First off, it's difficult to make broad sweeping generalizations about Soviet labor history and the average experience of a wage laborer given that the experience of the latter could vary quite widely over depending upon the political climate. A Soviet worker operated under a different set of circumstances and workplace environments under Stalin's first Five Year Plan than, say, Gorbachev's Perestroika. Although there were some peculiar aspects of the Soviet planned economy that persisted throughout the existence of the USSR, its contradictions and stresses were more salient at some periods than others. So what follows here is more of a survey of Soviet labor history with a focus upon the question of incentives.

In the immediate aftermath of the Civil War, the Soviet economy operated under a mixed-market system, the New Economic Policy (NEP), which instituted state control over heavy industry, but an allowance for petty capitalist enterprises. The state adapted this approach partly out of post-Civil War pragmatism, but also with the idea that a go-slow approach to modernization was the best response to the USSR's immediate predicament of being a proletarian state without much of a proletariat or industry. This was one of the few times in the history of the Soviet Union in which wages were the main guarantee to buy consumer products and other amenities such as food. The NEP era was characterized by a new Soviet consumerism that many ideologues found crass and a betrayal of socialist principles. In addition to working hard for wages to buy products, the typical Soviet worker also had to contend with a problem that the economy was, to an extent, market-driven. This meant there was the fear of unemployment during NEP and there was also a marked social divide between the wealthy NEPmen and those who were rank and file laborers. For the leadership in Moscow, the NEP economy was leading the Soviet Union in the wrong direction. To continue NEP would have meant accepting that the USSR could not embrace an immediate future of heavy-industry and strong state power. There were alternative voices within the state that argued for a continuation of NEP. The Commissar of Finance and Central Committee member Grigory Sokolnikov argued in 1926 that the state should develop agriculture ahead of heavy industry and that a market-economy in the countryside was fully compatible with socialism. Yet, for the state to pursue Sokolnikov’s model would have meant abandoning many of the tenets of Marxist-Leninism and a tacit accepting that 1917 was a far less transformative event in human history. Therefore, despite the esteem many Bolsheviks had for Sokolnikov, his prescription would have been a bitter ideological pill for the Soviet state to swallow.

Ultimately, NEP gave way to Stalin's drive for a crash industrialization called the Five-Year Plans in which witnessed the construction of massive factories, the squeezing of peasant agriculture, and the establishment of a massive industrial proletariat. One clear incentive for Soviet workers in this period was the paranoid and harsh measures of the state to coerce workplace discipline. The local state authorities often construed arriving to work late, not meeting quotas, and accidents as signs of sabotage or wrecking and could carry a sentence to the Gulag. The overly-ambitious nature of the Five Year Plans fed into this paranoia as the local authorities had to explain the persistent shortfalls of industrial output and many workers became convenient scapegoats. Furthermore, the Gulag system itself was an integral component for the development of infrastructure in the vast Soviet hinterland and there was a constant pressure among factory managers and police to provide the camps with the inmates to build the railroads and canals. Given this environment, there was a strong incentive for Soviet workers not to draw attention to themselves through absenteeism or shoddy labor.

However, although the stick of state coercion was omnipresent during the Five Year Plans, there were other incentives driving Soviet workers to work harder. The Stakhanovite movement, named after a coal miner who produced 14 times his daily quota, became a major factor within the Soviet working life. The state celebrated workers that exceeded their quotas and lavished them with access to special perks like better housing and material goods. In a time of great dearth, these rewards were quite prized. Some Stakhanovites were individuals who worked hard, other those nominated to represent the interest of a group of workers. Of course, some workers felt that the Stakhanovite movement was an attempt by the state to squeeze more labor out of the proletariat and there was some resentment directed towards Stakhanovites on the shopfloor. Participation in the Stakhanovite movement also reflected a greater trend of upwards mobility within the economy wherein hard-work and self-improvement led to a higher social status. This new technocratic elite had access to better goods and housing (an issue the Soviets never really tackled until the 1960s, and then imperfectly). There was also substantial lateral movement within the workforce as workers sought to switch jobs that either paid better or had more perks surrounding them. Although the state was highly coercive in its regulation the movement of its citizens, the organized chaos of a crash industrialization program made this easier.

The postwar period continued many of the Stalinist economic trends, albeit with much less recourse to state violence. There was also a much greater normalization of the economy and less visible campaigns to meet production quotas. As Soviet workers gained experience and institutional knowledge of how the system functioned, they increasingly figured out ways to cope with it. There was also an growing trend of professionalization within the Soviet proletariat. 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 medical 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. Blat often took multiple forms and first arose as a means of social lubrication during the 1930s. Blat could take the form of amenities like higher quality Soviet products or rare Western imports that a factory management would give as a reward for meeting quotas or otherwise exemplary performance. Such products were often traded within underground networks to gain access to goods and services not available to the wider public. 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 largely 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.

Fitzpatrick, Sheila, Alexander Rabinowitch, and Richard Stites. Russia in the Era of NEP: Explorations in Soviet Society and Culture. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991.

Gronow, Jukka. Caviar with Champagne: Common Luxury and the Ideals of the Good Life in Stalin's Russia. Oxford: Berg, 2003.

Kotkin, Stephen. Magnetic Mountain: Stalinism As a Civilization. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995.

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