Only really true for higher education. It was seen as a sort of “social payment” in exchange for the free education. Better than tuition loans IMO.
Ah, yes, USSR had plenty of "social payments", it was considered that the reason wages are not so big is that you've been given the rest in the form of education, healthcare, everything else. People who were allowed to leave USSR in the 70s had to pay a sum approximating like a year of wages, to "compensate" the state for their education.
Uhhh… Do you think that doesn’t exist in the west right now? What do you think the SCHUFA does in Germany? Do you seriously think high tech companies don’t have a gray-legal-area history of your employment? At least back then it was a thing you could check…
It was worse, an employer could "lose" your labor book, then you were fucked a lot. These things are kinda the opposites of each other, in the USSR the power of that document was the problem I meant. It was like losing an ID. Modern problems where everyone has the information about you, augmented by interpretations and perspectives of various jerks, are different.
…as opposed to capitalism, where you’ll be left unemployed and without a wage if your boss doesn’t like you. What do you prefer?
Such a characteristic would possibly make it very hard to find a new job. In USSR, yes. And not having a job was illegal.
Housewives existed, what are you talking about?
If you mean staying at home all day and not having a job, no they didn't. Anyway, most Soviet citizens didn't make enough money for one of the two to not have a job.
If you mean that USSR had kinda backwards views of gender roles, so a woman would not just work all day, but also get back and then do laundry, cooking, cleaning and all that stuff, - then oh yes. That's what you see in Soviet movies, not housewives in the western sense.
The only way to obtain an income in the Soviet Union was throughout work or throughout a pension (think widows, disabled, or retired people). This was by design, and it’s in my opinion a moral good.
Living off a farm where you alone work would be illegal, for example. Or selling things of some craft.
People on those pensions needed support from their friends and neighbors. They were bad even by Soviet measure.
Colour me surprised: there were racist people in the mid-20th century?! I’m sure that’s exclusive to the Soviet Union!
The particular economic system in which they couldn't avoid being unemployed or barely employed due to that was.
Tell that to the millions of unemployed and homeless in the USA.
I agree that the lowest of the low was higher in the USSR than in the USA, maybe notably. But the average and the median were much lower.
We are also not talking modern USA, we are talking, suppose, 80s' USA.
The average material conditions in the Soviet Union, a country that begun to industrialize in 1929, were worse than in the USA, the literal core of world colonialism and imperialism which relies on exploited labour all over the global south, which industrialised in the 19th century. Hmmm, I wonder why that was…
The signum is not surprising, I mean that the scalar is much bigger than you think.
A young family having their own place, even if that's one room, was not a thing. They'd live with the husband's parents. Sometimes with the wife's parents. Maybe with some aunts and uncles. Crammed like sardines. In those modular Khruschev-era houses (and that's almost the optimal kind, say, I live in a flat in a Stalin-era brick house with high ceilings, that wasn't common in any way, my grand-grandpa was a civilian railways analog of a general ; some people still lived in communal flats even in the 90s, that'd be one room per family, with common kitchen and bathroom), hearing and smelling all of your neighbors talking, sleeping, fucking, cooking and so on, with leaking walls, cockroaches etc.
There are things you don't even think about and take them for granted. In USSR you couldn't buy anything. There were a few basic kinds of goods that could be bought anytime. The rest would happen to be in stores occasionally. On those occasions there'd be enormous queues, people would stand in queues more than half of their time not at work, excluding sleep. People would take days off to stand in queues. To get things you can just buy if you have money. Like - some fruits. Or - some t-shirts. Mundane things.
That free healthcare was also not what you think healthcare to be, being a westerner. Dentists would work without anesthesia, a lot of surgeries would be done without it too or with very basic anesthesia. Doctors would have all kinds of medieval bullshit ideas, so people would be afraid to go to a doctor the normal way, they'd use acquaintances and connections and favors and barters to find a good doctor. Getting various nasty infections in medical institutions was normal.
How do I explain it to you - for a person 60-70 years old now, grown in USSR in a "normal" situation, foreigners, and especially westerners, are some kind of magical creatures from heaven. What you call bad and horrible is, for such a person, much less hopeless than their life when they were 20.
