This is a tricky question to answer for a number of reasons. Firstly, the official stance of the USSR from the 1930s onward was that unemployment, like other social ills that characterized monopoly capitalism such as homelessness, did not exist in the Soviet Union. Although the Eastern bloc states did keep tabs on their unemployed, the states' treated unemployment as an individual's own fault. The Soviet constitutions guaranteed an right for employment for all Soviet citizens and therefore if an individual did not take advantage of this, they were somehow asocial and abnormal according to the state. How the state reacted to this asociality depended heavily upon both historical timing and specific context.

The most dangerous time to be "that guy" on the Soviet shopfloor was the Stalinist industrialization drive of the 1930s, especially during the Great Terror. Factory managers were under intense pressure to meet quotas and uncover evidence of wrecking and sabotage by enemies of the Soviet state. As such, an individual working in a factory without a good work ethic was an ideal candidate for scapegoating the shortfalls of the first Five Year Plans. The Stalinist period also saw the unmuzzling of Soviet policing and Soviet police often sought to prune out the undesirable elements in society, including vagrants and layabouts. Depending upon the seriousness of the charges for shirking, sentences could range from death, to factory discipline, or assignment to a GULAG. The GULAGs themselves had a high turnover/release rate of around 30% during the Stalinist period, but were brutal and harsh labor camps. The attitude of the Soviet state to those sentenced to the GULAGs for shirking work or other asocial crimes was that hard labor would reform these individuals and the GULAGs operated on the principle of "he who does not work, does not eat." Gulag rations were often quite mean and the corvée labor had little to no safety standards. The German invasion sharpened the Soviet state's attitude towards shirking and other signs a Soviet citizen was not doing their part. The loss of so much agricultural land to the Germans meant that between 1941-1943, the only segments of the Soviet population that were adequately fed were the military and the workers in war production factories. The simple fact that workplace canteens were one of the few areas available for Soviet citizens not in uniform to supplement their meager rations was an incentive to show up for work.

While the Stalin period witnessed the harshest approach to shiftlessness, the state's concern for those unwilling to work did not go away with Stalin. In both the Thaw and the early Brezhnev period, there was a persistent concern with youth hooliganism and the inability of for Soviet youth to shape up and take their place as workers. Soviet police often enacted harsh penalties for crimes they associated with youth hooliganism. Some of these "crimes" could be as innocuous as picking flowers on a road and hanging out in a park afterwards. The post-Stalinist state also sought to deal with problems like homelessness by shipping individuals to areas inside the Soviet interior where the police would keep an eye on them.

Part of the problem with the Soviet perspective on unemployment was that the Soviet state was of two minds about the nature of work, and these ideas were somewhat contradictory. Om one hand, the Soviet state enshrined the idea that work was a natural right of the proletariat and the planned economy would resolve all the issues of shortages and overwork. The Soviets also held themselves up as the paragon of the worker's state in which the toiling classes would be able to enjoy a full life of leisure and cultural fulfillment. The problem was that the Soviet state could never really deliver on both promises. Soviet industry was never really able to deliver the masses the promised consumer goods in appreciable quantity and were chronically inefficient. The guarantee of work also meant that Soviet firms often maintained an excess number of workers for the tasks needed, with much duplication of effort and wastage. The Soviets were hesitant to introduce any innovations in management for production beyond the Taylorism of the 1920s. The typical Soviet factory often went through periods of relative inactivity to frenzied work hours to meet quotas (the best analogy I have to this is it is the postwar Soviet factory life is like a typical American college student work ethos- there is a lot of minor stuff in the semester punctuated by all-nighters as test and paper dates loom). The Soviet commitment to education meant that this was one avenue to go down if one wanted to opt out on factory life. The over-stuffed employment often meant Soviet graduate students often tried to find work in the boiler rooms of various state-run buildings. By the late Soviet period, "Boiler-room jobs" became a slang term meaning a sinecure that allowed a Soviet citizen to engage in other activities, such as doctoral research or forming their own garage band.

Of course, gaining a boiler room job was highly dependent upon access. Blat, meaning influence or sway, was a vital aspect of navigating the Soviet system. The fact that beneath the Soviet state's promises of the good life was a vast informal network of patronage and social connections helped sap confidence in the Soviet state's promises it was going to deliver the good life. This helped to foster an increasing number of individuals who decided to opt out of the Soviet's social construction of work, whether through working a minimum of hours and devoting themselves to their hobbies, or alcoholism and other means of escape. Ironically and perhaps counter-intuitively, the Soviet worker arguably believed most in the promise of the Soviet worker's utopia when the regime was at its most murderous. Although historians like Don Filtzer have shown that Soviet workers resented the Stalinist state's intrusion and regulation, various other cultural historians have shown there was widespread worker interest in the connection of the Five Year Plan to the cultural uplifting of the Soviet worker. Factory magazines often had articles on what was the proper attitude to Shakespeare and Tolstoy and there was great enthusiasm for the achievements of Soviet science such as aircraft. The Soviet state's inability to make good on this promise of a grand social transformation helped to depoliticize work in the USSR, and the promises of material goods became just that, a promise of material goods and not something connected to creating a New Soviet Man. In this respect, the USSR was its own worst enemy as the discrepancy between its promises and reality widened to a gulf it engendered a widespread apathy and social anomie within its own population.