For 11 Years, the Soviet Union Had No Weekends | Hacker News Reader

For 11 Years, the Soviet Union Had No Weekends

history.com

90 pointsblfr119 comments

"It was five days long, with days of rest staggered across the week. Now, the Soviet economist and politician Yuri Larin proposed, the machines need never be idle." This is actually totally sensible and was practiced in the factory where I once worked.

Totally sensible? The whole thesis of the article is its failure.

And yet find me the Walmart that's closed Sundays.

Yes. I do find we would be better off if these places were closed on Sundays. But this hardly compares to the forced labor of the USSR.

How. You are forced to work or you lose your job and your house, food, etc. Please tell me how our system was so much more moral than theirs. Where working at Walmart for 40+ hours a week still isn't enough to make rent. Where many people are working 2 or 3 jobs just to have a roof over their head and food on their table. Let me guess, you are a middle class white guy who never had to experience that, that's why you think our system is so much more moral.

You point about about the plight of the poor in any country including the US should be taken seriously. You comparison with Stalinist USSR is completely insane. Go read The Gulag Archipelago. Please.

That's not a book of scholarship. Read an actual historical account of the gulag system. Trust me, its depressing enough without literary embellishment.

And then compare it to the atrocities that established western capitalism. Fairly, I recommend.

Well for one, you have a choice of where you want to work.

If you can convince someone to hire you, the government isn't going to come in and say "actually, we need more factory workers. So you don't work there any more. You instead are working here."

I'd also like to point out that there are numerous places in the US where people are perfectly capable of living on minimum wage, working 40 hours a week.

Most homeless people are homeless not because it is impossible for someone to live off of these wages, in the right areas. They are instead homeless because they have some sort of mental or physical disability that makes them incapable of work.

The idea though, that able bodied adults are unable to provide for themselves, is ridiculous. There are numerous living conditions and places where it is cheap enough to live off of.

> Well for one, you have a choice of where you want to work.

No you don't , it's entirely dependent on your birth and the luck of the draw in what class you were born into, your opportunities etc.

> If you can convince someone to hire you, the government isn't going to come in and say "actually, we need more factory workers. So you don't work there any more. You instead are working here."

There was no forced allotment of work in the soviet union, that's a nonsense claim coming from McCarthyist myths

> I'd also like to point out that there are numerous places in the US where people are perfectly capable of living on minimum wage, working 40 hours a week.

Not without exorbitant debt or unfavourable conditions compared to those who work above the minimum wage. A society that does not require you to work, and allows a livable wage for all work is a preferable one.

> Most homeless people are homeless not because it is impossible for someone to live off of these wages, in the right areas. They are instead homeless because they have some sort of mental or physical disability that makes them incapable of work.

That's not true at all, here in Ireland for example, mostly it's because of real estate speculation and treating houses as investments rather than places were people live. Mental and physical disability should not mean you live out on the streets

> The idea though, that able bodied adults are unable to provide for themselves, is ridiculous. There are numerous living conditions and places where it is cheap enough to live off of.

I've never seen a country where most of the homeless were unemployable, and in many cases the homeless have jobs, at least here. It is absurd to argue that people should move into the rural equivalent of a ghetto , devoid of job opportunities or development, or live cold.

There are tons of places in the first world that are both cheap, and definitely not a ghetto.

Not everyone should live in the Bay area, or New York, or even downtown in some major city!

There are lots and lots of places that are even within commuting distance of a major city (that isnt SF or New York...), That are inexpensive.

The world is bigger than a couple coastal cities, and there are lots of opportunities if you are willing to expand your horizons beyond 1% of the land.

> here in Ireland for example, mostly it's because of real estate speculation and treating houses as investments rather than places were people live

Then maybe people shouldn't live in this very small percentage of the world, or expand your horizons beyond demanding that you be able to live in the most expensive parts of it?

Please tell me how our system was so much more moral than theirs.

There's this FTFA

For ordinary workers, quitting one’s job, missing a day’s work or being over 20 minutes late became criminal offenses, with mandatory prison sentences.

and then there are tens of millions of people murdered, starved, and sent to gulags by the communists.

Communism has an absolute lock on the title of the greatest moral failure in human history.

Honestly, this drives me nuts. Retail used to be a middle-class job... And now we're employing more people to work longer hours but less money per hour, so in the end the same amount of wages are paid but it's less livable for the individual employee. And for what? So we can get groceries at 10pm on a Sunday.

The same amount of product is getting sold for the same amount of wages, it's just the wages are smeared across more hours.

Germany. That is, as long as Walmart had tried to fight German labour laws.

They've since given up, so I guess it's really "Germany, in the past".

And yet they are open on Saturday. So I suspect it's more to do with the Christian religion than with preserving weekends.

Can a store in Germany choose to close on Saturday and open on Sunday?

There are lots of laws in different European countries about when businesses can open on Sundays. They typically have religious origin (aiming for all people being sober and able to go to church on Sunday) but most of those countries are not so religious now yet some of the laws remain. Perhaps it’s just inertia, or some interest in the laws staying the same (eg in the U.K. small shops can open longer hours on a Sunday), or maybe in some places the people don’t want the laws to change.

Saturday used to be a workday. It might have remained a workday for shops to make it easier for the Monday to Friday, nine to five, people to go shopping.

Shops used to close at 6:30pm, which made it difficult to do shopping after work. So being able to go shopping on Saturday was important.

Saturday is still legally considered a work day in Germany.

One of the more important places to remember this today are public parking lots with usage limits on work days: those apply on Saturdays just like on Mo-Fr.

Culture and Religion are deeply intertwined in most of the world, even if people are not particularly overtly religious, traditions and behaviours are integrated.

It's pretty hard to convince regular people how they should change their ancient ways to make investors an extra buck.

> Can a store in Germany choose to close on Saturday and open on Sunday?

https://www.gesetze-im-internet.de/arbzg/__9.html says "no work on Sundays or public holidays from 0:00 to 24:00", plus a few exceptions where the 24 hours window can be shifted by up to 6 hours (but has to remain 24 hours long).

This implies a legal work week from Monday to Saturday within which employment contracts can schedule their working hours (following more rules, eg. not more than 10 hours at a time, mandatory breaks of a certain length within those 10 hours, and at least 11 hours of rest between two days of work).

7-8 hours a day Monday to Friday is currently normal, but deviations are possible within the legal limit.

https://www.gesetze-im-internet.de/arbzg/__10.html enumerates the exceptions to the "no work on Sunday/holidays" rule. If your business doesn't fit into these exceptions (as is common for regular stores), you're not allowed to open on Sundays.

Do Jewish business fit in the list of exception? Can they open on Sunday and close on Saturday instead?

There's no mention of religion in the laws I cited.

Some digging got me https://www.verkaufsoffener-sonntag.com/ladenoeffnungszeiten..., which tells a history of shopping time in Germany (although I don't know how accurate). There are minor differences on the wiki page about the same topic (https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laden%C3%B6ffnungszeit#Geschic...)

According to that page the first laws of that kind in Germany were established in 1900 and were amended by exemptions for grocery stores - and jewish shops (to open on sunday instead of saturday).

Merchants (presumably including the jewish ones? that article doesn't tell) worked out a new scheme in 1911-1919 that introduced common closing times and the "calm sunday" to coordinate opening hours. While there were other changes in the meantime (mostly around closing hours), the Sunday provision stuck since then.

(Also note that there are separate laws for working hours and shop opening hours. The citations up-thread were about working hours, while this post refers to shop opening hours)

There was a constitutional court decision ~10 years ago as the state of Berlin (shop opening hours are a state matter) decided to relax the rules. "10 Sundays across the year, and all Sundays in December" (in the lead-time to Christmas) were supposed to be shopping days. The churches sued, and while religious aspects came up as well, the main thrust was about the social state principle (ie. "One full month with no mandated rest leads to exploitation"), and so the rules where tightened somewhat.

I guess a state could enact per-shop rules (ie that a shop could decide to open up to 6 days a week as to their choosing, and to avoid exploiting the regulation, the schedule must be held up for at least a year).

As Berlin seems to be the hub of Jewish life in Germany, that looks like a good place to lobby for that, but that would also require some changes to §9 / §10 ArbzG as linked upthread as an open shop on sunday without people working there is rather useless.

Don't most factories work like that?

Not in my experience, no. There are some that do, such as the ones running chemical processes that can't be stopped and restarted. The ones that are basically assembly lines putting parts together can stop on weekends.

Well the most interesting part is that the preferences of workers are reflected in salaries in a free market economy. So its usually more expensive to have night shifts and more expensive to have workers work on the weekends because these are less desirable working times.

In civilized countries it's legally mandated to pay more for nights and weekends.

It's not mandated in the US.

I know...

When it is some factories and some workplaces it is ok. When you try to adopt it nationwide it breaks down.

Like in hospitality, hotels are not going to stop cleaning rooms on weekends. You are not going to close restaurants on weekends. So quite some people in services also have random days in week off.

Not only that, many factories are 24/7. So not only do workers have their weekends scattered throughout the week, but they have their shifts scattered throughout the day/night. The same for certain retail.

But many do not do this, as well. It all depends on what the production target of the factory is and how much throughput the supply chain has. I think those factors tend to determine this much more than worker satisfaction.

In my personal experience, I worked at a factory that would typically run two shifts, so 16-20 hours a day in production (variable), and the third shift overnight for maintenance/cleanup, 7 days a week. But if the prices were high enough for the product at the time and the supply was in place, it would run as close to 24/7 in production as possible.

It is sensible, on the face of it. It just doesn't appear to scale.

Once you and your partner are both on shifts, any semblance of a weekend is gone. I worked 3-on 2-off for a long time, it was fantastic. Then once I got a live-in partner, on a regular 9-5, I was unavailable for 40% of her weekends. That was a stretch.

Add in kids, and it'll get even messier. If mom's day off is Tuesday, dad's day off is Thursday, and the kids have the weekend off?

It works for the factory, but the more of the same family you put on opposing shifts, the messier it gets.

Scheduling is hard but in a factory you have a wider range of workers in different life circumstances, add small factor to the pay on unpopular days and it could work. Here in Germany hairdressers are closed on Mondays because they are open on Saturdays. If we can finally move on to the four-workday-week we can also think about rescheduling work more flexible with the help of computers.

I'm unconvinced a prescribed two day set of days off is really the right way to balance work and leisure.

People end up focusing on milestones like TGiF or humpday, working for the weekend, etc.

As automation and globalism and remote work become more pervasive across industries, I hope to see more flexibility here rather than less. Culturally it would be unacceptable to take a random three day weekend and work 6 the next, but I think the benefit to mental health and productivity would be measurable. The always available culture in tech is a mess.

You are thinking pretty narrowly. Why not take a 3 day weekend to start the year and then do it again the next 51 weeks?

I prefer a four day working week where you don't put the extra day on friday: a thee day weekend does not help your routine. Wednesday is the best for balance and recovery.

Problem of this is that you generally need to work with other people and most productive way is to work at same hours.

That definitively depends on the role you’re in. I often find my most productive hours are those when others are not pinging my by Slack, email, Skype, phone. I absolutely must have overlap time with others to keep things moving forward, but I find reducing overlap time is actually better.

Absolutely. But often not every day. And more often not in the same physical place.

Thing is what is flexibility to one are highly insecure working conditions to another.

In Soviet Russia there were perhaps additional goals for this idea (religion, less integrated familial units, divide and conquer).

But I wonder if a more enlightened society that doesn't have those additional goals could make this work. Perhaps some of the obvious problems can be addressed, or at least ameliorated:

- Shifts could be sharded across families rather than individuals. Individuals seems needlessly granular and disruptive.

- The number of shards could be reduced. With 5 shards, 4/5 potential friends don't share your weekend. But maybe we could have only 2 or 3 shards.

- A single day (e.g. Sunday) could remain a society-wide day of rest.

I think a proposal that included some of the above characteristics along with a shortening of the standard work week (to 35 or 32 hours, perhaps) might be interesting.

I suppose we already have a bottom-up version of this with shift work, but probably there is some small benefit to aligning shifts in a top-down way (i.e. it reduces shards which should increase happiness).

So how many years has it been for the US?

Exactly!

US-style capitalism is at least as bad as the system described in the article. People living to work rather than working to live. :-/

At least as bad? I'd recommend you use your weekend to read up on Stalinist Russia.

Written by who? As far as the USSR doesn't exist anymore, it's not like people who never lived there, like me, can form an objective opinion about it.

The USSR collapsed less than 30 years ago finding people who lived during it on both sides isn’t hard neither it’s hard to find books on the subject from both sides of the iron curtain.

It depends a lot on where you live. I've yet to meet anyone from the former Eastern block who was an adult by the time it collapsed. About books, that's the problem, they're all biased in one way or another. Some will depict East Germany as a police state living hell, while others describe it as a paradise as long as you didn't get involved in certain things. It's difficult to figure out what was it all about.

> About books, that's the problem, they're all biased in one way or another.

This is no excuse for not becoming more educated on the subject if you are ignorant. Every source is full of bias. That's why reading more than one book on the same subject is a worthwhile endeavor, because even a supposedly objective history is full of some editorializing of the events. The trick is to recognize when the author is editorializing and when they are presenting the events as they happened, and to take the editorializing as the author's point of view and the events as factual unless proven otherwise.

Disagreeing with someone's opinion about something does not require you to disagree with their presentation of the facts.

Bias isn’t an issue everything has bias in it but in your case it wouldn’t be really hard to figure it out, East Germany was objectively a police state while it might not have been as bad as worst case for everyone it was never a paradise.

There is a difference between editorializing and fabricating complete nonsense and unless you are looking for facts to reenforce your own bias it’s not hard to distinguish between them.

Loads of people today who lived under Soviet rule want to return to soviets rule. Capitalism destroyed Eastern Europe. It's horrible over there right now.

Really? I'm living in Russia right now and can purchase an Advacodo from just about any grocery store.

If we're going to compare apples to apples (or really avocado to avocado), the US couldn't consistently put avocados on grocery store shelves outside of California until the late 1980s either. There were trade restrictions with Mexico, and California didn't yet have the capacity for much beyond local sales.

Not sure why you're being downvoted...

http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2017/06/29/in-russia-no...

Because statistics are meaningless nearly no one surveyed actually lived under Stalin or spent time in the gulag.

Russian propaganda has been working on “restoring” the image of Stalin and the USSR diligently for over two decades heck just a few days ago they’ve arrested a Russian historian who authored a book on Stalin for being unpatriotic.

https://historynewsnetwork.org/article/170146

https://www.rferl.org/a/second-historian-of-stalin-s-crimes-...

I mean, the statistics lean significantly towards those who were adults during the USSR.

It's hilarious that you literally link to radio free europe. "Statistics are meaningless" lolz

Statistics which are built on a state fabricated lie are meaningless when you objectively try to understand the history of the USSR the only thing that is meaningful is is just how bad the transition period is remembered and how well the current propaganda machine works.

It’s also interesting to see just what is driving it, countries like Estonia and Lithuania are EU countries which greatly benefited from integration with western society while the rest of the Russian vassal states were left to fend for themselves and essentially lost what little power they had even if it was only power by proxy.

Except, once again, the statistics say that the people who were alive tend to have the most favorable opinion. If it was just some conspiracy were everything was made up, you'd expect the opposite.

Stalin died in 1953 how many of the people surveyed were alive during that time to have a favorite view of him especially in comparison to reformers like Gorbachev vs how many of them are utterly brainwashed by the current Russian propaganda machine?

An easy answer would be too look at the numbers for the former USSR states which are now EU members.

Furthermore it's important to note that this is an aggregated statistical butchery from multiple surveys in none of which was a question asked along the lines of "would you rather live under the USSR or being free".

All of these were peripheral questions about various nationalistic identities and historical figures, all of which were heavily retconned in the past few decades by Russia.

Stalin used to be one of the most despised figures in Russian history even during the USSR today he is celebrated as a hero that is simply sickening.

That's false. He was arrested on pedophilia charges.[1][2] I don't understand how that's "unpatriotic".

1. https://www.newsweek.com/men-uncovering-stalin-era-atrocitie...

2. https://themoscowtimes.com/news/gulag-historian-detained-ped....

Are you serious? Go read The Gulag Archipelago.

Go read an actual scholarly look at the soviet prison and forced labour system, rather than essentially fiction.

It's not like the purges or the genocide of the Kulaks or the labor camps are heavily disputed subjects that may not have happened.

Kulak isn't a ethnic group, so there can't be a "genocide of the Kulaks". The definition of Kulak were the landowners who wouldn't collectivize. And yeah, a bunch of them were executed doing shit like lighting grain on fire during a famine out of spite for the government.

Alright, what is the word for systematically killing a large group of people grouped by something other than ethnicity?

Death penalty? At least that's what they call it in the USA.

Or, for doing absolutely nothing. It didn't even matter if they actually were "rich" or not.

Well, you could read the stuff that was written by the people who actually lived through it.

Many people who grew up in the Soviet Union, are still alive today. There are even a couple in this very thread, and apparently they know very much how horrible it was.

Yes, I could read that kind of stuff, but I would also find opinions of people who also grew up in the SU and miss it. In fact, I've recently read about polls where 60% of the russians regret the end of the USSR. So, I think this is not something black or white. You had to actually live there, not just watch it through television.

There very much are people who miss the USSR. Some are paid for it. Some honestly miss it because... well, I don't want to go into analyzing national mentality here, but there's a Russian saying that goes "if they are afraid of us, it means that they respect us". And people certainly were afraid of USSR.

This perceived loss of respect drives a lot of nostalgia for the USSR.

I lived in the Soviet Union. And you have no idea what it is to live under the totalitarian regime, that is poor and oppressive. You have no idea! Your words above is an empty brainless rhetoric.

If you really think the stalinist USSR was any worse than modern capitalism I'd highly like to you to look at the plight of third world countries and the post colonial ties that have caused famine,war and chaos in many of them for over 100 years. Western capitalism is built off the abominable conditions it creates, at least the USSR had a measurable improvement and a move away from the horror of the 30s in the 50s.

And why pretty much every Soviet citizen would have killed for a business trip (leisure trips very pretty much impossible) to even the poorest third-world country?

But retirement started at 55 for women and 60 for men. Russia changed that just recently.

It has something to do with the fact that few people live that long.

There are lots of companies where this is done today. I worked in a casino and it was 4 on and 3 off with everyone having different days off.

As real estate prices go up and up how long before white collar businesses try working in shifts so they can have offices that are half as big with people sharing desks?

Some already do. Mainly consulting though. Most employees there are at customer offices anyway.

Soviet leaders had no choice. In 1920 the country was destroyed by civil war. Industry was absent. The people were starving. Society was split. Nobody has experience living without a Tsar. Nations within the country did not like each other. Fascism was arising in Europe, militarism in Asia. Everyone knew that time was short. The Soviet Union had to create powerful industry or be destroyed (and the apocalypse came very soon - in 1941). People did what they should and did not pay attention to stupidity, cruelty and injustice. All of this was secondary problem. Sovet Union managed to force Hitler to get stuck and retreat before Normandy landings. If it could not, Hitler would receive all resources of Russia and then the apocalypse would come to Great Britain and the USA...

Just the reminder - Soviet Union entered WW2 on _Hitler's_ side.

So, they were preparing for war - but for the offensive one.

This is a myth based on a misconception about Russians. Stalin and USSR is not same. Hitler was not a friend. Fascism terrified all Russian people. Stalin dreaded Hitler and showed friendship in order to gain time. Hitler attacked Poland and it has no chances. The USSR just return the part of Belarus. Later, the Russians entered Europe as liberators from fascism, but they would never enter as conquerors. And, yes, later this liberation turn to ocupation for same reasons: if USSR was not strong it would have been isolated and destroed. And the Russians themselves stop all this and left Europe when they finally realized that communism will never work. Maybe the Russians are not the most pleasant people, but they didn’t do what the Germans did and communism is not fascism.

It was similar in Romania, but it lasted until 1989. The workweek was 6 days long. My parents dealt with it until the revolution. It’s funny how socialism was worse for the average worker in that way.

Is that socialism though? It did begin that way but sticking a label on a savage dictatorship doesn’t make it true.

"Dictatorship of the proletariat" necessarily collapses into plain dictatorship almost immediately, because there's no room for pluralism and dissenting factions. That's the problem with all the Leninist/Trotskyite/Maoist inheritors of Marxism. It was also the key difference between the social-democrat states of Europe west of the Berlin wall and the Communist states east of it.

No it doesn't , DotP necessarily means factionalism and such, democratic centralism simply necessitates an agreement to be abided to by all constituents of said group

Since this account has been using HN primarily for ideological battle, we've banned it. That's not allowed here, because it destroys the intellectual curiosity this site exists for. If you don't want to be banned, you're welcome to email hn@ycombinator.com and give us reason to believe that you'll follow the rules in the future.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Much more explanation if anyone wants it:

https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme...

Ceaucescu's hated austerity was because it was attempting to pay off the national debt to western countries.

There are plenty of other notionally capitalist countries that have suffered bitterly under a similar kind of debt yoke (e.g. Greece).

Because it wasn't socialism. It was a centrally planned capitalist economy. There were still commodity production, accumulation of value and a State that regulates value. The only way in which USSR and the Eastern Block was socialist is the way they called themselves. If they called themselves aliens, it would make about the same sense. Even Lenin called the system "State Capitalism" in his works. Socialism in the classic Marxist sense -- which is the exact same thing as communism, communism/socialism divide nonsense comes from Stalin and makes no sense -- is the society after capitalist economy collapses, and the natural force that makes capitalism possible is value generation. It's simply by-definition not possible to talk about socialism in a society that still has value (money), the division of labor (job), class (worker vs employer) and state (a body that regulates trade which is integral to capitalism). Marxism is above all materialism and ideologies like Marxism-Leninism is the most anti-Marxist thing imaginable.

It is not research but very fundamental lie. Author to proove what "Soviet Union had no weekends" give us the weekends plan. Well done.

Worst of all the author does not explaining WHY weekends was limited in 193x, but this is most interesting. From point of view author and "experts with the same opinion" it was cancelled because it's failed. I bet it was cancelled because it did the trick.

Here a Red pill for you:

After 3 revolutions and 2 civilic wars, loosed WWI in begining of 20 centure Russia was in degrade state. People realized what conflict of WWI is not ended and it is means war will be repeated. "We are in 50–100 years behind the advanced countries. We must run this distance in ten years. Either we do it, or they crush us.", said Stalin in 1931.

So walking whole country on weekends to churche may be good, but when somebody want's to kill people of you country in the middle of 20 centure you need aircrafts and tanks. To produce that you need fuel, technology, machine tools and people working hard.

So what was the result of "had no weekends" for 10 years? Soviet Union with allies wins the WWII.

I can't believe author and "experts" don't know that. I belive they just prefers ignore that. But WHY?

You do realize that all the production necessary to win the war was done by countries that did have weekends.

I missed.. Do you mean what 100k tanks, 150K aircrafts and alot other stuff produced in Soviet Union does not help to win the war or you mean SU has weekends too?

Mostly that it pales ion comparison with what US Military-Industrial Complex had produced, and that a lot of it would not have been produced in the first place without massive supplies from US (and to lesser degree UK).

> It’s quite possible, argues Eviatar Zerubavel [...] that the calendar reform tied into a traditional Marxist aversion toward the family.

Oh, right. This is from history.com, known from the Aliens-meme, so I shouldn't expect they asked someone who would actually know about the background...

This article paints an entirely bad picture of Soviet Russia working conditions without going into the improvements they made over time. Working hours were not all that much different than modern USA, however they seemingly had better benefits.

https://nintil.com/2016/04/03/the-soviet-union-working-hours...

>Then, in 1961-1967, they switched to 5 days per week, 8 hours per day, which finally gave the Soviets a real weekend, like those in the West.

>In 1987, the maximum number of hours was limited to 40 per week, with more in some sectors (agriculture, construction, transport), and less in others (education, art and culture, or coal mining)

>Soviets had 15 minimum days of paid holidays per week by then and 75% of workers had more than that. Workers younger than 18 were entitled to twice that. Working mothers with more than two children and less than 28 days of holidays per year, had three more days of holidays. Additionally, women had partial paid leave for infant care (<1 year), and they could take additional unpaid leave (<18 months)

Don't forget the long, free vacations to Siberia for saying something bad about the government near your neighbor.

Or politically caused famine

Oh, you mean the government aided weight loss program.

Or politically caused sterilization programs. The blame game could take another few rounds.

Or you can become a homeless, unemployment person and have 365 days of vacation per year. Imagine that.... Err, sorry in Soviet Union you were not allowed to do that, these commies had to ruin the last bastion of human freedom! No worries, in the USA they still have it. I heard plenty of families take up on the opportunity.

You’re not wrong, homelessness was illegal in the Soviet Union and not in the “we will not rest until everyone has a roof over their heads” kind of way, rather more like “you better be staying at your registered address (raspiska) OR ELSE!” That’s one way to solve homelessness.

I think you mean propiska (прописка)

Absurd.

1st. After revolutions and civilic wars in 1922 Soviet union got 4-7 millions homeless childs. How did these children survive? Without education and socialization childs can't even communicate normally. They stole and even killed for money. They represented a virus epidemiological risk. So Soviets resolve the problem very hard to gave roof and education for that childs and in 1924 they got "only" 280 000 homeless childs. Without mass shootings for nothing. It's very fan sometimes imagine what in the heads of the people thinking Stalink kills every second in Soviet country. If so who building cities, working on farms and factories, who was fought and win WWII? Oh.. Try to read less of propaganda.

2nd. Since that childs was illiterate and all time moving searching for food and money nobody can't register them in City Hall. The register process have name "propiska" in mean fixate persone leaving address. Not "raspiska". Raspiska is just mean confirmation document writed and signed by you.

You'll be wondered but today in capitalistic Russia got "propiska" too. As the Spain for example.

But earlier "propiska" in Soviets was used to prevent mass moving people from one region to another. It's true. But you must take this true in context of the time and events. It was really hard times.

No one is saying that the US is perfect, it has a huge number of problems, some of them very severe. But that doesn't detract from how incredibly awful the government of the USSR was for many years, especially under Stalin, and it's an enormous mistake to look back on it with nostalgia as some people who feel like capitalism is a bad system seem to be doing.

Don't forget about the endemic racism and genocide that has existed in America since it's founding, and still exists to a lesser extent now.

I know this has already been down voted, but I want to point out that this exact dialog was invented by the soviet union to distract from their abysmal human rights records[1]. Moreover, it doesn't even make sense as a deflection given that the Soviet Union had institutional racism at a very high level, ranging from antisemitism [2] to ethnic cleansing[3] to outright genocide[3]. America is certainly guilty of racism, and we should discuss these issues. However, it should not be used as a weapon to defend evil regimes.

[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/And_you_are_lynching_Negroes

[2]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stalin_and_antisemitism

[3]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Racism_in_the_Soviet_Union#Kor...

[4]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holodomor

It still happened in the USA and I don't think the above comment was defending either side. The USA is just as evil and always has been.

I would like 15 days of paid holiday a week.

Me too! I think it's an error :)

The quality of those benefits (if you could even claim them) was rather lacking, though.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com