What was life like in the USSR?

[psychonaut]

@Neur0mancer.

work was a place you showed up at every day to waste your time, since you could not gain promotion or pay raises by being a hard worker. Example - a building that was started under construction near the apartment where I lived still barely had the foundation laid when we left the USSR, 2 years later. The workers would come in the morning, sit around and occasionally do something productive, then at lunch they’d buy vodka (3 people to a bottle) and then they’d sit around and tell dirty jokes for the rest of the day.

Again, reminds me of certain jobs in the US:

@filmyak

I have a friend who works at the patent office. He says it takes about 3 hours/day for him to meet his quota of work. For the remaining 7 hours, he surfs the web, goofs off, etc. Says as long as you do your quote you can’t be fired, and there’s absolutely zero incentive to do more work. You don’t get promoted, no raise, etc, so no reason to do more than you have to.

Obviously not all jobs are like this. One of the common elements seems to be that the government is the employer.

[dangermom]

My SIL grew up in Soviet Russia. I should ask her to tell me more about it, only I don’t want to sound nosy! She’s ridiculously well educated, though her family is pretty ordinary. I’ve seen photos of her in 8th grade “war class,” where she got good grades in Kalashnikov shooting (!). She was a Young Pioneer, of course. As a college student, she had a job as a stewardess on a train, so she’s seen large amounts of countryside. She liked that job a lot.

Now that she can send some money to her elderly parents, they are able to afford a phone for the first time. They always plant their own potatoes, so as to be able to eat during the winter. They won’t leave though, not even to just visit her in the US–they say they’re too old. They live in Kaliningrad, and it’s slowly getting better there–things aren’t so run-down and awful as they were a few years ago.

I think she’d be happy to move back if it was possible to make a living. There are a lot of things she misses very much.

[dangermom]

I’ve also read some really interesting books on life in Soviet Russia, but the only one I remember now is from an American POV–Moscow Stories. He was one of the few American students to get persmission to study in Russia in the 60’s and 70’s.

I’ve read that doctors in the USSR spun the unavailability of the Pill as a good thing, since it was bad for you and would result in mental illness. Abortions were promorted as healthier and more natural–and incidentally profitable for doctors, who could charge high prices for such extra luxuries as anaesthetic.

[Derleth]

@psychonaut

One of the common elements seems to be that the government is the employer.

The true common element is that it is difficult or impossible to fire someone. Thus, union jobs commonly end up the same way even without explicit featherbedding: Once someone has achieved sufficient seniority (that is, part of his pay is now job security), he can afford to slack off and hone his mad solitaire skills while on company time. Civil servants are just an extreme example. Teachers are the other prime example.

[Capt.Ridley_s_Shooting_Party]

OK, thanks for the book recommendations.

[Yeah]

A Russian friend says that the Soviet Union fell when Party members, who were the elite in the USSR, realized that their “elite” lifestyle was no better than that of the North American and European lower middle classes.