3 ms·
At the time when this really mattered, everyone was a party member as not being one meant not being to find a job and be practically outcast. What mattered muc
by andrei_says_ 8y ago
At the time when this really mattered, everyone was a party member as not being one meant not being to find a job and be practically outcast.
What mattered much more, was: are you related to a high-ranking party member or not?
- gambiting 8y agoYour experience might be different to mine, potentially from a different communist country perhaps? But in communist Poland you could very much not be a member of the party, and still function fine. It's just that any sort of "better" job was inaccessible to you(to be a teacher you had to have party connections for example) - but not having party affiliations was far far away from being an outcast.
- js8 8y agoI guess it depends on the country, but in former Czechoslovakia, it wasn't true. There was about 1 million party members to about 10 million adults. Whether you needed to be a member depended on the nature of the job. But you're correct that family relations played a big role, the nepotism was rampant.
- andrei_says_ 8y agoI stand corrected, seems like different “socialist” countries had different amounts of slack :)