The following only applies to the late Soviet period (from the Thaw to Glasnost) and is painting with a broad, generalized brush.

Since it was ideologically a worker's state, the USSR heavily controlled wages for its citizens and these wage scales favored blue-collar professionals. For example, according to Eaton's figures, a general practitioner in the 1980s drew a monthly salary of 130 Rubles, which was more than an orderly, but less than a typical bus driver's salary. Not surprisingly, many young academics and professionals gravitated towards "blue-collar" jobs as an intermediary step within their careers. Alexei Yurchak reported on one Leningrad example in which a young Medievalist got a job within a boiler room. Thinking that she would be alone given her education, she found out among her coworkers were two PhD candidates and another about to defend his dissertation. She soon found out that many of her colleagues were using their boiler room wages as unofficial research grant money.

While this wage system might appear to stifle professional classes, and to an extent it did, the crucial thing to realize is that wages in the Soviet Union did not operate like those within capitalist countries. Money could be relatively useless if it did not buy access to services that the state did not subsidize cheaply. While the Soviet state provided bread and basics of life, other amenities had to be acquired more discretely. Often this meant individuals would need Blat (sway or influence) to navigate this system.

Professional groups had a network of official and unofficial blat privileges that the Soviet blue collar lacked. The above boiler room example illustrates this, such a sinecure could be acquired through personal connections. Additionally, being a professional meant you had some sort of pipeline into the Soviet state system, which meant the further up the professional ladder one climbed, the more blat such an individual would possess.

Some historians such as Sheila Fitzpatrick who have examined the Soviet society speak of neo-Soslovie becoming one of the norms of Soviet society as a result of collectivization and the state-planned economy. Soslovie were the sundry system of social ranks within the tsarist empire in which a person's social position depended upon a state-defined occupation. Within the USSR, often getting by was highly dependent upon your workplace social networks. Thus it still was a classed society, but not one solely based upon money and wealth.

Sources

Eaton, Katherine B. Daily Life in the Soviet Union. Westport: Greenwood, 2004.

Fitzpatrick, Sheila. Stalinism New Directions. London: Routledge, 1999.

Yurchak, Alexei. Everything Was Forever, Until It Was No More The Last Soviet Generation. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006.

Hopefully you won't mind some data from socialist Czechoslovakia. Remember that the countries in the Soviet sphere of influence and USSR itself were merely striving towards the ideals of communism, and as such they were not classless societies, so it should come as no surprise that wages differed in various professional fields.

The average monthly salary in 1960 Czechoslovakia was 1303 crowns. Workers in agriculture, hunting and forestry earned 943 CSK per month, those working in hotels and restaurants 1030 CSK, financial and insurance services 1205 CSK, construction industry 1521 CSK. In 1975, the average wage was 2313 CSK, and the average earnings in the above fields were 2289, 1727, 2317, and 2601 CSK respectively.

You can look up more data and information about other fields in this Czech Statistical Office document, English notes included. I recommend the 'diferenciace' tab for a quick overview of just how much the average salary in various fields differed from the national average from the year 1955 onwards.

Although these are just average monthly salaries for whole sections of economy, you can see that they differ fairly considerably. I can only find partial data for individual professions, and even then sadly limited to the year 1988. The average monthly salary was 3095 CSK, doctors (other than dentists) earned 5062 CSK, directorial or leadership positions in finance or insurance 6718 CSK, nurses 2955 CSK, miners 7199 CSK, window cleaners 2693 CSK, chemists 4220 CSK, seamstresses 2673 CSK, livestock (other than poultry) breeders 3722 CSK, statisticians 3030 CSK.

Once again, the difference is clear even in this sample, with what we would now call 'management' or 'white collar' workers or simply put those not involved with manual or even unskilled labor receiving noticeably higher pay.

A reminder to everyone - please no personal stories and anecdotes! We need your information to be based on independently verifiable sources.

I'm really surprised that I wasn't to able to find some good data on the subject off the bat especially with wages of higher-ups like top managers and government officials. Blue collar wages varied with the industry, here are some excerpts from "Soviet Industry in 1990" statistical study. Coal mining - wages from 342 to 530 roubles, textile industry - 201 to 313, bread making - 130 to 232. These are numbers for 1985 that could be considered the last year of true USSR. The book itself is available here http://publ.lib.ru/ARCHIVES/N/''Narodnoe_hozyaystvo_SSSR''/_''Narodnoe_hozyaystvo_SSSR''.html

I could elaborate on inequality in late USSR but alas anecdotes are forbidden.

UPD. I went ahead and translated per industry average wages table

UPD2. Found some info on lawyers but the numbers don't add up. Apparently in 1955 they were paid 50 to 200 roubles but that doesn't seem right because they were rather well off.

Unfortunately I cannot find my copy to get exact quotes, but the book "MiG Pilot: The Final Escape of Lt. Belenko" is a biography of the titular Lt. Belenko, who is famous for defecting to the United States from the Soviet Union with a Mig-25 "Foxbat" in 1976.

The book holds that While they were paid similar wages, factory workers (which Belenko was for a time) and Doctors lived very different lives. Doctors received special treatments such as better living conditions. But because they WERE being paid similarly the procedures you could get on "normal wages" were often inferior to those you could pay for on the black market. An Appendectomy might cost something like 200 Rubles for face value, but the facilities would likely be sub-par and the doctors less careful. Whereas 1000 Rubles would get you a "Black Market" Appendectomy most likely at the Doctor's House, but everything would be clean and sterile.

Sorry if this falls too close to personal anecdote (Though it is Belenko's, not mine) Also the costs are pulled from memory (which is about 4 years old at this point) and are probably off, but are used to illustrate the point. Anyone with further knowledge is perfectly welcome to correct me.

This question brought to mind a question of my own - has there been any sort of comparison between this ratio (of blue-collar worker pay vs. white-collar pay) in the USSR and the USA? I know that in the United States, for example, the difference was much lower (as discussed in books like Piketty's Capital) up until around the 1980s.

I guess what I mean is, we might be able to look at the difference in pay for the USSR, but shouldn't we also consider how this compared to the rest of the world at that time?

Your question belies a commonly held fallacy which maintains that there is always a direct, causal link between incentives and work.

Tons of modern research has clearly shown that monetary rewards not only fail to produce better work in employees (in many cases), but can actually reduce the efficacy or productivity of their work.

Not to mention that there are often a whole host of other benefits outside of monetary compensation that someone can receive for their work, even in communist economic systems, such as renown, greater ability to determine their work schedule, etc.

I'd suggest that it would be better to ask, "How did the U.S.S.R. manage to find anyone to work in sewage or as janitors when they could have been doctors or secretaries instead?"

Some data on doctors. According to the order of Ministry of Health in 1986 doctor's wage was 180-220 roubles depending on experience and specialization, head physician's salary could be as high as 340 roubles. Src http://www.lawrussia.ru/bigtexts/law_1450/index.htm

I have a question to piggy-back on this one. How was worker productivity? If everyone in my field was making 3000 crowns, then what kept me working hard?

Any data on teacher pay or information on how teachers were perceived and treated under communism?