THE SOVIET UNION’S ACHIEVEMENTS (Keeran & Kenny, PP.4-5).
In fifty years, the country went from an industrial production that was only 12% of that in the United States to industrial production that was 80% and an agricultural output 85% of the US> Though Soviet per capita consumption remained lower than in the US, no society had ever increased living standards and consumption so rapidly in such a short period of time for all its people. Employment was guaranteed. Free education was available for all, from kindergarten through secondary schools (general, technical and vocational), universities, and after-work schools. Besides free tuition, post-secondary students received living stipends. free health care existed for all, with about twice as many doctors per person as in the United States Workers who were injured or ill had job guarantees and sick pay. In the mid-1970s, workers averaged 21.2 working days of vacation (a month’s vacation), and sanatoriums, resorts, and children’s camps were either free or subsidised....The state regulated all prices and subsidised the cost of basic food and housing. Rents constituted only 2-3% of the family budget; water and utilities only 4-5%. No segregated housing by income existed. Though some neighbourhoods were reserved for high officials, elsewhere plant mangers, nurses, professors and janitors lived side by side.
The government included cultural and intellectual growth as part of the effort to enhance living standards. State subsidies kept the price of books, periodicals and cultural events at a minimum. As a result, workers often owned their own libraries, and the average family subscribed to four periodicals. UNESCO reported that Soviet citizens read more books and saw more films than any other people in the world. Every year the number of people visiting museums equalled nearly half the entire population, and attendance at theatres, concerts, and other performances surpassed the total population. The government made a concerted effort to raise the literacy and living standards of the most backward areas and to encourage the cultural expression of the more than a hundred nationality groups that constituted the Soviet Union. In Kirghizia, for example, only one out of every five hundred people could read and write in 1917, but fifty years later nearly everyone could.
In 1983, American sociologist Albert Szymanski reviewed a variety of western studies of Soviet income distribution and living standards. He found that the highest paid people in the Soviet Union were prominent artists, writers, professors, administrators, and scientists, who earned as high as 1,200 to 1,500 roubles a month. Leading government officials earned about 600 roubles a month; enterprise directors from 190 to 400 roubles a month; and workers about 150 roubles a month. Consequently, the highest incomes amounted to only ten times the average worker’s wages, while in the United States the highest paid corporate heads made 115 times the wages of workers. Privileges that came with high office, such as special stores and official automobiles, remained small and limited and did not offset a continuous, forty year trend toward greater egalitarianism. (The opposite trend occurred in the United States, where, by the late 1990s, corporate heads were making 480 times the wages of the average worker.) The overall equalisation of living conditions in the Soviet Union represented an unprecedented feat in human history. The equalisation was furthered by a pricing policy that fixed the cost of luxuries above their value and of necessities below their value. It was also furthered by a steadily increasing ‘social wage’, that is, the provision of an increasing number of free or subsidised social benefits. Beside those already mentioned, the benefits included paid maternity leave, inexpensive child care and generous pensions. Szymanski concluded: ‘While the Soviet structure may not match the communist or socialist ideal, it is both qualitatively different from, and more equalitarian than that of western capitalist countries. Socialism has made a radical difference in favour of the working class.’
In the world context, the demise of the Soviet Union also meant an incalculable loss. It meant the disappearance of a counterweight to colonialism and imperialism. It meant the eclipse of a model of how newly freed nations could harmonise different ethnic constituents and develop themselves without mortgaging their futures to the United States or western Europe. By 1991, the leading non-capitalist country in the world, the main support of national liberation movements and socialist governments like Cuba, had fallen apart. No amount of rationalisation could escape this fact and the setback it represented for socialist and people’s struggles.
http://www.socialistdemocracy.org/Reviews/ReviewTheStalinMythsAfterTheSovietUnion.html
