You will be quite a craftsman!

A Review of Occu­pa­tions in the Soviet Soci­ety: the high, the low and the marginal.

The Pro­fes­sional Ori­en­ta­tion in the USSR meant, first and fore­most, a process of advis­ing the youth on the future career choices. A group of teach­ers and fresh grad­u­ates of a col­lege would go to high schools to give talks to school kids in order to deliver the first hand infor­ma­tion on voca­tional choices. Every occu­pa­tion is regarded highly in the Soviet Union  — well, this slo­gan turned out to be quite untruth­ful. Please read on find out about the dif­fer­ences in social lad­der between the dif­fer­ent occu­pa­tional groups. The hier­ar­chy of labour was a prime ele­ment in social dis­crep­an­cies in this country.

Cer­tainly the sys­tem of social­ism would deny the mere exis­tence of the dual labour mar­ket, yet all occu­pa­tions in the USSR occu­pa­tions were covertly divided into the pri­mary and sec­ondary ones. If we were to analyse the Soviet media press releases, then we’d notice that 90% of all jobs men­tioned in the papers as cover or suc­cess sto­ries were of the work­ing class ori­gin. Cer­tainly the list of jobs was just as wide as any­where else in the world, how­ever, the work­ing class had a spe­cial atti­tude towards its.The work­ing class was declared to be the base for the rul­ing social­ism due to its hege­monic part in all part and future revolutions.

Gagarin, from ‘Paper sol­dier’ movie

There were two rea­sons for it – a polit­i­cal and an eco­nomic one. On one hand, it was well wor­thy to praise the hege­mony, on the other – it was impor­tant to attract new mem­bers to its teams, as nobody really wanted to join in. The tech­ni­cal col­leges – where one could become an elec­tri­cian, a seam­stress, or a lock­smith – were a con­stant scare for the grow­ing gen­er­a­tion of high school kids. Like, if you don’t do well, you end up as a painter. This was the absolute and finest exam­ple of the Soviet dou­ble stan­dards: from the papers the work­ing class was praised daily, in real­ity, it was almost like a curse to belong to it. Cer­tainly the work­men did well, they had respect in the soci­ety and they had their priv­i­leges, but nonethe­less, it was some­what of a forced choice. The USSR had a cult of ter­tiary edu­ca­tion – of uni­ver­si­ties and insti­tutes of all sorts, often of any sort, as long as it was a uni­ver­sity, not a tech­ni­cal col­lege. The highest-flying uni was the MGIMO – the Moscow State Insti­tute of For­eign Affairs: diplo­mats, ambas­sadors, attaches and future politi­cians and min­is­ters grad­u­ated from there. The Moscow State Uni­ver­sity was also highly regarded. These two had very high level entry exams, and often the knowl­edge itself was not enough – one had to be well con­nected to get in. Need­less to say, kids of diplo­mats, ambas­sadors, attaches and politi­cians were des­tined right in.

MGIMO grad­u­ate

As for the tech­ni­cal uni­ver­si­ties, Moscow had a great range of those. Excel­lent engi­neers of all sorts were grad­u­at­ing in huge amounts, and, if a stu­dent had half a brain to hold on to his place, they became very knowl­edge­able and very employ­able spe­cial­ists in the cho­sen field. How­ever, the ide­ol­ogy went as far as to remain peo­ple that it was shame­ful to engage into a career path solely on the mon­e­tary rewards: the media, the movies, the books were con­stantly rein­forc­ing the good­ness of any job, regard­less of the pay. Every now and then there would be a story full of good morale: how a guy would want to get rich quickly and aban­don his geo­log­i­cal research for the instant cash reward of being a taxi dri­ver. The USSR phi­los­o­phy was to strongly dis­cour­age such action. Inter­est­ingly, what strongly encour­aged was a long tenure, a job for life kind of a thing. Those who liked to change jobs (or even worse, careers) often, were called “fly­ers” and it was a shame to be iden­ti­fied as one. Another unusual moment was that women doing the typ­i­cally male jobs were praised highly. This Soviet phe­nom­e­non could pos­si­bly start after the war, due to the severe short­age of males, and then some­how lin­gered. Women oper­ated heavy machin­ery, women did road works, women engaged in oil refin­ery – the list is long. We men­tioned it in more detail in our arti­cle on Russ­ian fem­i­nism. What didn’t occur to this staunch fem­i­nists was that the labour itself did not have to phys­i­cal in order for a woman to be equal – man­age­r­ial posi­tions were just as good. Unfor­tu­nately, it was just as hard for a woman to make it to the top  — as any­where else in the world.

‘Post­woman’

To con­clude, it would be a fair assump­tion to say that in the Soviet Union the most pres­ti­gious occu­pa­tions were con­sid­ered those of the impor­tance to the well-being of the coun­try. Every­thing which was related to a per­sonal well being was always sec­ondary and sup­ple­men­tary. Under­stand­ably, the people’s choice begged to dif­fer: so a good-for-everyone hair­dresser had more social lever­age that a good-for-the-country pro­duc­tion line worker.

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Related posts:

1. Fash­ion in the USSR. DIY.
2. Soviet Brands: The Scent Of Com­mu­nism. Part 1 of 2
3. Best of Win­ter 2009  –  2010
4. Gaddafi Really Had It Coming
5. The Patri­otic Edu­ca­tion in the USSR. Part One: the Octo­ber Kids.