
For 11 Years, the Soviet Union Had No Weekends - blfr
https://www.history.com/news/soviet-union-stalin-weekend-labor-policy
======
petermcneeley
"It was five days long, with days of rest staggered across the week. Now, the
Soviet economist and politician Yuri Larin proposed, the machines need never
be idle." This is actually totally sensible and was practiced in the factory
where I once worked.

~~~
Udik
Don't most factories work like that?

~~~
petermcneeley
Well the most interesting part is that the preferences of workers are
reflected in salaries in a free market economy. So its usually more expensive
to have night shifts and more expensive to have workers work on the weekends
because these are less desirable working times.

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kungtotte
In civilized countries it's legally mandated to pay more for nights and
weekends.

~~~
monocasa
It's not mandated in the US.

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kungtotte
I know...

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nkozyra
I'm unconvinced a prescribed two day set of days off is really the right way
to balance work and leisure.

People end up focusing on milestones like TGiF or humpday, working for the
weekend, etc.

As automation and globalism and remote work become more pervasive across
industries, I hope to see more flexibility here rather than less. Culturally
it would be unacceptable to take a random three day weekend and work 6 the
next, but I think the benefit to mental health and productivity would be
measurable. The always available culture in tech is a mess.

~~~
czechdeveloper
Problem of this is that you generally need to work with other people and most
productive way is to work at same hours.

~~~
davidgh
That definitively depends on the role you’re in. I often find my most
productive hours are those when others are not pinging my by Slack, email,
Skype, phone. I absolutely must have overlap time with others to keep things
moving forward, but I find reducing overlap time is actually better.

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dmnd
In Soviet Russia there were perhaps additional goals for this idea (religion,
less integrated familial units, divide and conquer).

But I wonder if a more enlightened society that doesn't have those additional
goals could make this work. Perhaps some of the obvious problems can be
addressed, or at least ameliorated:

\- Shifts could be sharded across families rather than individuals.
Individuals seems needlessly granular and disruptive.

\- The number of shards could be reduced. With 5 shards, 4/5 potential friends
don't share your weekend. But maybe we could have only 2 or 3 shards.

\- A single day (e.g. Sunday) could remain a society-wide day of rest.

I think a proposal that included some of the above characteristics along with
a shortening of the standard work week (to 35 or 32 hours, perhaps) might be
interesting.

I suppose we already have a bottom-up version of this with shift work, but
probably there is some small benefit to aligning shifts in a top-down way
(i.e. it reduces shards which should increase happiness).

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rhacker
So how many years has it been for the US?

~~~
mijkal
Exactly!

US-style capitalism is at least as bad as the system described in the article.
People living to work rather than working to live. :-/

~~~
lurquer
At least as bad? I'd recommend you use your weekend to read up on Stalinist
Russia.

~~~
severino
Written by who? As far as the USSR doesn't exist anymore, it's not like people
who never lived there, like me, can form an objective opinion about it.

~~~
dogma1138
The USSR collapsed less than 30 years ago finding people who lived during it
on both sides isn’t hard neither it’s hard to find books on the subject from
both sides of the iron curtain.

~~~
severino
It depends a lot on where you live. I've yet to meet anyone from the former
Eastern block who was an adult by the time it collapsed. About books, that's
the problem, they're all biased in one way or another. Some will depict East
Germany as a police state living hell, while others describe it as a paradise
as long as you didn't get involved in certain things. It's difficult to figure
out what was it all about.

~~~
jschwartzi
> About books, that's the problem, they're all biased in one way or another.

This is no excuse for not becoming more educated on the subject if you are
ignorant. Every source is full of bias. That's why reading more than one book
on the same subject is a worthwhile endeavor, because even a supposedly
objective history is full of some editorializing of the events. The trick is
to recognize when the author is editorializing and when they are presenting
the events as they happened, and to take the editorializing as the author's
point of view and the events as factual unless proven otherwise.

Disagreeing with someone's opinion about something does not require you to
disagree with their presentation of the facts.

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amai
But retirement started at 55 for women and 60 for men. Russia changed that
just recently.

~~~
Fins
It has something to do with the fact that few people live that long.

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jccalhoun
There are lots of companies where this is done today. I worked in a casino and
it was 4 on and 3 off with everyone having different days off.

As real estate prices go up and up how long before white collar businesses try
working in shifts so they can have offices that are half as big with people
sharing desks?

~~~
pintxo
Some already do. Mainly consulting though. Most employees there are at
customer offices anyway.

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Muha_
Soviet leaders had no choice. In 1920 the country was destroyed by civil war.
Industry was absent. The people were starving. Society was split. Nobody has
experience living without a Tsar. Nations within the country did not like each
other. Fascism was arising in Europe, militarism in Asia. Everyone knew that
time was short. The Soviet Union had to create powerful industry or be
destroyed (and the apocalypse came very soon - in 1941). People did what they
should and did not pay attention to stupidity, cruelty and injustice. All of
this was secondary problem. Sovet Union managed to force Hitler to get stuck
and retreat before Normandy landings. If it could not, Hitler would receive
all resources of Russia and then the apocalypse would come to Great Britain
and the USA...

~~~
gandhium
Just the reminder - Soviet Union entered WW2 on _Hitler's_ side.

So, they were preparing for war - but for the offensive one.

~~~
Muha_
This is a myth based on a misconception about Russians. Stalin and USSR is not
same. Hitler was not a friend. Fascism terrified all Russian people. Stalin
dreaded Hitler and showed friendship in order to gain time. Hitler attacked
Poland and it has no chances. The USSR just return the part of Belarus. Later,
the Russians entered Europe as liberators from fascism, but they would never
enter as conquerors. And, yes, later this liberation turn to ocupation for
same reasons: if USSR was not strong it would have been isolated and destroed.
And the Russians themselves stop all this and left Europe when they finally
realized that communism will never work. Maybe the Russians are not the most
pleasant people, but they didn’t do what the Germans did and communism is not
fascism.

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theodormarcu
It was similar in Romania, but it lasted until 1989. The workweek was 6 days
long. My parents dealt with it until the revolution. It’s funny how socialism
was worse for the average worker in that way.

~~~
gnulinux
Because it wasn't socialism. It was a centrally planned capitalist economy.
There were still commodity production, accumulation of value and a State that
regulates value. The only way in which USSR and the Eastern Block was
socialist is the way they called themselves. If they called themselves aliens,
it would make about the same sense. Even Lenin called the system "State
Capitalism" in his works. Socialism in the classic Marxist sense -- which is
the exact same thing as communism, communism/socialism divide nonsense comes
from Stalin and makes no sense -- is the society after capitalist economy
collapses, and the natural force that makes capitalism possible is value
generation. It's simply by-definition not possible to talk about socialism in
a society that still has value (money), the division of labor (job), class
(worker vs employer) and state (a body that regulates trade which is integral
to capitalism). Marxism is above all materialism and ideologies like Marxism-
Leninism is the most anti-Marxist thing imaginable.

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entry
It is not research but very fundamental lie. Author to proove what "Soviet
Union had no weekends" give us the weekends plan. Well done.

Worst of all the author does not explaining WHY weekends was limited in 193x,
but this is most interesting. From point of view author and "experts with the
same opinion" it was cancelled because it's failed. I bet it was cancelled
because it did the trick.

Here a Red pill for you:

After 3 revolutions and 2 civilic wars, loosed WWI in begining of 20 centure
Russia was in degrade state. People realized what conflict of WWI is not ended
and it is means war will be repeated. "We are in 50–100 years behind the
advanced countries. We must run this distance in ten years. Either we do it,
or they crush us.", said Stalin in 1931.

So walking whole country on weekends to churche may be good, but when somebody
want's to kill people of you country in the middle of 20 centure you need
aircrafts and tanks. To produce that you need fuel, technology, machine tools
and people working hard.

So what was the result of "had no weekends" for 10 years? Soviet Union with
allies wins the WWII.

I can't believe author and "experts" don't know that. I belive they just
prefers ignore that. But WHY?

~~~
Fins
You do realize that all the production necessary to win the war was done by
countries that did have weekends.

~~~
entry
I missed.. Do you mean what 100k tanks, 150K aircrafts and alot other stuff
produced in Soviet Union does not help to win the war or you mean SU has
weekends too?

~~~
Fins
Mostly that it pales ion comparison with what US Military-Industrial Complex
had produced, and that a lot of it would not have been produced in the first
place without massive supplies from US (and to lesser degree UK).

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Trombone12
> It’s _quite possible_ , argues Eviatar Zerubavel [...] that the calendar
> reform tied into a traditional Marxist aversion toward the family.

Oh, right. This is from history.com, known from the Aliens-meme, so I
shouldn't expect they asked someone who would actually _know_ about the
background...

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prolikewh0a
This article paints an entirely bad picture of Soviet Russia working
conditions without going into the improvements they made over time. Working
hours were not all that much different than modern USA, however they seemingly
had better benefits.

[https://nintil.com/2016/04/03/the-soviet-union-working-
hours...](https://nintil.com/2016/04/03/the-soviet-union-working-hours/)

>Then, in 1961-1967, they switched to 5 days per week, 8 hours per day, which
finally gave the Soviets a real weekend, like those in the West.

>In 1987, the maximum number of hours was limited to 40 per week, with more in
some sectors (agriculture, construction, transport), and less in others
(education, art and culture, or coal mining)

>Soviets had 15 minimum days of paid holidays per week by then and 75% of
workers had more than that. Workers younger than 18 were entitled to twice
that. Working mothers with more than two children and less than 28 days of
holidays per year, had three more days of holidays. Additionally, women had
partial paid leave for infant care (<1 year), and they could take additional
unpaid leave (<18 months)

~~~
ericd
Don't forget the long, free vacations to Siberia for saying something bad
about the government near your neighbor.

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myth_drannon
Or you can become a homeless, unemployment person and have 365 days of
vacation per year. Imagine that.... Err, sorry in Soviet Union you were not
allowed to do that, these commies had to ruin the last bastion of human
freedom! No worries, in the USA they still have it. I heard plenty of families
take up on the opportunity.

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guntars
You’re not wrong, homelessness was illegal in the Soviet Union and not in the
“we will not rest until everyone has a roof over their heads” kind of way,
rather more like “you better be staying at your registered address (raspiska)
OR ELSE!” That’s one way to solve homelessness.

~~~
amaccuish
I think you mean propiska (прописка)

