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Comment by msikora | Hacker News Reader

Casual embezzling on all levels of society was extremely common in communist Czechoslovakia (and probably other Eastern Bloc countries). For example construction workers might steal material from their job site to build their own house (often during work hours as well). There was even a popular adage normalizing this behaviour: "One who doesn't steal steals from his own family".

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Years ago I recall a guy in Russia who documented over several years the continuous announcement of a given local road being improved. Every year trucks, supplies and such would show up at the appointed time, local news would show up with a local authorities and they'd point at things and film. Then the next day everything was just left in place, no workers, eventually each night the construction equipment would slowly vanish, and finally other trucks would come and slowly collect the supplies. Then next year same thing again, same spot, they'd dig up the same ground for TV, wash rinse, repeat.

This is why punishment for any non-trivial corruption by officials should be a life sentence. So they would know, if they are caught, it will be maximum possible penalty. Because, unlike usual theft, embezzlement affects lives of many people.

Good thing all my enemies are corrupt.

How would that work in Russia?

There's no independent judiciary, those in power are not going to jail ...

Stealing from work in the USSR was so normalized that people just referred to at as "carrying out". Workers sometimes picked careers based more on how much they could steal than on the nominal salary. An engineer had a higher monthly salary than a waiter, but a waiter could effectively earn more than the engineer by stealing food.

https://youtu.be/Jz4lD76nbds?si=iUXoDEAZI8SMJ8z4

Not to totally discount embezzlement, but I think people underestimate just how poor these countries were after world war 2.

Usually people are talking about the 60s-80s when sharing these stories since that’s what grandparent/parent generations remember. USSR did experience significant growth at least at the beginning of this period and most of that theft/embezzlement was certainly committed to later sell/exchange those goods for profit (e.g. working at coffee shops was were lucrative since you could just reuse the same ground coffee for 5+ cups and steal the rest).

If you own the means of production, is it really “stealing” though? /s

That's very much how it was justified. There was a saying in USSR:

"Tащи с работы каждый гвоздь - ты здесь хозяин, а не гость."

translating to:

"Grab every nail from work - you're the master here, not a guest."

essentially parroting the Soviet cliches about how proletariat was in charge etc.

You see a similar phenomenon with propensity for litigation and pushing to limits of the letter of the law in the US. "everyone"'s doing it, which leads to people feeling like they have a right to and like they're missing out if they don't. But in the end most people lose out overall.

In USSR similar adage was: “No matter how much you steal from the State, you can’t get even.” (Сколько у государства не воруй — все равно своего не вернёшь.)

This was a case in Poland as well. And the reason was simple: communist countries were in a constant supply crisis. Even when you had money you couldn't just go and buy material to build your own house, you had to steal it, otherwise you'd never get your house built. That's why all those great construction projects of communism like factories, power plants, etc. were so expensive: half of the material never made it to a site, being stolen along the way.

Or as I like to say: Eastern bloc communism was often so bad that it makes Objectivism look like a reasonable philosophy.

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