When the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) was created in 1917, many academic economists, including those in the United States, believed or claimed to believe that socialism—which entails government ownership of all production goods and government control of all economic activity—was the most productive economic system. A few years before the collapse of the USSR, even Communist Party members in the USSR did not seem to believe this and were moving away from this system, allowing some private activity. Unfortunately, some similar fantastical beliefs persist and some of them become even stronger as the memories of what happened in the USSR fade.
I repeatedly hear and read claims about how safe life was in the USSR from people who have not lived there. For example, I recently read an article about an American who moved to Estonia in 1992 as Peace Corps volunteer and remained in Baltic states afterwards (Lessons for a Lifetime). The writer described the post-Soviet Baltics as a place “in which theft, corruption, and opportunism were standard fare. The guarantees of the Communist state had disappeared, but nothing had taken their place.” The article was written less than 20 years after the collapse of the USSR.
Theft, corruption, and opportunism did exist in the Baltic states at the time, but they were leftovers from the past, especially from Communist rule. They were not caused by the disappearance of the Communist state; instead, these problems began declining after leaving the Communist state. According to the corruption perception index by Transparency International, in 2024, the average corruption score of Baltic states was 66 (Estonia 76, Lithuania 63, and Latvia 59). For context, this is a slightly better score than the United States (65), as higher scores represent less corruption.
However, the phrase “theft, corruption, and opportunism were standard fare” is a good description of the USSR. I was born in the USSR and lived there my first twenty years. Stealing from factories was a common business. People joked that they only take and sell what is theirs, as factories belonged to them according to the claims of communists.
Even obtaining simple services like medical care required bribes if one cared about one’s health. Moreover, people forget that communists did not create medical care in those countries—it did exist before their rule. Instead, they assigned the monopoly for practicing medical care to themselves and forbade anyone who did not work for them to practice medicine as a profession. Some medical procedures and medicines that were available at the time in countries that relied more on free markets were not obtainable in the USSR even after paying bribes. Only people with sadomasochistic tendencies could admire pain management in the USSR.
When production and distribution are separated, as is common in socialist regimes, people become focused on distributing more to themselves instead of producing. Opportunistic behavior flourishes. When interactions between people are not voluntary but regulated by the rulers of socialist and other despotic states, people do not have to be considerate to others when interacting with them. It was nice to see how quickly salespeople learned politeness after the collapse of socialist rule in the Baltic states of the USSR. Karl Marx was right that economic conditions affect people’s behavior; he just lied about the way that works.
People forget that the arguments for socialism are very similar to the arguments for slavery: some people cannot take care of themselves, so somebody else should take care of them and make decisions for them. Moreover, there is no evidence that governments cared more about their slaves than private individuals did.
People often confuse promises of guarantees with actual guarantees. It is very easy to make promises when one does not mind lying. I did not experience any of those guarantees that the author of the above-mentioned article seems to suggest existed under the Communist state. Neither did my parents. If the claims of communists had any truth, I should have been especially protected, as my parents were workers—the group whom communists claimed to care about.
Yes, communists liked to talk about equality, like their various modern counterparts do. However, they did not like to practice it, just like their modern counterparts do not. Communist propaganda about equality and taking care of common people was just a way to grab power for themselves. Some people continue using this technique for gaining power today.
Unfortunately, the only people who had some guarantees in the USSR were Communists Party members and their collaborators. For example, they often kept their privileged positions running companies in the USSR and stealing from those companies, regardless of how unproductive those companies were.
However, even communists were not completely safe, as they did not get along all that well among themselves. Better known are disagreements at the top of the Communist Party (e.g., the fighting among the members of the Communist Party Politburo after the death of Lenin that led to Stalin’s ascension), but there were fights among the lower levels of Communist Party members and their collaborators too. Moreover, different types of socialists collaborated only when they did not believe themselves to be strong enough to rule alone. Remember, communists and fascists killed each other during the Second World War. Modern opportunists may want to think twice before collaborating with such groups.
People need to be careful with their sources of information about the USSR. As the USSR practiced their version of serfdom, people were not allowed to leave the country without the permission of the rulers. Thus, people who were able to leave the USSR and immigrate to other countries were disproportionately those who had close ties with the Communist Party. Even after the disintegration of the USSR, in many republics, communists (they changed their name at the time, but many continued their opportunistic behavior) and their supporters continued controlling most assets and had more resources to move to other countries. These people were never known for their honesty.
Moreover, the Prussian education system—which we still have in the United States and other countries—works hard to misinform people about the USSR. Understanding the basic history of the region makes that unsurprising. Prussia was a major center of both best-known types of socialists: international socialists (communists) and national socialists (fascists). The power of the Prussian education system’s spread of misinformation is well demonstrated by the fact that most Americans (and other people) do not even know what kind of education system they have.
(For a brief introduction about the Prussian academic system see “The Inherent Flaws of the Prussian Education System”, “What Has Happened to Our Great Universities?”, and “Why Are American Taxpayers Forced to Subsidize and Support the Prussian Education System?” For examples of other current problems in this system, see “Peer Review of Academic Articles: Gold Standard or Paper Money Standard?” and the articles you can access from there.)
Those who know about the Prussian education system need to speak up more, as most people do not know about it and trust it too much. Some people, like professors of history or education, have no good excuses not to know about the Prussian education system and not to seek further information and share it. Our politicians and bureaucrats who force American people through taxes to finance this system at least owe full disclosure to those people. Americans have a right to know what they are forced to finance. Financing the fraud about the USSR is bad enough in itself. However, the falsehoods about the USSR are just examples of the falsehoods this system spreads.
