There are many attractive stories about the USSR as if everyone could make a career by dramatically changing their social status, the state provided free housing, and everything was very affordable. But were people really so well off in the Union? The answer was given by Maksym Mirovych, a blogger and researcher of Soviet-era life. He compared the salaries of Soviet workers with the prices and availability of goods on store shelves.
He concluded that the "middle class" in the USSR did not exist, and the vast majority of the population lived on the brink of poverty. And this is how it was. How much people earned in the USSR To understand the degree of Soviet poverty, we first need to determine how much money people in the USSR received.
So, the average salary was about 120-130 rubles. At the same time, there were positions where you could get 350-400 or even 500-700 rubles. These were the salaries of bosses and officials.
For example, a minister's salary was 800 rubles. But some earned no more than 80-90 rubles. Of course, there were many more.
At the same time, the minimum wage in the USSR was 70 rubles, which was the amount of money that unskilled workers, such as janitors, received. Mirovych chose 120 rubles per month as the average amount. This was the amount of money that average engineers, doctors, teachers, and civil servants-that is, the majority of the urban population in the 1970s and 1980s.
What you could buy with your salary What was this level of income enough for.