Mending the Human Motor 35or competitions.^62 Nonmaterial rewards were also important, and these were
rationed to reward high productivity and compliant behavior. At Moscow’s
Elektrozavod, for example, workers received as salary only one-ninth of what
they “earned”; the rest came through the social fund: housing, culture, educa-
tion, medicine, insurance, and vacations.^63 The new material culture of the
1930s created “islands of abundance” to signal to all Soviet citizens a coming
world of socialist plenty. Not all could expect to receive such benefi ts immedi-
ately, but workers had become accustomed to the logic of rationing, and they
received the rare and occasional material bonus with gratitude. In this “gift
economy,” all rewards increased the recipients’ dependence on and gratitude
to the state.^64 Similar to the wage bargain, though, these gifts were seen by
their recipients as reciprocal. Like Alexei Karenin, Soviet workers promised to
justify their vacations with increased Stakhanovite energy upon their return.^65
The Soviet state implemented a hierarchy of consumption as a way to ration
scarce commodities and services and to reward the most essential contributors
to the state project. These offi cial inequalities existed in all areas of economic
life and were widely understood, if not always accepted. Other reasons for
workers’ underrepresentation at health resorts included the high cost (in time
and money) of transportation: a Moscow factory worker who received a two-
week putevka to Sochi would spend six of those days on the road: “They no
sooner get to Sochi than they have to leave.” Factory workers’ two-week an-
nual leave made it diffi cult to utilize a putevka for the standard forty-fi ve-day
cure in a health spa unless they received additional sick leave from their insur-
ance funds. Less palatable to the regime were examples of the manipulation of
the system by those with inside access to such goods. Employees traveling to
southern spas with a red or green worker’s putevka not only received a coveted
space but paid the worker rate for the privilege: no wonder insiders used their
positions to send themselves and their relatives instead of genuine workers
and then maintained “there were no workers” to send. A woman printer, Mat-
veeva, at Moscow’s First Model print shop wrote to her local shop newspaper
that she had waited three years for a putevka: she had become ill in 1930,
and in 1932 the local spa selection commission approved her treatment at the
Caucasian Mineral Waters. But for three years, her factory committee could not
fi nd a putevka for her. “I am ‘treated’ with promises.... [The factory commit-
tee chairman] said, ‘Let them give me fi ve hundred rubles, and I will buy you
a putevka.’ ”^66 Ordinary channels favored those with connections or money.
- See Diane P. Koenker, Republic of Labor: Russian Printers and Soviet Socialism,
1918–1930 (Ithaca, NY, 2005), chaps. 4 and 7; Siegelbaum, Stakhanovism ; Andrei Markevich
and Andrei Sokolov , “Magnitka bliz Sadovogo Kol'tsa”: Stimuly k rabote na Moskovskom
zavode “Serp i molot,” 1883–2001 gg. (Moscow, 2005). - Zhuravlev and Mukhin, “ Krepost' sotsializma,” 62–63.
- Jeffrey Brooks, Thank You, Comrade Stalin! Soviet Public Culture from Revolution to
Cold War (Princeton, NJ, 2000), 83–84; Gronow, Caviar with Champagne , 148. - Martenovka , 30 June 1940, but there are many, many examples.
- “They no sooner get to Sochi,” GARF, f. 5528, op. 4, d. 132, l. 8; d. 131, l. 80; GARF,
f. 9493, op. 1, d. 2, l. 86; “I am ‘treated,’ ” Pravda poligrafi sta , 4 June 1935.