I’ve been thinking about this a lot and came to a conclusion that because of the fact that in communist/socialist society of Soviet Union money couldn’t buy you things you wanted, government really struggled to motivate people.
That’s why they resorted to intimidations, threats and physical abuse to force people to perform, as soon as propaganda couldn’t bring the needed motivation anymore.
In the west a lot of people work hard because they anticipate some big reward in the end. In Soviet Union, even celebrities lived like peasants, only party leaders had more than others.
>money couldn’t buy you things you wanted, government really struggled to motivate people.
What money could not buy, your position itself provided. There were queues and there were priorities built in.andit wasn't just party leaders. There was different housing for scientists in fields important for state, for security employees and sometime for army officers and there were nice percs for trusted people who were able to visit conferences abroad and buy nice things there. There were people sailing abroad and they brought contraband with them, which they sold on black market.
You could have used your position to ask for retirement and dacha in a nice place on the south if you were in kgb, instead of Frozen Ass Oblast'.
All of that plus a credible threat of violence for perceived dissent worked for a while.
It's somewhere in between working for large corporation and living in a really large prison. You obviously could bend some rules and things you are not supposed to have.
You can rely on humans to turn pretty much any form of political organisation into a hell of corruption, nepotism, status-seeking, short-term exploitation, and resource rationing.
You can also rely on humans to protect their own interests and stop criminals, but they must be allowed to do so. You have to have a system where the masses who are hurt by corruption have a chance to fight against it, if all power is held by the central party you will see the negative aspects of human nature while the positive aspects are suppressed.
While money weren't useless, being close to right people was absolutely necessary prerequisite. Also, one couldn't earn enough money simply by good engineering anyway. So the arguments stands.
I'm in the middle of Strugatsky brothers' "Probationers" - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_Apprentice - which paint another picture of motivation than this. Strugatsky brothers are foundational to Soviet sci-fi literature just as Alexander Solzhenitsyn is foundational to Soviet opression literature.
This is directly contradicted by the article - they mention imprisoned scientists and engineers proposing what eventually becomes a sharashka themselves. I think where your logical chain falls apart is the assumption the purpose of the oppression was motivation. The purpose of the oppression, though, was actually just oppression.
No, not well, just better than the nobodies in the same system. Plenty of things were unavailable to anyone. For example, you couldn't own a good car, no matter who you were. A party boss could use a luxurious government dacha, but could not leave it to his children because he did not own it.
> you couldn't own a good car, no matter who you were.
Well, theoretically you can. But you have to be a really high on the ladder.
Brezhnev had several good _imported_ cars. Gagarin had a sport car (gift from French, I believe). Vysotskiy (think of a Soviet Elvis Presley) had a good car.
But other 99.99%... no chance.
Of course, I'm not taking into accounts hundreds of "expropriated" German cars which appeared in USSR after 1945.
It wasn't impossible to get a good car - just quite hard. My grandfather was just an ordinary steel plant worker, who was so good, that he got a short term contract in Egypt and earned enough hard currency to buy one of the first Volga's in the city (a white one, because black was reserved for party apparatchiks). He was not even a member of the Communist Party, on the contrary, when he was young he was conscripted for a forced labor as German ethnic minority.
Well, after his first ever space flight, Yuri Gagarin was granted, by the order of the Soviet government, among other things, several pairs of underwear. That should tell you all you need to know about how well even celebrities lived in the USSR.
Sure. But just to think -- a few sets of underwear were something that would be considered among things that you need to have gifted by the government, along with a car or a house.
Can you imagine John Glenn being presented with some underwear in the White House?
I don't quite see what's wrong with that part of Gagarin's award. Maybe some items could be of higher comparative value in USSR than they were elsewhere. Military uniform is usually provided by government, and it's not far from that to some element of underwear. What does it mean, in your opinion?
Only that it wasn't some martian silk underwear embroidered with gold and unobtainium threads. Just regular underwear, but even that was something that your regular Soviet citizen had great trouble finding. I can believe that those were of a higher quality than goods provided for regular citizens (elites in the USSR always had access to higher quality, and usually cheaper, goods) but seriously, isn't there something wrong with a picture where a country spends billions on a vanity project but can't even make it so that a well-paid fighter pilot can just go and buy himself whatever underwear he wants?!
Decent underwear was not that easy to find even in the 80's.
There certainly are reasons for space exploration. In a country where a year after Gagarin's flight army shot unarmed civilians who were demonstrating asking government to give them some food, it is far harder to justify.
There's definitely something wrong with the picture, where a small part of reward is taken as a proof of something. For a single flight Gagarin got more than $100k in today's money, plus a house, a car and some clothing including underwear which was more like a supply than a reward.
Umm, no, I think it is the other way around (it's not like it were a lifetime supply of underwear, although even that would have been pretty weird). There is definitely something wrong with a picture where several pairs of underwear are listed together with a car, house, etc., as a reward (yes, reward) for extraordinary achievement.
The other problem being, of course, that whether you were given $100K, or a million, you couldn't really go buy a car or a house anyway. And, apparently, underwear or a decent coat either.
Even a Volga, which was rare in private hands, was not as good as a Western car of the time, and there was (I think) only one model of each brand and a total of four (4) brands of cars you could buy.
It's not the point. They lived better than others because of their loyalty (or sometimes, simply proximity) to "dear leaders", not because of their outstanding skills.
Leo Trotsky, for example, wrote that Soviet state should exploit its workers to attain its socialist goals, with hopes that at some point things would go sufficiently well that they will no longer feel exploited. If it never happens, too bad.
Stalin forced him away but he never had any other policy.
Fast forward to 1990, nobody wanted to be a part of Soviet state to lift a finger to keep it whole. And we're talking high ranking officials, army and state security here.
That’s why they resorted to intimidations, threats and physical abuse to force people to perform, as soon as propaganda couldn’t bring the needed motivation anymore.
In the west a lot of people work hard because they anticipate some big reward in the end. In Soviet Union, even celebrities lived like peasants, only party leaders had more than others.