7 ms·
The Sharashka Phenomenon (2011)
- dsabanin 8y agoI’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.
- eps 8y agoIn Soviet Union there were a lot of people that lived very well, celebrities included.
- dsabanin 8y agoYou probably mean they thought they lived really well.
- perfunctory 8y agoIt's the same thing.
- kingofhdds 8y agoIt'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.
- wolf550e 8y agoNo, 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.
- ivan_gammel 8y agoIt 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.
- wolf550e 8y agoEven 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.
- wolf550e 8y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ZAZ_Zaporozhets#Second_generation_(1966-1994) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ZAZ_Zaporozhets#Second_generat... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moskvitch_2140 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moskvitch_2140 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lada_Riva https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lada_Riva https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GAZ-24 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GAZ-24 There were a few models concurrently of the two popular brands, but they were not great.
- stevespang 8y agoMy ex father in law of the exact same name owned a Zaporozhets (1994). Had a hand crank accessory for manual starts in case battery failed. He would take apart the battery once a year and steel brush all the lead plates. I finally talked him into a newer Ukrainian car, still was a POS.
- Fins 8y agoWell, 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.
- KozmoNau7 8y agoIn the USSR, money could buy you anything, provided you knew the right people.
- dsabanin 8y agoWell to me that means that knowing the right people got you stuff, not money.
- nine_k 8y agoYes, large networks of "right people" to set up elaborate barter or quid-pro-quo schemes.
- kingofhdds 8y agoWhile 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.
- doombolt 8y agoNo way you could buy an imported car, for starters. You had to be a Vysotsky to pull that off.
- rdtsc 8y agoPeople were also demotivated because of corruption. They saw their lazy incompetent co-workers steal and lie and get promoted.
- TheOtherHobbes 8y agoYou 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.
- whatshisface 8y agoYou 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.
- trevyn 8y agoAnd now, social media is all about allowing peasants to live like celebrities. Fascinating.
- Muromec 8y ago>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.
- doombolt 8y agoThere were never any other plan. 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.
- pvg 8y agoThis 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.
- avmich 8y agoI'm in the middle of Strugatsky brothers' "Probationers" - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_Apprentice 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.
- rossdavidh 8y agoIt appears to me that a rigidly controlled organization, like the Sharashka seems to have been, is actually a pretty effective way to reach a well-defined objective. For example, reverse engineering something, or "make us a thing like those people over there have". The reason the Soviet Union and China (when it was actually communist) could do well at catch-up, but not as well when it was time to move into the lead, was that it is not a good system for researching or engineering new things, because in that case you need to try a lot of different things and see what works.
- omazurov 8y agoOne would think of the Russian space program... >As Sergei Korolev was said to have joked, the guards who protected him in his high position as the chief designer of the Soviet space program were probably the same ones who watched over him in the sharashka.
- srtjstjsj 8y agoThe Soviets pioneered space travel. The Soviets dominated mathematical research; the West only caught up when the government collapsed and the Soviet mathematicians emigrated to the West. https://www.nber.org/papers/w17800 https://www.nber.org/papers/w17800
- hyperpallium 8y agoIt is logical that freedom is required for innovative scientific progress - and nice to think so, because it means that the free inevitably become more powerful, and defeat tyranny. A built-in safety device. e.g. Einstein, escapes nazis, leads to atomics (though to his regret). If the nazis had accepted everyone, they would have been more powerful... though, I guess, not nazis. I haven't read your link yet, but I understand soviet maths developed more-or-less in parallel isolation, with some innovations on both sides - about what you'd expect. Non-isolation would have yielded greater progress.
- Fins 8y agoIt would be news to von Ardenne et al to hear that they were Soviet, and their input to Soviets' "pioneering" space travel is at least as important as von Braun's to American space program. (edit: spelling)
- trhway 8y ago> the prisoners themselves called sharaga (or sharashka in its diminutive form), a word derived from a Soviet-era slang expression meaning a sinister organization based on bluff or deceit. while it somewhat nuanced, wikipedia provides better sense of that word (specifically the "sinister" above doesn't sound right) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sharashka https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sharashka: Etymologically, the word sharashka is derived from a Russian slang expression sharashkina kontora ("Sharashka's office", which in its turn comes from the criminal argot term sharaga (шарага) for a band of thieves, hoodlums, etc.[1]), an ironic, derogatory term to denote a poorly organized, impromptu, or bluffing organization.
- lostconfused 8y agoWell that's translation and localization for you. The end result is always filtered through the personal biases of the translator. Although to some people evil and criminal might be same thing as well.
- emayljames 8y agoThe authors article is littered with opinion and self importance.
- pfortuny 8y agoRead Soljenitsin’s (spelling?) ‘The first circle’ to get a good idea of sharaskas.
- JamesCoyne 8y agoThere is a recent (2009) edition of the same book titled In the First Circle which includes chapters which were removed for the first edition (The First Circle, published 1968). Anyone interested in the title should also consider listening to the two EconTalk podcast episodes relating to the book. http://www.econtalk.org/kevin-mckenna-on-solzhenitsyn-the-soviet-union-and-in-the-first-circle/ http://www.econtalk.org/kevin-mckenna-on-solzhenitsyn-the-so... http://www.econtalk.org/kevin-mckenna-on-characters-plot-and-themes-of-in-the-first-circle/ http://www.econtalk.org/kevin-mckenna-on-characters-plot-and... Also, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich is a much shorter, more easily digested, novel by Solzhenitsyn.
- alexval 8y agoI'm in the middle of _In_the_first_circle_ right now and really enjoying it. I also got turned on to it from econ talk. Highly recommend reading this book!
- exebook 8y agoOnce I watched a documentary about US nuclear and space programmes, the way engineers lived and worked there in forties cannot be directly compared to sharashkas but the military and the government still limited the engineers (especially germans and jews) in many ways.
- golergka 8y agoI still don't think that it even closely compares to soviet antisemitism. Don't know about the Germans, but I don't they were treated better.