stuff or sell a few apples picked from the woods or otherwise do something to supplement your state income?

All the books I’ve ever read on it as a Westerner are an unceasing series of accounts of how bad it was. However, objectively speaking, Soviet era Russia had superior technology, military, and various bits of civilization to all of South America, all of Africa, Mexico, everywhere in mainland asia, about half of even Western Europe.

If Communism didn’t work at all, they would not have been in the top 10-20% or so of nations.

So I wonder how it worked at all. If you believe books like “A day in the life of ivan denisovich”, the Soviets couldn’t even build a brick wall without 3 layers of bureaucracy. So why did they have more brick walls, so to speak, than, say, any nation in Africa or South America? The system must have worked somehow.

I’ll give it a start.

No. There were differentiated salaries depending on the job you had. The problem was that there were limits as to how useful money was. See next question.

You were paid a monthly salary in the form of the Soviet currency, the rouble. You could use these roubles to buy stuff, mostly from state-run shops, but at a smaller scale there was also private enterprise; Soviet policy as to allowing or banning private entrepreneurial initative varied greatly over the 70 years of existence of the system. The problem was that there were limits as to what you could actually buy with your money. In the hard times, e.g. during WWII and the post-war period, there was, in fact, rationing where you needed ration cards on top of roubles to buy rationed items such as food or clothing. Later on, this formal rationing was abolished. Nonetheless, many items, especiallyproducts which were considered luxury in the Soviet system (but not necessarily luxury here - it applied to pretty much anything that had to be either imported, or consumer products which required an extensive industry to make, such as cars) were hard to get. There would be long waiting lists for cars (up to ten years waiting to get one, for instance), and whenever a grocery shop got a delivery of scarce fruit there would be long queues and it would be sold out soon. Basic necessities were readily available and were cheap, but most of what went beyond that was hard to get. As a result, to a Soviet citizen the amount of roubles they made each month was not the primary indicator of actual wealth, since not everything could be readily bought for roubles. Many citizens piled up considerable rouble savings simply because there were limited ways available to spend them sensibly.

You could have it repaired by a state-run place, or you could hire an electrician on the black market who would repair it on their own behalf, outside the official system. In many cases, the spare parts required for this were stolen from the official economy, further exacerbating the scarcity there.

That’s because the system chose to spend a massive percentage of GDP on military, space exploration, or similarly prestigious projects. In relative terms (relative to GDP, that is), this was far more than the West spent on similar purposes. The result was that the resources pent on these endeavours were lacking as far as private consumption was concerned. Throughout the Soviet era, the big debate in economic policy was whether more should be spent on making consumer products to increase the standard of living of the general population, or whether efforts should be focussed on military, research etc. From the 1970s onwards, the standard of living of the average Soviet citizen gradually increased, but it was still far away from the material standards of living enjoyed in the West.

Yes. But wasn’t it still better than the material standards of Mexico? Or anywhere in South America or Africa? It wasn’t all prestige projects : they built modern infrastructure, had a large number of educated and skilled workers, and so forth.

It’s hard to find figures on which an objective comparison could be based, since the economy wordked so fundamentally differently. For instance, among capitalist economies, you could use exchange rates to compare GDPs or average income across countries. This does not work in the case of the Soviet Union (or other Eastern Bloc countries), because the role of currency was fundamentally different. There were, in fact, offical dollar-rouble exchange rates published by the Soviet government, but this does not mean it was possible to actually exchange roubles for dollars, or the other way round, at this rate; the official rates were far away from the economic reality, as is evidenced by the fact that black market rates for tourists who travelled to the Soviet Union were considerably different from the official rates.

If you look at actual material standards of living enjoyed by the average citizen, I figure that the Soviet Union did, in fact, do better than many developing countries, at least from the 1960s onwards, when the Soviet economy was growing and the low caused by WWII and Stalin’s repression was overcome. It would, however, be an illusion to believe that the Soviet economy was egalitarian. Influential people from the party or the official bureaucracy had easier access to luxury goods or better apartments than the average John Doe. In addition, in spite of its official federalist nature, the Soviet government was highly centralistic, and everything that mattered took place in Moscow. As a result, the average citizen in Moscow had a higher standard of living than the average citizen in other towns, because infrastructure budgets heavily favoured Moscow. There was an extensive system of domestic passports and permit requirements for moving within the country to prevent mass migration from the rural areas to the major cities as a result.

A number of things:

First, as has been mentioned earlier, a doctor would get paid more than a bricklayer, but even more importantly he would have better connections; in practice, a professional could get things a laborer either couldn’t or would have to wait months or years for.

Secondly, whatever its other failings, the Soviet Union took education seriously and produced scientists and engineers equal to any in the world.

Third, the Soviet Union was a vast continental nation that was nearly self-sufficient in material resources. The extraction and use of those resources was often spectacularly inefficient, but they had them.

And lastly, because Lenin and Stalin were determined to industrialize the Soviet Union, and because those industries didn’t have to make economic sense in terms of either attracting investment or turning a profit, a large industrial infrastructure could be built on a command economy basis. It worked, after its own fashion, but the Soviet economy was essentially kept going on a ventilator for its entire existence.

I swear there was a Straight Dope column about special department stores in the Soviet Union that catered to the party bigwigs, but my google-fu has deserted me. Anyone?

Another factor which contributed to this was the official policy stance that there should not be unemployment in a communist society. As a result, state-run enterprises were often ordered to hire staff which was not really needed from an entrepreneurial point of view. Such staff members would often be idle for most of their “work” time, and the efficiency of the companies suffered consequently, but this was put up with since the purpose of a state-run company in the Soviet system was not be efficient, but to implement orders which came from higher up the ladder.

There was a vast black market for this kind of services. In many cases, people who were officially employed by a state-run company would do the same kind of work in their private time on an informal basis. This black market would often run on a barter basis, where goods and services were exchanged for other goods and services rather than money, simply because money (roubles, that is) was of limited use. Foreign convertible currency, such as dollars or deutschmarks, could buy you pretty much anything on the black market, and in some cases socialist governments tried to capitalise on this by setting up stores where goods could be bought for foreign currency which were not available for domestic currency (the Intershops and Forum system in East Germany was a particularly sophisticated example for such state-run systems trying to skim the foreign currency holdings of the population; even today, Cuba works on this basis, where the convertible peso can buy you anything that the domestic peso won’t buy). Officially, such black market transactions were illegal, but to some extent they were tolerated by the authorities because the population relied on them for many goods and services which they would otherwise not have access to.

A number of illustrative anecdotes I recall from reading especially news correspondents at the time:

Any time it rained, anyone who owned a car would pull over and put on their windshield wipers, kept in the glovebox. Replacements were hard to find, so if you left them on while parked, they would be stolen, and you could not easily buy replacements. (Plus, ever seen a Lada? They imported those to Canada for a while, they were built in a factory and from a design provided by Fiat.) There was a limited supply, and a worker with no connections paid cash, so they had to save up and then wait for their turn, sometimes up to 10 years.

Queuing was an essential part of the economy. A rumor would go around that a store had a delivery of, say, meat or cheese and everyone would rush over and line up for what they could get until it ran out. The saying about the fall of communism was “before we had money and nothing to buy, now we have lots to buy and no money.”

Birth control - condoms, pills, anything consumer - was hard to find in Russia so the birth control of choice was abortion, since hospitals were free. Many women had had 5 to 10 abortions by age 35. Romania doubled its birth rate in one year by banning abortions. (Answers the scare claim of the anti-choice protesters, that having two or three abortions could make you sterile).

Another comment I read was that the position of general practitioner paid poorly compared to the west, as a result the USSR had a lot of women doctors. Specialist were well paid and generally men. Sexism was alive and well there despite the lip service.

Want to read about workers’ lives - an interesting book was written by the defector who stole his Foxbat aircraft and flew it to Japan to turn over to the CIA. He mentions alcoholism being rampant, many people didn’t work hard (“we pretend to work, they pretend to pay us”) and factories were more concerned with finding acceptable excuses why they could not meet quota. The first time he saw a western supermarket he accused his handlers of setting it up as a showpiece to fool him.

I knew a fellow who went as consulting engineer to some refinery in communist Albania - same attitude. The workers would stand around and listen to a pump slowly grind itself to pieces; if the pump failed, it wasn’t your fault - but if you ordered production shut down to fix it before it failed, then production shutdown was your fault. Nobody wanted to take responsibility or blame.

The joke about tourists visiting Russia was that the locals would pay big money for blue jeans and pantyhose and similar western “luxuries”.

A comment about one five year plan (master plan for economy) was that a glass factory’s quota was set in square feet (meters?) of glass. So to meet the quota with less effort they produced thinner glass, most of which broke en route to construction sites.

A Canadian correspondent’s comment about Cuba’s command economy was “imagine a whole country run by the post office.”

(Old joke: What did the Romanians use for light before candles? Light bulbs.)

I knew a mining engineer who describes going over to Russia not long after the fall. He mentioned that the one mining company at the time that had the most profitable venture was running a mining process on the tailings of a copper(?) mine. The five year plan for that mine did not include anything else, so the tailings piles from 50 years of mining had a higher concentration of gold than ore in most modern western mines. They weren’t told to extract it, they weren’t allocated the machinery to do so, so they had never done so. Bureaucracy over common sense.

He also mentioned that since the state owned everything, their land title survey system was still stuck in the czarist middle ages of the 19th century. Deeds would read like “The land starting 20 yards past the big rock at the fork in the road, for 200 yards back” rather than serious survey coordinates.

There were certainly layers of privilege in the USSR. The nomenklatura had access to goods and services that ordinary people did not have. My husband remembers being sent to the city administration building for some work-related task (this would have been in the 1980s). Because he was there in an official capacity, he was allowed to eat lunch in the cafeteria that was usually restricted to the Party bigwigs. He said the meal was fantastic, so good that he tried to sneak into the cafeteria on another day but was turned away.

Connections were crucial. Everyone had a list of phone numbers of people who could help out with everything from plumbing problems to health concerns. There is a very funny comedy routine based on this idea. A fire starts in a man’s apartment, and instead of calling the fire department directly he starts calling various acquaintances who might have connections with the fire department.

Want to know what the late glasnost’ era was like? I could tell you a few stories.

Things like this make it so difficult to examine how unequal the Soviet society actually was. In terms of the rouble salaries that people made, the difference between various jobs, or between commoners and party bigwigs, might not be that big. But if the bigwigs get access to stores from which others are excluded, or get to dine at restaurants and canteens that others don’t have access to, or are even allowed to travel abroad and exchange roubles into foreign currency for a shopping trip to Paris, then the difference in actual standard of living would be much bigger than the simple salary figure would suggest.

And the opportunities to do side jobs on the black market made a huge difference, too. My ex-boyfriend’s father (from Moscow) was a dentist, and he made a lot more from side jobs than he did from his official salary, which was less than what a bus driver would make. His mother was an accountant responsible for budgets in the Moscow school system, which meant that she could get her kids enrolled in the good school in exchange for allocating funds to build the school a swimming pool.

I’m looking at an article from 1974 in a German news magazine about the health system in (communist) East Germany. According to this article, a typical medical doctor would make about 1450 marks (East German marks, mind you!) a month, roughly about twice as much as a typical factory worker would earn. At the same time, a typical doctor in West Germany made about 10,000 marks a month (hard, West German marks) after taxes.

That’s one of the reasons they had to build the Berlin Wall: During the 1950s, about 25 % of all East German medical doctors had defected to West Germany.

Precisely. The differences in official salaries were fairly negligible. Privileges and power came from other sources.

Any idea how they figured that a dentist should make less than a bus driver?

I heard many, many rationalizations for this. A popular one was anti-elitism, i.e. why should a bus driver make less just because his work was less specialized and required less education? All jobs are important!

You may be thinking of this thread: What was life like under the soviet system? started by Komsomol, 4/21/2002, where there is some discussion of the department stores where wealthier or well-connected Soviets could purchase some of the finer things in life.

See, in particular, Post #6 by Sam Stone, and subsequent discussion. Note also that Schnitte contributed to that thread similarly to his posts in the current thread.