Reflections on "free"
Having undertaken to write the second planned article of the cycle, I realized that I would very much like to work through one moment in the introduction, which I met en masse in the comments earlier.
Having started to write this introduction, I was suddenly confronted with the fact that there was a whole article, and the size of such an "introduction" does not go into any gate. So, readers will forgive me, this will not be the second part of the cycle (the first is still being moderated) - but it will be an important branch.
Many commentators were sincerely perplexed, seeing my position in relation to "free" Soviet things - free medicine, education, apartments.
Readers sincerely believed that this is a masterpiece, a kind of climax, which must be recorded in top success.
Well, I need to clarify my point of view!
To begin with, it is worthwhile to understand that there is very little “free” and, moreover, material around us. As a rule, they approach the "free" gifts of nature of one kind or another - and where a person has worked on a product in one way or another, this product has a price that is made up of costs.
Free accommodation
Conditional free housing thus consists of conditionally paid work of designers, builders, on the creation and operation of construction equipment, cement, reinforced concrete, iron for this reinforced concrete, logistics, earthmoving work, man-hours and material costs for production absolutely all related products within this process.
Perhaps for some it will be unexpected, but in this the building of socialist states is completely analogous to the building of capitalist countries.
Moreover, if conditional cement or rolled metal is an opportunity to float abroad for bоIf the price is higher than inside the country, then it will also be safely floated there, and this, in turn, means that the conditional value of many things (material resources, fuel, technology) inside socialist construction will be very close to analogues in capitalist construction.
Of course, there will be a speculative premium for this, which, however, can be partially compensated by more skillful logistics, higher labor productivity, better technological elaboration of a number of processes that reduce material costs (innovations).
That is, in material terms, the resources from which socialist housing is created, at a cost always will be roughly comparable to those used in capitalist housing. If they will are equivalent.
In addition to material and technical resources, a substantial part of the cost of housing is the cost of man-hours directly for builders, designers, etc. This cost within individual states (especially isolated ones) can really be kept several times lower than in those more closely tied to the world market.
And at this point we come to the heart of the matter - for example, the good USSR builds free housing for its citizens, while for the good USSR this housing costs (at least in material costs) comparable to the cost in capitalist countries, that is, the state pays money for this to himself and to his employees, who are clamoring in mines, factories, etc.
This leads us to the fact that in the calculations at the state level a certain figure, the price of "free", involuntarily appears.
This figure also includes the man-hours of the builders, and - since each builder also participates in the free housing program, in his remuneration should a certain amount will be included, which he will not see in his eyes, but which will monthly go to the fund for the cost of his future housing.
The same mechanism will apply to all free housing program members as long as it is a comprehensive program.
That is, the state will pick up money for this is "free" with all participants in the production chain.
Apart from taxes, of course.
But back to the builders.
In order for them to build with high quality and there was an influx of human resources into construction, accordingly, it is necessary that the salary of the builder, even minus this money, be decent. If we are talking about mass construction, then there should be a lot of builders (as well as participants in the scheme behind mass construction in general) - and all of them should receive good money already behind deduction.
This money needs to be taken from somewhere, and, therefore, there is a hidden rise in price or a hidden increase in the tax burden, or the state begins to "print candy wrappers".
Typically, these are all three measures.
That is, "free" apartments also rise in price (according to the costs appearing in the calculations) - and since they rise in price, you need toоit is better to pay the employees of the entire chain of the hidden part of the salary that is deducted for the "free". Or the moment they receive housing is conditionally postponed.
So, the above indicates that "free" housing is also inevitably a participant in market schemes, its creation works according to the principle "20 plow - one gets."
On the whole, this is a good scheme; I have no complaints about the principle.
However, to consequences principle claim becomes.
As noted above, the mass construction of housing creates the problem of its hidden rise in price, and therefore the state is forced to find methods to reduce the cost of construction.
In this formulation, as you know, both good and bad are hidden.
This is the way of large-scale standard projects - weak from an aesthetic and ergonomic point of view. In such a project, the compromise between convenience and practicality will always lean towards practicality, and at the end we will get microscopic kitchens, unused balconies, weak sound and heat insulation, dubious footage and other delights.
All these problems have fully shown themselves in the Khrushchevs.
Further, moving along the path of reducing costs, the state will seek to save on building materials - where possible, using dubious or short-lived materials, reducing potential maintainability.
Despite all this, the bulk of those waiting will not receive housing at once - they will have to plow for many years and live in communal apartments, barracks, dilapidated housing of old structures, or simply crowded.
Even in a static state, it takes quite a long time, but, as you understand, a person, among other things, also multiplies - therefore, the situation here is not static. Considering the increase in population during the period of large-scale construction and the preceding one, this creates additional problems.
Within the borders of another state, perhaps part of the housing price could be compensated for by the excess profits received abroad - and that would be reasonable. But the USSR was not such a state - firstly, it did business extremely weakly, secondly, a solid part of the margin flowed away in the form of assistance to all sorts of brothers, and thirdly, finally, it should be understood that a solid piece of what was left was spent on militarization, heavy industry and space.
I think it is unnecessary to explain what a tiny fraction of this went into housing construction, given the need to build housing for tens of millions people.
Actually, in this regard, we are entering the home stretch for free housing - it was not free.
In fact, the mechanism of "free" housing in the USSR existed in the form of a hidden, compulsory mortgage, at the end of which the employee received housing of a very narrow range of choices (due to standard projects), often of very average quality, and, importantly, he still continued to pay after that hidden mortgage.
With all this, this housing was not the property of a citizen - he could not leave it as an inheritance in the classical sense, which we now understand.
It is also worth noting that, despite the presence of money and market elements, the opportunity due to the accumulated money influence and to form wishes within this scheme was very limited.
Thus, as a rule, "prosperous" or economical people by the standards of the USSR could not realize their super-needs. The direction of cooperative construction existed, but developed poorly, since the command-administrative-planning system experienced logical competition from its side for personnel and materials and, in this regard, passively suppressed such activity.
So, to summarize - “free” housing was not “free” - a citizen paid for it both before and after (do not forget that people in the USSR were forced to work and tried for parasitism), in fact, in the form of a life mortgage.
Since there were a lot of people willing to buy housing - the quality of such housing for the most part left much to be desired - in the absence of clear mechanisms of influencing this quality through money.
In the era of the late USSR, they knew how to create more or less necessary housing, but by the time of its more or less massive deployment across the country, Khrushchev and block houses would have to be massively replaced - and this probably means that the quality of construction would again break through the baseboard.
The dwelling was not “privatized”.
Housing queues in terms of terms often corresponded or exceeded modern mortgages.
I think I've listed enough to make it clear why I can't write "free" housing into a masterpiece of success. It was, in fact, an alternative to commercial construction, as a result of which, as such, only the mass construction of human beings by the very end of the USSR could be considered a success.
The system itself was not something extraordinary.
At the time of the post-war reconstruction, it was very cool, but as the distance from the Great Patriotic War was removed, the system itself became less and less consistent with the growing demands of society and the growth of the middle class, becoming more and more a rudiment.
Until the housing issue was closed, even in 1991, there was still a very long time, a significant mass of people lived anyhow.
Free medicine
By analogy with housing, free medicine has similar problems.
There are slightly different resources involved, lower prices, lower man-hours, but this does not mean that “free” was free - within the planning system there were estimated funds for each person involved.
It must be said right away that the system itself was really good at the time of the exit from the Civil War, industrialization and the end of the Great Patriotic War.
This somewhat, however, obscures the fact that in the Soviet Union there were simply no alternatives to it - the market mechanisms brought NEP to the handle, which they, in general, remained after the NEP.
A working, medical practitioner could receive good income, but outside this system he would automatically find himself in the category comparable to the Nepman, and his fate would be very sad. Not to mention the fact that the population of the USSR, almost before the war itself and for a long time after, did not boast about money.
So free, general medicine was the only solution.
Free education provided an array of specialists for it. Industrialization and the chemical industry under construction created cheap mass medicines for it and the ability to massively fight diseases - here I really take off my hat, Sanepid was developed at the state level on a very large scale: there was a promotion of healthy lifestyles, and hygiene, etc.
The system itself has made a colossal contribution to the reconstruction of the country - this cannot be taken away.
But we are moving on - now, the country has been restored, the Great Patriotic War has died down, the USSR has become a superpower.
What happens next?
Gone are the terrible epidemics, people were treated for tetanus, tuberculosis, smallpox. The standard of living has grown, mortality has fallen, and life expectancy has increased. Parameters such as innovation, prevention and fight against senile and age-related diseases, the development of the latest methods of treatment and surgery, the invention of time-appropriate technology for these methods, the introduction of new views on the treatment of diseases based on new world-class data came to the fore for physicians. - the genetics is the same.
This is where the wave of problems of this system becomes clear, which can be briefly formulated as the presence of two: confusion with the introduction of innovations and chaos with financing and distribution.
Mass medicine worked perfectly with the treatment of pre-war diseases, with their prevention, but with the post-war - everything was much more complicated.
It was necessary to create a whole shaft of medicines for new diseases, including more rare ones, test them, introduce and launch new production facilities.
All this was done with a creak within the framework of the command-administrative system, often there was a fierce struggle for funding, and therefore the issues that seemed insignificant to the planners were dragged out - regardless of whether the sufferers had money on hand.
These people had to get some drugs abroad or just quietly crawl to Valhalla. The problem worsened over time and was compounded by ever-increasing military spending and technological backwardness.
The cost of medicine in the world has been increasing over the years, drugs are becoming more and more, and the drugs themselves are often very expensive, because long life and a bad environment, as well as the fact that progress has reduced child mortality and increased survival - new generations of people have been launched, full chronic and genetic diseases, new pathogens resistant to antibiotics, new viruses mutating within an ever-growing population.
We are seeing all this now - all this existed during the mature USSR. And the command-administrative system coped with this less and less effectively, supplying physicians with new means more and more weakly (for an increasing range of problems), responding more and more slowly to objective needs.
One of the not very pleasant moments of medicine in the USSR was the existing segregation - there was, as it were, general medicine, as well as branch and even elite, "Kremlin" medicine. These factions, among other things, differed in supply - the last two had access to foreign drugs and technology. The first, the most widespread, lagged behind them more and more steeply, by the end of the USSR it had actually turned into some kind of separate kingdom.
Even with money and objective need, a person “from the street” could not get inside various elite segments on time, the bureaucracy shook him while some cancer progressed.
The work of Soviet free medicine also showed itself not from the best side during the Chernobyl disaster. It turned out that, despite the thirty-year practice of large-scale NPP construction and nuclear tests, medicine is completely unprepared for such a development of events - neither at the preparative level, nor at the organizational level.
It is worth noting that the peculiarities of the "binding" of the population to medical institutions created such a bad phenomenon as the growing lack of alternatives for specialists.
This led to the fact that the personal and professional qualities of specialists could be multiplied by the bureaucracy, and this prolonged questions, worsened the quality of service, introduced such an unhealthy phenomenon as "bakshish", which accelerated the ramified bureaucracy.
It was extremely inconvenient for a person, even with money and need, to effectively solve an important issue for him if the local environment hindered this, because the state literally nailed him down and attributed him wherever possible.
Now we can (in theory) choose one of 100 dental clinics in our area, then everything was different - and the doctor was the first after God, and the materials with which he worked were mostly designed to eliminate the problem and affected much less. the aesthetic side.
It was also a very poorly researched question.
Before you speak phi - think about how important aesthetics is to you personally today. In your clothes, in your appearance.
Free medicine completely ignored this factor, among other things.
Her task was to get the worker to his feet so that he would continue swinging the hammer and sickle.
These are also good qualities, but the trouble is that there were no alternatives at least some serious, and correspondingly, people who had extra money did not let them into the economy or the development of medicine or the development of medical technologies within this system - this money was wasted.
It should be recalled that in the USSR there was general secrecy and secrecy for Western information, as well. Branched chains of access to foreign press and not always promptly processed translations for domestic highly specialized periodicals, insufficient circulations of these periodicals, low interaction between industries in requests for the required modern technology - all these were also puzzles of the problem, contributing to the lagging behind the quality of our medicine from foreign ones.
I summarize.
Prophylaxis and vaccinations were well organized, and they effectively fought against massive problems and epidemics. However, extremely ineffective mechanisms for introducing innovations, the segregation of unified medicine into elite fragments, a very poor market response, an increasingly stuck bureaucracy, an increased uncontested dependence on a specialist on the spot - as a result, they drove Soviet free medicine into the abyss of a decline in its level.
In this regard, I, again, cannot call this system a masterpiece or a success.
PS
The author is quite well aware of the progress, despite all this, in the fields of cardiac surgery, nuclear medicine, and transplantology. The development of these areas took place, as a rule, on some branch islands, and their funding was “knocked out” separately, not at the systemic, but at the personal level. The fruits of such developments could, unfortunately, go to the masses for years. Within the framework of the system, over time, all this became more and more the exception than the rule - this is what I would like to point out to people who piously believe in the combination of free and super-efficient.
Free education
The main task of free education was the earliest possible release of ready-made, highly qualified specialists for specific industries.
As long as the world was simple and the tasks were simple, everything was magical.
If we look at the first third of the XNUMXth century, and in fact until the end of the forties, we will see that specialists at the junction of sciences are much less in demand - because there was much less understanding of the importance of the junction of scientific activity itself. Physicists worked separately from chemists, the theory of matter was still developing, in biology and agriculture they had not yet finished off the heretics-vitalists.
With the end of the Great Patriotic War, the development of missile, nuclear and electronic technologies, a wave of information literally fell on the heads of Soviet education, which needed to be clothed in planning future industries and specialties for them.
At that time, this daunting task was mostly successful - probably, the talented and still fresh bureaucracy at all levels played its role here. But even then it was possible to notice the prerequisites for a technical lag that we had start to compensate ahead of time, releasing more specialists in a more flexible profile, at the intersection of sciences, a more educated bureaucracy, more sophisticated and disruptive economists.
Just as we had successfully established the activities of OSOAVIAKHIM, various sports societies - with production and sports of high achievements, it was necessary to build a vertical line of work with talented youth in the electronic, physical, chemical and management areas. Over the years, this kind of work is becoming more and more pure formalism (in comparison with, again, rather effectively built interaction in sports). Soviet specialists, especially technical ones, were well trained in depth, but they were less well trained in breadth, paying even less attention to the training of organizational and coordination personnel.
This was expressed, in particular, in the fact that with the departure of the “old bureaucracy” from the State Planning Committee, their change did not become qualitatively better or more efficiently to plan, did not contribute to the widespread introduction of information technologies (as opposed to their Western colleagues), although even then it was quite clear how such a view simplifies work and increases its efficiency (and this was already clear in the 70s even for a number of elites in Latin America, the same Allende).
The education of the highest officials of the state, members of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR, the bulk of the deputies was also far from perfect in comparison with the requirements commensurate with their positions.
The education of journalists-observers, state propagandists - was also, from my point of view, artless, the product created by these people was competitively or quantitatively inferior to the Western product. Soviet economists have shown themselves, in my opinion, rather mediocre, giving birth to one unsuccessful reform (cost accounting, anti-alcohol campaign, permitting cooperative activities) within the system after another.
All this suggests that the undoubted advantage of the free education of the USSR was the graduation of grassroots technical specialists, the rise of the general intellectual level of the population to a fairly good level, certain specialties of certain industries also deserve all respect - but to talk about the general life-giving force of a certain “Soviet free educational system ”, I would not risk it, because the fruits of this system could also be worthless and unprofessional, inert in thinking, insufficiently receptive and creative - in comparison, in my opinion, with their Western colleagues.
And these qualities, as we know, with the development of scientific and technological progress and the increasing demands of society, became more and more important..
The formation of the USSR did not give enough influence to the formation of creative, collegial, and often individual qualities that contribute to the release of specialists for larger and more complex tasks than the bottom of production.
A well-processed ideological screw was formed, capable of "screwing" into the existing system and being a reliable part of it - not an advanced one, not inhibiting - namely: reliable, and in the second place - professional.
And it was precisely this basic requirement that had already been violated by the middle of the 70s - ideological processing began to decline steadily, the graduated specialists in this field were unprofessional, not creative, the bureaucracy managing their activities was also not flexible and did not know how to form intelligible, feasible tasks for them. ... As with everyone else, unfortunately.
I summarize.
In my opinion, the USSR achieved a good level of basic education, defeated illiteracy, strengthened its scientific school and produced excellent technical specialists - all this, however, by the beginning of the 80s, we also see in the West, and partly in the East.
Judging by the fact that the foreign society developed more dynamically than ours, their GDP was catching up (and the Japanese did overtake ours altogether), it can be assumed that they also quite effectively solved the problems with the education of people - and the fact that their technical specialists did not occupy " golden "places at some Olympiads, did not interfere with the progress of their industry, microelectronics, fundamental physics, genetics, computer science and so on.
Some of the readers may point out to me that these industries in the West were pretty much fueled by "Russian minds" - and rightly so!
But why did this happen?
Because other "Russian minds" were not capable enough in their activities to create a worthy place for such people in their homeland. And they sailed with their ideas to other states.
For me, this is also a problem of education - a problem of the educational complex.
In the West, a person who has received an education can receive something else that expands his capabilities, contributes to work at the junction, etc.
In the USSR, education was free - but getting a second, unnecessary for the state, but necessary for a person, in my opinion, such an opportunity experienced certain obstacles, as, in fact, the conduct of personal activities.
It was a pretty strong deterrent developmentand this factor worked against us.
It is for these reasons that I do not consider the free education of the USSR to be some kind of extraordinary masterpiece - you should not overestimate it, there was a completely effective alternative to it.
The overall result
In this article, my main task was not to discredit the USSR at all, as it might seem to many who were not very distant and who were looking for simple answers.
My task was to isolate what contributed or hindered our progress as a country.
Many of these free things in the idea and at the initial stages were extremely important, interesting, effective in their own way, etc. But if each such mechanism is disassembled, there will also be visible irreparable disadvantages, inevitably shifting what we called socialism. towards market relations.
These concepts are still relevant, they also appeal to me personally, contrary to the conclusions of the article - I believe that they are possible and even necessary to be finalized and, within reasonable limits, to have and develop in a modern state.
But so also in such a way that the work of these mechanisms could not damage development and quality, so that the system, which includes them, meets the growing needs of society and the state, and also does not yield to foreign counterparts in progress.
Information