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Consumer goods were consistently under-produced, with higher priority being given to other sections of industry. Combined with a portion of the final production potentially being siphoned off before hitting stores, you end up with far fewer goods than you need to meet demand. Quality was a combination of poor materials and poor organizational practices which encouraged quantity over quality and/or only really cared how many units were produced at the end of the month. This resulted in things like "storming," where the first part of the month workers would be recovering from the previous rush, spend the middle portion producing goods at a casual pace, and spend the last week busting out unit after unit of sub-standard goods to meet the quota. Compounding this was the fact that Soviet factories were far from consistent, so you do not only have variation with factories, but across the entire industry as well! That, of course, is for consumer goods that people wanted and the government acknowledged there would be a demand for. There's no real way to handle (as Disinterested notes) demand for consumer goods that comes suddenly, or to handle sudden shifts in taste. The Soviet Union therefore not only suffered from not having enough goods produced (due to the aforementioned priority being given over to other industries) but also from consumer goods lagging behind Western countries (since you have to go through the whole planning process before, say, televisions can hit the market) and not always being the most consumer friendly products. One of the things that is most interesting to me about the Soviet Union is that there was a lot of genuine belief in the system and the state during the Soviet Union's early years, during the first few Five Year Plans. Yes, there were plenty of people that suffered from it or who hated it - and I will make no apologies for the cost in human life - but you also get Soviet citizens willingly putting up with some of the shittiest conditions around when constructing a factory, or accepting that there are not enough coats to go around, sucks but we have to make sacrifices. The state put out genuine efforts to improve the lot of citizens as well, trying to ensure that workers had access to education and healthcare. It was often scattershot, but people accepted that things would be poo poo for awhile until everything is up and running. Then that largely goes away as the years progress slowly into and more completely into Stalinist terror. You see the same cycle during the Great Patriotic War and immediately after.
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Dec 21, 2014 20:38
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| # ¿ May 11, 2024 17:23 |
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