Education in the Soviet Union – emphasis on science (1958)
sci-hubtw.hkvisa.net
sci-hubtw.hkvisa.net
This way they can use their top expertise to explain how 3.8 roentgen is not great but not terrible.
Or how did they didn't need to worry about ethics since obviously "boss knows better"
That was compensated by a great push towards exact sciences, accompanied by the fast pace of industrialisation, electrification and mechanisation.
Preferably nonfiction, but fiction would be good too.
Struggle to get the basics for life: heat, food, clothing, books, disposables. It all took queues, friends, relatives, and black markets.
No hope for the future: no matter what you did, how hard you tried, there was no way to improve your lot in life. It was all outside your influence, all controlled by The Party.
The only dream we had was to somehow escape to the Free West. It was dangerous and you could lose your (or your loved one's) life in the process, but for many it was worth it.
My grandfather was repressed (forced labor) in Stalin times, but later became a worker at very large steel mill and made very good money there, even traveling to Egypt as a consultant. He had a good car — Volga (white, the black ones were reserved for party VIPs), moved to a new apartment couple times. We spent enjoyable weekends on dacha (a small plot of land with a house and a garden) or went to a nearby lake to swim or to fish. Spending a week or two in sanatorium in the mountain area was also possible (I think this was sponsored by trade union — still a thing in some large companies in Russia).
My parents were engineers back then, they also had a good job, separate apartment (no morgage, no expensive payments) and dacha. Travel abroad wasn’t really accessible (my father was in Hungary once), but within the country it was a normal thing, flights were relatively cheap.
This was the lifestyle of many our family members and their friends. Of course, there were many people which lived much worse, but for sure life in SU was not eternal suffering of everyone and you did not have to be a party member to live well.
Some countries like Rumania had rulers that were the typical tyrants, enriching themselves in the process. But that was not so in all Eastern countries. YES, the party members and governing people did have it better - but the gap between them and the rest was waayyyyy lower than that in Western countries.
Here are two pictures of Erich Honeckers house, the leader of the GDR, in the protected area where several of the leaders lived, front and back:
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/8/86/Ha...
https://www.staedte-fotos.de/1200/das-ehemalige-wohnhaus-eri...
Here is the statement of a famous GDR reporter who was the first to report from "Wandlitz", name of the special territory:
https://www.spiegel.de/geschichte/honeckers-elitesiedlung-a-...
He explicitly states in that text that every well working and connected GDR craftsman, movie actor or pub owner would have laughed about the size and everything in there, and that after being the first journalist to tour the place his sense of justice was not triggered at all while seeing it all from the PoV of a regular GDR citizen. Which is exactly the same impression I myself had too when I saw the pictures on TV.
The had a pool! I'm sure every American is very impressed knowing that. They had a better food selection, like the famous bananas that GDR people were always longing for, but it's not like the rest of the country was starving. I remember 40% bad food at school and later in the factory (especially pasta, it was really bad), but at home it was always really good. Only more exotic imports were hard to get, like said bananas, or oranges (other than the terrible Cuban ones).
Honecker did have some privileges, like a hunting ground, but that really is not much, hunters in Germany all have theirs too.
I heard that in Russia it was somewhat similar: While the nomenklatura were better off, e.g. they had Volga cars, but in the end all their advantages pale to anything some middle class person in the west has, never mind the truly rich. The "Getting rich and become a billionaire" thing only started with the economic chaos of the 1990s.
I was one of those in the rallies leading to the fall of the wall (I was 17), and I had always known the fortified GDR borders were keeping us in, and not the Westerners out. But I have to admit the leadership was NOT doing it for their economic benefit. It was truly political and ideological. And it was truly meant to be for the benefit of the "working class". They did care a lot about everyone especially worker and farmer children to get the same good education (well, always plus "political education", but they really believed what they taught, unlike Putin and his cronies today who I think know they are lying to their people and behave more like Mexican cartel bosses) - see my other comment.
What you call "small" advantages: car, pool, VCRs, bananas - put them so far about their average citizen that it was like having a private jet and yacht today.
They justified that amazing power to themselves by saying they did their duty to us... the people. But make no mistake, they were never elected and they didn't give up their power willingly.
At this point at the very latest, if not your first sentence already it is clear that you are nothing but a troll.
But tell someone who actually lived there, me, your nonsense - sure.
> and they didn't give up their power willingly.
They did. I lived there in 1989. Nothing happened. They could have given the order to fire, the troops were listening and obeying. They never did. You tell lies. What a twisted, biased, one-sided world view, on a site that's supposed to have open-minded discussions. Truly disgusting, and I say that especially because this was my live, right then, right there, and you do speak nonsense, which sounds not less ideologically blinded than the worst I heard in the GDR, sometimes personally (to me, a teacher, 1989: "Sie schwimmen im Fahrwasser des Klassenfeinds!").
Just in a different EE country, not in GDR - I must specify. Here we were starving. And they did gave the order to fire - the troops obeyed.
I must also admit that we are extremely skeptical of anything coming out of the ex-GDR around here. We know it was thoroughly infiltrated by the KGB and Stasi controlled everything in the country. We also watched Merkel making the whole Germany dependent on Russian energy, practically delivering it in Putin's hands - who was in KGB in GDR...
He was repressed because of his ethnic origins, taken to labor army from a peasant family on 17th birthday. Is this establishment too?
I‘m seriously impressed by how some people jump to conclusions sometimes.
It's a relic from the past where the eastern socialist block was very preoccupied with projecting an image of power superiority over the "dumber" and "weaker" west, so investing massive resources in prepping a few younglings in STEM olympiads, along with sports olympics and chess were a way to assert that superiority over the west. As such, back then, if you studied hard and got into a good STEM university you were set for an easy and stable carrier in a big city where the government would provide you with a nice apartment and great school for your future kids. It's how my dad managed to escape one of the poorest villages in the country and move to a big city with a nice job, until everything collapsed in '89 that is and everyone was now broke.
Now it's a pointless endevour as those olympiad medal winners immediately go to ivy league universities, propping up the US economy instead, who doesn't need to invest much in its lower education system as it gets the best students from abroad anyway.
It matters in the way that it projects an image abroad that the Romanian education system must be really good if so many grads from there win medals and go to ivy league universities. Even though this ads absolutely no value for Romania.
(1)
I grew up in the GDR (East Germany). During the standard ten year "polytechnical secondary school" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polytechnic_Secondary_School) when it came to deciding what I wanted to become I chose... officer in the East German army, specifically, engineering, airplane maintenance. It never came to that because the wall came down and I switched target to computer science and the civilian sector - for the exact same reason why I wanted to go to the army: A civilian engineering job seemed quite useless.
During school we had lots of contact with real world jobs. Apart from summer jobs, where I usually ended up in some food production factory (brewery, chocolate, sausages - everything was very clean and sanitary, not a single bad anecdote here in any of them), we had "lessons" where we went to the factory and did some limited production of household goods ourselves, learning factory life, processes and various machines. It was a lot of fun and an unambiguously good experience by the way.
Anyway, during my time in the (huge, extremely run-down chemical fiber) factory I saw engineers with shovels digging. That was the last straw, for good pay, good advancement, good social standing and better job satisfaction than the pretty much non-existent one one of an engineer in the GDR (as far as I could witness) the army was the only real option. Ironically, for the exact same selfish reason I switched to desiring a company job immediately after reunification, to the dissatisfaction of the guy in the recruitment office who still hadn't realized how everything had changed around him including his own citizenship.
(2)
The German equivalent of "Business Week", which is called "Wirtschaftswoche", even before the actual reunification had a thick special edition for students about to leave high-school, for the first time issued for both East and West Germany. It included some really big test that one could fill out to get some free advice for oneself based on the result.
It was popular enough that tens of thousands of results were available from both West and now also from East Germany, I had submitted one of them (by letter). It had taken a whole afternoon to fill out.
The result was that overall the East Germans were better than the West Germans in the STEM fields, worse in languages (East German language education sucked, mostly rote learning - even though I had had not just Russian but English too) and in text interpretation.
That's still not the norm in Russia. Instead, there are agreements between the schools and the nearby public swimming pools that their instructors will teach school children at a certain predefined time of the week. E.g., "between 10am and 11:30 am, the first three lanes in this pool are reserved for school number 42".
Modern people must remember that they were told what to work on, when, and how much they would get paid. There wasn't the concept of Sundays or vacations as we have today. There were no choices, only the government's choice.
Things could've been different in the USSR which was the conquering country while the Eastern Block their vassals. Many goods produced went straight to the benefit of Russian occupiers while lacking in the Eastern European countries.
Your personal tourist impressions are not making you closer to understanding of such a big country with such complicated history. Try reading some books if you are really interested.
2) After graduation, you'd get an assignment for your first workplace. Technically you could choose, but in reality the choice was limited and it was more like companies headhunting students. There was no option to refuse all assignments and go on your own.
A partial opt-outs was to get married while in university. If your partner already has a job, then you'll probably get an assignment in same city. Although sometimes they'd just get your partner to move too :)
3) Hiring even for unskilled jobs was highly political. E.g. political prisoners of Stalin era, after returning, would have very hard time to get even a cleaner's job. If somebody had a specific position for you in mind, they had all tools to make it happen.
4) Changing jobs was pretty difficult. You couldn't just leave, move to another city and then look for another job. You couldn't get registration in another city without employment. You'd have to find a company that will agree to hire you first. And if you were needed at your current job... They could easily talk to that company to not hire you (after all both managers were members of the party). Unless that other company really wanted you and the manager had enough political weight to make it happen.
All in all, was it forced labor at gunpoint? No. But free will to pick employment was very limited to say the least.
Time-bound forced work is still forced work.
> and came with additional job security guarantees and often with guaranteed accommodation
Serfdom and slavery also comes with job security and accommodation. It's still forced labor though.
> Not sure if it’s really different from some modern contracts.
You're free to not sign up a modern contract.
> (3) I suggest to stop referencing Stalin era as something that is characteristic for the entire history of SU. It was not the longest period and it was indeed special. In other periods being forced to do a particular job was a rare thing.
Specific example was about post-Stalin era. Many political prisoners and their kids were released from gulags after Stalin's death. Coming back home, even to full-of-anti-soviet-resistance Lithuania, was not easy. A distant relative had to live in Kazakhstan for decades since he couldn't get a registration closer to home. We're talking „lax“ Chruschiov era.
> (4) There were restrictions on the process of changing the job
And there was a lot of unwritten rules were special persons would just fall in a never ending quagmire.
> but compare that to modern world: large notice periods on contracts, non-compete agreements
Non-compete is illegal in many jurisdictions. Few weeks notice seems fair to both sides TBH. Dropping a job on the spot is not nice.
> visas
That doesn't apply to 99.9% of people. If you work in foreign country and don't have permanent residence there, it's up to you. But when you need visa equivalent to move to a city from a village in your native whereabouts...
On the other hand, all of that is a good example how experimental and far-reaching the totalitarian regime was. Which is a frequently overlooked feature of this „progressive“ mindset. Every societal change comes with a cost, frequently unexpected.
> how much they would get paid
Most people in capitalist countries have very limited control over how much they are paid.
Communism sucking does not magically make USA style capitalism a magical utopian paradise where everyone has a private yacht. Sure between the two i'd definitely pick usa - hands down, but lets not pretend that the average worker in usa can just dictate what their wages will be.
And I totally agree that being at the mercy of someone you have to ask permission, can be every inch as dispiriting being at the mercy of a person who can set a price.
But asking for permission was dehumanizing. You ass belonged to them afterwards. Like asking for a favor from the mob. You were a slave. They were the aristocracy and you were less than dirt.
Of course things were different if you were part of the nomenklatura (leading party) or the secret police. You were a winner in communism then.
In a socialist regime, job assignments are made by the state. The state controls most industries and companies, and is responsible for assigning jobs to citizens. However, there may be corruption in the system where individuals in positions of power use their influence to give jobs and favors. It's important to note that the reality of socialist systems can vary significantly depending on the country or region in question and may have different characteristics than described.
But the basics of the corruption system is the same. In fact, low level officials traded jobs, cigarettes, food, for sex if it was a woman who wanted a favor or a job, and rubles if they were males, there are accounts of men giving their wives in order to obtain promotions, jobs, or moving to a another city.
In Venezuela as an example, or Cuba, it happens the same. Citizens don't deal with the State, they deal with low level officials who have the veto power. Basically you become a slave.
This is a generic and oversimplified statement that does not apply to Soviet Union. Its history is divided into several periods in some of which mobility of workforce was severely restricted (1940—1956), but not most of the time. You only had to have work, but moving to a different job or different city was certainly possible with 2 weeks notice period (in modern Germany typical contract requires 3 months notice). Some HR departments in manufacturing even had to solve the retention problem due to high churn.
If you want to study history, do not go to nearby book store, read real historians instead.
In a socialist system, the workers exercise control of the means of production, and, as a consequence, of industry.
There are models of socialism where this control is exercised centrally through the state, but it is controversial within socialism. It is widely known because a branch of socialist theory that attempted to adapt Marxist theory (itself one particular corner of socialism) to avoid capitalist development as a prerequisite was influential with groups that haf some success establishing control of various states and implemented it, but it is not the only model of socialism.
So, yes, in the USSR this is a (gross simplification of) the system, but it is not general to “socialism”.
Is that that different to the Western model: I have a masters degree in physics. I either have to give up on having a family and buying a house and do research / teach. Or I can go work at a bank doing something with no real social value and have an Ok life.
Even down to "if my parents were rich and connected I would have more options" our system mirror the soviet one in actual opportunities and outcomes. We just have better marketing...
Under communism you'd just get told what to do, by others.
In capitalism, if the system is not providing you opportunities, you can go out and attempt to make your own opportunity. It's damn hard, near impossible, but nobody is stopping you try. Under communism, it was illegal and they would shoot you for it.
I don't think people actually really care about communism vs capitalism. They want opportunity. When communism provided that, it did great. When it stopped it fell (after a few shitty decades). Now capitalism has stopped actually giving people actual opportunities...
It makes me wonder what we will do next. Is the service economy the final form? Will we need different political/economic models to move to whatever the next form is?
People working at farms ("колхоз") got their passports in the 70s. You have no right to leave without a passport, that's a criminal offence. Not to mention you must be registered at a specific address ("прописка", "регистрация") or you'd be detained by the first police patrol. And they got their first salaries in the 50s. Farmers in the USSR were effectively serfs for the most part of history. Slogans aside, no one got them anywhere.
> He took the USSR from a feudal society to industrial society.
Thanks, american taxpayers and spiness commie sympathizing administrations for sponsoring and building the "soviet" industry.
It doesn't actually matter what system you are stuck with. It matters whether that system offers you actual opportunities and choices. Both can do that. Both can fail to do that. Right now, we in the west are failing.
We also ignore our own system's similarities to the failing parts of communism. Take for instance your own question:
>Do you stay in 1hr lines every morning to buy bread and milk? Do you need a year savings and connections to buy furniture or tableware
Of course I don't. Wasting an hour a day for essentials would be terrible right?
Instead, as a rich western capitalist, I waste 2 hours a day commuting to and from a job because our free market has totally failed to provide affordable housing for working people.
It would be madness to have a system where people wasted an hour a day getting bread. So how is it so sensible that the same people waste 2 hours because of crippling housing shortages?
You can do the same comparison with 101 other things like education. I am not required to work for the state to repay my communist state education on pain of arrest. Instead I am required to work for private companies to pay my student loan on pain of homelessness and starvation. But neither system has much opportunity right?
The problem is, such an utopic system where everyone works on whatever they want and gets free housing from the state was economically unsustainable long term. Which is why it collapsed and most of those people working in science immediately packed their bags and move to the US when it happened because talented people working on interesting things don't like living with shortages in a strict oppressive environment where you had to constantly watch your mouth or risk having your career or life ended swiftly.
It was only sustainable back then due to the massive natural resources the SU had, while enduring shortages and exploiting the forced/slave labor the SU had access to. Not something replicatable or desired in free societies today, though plenty of modern slave labor practices exists in rich western nations today where some industries only survive due to access to cheap labour willing to work below market rate and live in worse conditions than the locals.
Unsustainable part of USSR was military spending, not free housing.
I meant it's unsustainable in capitalistic "free" market economy where it's an appreciating asset. But yes, the free housing in the communist times was actually one of the best things.
In reality that was more a queue for basically anything including apartments, all the high position jobs were taken by party members where you had no chances hence why nobody misses that.
It is normal to feel nostalgia about good old times when we were younger, yet you assume the motivation is a “colonial empire” (SU was very different from British or Spanish empire in that sense, I’m not sure “colonial” even applies to it economically — this is a political narrative of former republics, which were colonies of Russian empire).
It was also the wealthiest eastern bloc country, and the one with most "economic freedom" relatively speaking. And despite the infamous totalitarian surveillance system, there was a lot more open, civic defiance like conscientious objection to military service, than there was in Russia.
I do think there's a lot more longing for the empire than for the planned economy in Russia today - but that's not so different from the nationalist movements in Hungary, Poland and Ukraine. They just have other ideas of past greatness.
You want to raise beyond certain level in engineering or management? You gotta sign up to the party. But signing the paper may be your only activity in the party.
Soviet/Chinese style communist parties were vanguard parties. Party membership was a privilege you had to earn, and it generally meant that you were a reputable person and potentially a member of the elite. In some sense, it had the same kind of signaling function as having a college degree or passing a leetcode interview.
American Democratic/Republican parties are kind of like semiofficial branches of the government. They have little control over their membership (or their candidates), and membership in itself means very little.
European political parties (at least in the countries I'm familiar with) are private organizations. Party membership tends to be lower than in the Soviet/American systems and signals some nontrivial commitment to the party.
Or, you know, having a conscience? Values? Ideas? Wanting freedom? Daring to think differently?!
This is simply not true and is main reason that superior education in USSR did not materialize in economical and technological prosperity.
Your career advancement in USSR was affected by many factors with your actual performance being near the bottom. Being Jewish was a huge handicap, not being member of the party was another one. Coming from peasants/laborers family was a plus, for there were quotas for advancement of the "hegemony" classes. Bribes as well as your network (or your relatives') could land you better job much easier than hard productive work that nobody values.
Existence in USSR was dull, many talented people drunk themselves to death (drugs were hard to get by). These distinct bright spots like superior education did not change the overall picture.
There was an attempt to remove religion in early era, but Stalin put an end to that and brought back Orthodox church. Later there was some lip service and lame attempts, but not that serious. Although party members would still get in trouble for openly celebrating christmas. Which many people did anyway, just privately behind closed curtains.
My mother told me she left the women's front because it had been "couped" by socialists. In particular, they opposed pension rights for unpaid care work, because they believed that would encourage women to stay at home, and my mom thought it was a lot more important to value the work women had done than to push them into the wage economy.
Looking into it, though, I think maybe the women's front was socialist dominated from the start, and it was 68er, second wave-ish women like her who were "entering".