Time Frame

• The Soviet Union was a state established by the Bolsheviks following the Russian Revolution of 1917 and the Russian Civil War of 1918-1921. It was formally established in December 1922 and continued until December 1991.
  
  

Size

• A key issue in considering the living conditions under the Soviet regime is the Soviet economy. At the time of its dissolution, the Soviet Union was the world's second largest economy. However, it's gross domestic product, or GDP, the aggregate of its economic activity, trailed far behind that of the United States despite having a larger population. In 1989, the per capita income of a Soviet citizen was $9,211; that of an American was $21,082.
  
  

Features

• The Soviet Union had a centrally planned economy and tightly controlled civil society, governed under Marxist-Leninist principles established by the Communist Party and enforced by the police and secret police, known as the KGB for most of its existence.
  Technically speaking, the Soviet system should have produced a near-utopia. Housing, food, health care and a job were all guaranteed rights under the Soviet constitution. In practice, despite its vast natural resources, the Soviet economy could never deliver on any of these guarantees, excepting that of near full employment. The latter was only achieved through a great deal of wastage. Consumer goods, food, and public services were limited by their supply, and the access individuals had to them as granted by the party. Ranking Communists, military officers, and members of the intellectual elite. such as professors, doctors, scientists were granted access to special stores, hospitals, and other services in a form of rationing that guaranteed better living standards for a selected few comprising what could be called the Soviet middle and upper classes. Socially, all civic group were required to be part of the Communist Party. Therefore organizations like the Boy Scouts, labor unions and even social clubs for interests like bird watching and chess had to be registered with and function as part of the Communist Party. The Soviet Union was an atheist state and banned religion. In the early period, persecution of religious believers and clergy was quite severe. In the later Soviet Union, religious activity was tolerated so long as it was kept small enough to be willfully ignored by the state.
  Speech and communication were controlled. In Leninist and Stalinist times, saying anti-government things could get you arrested and shipped to the gulag, but in later years it took a lot more to make the government punish Soviet citizens. However, the arts were required to support state ideology, and generally speaking anything that was not pro-Soviet and ideologically sound was either banned or simply not funded.
  Another feature of the Soviet system was the extremely high military budget. Although estimates vary and the exact numbers will never be known, it typically ranged between 12-18 percent of Soviet GDP in the post-WWII years. The American defense budget surged to an equal level during the Korean War years, but dropped to below 10 percent after that, and excepting some of the Vietnam War years, it has rarely exceeded 5 percent. That left a smaller proportion of a smaller economy for consumption in a substantially larger population.
  
  

History of

• When the Soviet Union was established, it was on the ruins of the Russian tsarist state. Tsarist Russia was a vast, populous country, with a largely rural economy and infrastructure, and this was in shambles as a result of the First World War and subsequent Civil War. The establishment of a Communist economy led to a focus on the forced, rapid industrialization and urbanization of the country. Part of this program meant forcing the rural peasant farmers into state collectives, and expropriating their agricultural products for export to generate the capital needed to pay for the state-directed industrialization. The combination of disruption, expropriation of foodstuffs and sheer indifference from the Communist regime led to the death of millions through starvation and murder. Consumer goods were in short supply, as most of the nation's wealth was focused on industrialization projects. Good meat was never a staple, and getting a car, apartment, or household appliance could mean been on a waiting list for up to several years.
  Concurrent with this early stage was a lengthy period of state terror directed by the Soviet government against its own people. Under Vladimir Lenin, this was directed mostly against state enemies Later, under Josef Stalin, state terror reached paranoid dimensions and was directed against everyone. Average people lived in fear, secret informers were seemingly everywhere, and anyone could be seized at any time and sent off to a state prison camp to work slave labor on a state project.
  Starting in the 1950s and after the death of Stalin, both social and living conditions saw improvement, though Soviet society was never free and living standards never caught up with the West.
  
  

Evolution

• Centrally-planned economics had its benefits, because it is very good at expansive growth, or the creation of new farms, mines, dams, factories, and other units of production. In absolute terms, living standards in the Soviet Union climbed rapidly in the 1950s and 1960s. It is guessed that the Soviet Union reached its peak performance relative to the West in the early 1970s, when its GDP was roughly two-thirds the size of the United States'.
  
  

Risk Factors

• The problem with centrally planned economics is that it is very bad at intensive growth. Plowing up a new farm field is expansive growth, but making that field more productive is intensive. The Soviets were terrible at efficiency and getting more out of what they already had. Another problem was that by the 1970s the economy had grown far too complex for central planning to even remotely cope with it. Finally, malaise had firmly taken root among the Soviet people, resulting in lax conditions, shoddy standards and general disinterest in doing real work for real results.
  
  

Misconceptions

• While the failures of the Soviet economy were manifest, and the living standards of the average Soviet citizen lagged far behind those of the average citizen of a Western state, it did have its successes. Hunger and outright homelessness were virtually unknown in Soviet times. While gaining access to specialized health care services was often difficult and required long waits if received at all, basic preventive health services were available and free. Finally, the Soviet education system was free, provided continuing education support and produced a highly educated and skilled populace. People lived and worked under this system, and while they may not have had freedoms and luxuries similars to those in the West, they might still have often been as happy as anyone.