Hacker News Reader

Comment by uwagar | Hacker News Reader

perhaps if the artist is cozy with the regime they cant be critical of the regime?

can parents support their child that is an artist with their income? or the state knows everything about the artist (her age, fit to work so on) and will compulsorily draft them to work?

View on HN

It was illegal not to work in the Soviet Union. There was even a name for such people who weren't officially employed - "tuneyadets".

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parasitism_(social_offense)

Young people were assigned jobs on finishing schooling. There was not much "looking for a job". Unless you had the right contacts, the closest thing to deciding where to work at was to pick a higher education - if you picked automotive engineering, you'd end up in a different place than if you picked medicine or something.

>> young people were assigned jobs on finishing schooling

Could you provide evidence for this?

"Job by distribution" was no secret and it is a well-known thing among people from post-soviet countries. Graduates were obliged to work at assigned place, usually for three years.

It's hard to find English source. You could try machine translation of this wikipedia page [1] - but that says it was mandatory only in 1951 to 1959 and then it was changed to a recommendation.

I know my uncle was supposed to go to one company but then that didn't work our for some reason and he had to look for a job himself, which was supposed to be rare. That would be early 1980s.

[1]: https://cs.wikipedia.org/wiki/Um%C3%ADst%C4%9Bnka

Reply on news.ycombinator.com