My other videos about stealing from work in the USSR: ua-cam.com/video/P6H384QTpMI/v-deo.html ua-cam.com/video/XH0p3bSYpR4/v-deo.html A short Soviet movie dedicated to the topic in this video: ua-cam.com/video/Zpye0I0_9bw/v-deo.html Thank you for watching Ushanka Show! My name is Sergei. I was born in the USSR in 1971. Since 1999 I have lived in the USA. Ushanka Show channel was created to share stories as well as my own memories of everyday life in the USSR. My book about arriving to America in 1995 is available on Amazon: www.amazon.com/s?i=stripbooks&rh=p_27%3ASergei+Sputnikoff&s=relevancerank&text=Sergei+Sputnikoff&ref=dp_byline_sr_book_1 You can support this project here: www.patreon.com/sputnikoff with monthly donations Support for this channel via PAYPAL: paypal.me/ushankashow Ushanka Show merchandise: teespring.com/stores/ushanka-show-shop If you are curious to try some of the Soviet-era candy and other foodstuffs, please use the link below. www.russiantable.com/imported-russian-chocolate-mishka-kosolapy__146-14.html?tracking=5a6933a9095f9 My FB: facebook.com/sergey.sputnikoff Twitter: twitter.com/ushankashow Instagram: instagram.com/ushanka_show/ Reddit: www.reddit.com/r/The_Ushanka_Show/
I heard from a Romanian it was about 90% of people who did it. VERY GLAD and grateful you aren't trying to pretend like these pro-communists do and try to get the REAL answer not the polished turd answer...
There was a soviet sketch. The head of kolkhoz saw one of the workers carry something away in a wheelbarrow, every night. Once he told the worker to show what was in there. But there was only trash in the wheelbarrow. Finally the head of kolkhoz got fed up and confronted the worker. "Tell me, Ivan, what are you stealing? I will not give you up, just tell me what are you taking." The worker replied: "I am stealing wheelbarrows."
There is a local version of this joke/story. Every Friday a certain worker would be seen going out the gate with a wheelbarrow. The security guard on the gate would check, but all he had in it was his workboots, his dirty overalls, taking them home to wash, his thermos drink flask and his lunchbox. Some Fridays the wheelbarrow was full of sawdust (a waste product from the Wood workshop, which staff were allowed to take home for their fires, or for garden compost). The security guard was suspicious and felt all through the sawdust with his hand. Nope, nothing in there. Nothing but sawdust. This continued for YEARS. Eventually both the worker and the security guard had grown old and retired. One day bumping into each other at the local pub, they shared a drink together. "Look we're both retired from there, and we're old men now, but I always thought you were stealing SOMETHING. Level with me and tell me PLEASE". "Yeah, alright, the worker said, yeah I was stealin' wheelbarrows !"
There's an early 20th Century American proverb used by the Industrial Workers Of The World(IWW or "Wobblies") that was along that line,-"A Poor Day's Work For A Poor Day's Pay", which was a play on an old American cliche proverb, "An Honest Day's Work For An Honest Day's Pay".
@@DonaldRilea That was before the rights of workers allowed unions, and labor laws passed. In the Soviet Union, there were no rights to organize outside "company " organizations. The state and corporation were one and the same, at the same time the reds claimed to be for the workers. There were the nomenclatura, who lorded over the workers like the robber barons of the early 20th century. The communists always talk about being "nice," while at the same time, they've got The Plan to fulfill. Add to that the forced labor gulags, the deadly canals, mines, and dams to further abuse the proles. Face it; governments have a greater ability and power than businesses, and they have the guns. This attracts those hungry for power, and excuses the insane abuses, because after all, the end justifies the means. Sickos get to be the torturers and killers. The Nazis hired similar sadists. Never allow government to run rampant. This is why we have our Constitution, and it hasn't been adhered to, especially by the hated left wing donkeys. The end justifies the means, and cuts loose the dogs of greed, cruelty, and lust for power, by any means.
In the 1980s, I met a world class mountain climber, who managed to get permission to climb a peak in the USSR. He climbed with a group of Russians, and they really liked a lot of his equipment. He traded some of his gear for the only interesting item they had, which were ice climbing spikes made out of titanium tubing. At the time, consumer items manufactured from titanium were rare even in the west. He declared them when he came back through customs, and didn’t give it a second thought. Some months later, a government agency contacted him, and asked to examine the spikes. It turned out they were stolen from a Soviet shipyard, where the tubing was intended to be part of a submarine’s nuclear reactor.
here in Czech republic there was a saying "Kdo neokrádá stát okrádá rodinu" which basically means "he who does not steal from the state is stealing from his own family". So this problem was not only in the soviet union but in all of soviet block too.
I'm confused. Aren't all Soviet blocks part of the Soviet union? Wouldn't Russia, Poland, etc, etc, all each be a Soviet block, but together be the Soviet union? Like in the USA, each state is separate (has its own local laws, local leaders/politicians, etc) but together are the United States (which have federal politicians who handle foreign affairs, and interstate issues like trade between the states, but they don't set local state laws like speed limits, building regulations, etc)?
@@masstv9052 Soviet Block - Countries that were not part of the Soviet Union but were very heavily influenced by it. Each country in the Soviet block had its respective government. Ie. Czechs were ruling over Czechs, Poles over Poles and so on. All of those governments were allied and supported by the government of the Soviet Union and vice versa. Consider the Soviet Block to basicallly be an alliance of communist states in Europe. Also each country had a different level of reliance on the Soviet Union, for example us Czechs had a huge arms and car industry, because unlike Poland the country wasnt bombed into oblivion during 2nd WW and thus we were allowed to make our own weapons such as the Vz.58 Samopal, instead of being only allowed to make licensed Kalashinkovs like the Poles did. Same goes for Škoda cars. The Soviet block also wasnt unified in its approach to western culture. For example if you went into a regular shop in Czechoslovakia in 1983 you could buy yourself an "imperialist" coca cola, Tabasco , Camel ciggies and other western products whereas none of this was available in Poland at the time. It is said that out of all the Soviet Block countries the best quality of life was to be had in Yugoslavia where literally everything western was available.
@@zelosmiman5533 FYI, Poland had their own officially franchised production of imperialist coca-cola and pepsi-cola since early 1970s for the local market, so it's not like they weren't available to buy. Also stating that Poland could only produce knockoff Kalashnikows is largely incorrect, although military and car industry of Czechoslovakia was way ahead for obvious reasons that it needn't be organized from scratch.
@@guesswho6038 Indeed, Browary Warszawskie launched their bottling plant in 1972, one plant for a country of 33 milion people at the time. Coke in Poland was available in two stores, and two stores only (If you are not counting Pewex) namely Supersam on Union of Lublin square and Sezam on Marszałkowska. Just 8 years later the Polish government ran out of foreign currency and were unable to buy coke syrup from Italy anymore and thus the production stoped, which brings me to my original statement, that Coke just wasnt available in Poland in 1983 and I fully stay behind this statement.
@@zelosmiman5533 Well if you care so much about 1983 for some reason. Anyway I remember pepsi being available in a local bar in 80s' and it wasn't Warsaw
This brings to mind the story of the Soviet worker in a baby carriage factory. One day, his wife has a kid, so he starts taking parts home from work to build a baby carriage. But no matter how hard he tries, every time he attempts to assemble them into a baby carriage, he gets an AK47...
This remids me of a joke that was popular when I was a kid: The Americans get the plans of the latest soviet plane, they call their best experts to replicate the plans but after 6 months of hard work they keep ending up with a tank no matter how they try to asamble it. So they say “let’s put the Germans to build this, they are the best mecanics in the world”. The Germans come work for 1 year and after that the chef mecanic comes all nervous and frustrated to say they quit, they can’t build that, they keep ending up with a tank no matter what. In the end somebody comes with “let’s get the Romanians, they are comunists also, maybe they can do it”. Everybody laughs but after no alternative was found they say f@€k this let’s give it a try, what can we lose, at the worst we end up with another tank. So they fly in a team of Romanians. When they land the workers are all drunk and making chaos, but are sent to the hangar to work nevertheless. Before the last one enters the hangar, he turns arround and asks that they recive a crate of tuica (we’ll call it alchool) every day. 1 month into this the American general sends his second in command to check on the Romanians, when he gets to the hangar he pokes his head through the door and finds the Romanians drunken as hell, partying and the soviet plane all built. When the general finds out he comes, congratulating the workers all happy and asks when did you finish this, and is told like 3 weeks ago. Then curious he asks how they did they not end up with a tank (thinking there was a secret in the plans)? So he is told: ooo, the first time we got a tank but we filed it till it was a plane.
Man, I started getting mad about you picking on electrician, but then I realized how much copper goes "missing" at work, and I was like, yeah, makes sense.
With demand for copper to spike w/ the electrification of everything, for example an EV uses 2x to 3x more copper than ICEV, and new mines have great difficulty gaining approval, mineral resource scarcity will become more common. Prices increase as well as pilferage temptation.
I think electricians are paid too much where I'm from. When I visit job sites there's always copper everywhere. Can grab a pound of copper just checking the dumpsters and trash cans, most of it doesn't even need to be stripped. Of course I would never steal, just doing my part to recycle.
@@gorkyd7912 I used to work at a place that rented warehouse space. Some pallets were really dusty and may even been "abandonded" by the other companies. One pallet had about 100 boxes, and in each box was a 3 foot copper cable, that was as thick as a Banana. Needless to say I found out I could scrap them for $55 a piece. You can assume correctly that a few of them were removed at my bosses approval. I took about 7 of them over a few weeks time. Definitely helped out when I needed it. Almost lost my hand working for them on a faulty wood saw, got my hand snagged into a pulley and shot out around the other end of the roller, almost ripped it right off my wrist
my old department boss back when i was workin at this heat treating plant in germany was from poland & came over in the 80s. he used to say, "the difference between the communist east & capitalist west is, in the communist east, if ya need a hammer to fix things around the house, ya gotta steal one from work. in the capitalist west, if you need a hammer at work to do your job, ya gotta bring your own from home."
It doesn’t seem like it, but that is actually quite flattering to the west. The place where everybody has hammers in such abundance that they can just bring them from home.
@@andersbodin1551 To own a toothbrush or bucket of paint for yourself isn't privatization, as some guy with his personal use paint bucket isn't the private sector. To steal a television piece and fix you friend's TV with it is collectivism. And often, with privately owned business driven by profit, someone might buy an entirely new TV if the privately owned Electronics shop doesn't sell parts, and makes an effort to keep any parts shops that might ruin it's business away from town.
@Jack Obrein My brother there is no middle ground there is only our side or their side because being passive means allying with the group in power, and the bourgeoisie will never give up the means of production, it's a nice thought but the reality is that an uprising will be needed in order to liberate the working class and the rest of the masses, before capitalism collapses under the weight of its own unsustainable contradictions, both on an environmental and economic basis
Eric the Punk the only way capitalism will collapse is if people like Liz Warren and Burnie Sanders have their way. To your environmental assertions AOC has a plan to destroy the best hope for liberty the world has ever known. Communism is voluntary; you can go to Venezuela or Cuba any damn time you like...
walter kersting Lol capitalism already creates the means of its own destruction, through overproduction, outsourcing and chronic debt. Capitalism has already failed as economic system and is merely kept in a state of limbo through tax cuts, negative interest rates, and printing of new money. The situation is unsustainable, A crash is inevitable. The only question now is if the people will bailout the corporations or unite for a better future together
This habit is not limited to the Soviet Union. Every country had it to some extent. It was so easy for Soviet blue collar workers to take stuff home, because the companies books were also cooked with false inventory and production quotas. The who system was a sham.
@Jack Obrein Hard to say since theft from work was systemic starting in the 1960's to 1990's where there was no RFID. Plus in the Soviet system there were no computers that did inventory in local factories. It was all done by hand.
@@orim298s Punch card collation, like old IBM punch card data collation. Data encoded on 'paper punch card', can be 'retrieved'/read/decoded by same machine.
@@corvusduluth Not in the USSR, computers made factory's worse as the books couldn't be cooked as easy. There was a plan to computerize there economy, all the supply, transport and production could all be , that put the fear of god in the CIA an every manager from Berlin to Vladivostok So there was gap, by the 80s they had more programmers then computers.
Give examples that you can cite, on a wholesale basis as in USSR , the 1st country to enact anti-semitic laws immediately after the Bolshevik Revolution, by the way.
I grew up in the US in the 1950s and 60s. The only thing that we knew about the USSR was what we saw on TV, and in the movies. I know now that it was all just propaganda, so I find these little titbits of real life in the USSR very interesting. It has been my experience that the more you learn about other peoples cultures, the more you realize what you have in common. The differences are magnified by people who just want power.
Umm, Gerald, what do you mean it "was all propaganda"? People rightfully feared and despised the USSR in the 1950s and 60s, and this guy and his videos depicts the rotten elements of that society----------your post doesn't make any sense. Were you watching pro-USSR propaganda, and now that you see these videos you realize that was all lies?
@@JK-br1mu i think he means that the soviets were dehuminized but he later realized that we are actually all alike... And chill out bro watch how you talk to my boy. Respect
My grandfather worked in a storage warehouse. One day he asked for a raise. He was denied, because according to his boss: "he steals enough to make it up for it". The funny thing, he wasn't stealing, but he could still not get a raise, because he was expected to steal some of it. The key word is ''some of it". One of the people my family used to know indirectly worked in diary factory. One day he stole a lot of cheese and presumably other products. He stole so much of it all at once that he went directly to Riga from Lithuania to sell those products in a market. However, his boss noticed thievery quickly and went to Riga to expose him. He got fired immediately and goods seized. This experience in the Baltics shows that while stealing from work was expected in Soviet Union, a person still could not steal beyond his lot in life. The higher the ranks you go, more you could steal. However, if a factory worker would start stealing orders which factory has to ship, factory nor Soviet economy would work. Thus there was of course some unwritten rules to how much one person could steal. Same would apply even to highest ranking party members or even up to this day in China. Steal all what you can, but the project still has to be completed.
True story - my grandfather was a carpenter in a furniture factory. He wanted to make him self a chest set. So instead of working all day he kind of just made a chest board for himself and all it cost him was making the same for his supervisor. That board is a piece of art. 4 types of wood inlays, backgammon on the opposite side nice fittings. Probably took him 3-4 days each.
In the book, "Chicken Hawk," about helicopters in the Vietnam War, it documents how stolen equipment was written off. Anything that was lost in combat, could be taken off the inventory. At a major base, a battle damaged helicopter crashed as it trying to land. Officers who had equipment stolen, took it off the inventory by claiming it was destroyed in the helicopter crash. By the time the process was over, that crashed helicopter "carried" many dozens of tons of cargo.
Many years ago I worked with a colleague that came out from the districts, and he told me about the local village idiot that had got some road work of some kind, and had managed to steal some paint meant for the road, which the guy used to paint his house, and since the paint was reflective, every time a car drove by at night his whole house lighted up the whole nabour hood, it was not so popular as I understood
In America there was a similar sort of thing, at least in song. One of the most famous American musicians, Johnny Cash, made a comedic song called “One piece at a time” about a poor American worker who would “nesuni” out parts of a Cadillac car, over a period of thirty some years, since he knew could never afford it on his salary. I suggest you give it a listen if you haven’t heard it already!
My dad worked for the Gas Board here in the UK. Our garden looked like a stores yard, full of pipes and fittings. He would use the stuff for what they called "PJs"; private jobs. Some people in the military had businesses based entirely on "liberated" equipment.
@@MacakPodSIjemom it's called salami slicing or penny shaving here. In college, you're taught to expect everyone will steal pens now n then, which may add up to thousands over a year; but only crack down if it's threatening your business or is actual intent, not just 'ope forgot to return a pen'. Tradespeople dgaf and take home leftover supplies or thrown away material all the time- especially plumbers where technically the trashed copper piping should be sent to a company yard to be sold for the company-, it's expected. Still leads to a lot of arrests. White collar generally are forgiven- the recession of the 2000s was partially due to penny shaving schemes and other forms of fraud. Only Iceland actually prosecuted those who were responsible.
This actually happened at the big Ford factory in Liverpool (still there but now Land Rover / Jaguar ) There is a network of tunnels underneath that lead out into an area of social housing (council estate). Workers used to steal wings, bonnets, and any other parts to sell onto dodgy back street garages. Apparently one guy stole every part and eventually built a whole car(Ford Escort) but he did not realise that unless it was made at the factory it did not carry the correct ID log so he could not register it with the licensing authority.
I spent some time in Cuba a few years ago and I was told by the locals that the first question one asks when one gets a job is : ¿Aqui qué se puede arreglar?"... "What can we embezzle here? (the Spanish word is more euphemistic though). So it seems that what Sergei describes in this video is a common feature of every communist society.
@Taiwanlight When I was in Cuba a few years ago, I met with a surgeon who taught plastic surgery at the university of La Havana. She told me her monthly salary was around US$30. With that in mind, you can understand that they may want to get some extra...
Back in communist Poland we used to say "to arrange", or "to organise". "Stealing" was a different thing altogether - is was reserved for "full-time criminals" - regular thieves like house breakers, those who break into post offices/ warehouses or stores at nights, pickpockets, muggers, and such. Regular honest people merely "arranged for" whatever stuff they needed and/ or could "carry out" from their workplace, because all to often you just couldn't get them in shops. For instance back in early '80s when I needed some chlorinated rubber paint (nothing fancy, one typically used for painting over concrete or "outdoor" steel structures) for waterproofing walls in some shower "cabin" ("corner with a vinyl curtain", rather - ceramic tiles were a luxury item, available only for better-off folks, or... for those "who knew the right people"), the only way to get such paint was to "arrange" for it, since it just wasn't available "in stores". Same went for even simplest hand tools like screwdrivers, hammers or files were in the "unobtainium/ scarcium" category, ditto for regular every day items like shoes, toilet paper, and what not. Power drill? Bench grinder? In your wet dreams... Also, whenever you actually "could arrange" things in your workplace which you didn't really needed for yourself, you took them anyway, at every opportunity - because then you'd have something to "barter for" with others. And then it was (the whole "carry out" game, that is) also a "getting even" or "tit for tat" of sort, with the state that paid you peanuts ("they pretend they're paying us, we pretend that we work" as someone quoted it in some other comment - that was the saying/ justification back then), and - even worse still - cannot provide its citizens with those everyday items. And should you try to set up your own business, you effectively became the undeclared enemy of the socialist state, and you'd spend MOST of your time not on manufacturing or service, but on "arranging" things and goods you needed for keeping your business alive (sorta...). So yes, "they pretend they pay us, we pretend that we work", and the only thing here not "pretending" is time passing by - you work all your life and never achieve anything. When I was 19 yrs old I was doing my "substitute military service" (aka "alternative civilian service" - mind you, that wasn't available "by request", it had to be, erm... "arranged for" as well) in some hospital, and while there back then I happen one day to overhear soem old guy who was about to retire, and he complained "what kind of life is that - I worked hard through my entire life, never blow my money on booze or lassies, and now all I got is a bicycle and a two-room flat in that concrete-panels block" - and it kinda struck me, even though I was aware of "how things are here". Also, when this guy said "I have a two-room flat" he DID NOT mean "I own" - no, the state owned it, all he had was "an allocation of a flat" - basically for a lifetime, but nothing like "my OWN". So, this is how it was.
In Eastern germany my father told me the motto was "everything is for the people, so you don't steal a sack of cement you use it for the people and the people just so happen to be you and friends" His families house needed a new roof and all the tiles came from the same factory and just so happened to be "faulty" as inspected by uncle Uwe. And later my family home was renovated by my father and friends (a plumber, painter and some other people involved in construction) and they always just so happened to have some spare materials from "other projects" whenever there was a scarcity of anything they needed for the renovation. But then again even today such things happen. Afterall when I was working in a Biergarten our motto was "you only work for a minimum wage if you don't steal enough from work"
My Hungarian friend told me how when his father worked at a railroad yard, the workers would "liberate" metal train brake pads and sell them to recyclers.
I have a single set of stainless utensils somewhere bearing the logo MALEV from a flight on the now defunct Hungarian airline. Now you can't even eat with a decent set of plastic when flying.
I was also born in the USSR. It wasn't called stealing since the factory you are working in technically belonged to workers. Also, I've heard from my mother, who worked in a confectionery factory, that it was impossible to make products following recipes exactly, so some materials had to be taken away.
after the war my mother emigrated to canada . as an 18 yr old she worked in a chocolate factory. they let you eat anything you wanted,. she said after a week you never wanted to eat another chocolate again and they let you take some home as well. this is like 1948
I'm not trying to say my plight is similar to that of the citizens of the USSR, but I had a similar situation that came to mind. When I first started working at McDonald's, the job was great. It was corporately owned, so we had plenty of uniforms, there was always lots of people working, we got free food and drink, regular decent pay raises, the atmosphere was light, cheerful, and welcoming. After about a year of working there, a private small company bought the store. The change was night and day overnight. No free food or drinks. If you want to drink something, drink water. If you want to eat something, you can get a 10% discount (I am not wasting my meager pay on McDonald's), 1 shirt and 1 pants, skeleton crews, managers were a revolving door. We probably stole more food than we ever got free before. We felt slighted and that we were owed this as added compensation for us going above and beyond. Before, they would have you taking orders in drive-thru, and that was it. There was another person to collect money. There was a person to make drinks and hand out food. There was a person to put orders together. Not with Dashmac llc. One person to take orders, handle money, make drinks, bag the order, and hand it out. Also, to keep the drive-thru times low on the books, they would have you clear the order as fast as possible, but in reality the drive-thru was full and you pulled cars to parking spots, so you have to remember each order and who goes outside to deliver, you do. If you have downtime, it is resupply and clean. All while you are working on a work permit because you are a teenager and they are violating that by making you work 1½ to 2 shifts. I am taking a bag of nuggets home, and if you got a problem with it, find someone else to open the store tomorrow!
I hate when someone has to make a quick buck like that. There's no long term thinking. I eat at McD more than I want to and will drive out of my way to go to one on my favorites list ie a good one. And only during mealtimes when the turnover is high. Otherwise it's not worth it. I'm like that with a lot of business, if I have a bad experience they don't get another shot.
The same thing happens in Canada. I'm a carpenter by trade recently retired from a commercial contracting business. Everything that isn't bolted down goes missing off jobs. I've witnessed a laid off plumber, in the August heat, going to his car on the last day of work wearing a 3/4 length raincoat with the end of a garden hanging out from under his rain coat. Welding rigs worth thousands of dollars regularly disappear, in my own estimating I calculate in a number for "shrinkage" of small tools and consumables. It's long been known that the tough steel from 36" gas pipeline pipes makes for excellent snow plow blades. I've worked in meat packing plants where whole tenderloins worth a hundred dollars can be bought for $10 in the parking lot. I regularly get offers from other sub trades "I need some steel studs for a renovation .... I'll give you a couple of coils of in floor heating tubing if you turn your head and let me take some studs home" This is just the petty everyday stuff. The superintendent of a large general contractor I worked for was found to have in his possession a $50,000 tractor that was reported missing years earlier and the day after he was caught a flat bed truck the company didn't know they owned turned up abandoned on a city street. Then there's white collar crime which eclipses anything a working man can pick up and carry home.
So what your saying is, communist or capitalist, were a bunch of thieving vermin that can’t be trusted as far as we can be thrown over the fence and picked up later?
@@cpmenninga What's with this binary zero sum response? Either you've got a developmental problem and don't understand reason or you're an asshole ..... see, two can play at that game. Greed is a human trait not an ideological one. People of every political system and every socio-economic class steal. That's why they still have to build country club prisons and still have to audit tax returns.
My father was a bricklayer in WEST-Germany his whole life. When he needed electric cables, the electricians lost some. When he needed tubes, the plumbers lost some. When he needed wood, the carpenters lost some. When the plumbers/electricians/carpenters needed bricks/cement etc. ... you guess it. I was not called stealing, it was called "to organize something". My father was born 1934, I assume the hard years after the war formed his generation.
Ah yes, the NYC euphemism for this was "things falling off the back of the truck". let me tell you, most of the nice, new things I had growing up had somehow "fallen off the back of a truck" and made their way to our family. Great video, subscribed!
I've heard the very best job in the Soviet during the Cold War was Hydraulics Tech for Artic-run bombers because their hydraulics were filled with grain alcohol. This was much more cheap and plentiful than other forms of anti-freeze, although much more dangerous. It is said such systems "leaked" mightily and needed constant refilling.
Hello there! I lived in the post-Soviet Czechoslovakia with my family being spread aaaall the way from the Ukrainian border to Prague. My fondest memories from my childhood are of me stealing corn with my grandfather, from the Collective farms. I wasn't even a schoolboy yet and already I learned that from my granpa. He had this attitude that 'this field was ours before they took it - so we collect only what's ours' and he had stories of wives bringing lunches to their husbands in the collective farms while wearing tall rubber boots and their husbands filled them with grain so that they could carry it out. He laughed that there were clouds of flour dust coming from them as they marched... or stories of tractor drivers and harvest workers driving past their houses on purpose and throwing sacks of potatoes over the fences. Yeah, communism. Taught us how to lie and steal real good.
@@theronin365 people tried to steal little amounts (but frequently) so that they wouldn't get into big trouble if caught. The cops weren't called almost never because everybody was stealing at their workplace and nobody wanted to deal with it because they'd all get into trouble. Also - bribing the cops with whatever was very common (frequently they asked you for a bribe straight up to 'make the problem go away'), so unless you were stealing something like ammunition or such - you were usually let free with a warning.
@@theronin365 i'd imagine that where it was possible it was still going on deep into the 90s (out of habit and out of the bitterness that not so much changed for the ordinary folks) - the bribes sure stayed a big problem during my whole childhood after the collapse. I can't speak for all the post-soviet countries but it wouldn't surprise me if it was similar everywhere.
One of the reason why the workers stole from their workplace, and it was socially accepted, was that the goods were near-impossible to get in a legit way. This was often the case with tools and building materials, since hardware stores were very rare, and it's not like homes in communist countries needed any less repair or improvement. A more subtle way of stealing was to claim that workwear, safety boots etc. wore off, then sell them as second hand goods at the local market. Not all of it was clandestine or malicious though. Sometimes the workers would use their work equipment and facilities to improve local schools, parks, health centers etc. at no cost, and this was actually encouraged by the management.
My problem is the same in the US today in 2020. But if something breaks, we don't repair it - we replace the entire thing. If my fridge breaks where do i get the parts to fix it? Same problem.
@@t.gallagher2635 spare parts for name brand appliances are pretty available even my small city has an appliance parts house, it's directly behind the auto parts store.
@@t.gallagher2635 buy online or from an appliance parts place. You can get parts new or used. I just repaired my washer last year and my fridge a few years back.
@@maxmccullough8548 that store is a relic of the past. go to any metroplex nowadays you'll find 30 stores like that all decrepid and boarded up. there's a reason you find stores like that in small towns. i'm not saying it's right, just a fact of the present. it's downright criminal that we've been gated away from repairing our own electronics.
Ha-ha, when I was like 10 my father sent me once to the construction site with a 3 liter jar to look for some diesel fuel. And the guy there asked what I wanted, siphoned some diesel out of his excavator and sent me home. At the time I thought it was weird, but apparently a common practice. It was in Ukraine at the end of the Soviet Union. We had one gas station in a town of 7000 and it was always out of fuel.
Sasha retired after 30 years on assembly line in a vacuum factory. During his retirement party boss asks him if there anything he want for 30 years of loyal service? Sasha replies he wants new vacuum cleaner Boss surprised asks him: you mean in 30 years you didn’t carry out enough parts to make vacuum cleaner??? Sasha says… oh I did… but every time I try to put it together I end up with RPG. I grew up in Poland, but mentality of people was very similar. Best story I heard from my family was from my aunt (that worked in car plant) about lady that got caught trying to carry out 8 starters (12kg each!) under her coat.
My grandpa worked at a Navy shipyard just after WWII. One of his buddies worked in the wood shop making mahogany planks for the decks. He said every day he would take a piece home in his lunchbox. It wasn't until after he retired that he invited all his friends over to see the beautiful polished mahogany outdoor deck he had made.
It would actually have been teak, most likely. They used teak for ship decks because it did not become slippery when wet. While mahogany is used in small amounts in some luxury watercraft, nobody would cover a whole warship's deck with it.
70s,80s,90s, it was also EXTREMELY common in Australian factories. When I was a kid, I had every tool that existed. My mum worked in a tool factory. Everyone at the factory had the best tool boxes. It was the same for a huge local packaged food factory they let the staff take whatever they wanted, and we had endless packaged snacks. There were many others. We were a working class family, so we were well resourced.
@PAUL LECKNER The things we would find in student lockers at EOY. Food was common. High-priced calculators. Teachers would quit or retire after thirty years. Tons of paper. Had to segregate that stuff for commercial shredding.
When I worked at a aerospace company, there was a guy who tried to steal about 20 feet of large gauge electrical cable. He wrapped it around his body and secured it, then put on his jacket and went walking to the exit area - which had guards all around. He got so nervous and excited, and the cable was wrapped around so tight around his torso, that his breathing was restricted, and he passed out right at the exit. He got immediately fired.
My brother used to work for British Leyland. One day a worker leaned his bicycle up against the fence when he went into the 'clocking-out' shed on his way out of the Works. The bike fell over so a helpful Security Guard went over to pick it up. He could hardly lift it. It turned out the bike frame had been specially adapted for holding Mercury (quite valuable) and this chap had been stealing the stuff one bike-frame load at a time.
Theft from work might have been more common in the Soviet Union, but it was common enough in the USA for us to have jokes about it. Like the guy taking a wheelbarrow full of sand out the gate every day, and the same guard always checked the sand for goods and never found any. After thirty years and they both were retiring, the guard asked him what he had been steeling all those years, and the fellow told him "wheelbarrows." Johnny Cash song "One Piece At A Time" was about sneaking home a car from the plant piece by piece. Longshoremen had a saying, it isn't your take home pay, it was what you took home that paid.
This is something familiar the world over. I live in a town just outside the Kennedy Space Center. I was a roofing contractor in the eighties and nineties and spent my days measuring people's roofs. I always knew when someone worked at KSC because they would have a monstrous homemade aluminum barbeque grill or other thing made of space junk in their backyard.
Very interesting videos about everyday life in the USSR. It reminds me of: The Bisbee Copper Mine in S.E. Arizona also contained the world's finest examples of turquoise, malachite and azurite. Considered a byproduct low quality malichite and azurite were often thrown into the crusher as told to me by a former miner. The best examples of gem quality Bisbee turquoise, malachite and azurite that survived are reported by the same miner as having been taken out of the mine by workers in their lunch pales over the years. The mine is long since closed. An example of "taking home" that has actually preserved some of a scarce gemstone.
Thanks - great video. In Hungary this mentality is still very much alive - with similar economic results. Just a few years ago I overheard a 20ish guy on a bus complaining, that the sweet job he had at a small sandwich place is going bust. He was very sorry, that he has to start buying food again and can't treat his buddies to free stuff any more :D
I grew up using pens, pencils, and notebooks stamped with “Property of U.S. Government.” We kids used them in school with no problem because at least half of the parents worked on base (US Navy/Airforce) or were somehow connected with it. Same case with many of the spouses of the teachers. I still have a few boxes of the pencils although the base closed in 1989. No doubt a lot of other things vanished from there, as well. My father once told of the disappearance of a government car. He’d unfortunately been the last person to sign it out, but he’d also returned it. There was a record of him returning it to the motor pool. Two other workers vouched for him that they were with him when it was returned. (They’d gone together to a supplier off base.) He wasn’t charged, and he knew nothing about the car’s disappearance. I don’t think they ever found it. Taking a box of pencils is one thing; stealing a government car is entirely in another category!
That's not the same thing. Those types of resources are given to the military personnel. They aren't stealing them out of the factory they worked at for pennies a month.
At the opposite extreme, there was Lockheed, when after a government bailout, employees had to sign out ball-point pens. At a place I worked at, a real dog's breakfast of a workplace, you could only get paper and pens from the supply office, on Tuesday, between 2 and 3 PM, and under supervision. That place had like 80% profit margins making medical equipment, yet they watched every BIC pen.
I worked for Whole Foods for $10 an hour. They kept me working 36 hours a week to keep from having to give me benefits. I would steal a bag full or more of food every day.
My friend on the jobsite in England use to take 2 bricks home in his lunchbox every day and add them to the wall around his yard on the weekends. We worked on a huge building site that took over 4 years to finish, so all the bricks were the same kind lol - they call it "playing the fiddle"
This reminds me of a story I have heard from my home country of Slovenia. I am unsure if it takes place in Slovenia or in Yugoslavia, but it revolves around a worker employed in a car factory. One day a his neighbor noticed his barn was full of car roofs. Those were sheets of metal stamped in shape of a Renault 5 roof, before they were welded onto the chassis. Neighbor asks him in astonishment why is his barn full of roofs. And the man answers: “every time I am returning from work and it starts to rain, I don’t even need an umbrella. I just grab a roof, hold it above my head and walk home! And when I don’t need it any more, I just toss it into the barn”. And that’s how over the years his barn became filled with Renault 5 roofs.
One thing stood out to me in all the stories: the social cohesion between people who were stealing and helping one another steal. The story about the little boy on the construction site, for example. Thankyou for the video. It was fascinating
Stealing was different back then. What these guys did was called "Living from where you work". In my town, there were three factories next to each other: A slaughterhouse, a bread factory (bakery but a lot bigger) and a lathe factory. You should see the goods flying over the fences between factories... What is more interesting, is that both the bread factory and the slaughterhouse never had any maintenance issues. If something mechanical or electrical broke down it was repaired in record time by the technicians from the lathe factory, those guys could repair or manufacture absolutely anything. They even made a small sausage packing line to process all the meat leftovers for the workers of the three factories.
We had a similar situation working at the mines (NCB) in England in the 1984 strike, my mine already had an overtime ban issued by the local NUM office, we knew the strike was coming so we stockpiled some gun metal valves used in the pumping of gas which we serviced and fitted during our worktime, we took one home every day and when the strike came we cashed them in as scrap metal, the wages were poor in those days so before and after the strike you had to try and make whatever money you could, we did car and motorcycle repairs in our lunchtime, made gates and any other fabrication that our workmates or friends required, the management were implicit in this also, the union had a shop that sold everything and anything at near cost price, large items like washing machines had to be ordered in from their main warehouse, we would order items for non employees and charge less than market value but made ourselves a profit, everyone had what we called a "fiddle"
Stories like this always reminds me of what the Roman historian Tacitus wrote about the ancient Slavs. He said that they were mostly like their Germanic neighbours in that they were a settled people and practiced agriculture, but that they were called "wanderers" (Veneti, Wends) by their Germanic neighbours, because this practice of going on large plundering forays by foot. So basically they covered great distances walking in order to steal from their neighbours.
Nope, not just blue-collar at all. I used to work in the Kiev Institute of Material Science, which was chock full of - you've guessed it right, materials (some of them quite expensive and rare), not to mention supplies from the chemical warehouse (like chemically pure sucrose and salt) that would come quite handy at home. The people who would "carry out" any of those things they could lay their hands on were all white-collar crowd quite literally, all wearing white lab robes.
You should have seen what went on in the steel mills in the US..Lots and lots of hand tools and a few times I remember things disappeared that required a tractor trailer to move
I was a union electrician, and worked with older guys who did some of the massive new steel mills of the 1960s and 70s. They told stories of an electrical supervisor who stole a new backhoe out of the steel plant. He disassembled it, and had security take it out the gate, in pieces, over months. Another supervisor built a huge, all steel fishing trawler. He fabricated all the pieces at the plant, then took them back to a barn on his personal property and welded the whole ship together. It was so big that the end wall of the bar was disassembled to remove it. Another supervisor used thousands of hours of stolen labor, building a vacation home about an hour from the plant. He would load a company Suburban up with the right laborers, carpenters, plumbers, etc. They would drive to the home site, work a six hour day, then drive back to the plant in time to clock out. I know of two guys who were convicted of crimes when they stole so much copper wire at once, that their trucks failed. One was a pickup that broke an axle and was sitting on the shoulder of a major highway, with a two ton spool of wire crushing the thing to the ground, when the state police decided to investigate. Another was a dump tractor trailer that was leaving the steel plant, overloaded with stolen copper wire to the point that it was 20,0000 to 30,000 pounds overweight. The clutch on the truck grenaded as the truck left the gate, and plant security responded and figured out what was happening.
I knew a Czech guy who was an olympic wrestler. His team had very high quality leather jackets, but when abroad he felt that his jacket was backwards and rustic compared to the Americans' cool Adidas track suits - so he traded his leather jacket for an Adidas track suit. Later, when he got out and into Canada, he realized how horrible that deal had been for him and was really angry about it.
I worked at a factory in the US where the maintenance department was super corrupt. For every project they would buy maybe 20% more than they needed and take the extra home. One of the managers confirmed it when he saw that one of the maintenance guy's new shed was made of the exact same gage steel as the project the manager had overseen. Nothing was done about it for years, including by the manager, because that was just the price of doing business
When I lived and worked in Vallejo, Ca I got to know a number of retired workers from the Mare Island Naval Shipyard. I heard stories about theft and using facilities to manufacture car parts as a side hustle.
A true story from post-Soviet times (early 1992). We needed to obtain rubber cement to reinforce our collapsible canoes (another story in itself) and not being able to find any, approached a worker at a shoe factory and arranged to trade a half-liter bottle of vodka for three liters of rubber cement. He told us to come with him around to the back fence, where his friend on the inside would meet us. with the goods (obviously the controls were stricter at that point) Three plastic bottles of rubber cement came over the fence, and we handed the bottle over. It was one of those old classic versions with the tear-off top, so in order to share, his confederate held his mouth up to a gap in the fence and his buddy just poured it into his mouth.
speaking of which. We needed the rubber cement to glue reinforcement to a three-seat canoe. We wanted to get a three-seat canoe so I could come along on a boating trip. Three-seaters were impossible to find in any store or market, but my buddy found out that they were being manufactured at the Saljut defense works. That's right. a military plant. Part of Gorbachev's plan to have all military plants dedicate part of their production to civilian purposes. So we pulled up to the gate, I was driving a company car with foreign plates, I paid the cash Ruble equivalent of $50 and they came out the gate with a forklift and loaded the canoe into the back of car. That left me wondering what I could have purchased there for $1,500 or $15,000 dollars...
I had two roommates in college who were from the USSR. It was a great experience. They laughed about American's impressions of Russians. The propaganda is in 1979 they were still lining people up and shooting them. Everyone was scared etc.
We had a similar system in our home. We had 2 TV Sets complete with VCRs ,borrowed' from mums work even still with identification plates from the office she worked in. Idea was, should there be a unexpected inspection of all the video equipment, she would call my dad who would in hurry swiftly bring TVs and VCRs back to her office, as we lived some 3 minutes of running away.. Never in 20 something years that situation happened, and now some nearly 30 yrs later (this happened in 1993) we still have that equipment in our home now long forget by original owner - state :D
in Poland we also had "deputaty" so people get some of goods that place of work was producing, let's say in paper mill people would get salary plus some toilet paper, notepads etc to prevent people from stealing
Yeah, that seems proper. This policy should probably have been adopted elsewhere. It is at odds with ideology to give the workers at this specific factory some advantage in possessing some given product, when the products in principle belong to all the people, but in practice people will carry stuff off with them anyway, so who cares! :D May as well make it systematic and reduce unknown losses.
True story: when returning from work in the west during the eighties, my former boss jumped into the back of a taxi to go from the Berlin Wall back to where he lived. The driver asked him what he did for work. My boss told him that he worked in the movies. The taxi driver replied with disappointment: "nothing useful there".
My wife and her family 'escaped' the Soviet Union in the later 1970s. I get to hear stories of life under soviet style socialism from her parents but your videos are much more thorough with the research etc. Thank you for the videos. As for a translation to English for nesum, I am thinking maybe 'appropriator' might work.
In the USN, we sometimes had to go foraging for something at the tender. I called it stealing, but a coworker corrected me and said it was appropriating.
Very interesting. It's cool to see how resourceful people are, but sad to see they had to go to such lengths to hide making ends meet. In the USA as a kid, I found tons of tools lying on the side of the road, presumably fallen from work trucks. Dumpster diving for used microwaves and construction materials was also a college pastime.
I like the story from the Soviet Union about the man reconstructing the TV, because there wasnt a patent on things. So he just had an exploded wiring diagram of a TV and put it together one piece at a time with very limited knowledge of electronics, the plans were so wide open, he just basically put it together like legos.
Your labour time production depends on everyone else's labour time production. you don't get to "refuse alienation" at the expense of making more alienation for your comrades ;) lul
I think this topic is fascinating and find it very interesting. Back in 2006 I developed a problem where I needed money quickly very often. I was in charge of a particular Department and I had the final count for a certain material and it was extremely valuable at that time over $3 a pound. I carried many many of those home. Years later I became a network engineer in the technology field and it took a long time to get rid of that mindset of always scheming and trying to steal expensive products I wasn't raised like that
I love your channel, one of my best friends was an older Russian guy who use to tell me stories like this all the time, till he moved to canada, this makes me smile and think of him when i watch, and i always learn something cool :)
In England a distant relative of mine worked at a naval shipyard (70's I think) and 'acquired' some paint to paint his coal bunker with; apparently it looked fantastic in battleship grey and never rusted XD
I heard a story in Australia about a manager in one the state's department of main roads. This guy was a real ShOneT to those under him and was 'liberating' equipment as well. At the appropriate moment when he was being investigated for corruption, those who worked under him supplied the authorities with minute details of his stolen equipment which was found at his home, so that his "ship" was definitely sunk. His employees had marked star-pickets* with identifying numbers so that there could be no mistake. *stakes used for fencing.
"Carrying Home" isn't just unique to Soviet culture. I've worked two different factory jobs here where carrying stuff home happened fairly regularly. The first expressly permitted it, placing rejects unable to be reworked, and extras from orders into a box that workers were free to take with them if they desired. All that was asked was to not attempt to resell them, and to be courteous of others. Unfortunately, this got abused, and it was much more strictly-limited and rationed. The other didn't allow it as a rule, but the workers wouldn't rat each other out, and you could rarely get a supervisor's okay to do it more openly. That site worked with canned food, and so only cans that didn't make a complete box at the end of a run were considered (rejects were thrown away for safety reasons). These were also thrown away, so carrying them home was seen more as saving perfectly good product from the dumpster and wasted.
I was born in 1987 in Lithuania, so I missed most of this, but I've heard a lot from my parents and it was the same here as well. There are even people who managed to build stuff from stolen bricks. I once helped my brother renovate his apartment built in the 70s and after we removed the plaster we saw quite a few missing bricks. They were replaced with a mixture of sawdust and concrete... People stealing... ehem, taking, stuff from work was a completely normal part of life. Buying stuff that's impossible to get otherwise from people you know, from "under the counter", "pa blatu", was a large part of the shadow economy as well. Don't know who would miss stuff like that.
In the 80's and 90's if you went to the flea markets they had in military base towns you could always find stuff that had pretty clearly been stolen. The govt tightened it up after 9/11 but I 100% garuntee you there will still be atleast 1 military surplus store in every military base town with shelves full of stuff that walked off the base.
As my grandmother said: A grocery shop worker could feed one family by himself, but when he tries to feed two, both families will stay hungry. Mind you thats from a woman that worked in 5 or 6 places in her life. From a scrapyard where she put 60kg pallets of aluminum in a press for 8-10 hours a day (she herself weighed around 50kg), as a server working 12 hour shifts, as a barber, a cook all kinds of professions. As long as you want to work, there will always be a place to work. If you can't find a job (if you don't want to), the state will find work for you, but that won't be pleasent. I wonder how she will feel if I tell her that people from my generation get depressed for working in an air conditioned office for 8 hours a day for 5 days a week...
Easy jobs aren't the same as fulfilling jobs. A job where I get 20 dollars an hour to do some menial task in an office like counting sheets of paper and tacks would be very easy, but it would also drive most people crazy. Would rather work construction for the same wage and feel like I'm actually doing something.
I think the 8 hour office job thing is more about soul crushing mental prisons. I'm glade the woman was such a hard worker that doesn't mean we should eat shit sandwiches and be happy. Just like we don't owe the government nothing we owe corporate companies even less.
Yuri Maltsev once told this anecdote about a young lady working at his office stealing paper clips and when asked why is she stealing the paper clips she answered "what else is there to steal?".
I just discovered your channel this afternoon and I really enjoy the material. I'm looking forward to exploring the rest of your content. Thanks, man! 🤠
Even here in the USA, stuff goes missing on construction sites all the time. Not huge amounts of stuff but things here and there, a pallet of bricks, couple windows, reel of wire, that kind of stuff
Yeah this isn't just a Soviet thing, my friend who works for a meat cutter gives me fancy meat for free that I would never be able to buy. my friend who works at a bike shop can get me a new chain if I need it, my friend who works for a company that roasts and packages coffee brings big unlabled bags for all her friends. People just don't talk about it, and a lot think they are the only person doing it.
That last story about the anvil had me roaring with laughter. Thanks for another great video, Sergei! Your content has been both hilarious and very informative.
In a related story, I worked a powerplant shutdown in SC where a guy claimed he was bit on the toe by a black widow at work, word was that he was renovating an old house. I believe he was trying to get workmanship comp.
my grandfather was roofer he would always come home with pockets full of nails. i work as a fireman now and ive seen 1-3 liter glass bottles of mercury when fighting fires in peoples garrages. people didnt know what it is for and that its dangerous, but they would still steal it from the workplace and store it in their garrage because thats what you are supposed to do lol. i have at my possesion a bunch of stuff handed down from those days:)
I love it! I have a friend from East Germany and back when it was still communist, everybody did the same thing. Like his mom said, "They pretend to pay us, so we pretend to do our job"...
A friend bought a huge hip flask at the "black market" in Tambov. He didn't have a use for it, but just thought it was interesting. I think it could carry a litre of liquid. One of his Russian friends explained what it was for. There was an electronics factory that produced guidance systems for one of the USSR's missile systems, possibly the SS20. My friend said that the factory cleaned the circuit boards with pure ethanol. People used these huge hip flasks to smuggle the alcohol out of the factory.
I knew a guy who worked in a huge warehouse with me - he wanted a large torque wrench, so towards the end of the shift he took it out of the packaging, went into a dark corner and with some packing tape, taped the wrench around his body to align with his spine (more or less) and then for the head part that was poking out a bit, he threw his jacket on it over one shoulder. Security saw his jacket over his back (jackets/heavy sweaters were not allowed inside, you put all that into lockers outside the gate), he showed it to them, they patted it down, cleared him, gave him a warning about not having coats in there, and he threw it back over his shoulder, covering the tip of the wrench, and walked right out. $200 torque wrench, through the door. I was impressed by the balls he had.
There is an excellent book on the reality of life of Soviet block people. It's called 'Rosa Luxembourg Contraceptive Cooperative, or Civilization of Communism' by L. Tyrmand. Very fun to read.
In the late seventies I returned to the country of my birth, Canada. IN the UsA growing up (yeh, I know it doesn''t seem that way now) STEALING was just south of murder and kidnapping in most US based cultures. What surprised me was the level of outright THEFT in my Canadian business. It was overlooked, seemed almost ok as long as you didn't do it outright. Man.
Thats a fact. Thieves are thieves no matter how much they're paid. Canadians have a general attitude of if I show up for work, I've earned my wage. Many businesses shut down from overpaid underproducing & thieving employees from management down. I worked for a huge concrete mfg that went bankrupt primarily due to management/human resources hiring too many "ghost" employees.
@@masstv9052 No, it was regular old white collar greed. They were caught through auditing, the company was eventually restructured & still in business. Number 1 theft in Canada was probably work time theft. Why work when the boss isnt watching attitude? Had friends that made 15-18 dollars an hour in the late 70s. Asked what they did for a Living- "Nothing". 1980 hit, company pulled out to the US, & the fortunate ones took any job they could at half wage or less. Canadians are very good at pretending to be honest, from the top down.
awesome workers paradise - Bernie.. My dad worked at the Kiev meat plant and my grandfather owned a tractor trailer and a Zhiguli and we still decided to take our chances to leave everything behind and come to the US back in 1979
Interesting to hear how it was in the USSR, although it happens everywhere else, too. In the UK, there is a town near a military port, called Blue Town. The name comes from the fact the houses were often painted blue. The blue paint was used at the docks and "carried" home by the dock workers. Stevedores, as they are called. These days the navy is long gone, but Sheerness is still a port, and Blue Town still exists, although repainted other colours. Johnny Cash's song "One Piece At A Time" is about a man who works at a car factory and slowly builds a car out of parts he steals from work. It ends up looking rather strange though. 🤣
My dad would also tell me similar stories from the Soviet Union. It was commonplace to steal and to get a job somewhere. Not just to help friends and family. Also to sell since you barely made any money.
If you could not sell your stolen merchandise for cash, you could barter with someone else for the goods they had stolen from their workplace. Stolen potatoes for stolen eggs.
In '92 I drove a diesel van across Europe to St Petersburg. I was there for a couple of months. I discovered that there was no official provision for private motorists to buy diesel, only with commercial/military vouchers. So it could only be bought on the black market for cash. Not that we ever had any real problem filling up. Cans acquired from a bus station, fuel syphoned from a truck by the driver, bribe the petrol station attendant, whatever.
I worked at a plant in the UK where a guy rode out one day on his bike. It fell over at the gatehouse, the guard bent down to help him with the bike and couldn't pick it up .The rider had disassembled the frame and slid brass bars inside. Another friend told me of the royal mint where the worker's welfare sold concentrated fruit drink in gallon jugs and someone was caught trying to smuggle coins out in the concentrate.
My other videos about stealing from work in the USSR:
ua-cam.com/video/P6H384QTpMI/v-deo.html
ua-cam.com/video/XH0p3bSYpR4/v-deo.html
A short Soviet movie dedicated to the topic in this video:
ua-cam.com/video/Zpye0I0_9bw/v-deo.html
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My name is Sergei. I was born in the USSR in 1971. Since 1999 I have lived in the USA.
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Sergie, your first hand source memories betray you, the academic idealogs who never spent 1 day in Soviet Union obviously know how it really was...
I heard from a Romanian it was about 90% of people who did it. VERY GLAD and grateful you aren't trying to pretend like these pro-communists do and try to get the REAL answer not the polished turd answer...
I can't speak a word of Russian, but that short film was so funny Comrade 😁👍
Reminds me a bit of the movie 'Afonya'. On UA-cam with English subs. Great movie, with Evgeny Leonov in a great drunk scene.
@Jack Obrein Ebay got tons, coins and paper money
There was a soviet sketch. The head of kolkhoz saw one of the workers carry something away in a wheelbarrow, every night. Once he told the worker to show what was in there. But there was only trash in the wheelbarrow. Finally the head of kolkhoz got fed up and confronted the worker. "Tell me, Ivan, what are you stealing? I will not give you up, just tell me what are you taking." The worker replied: "I am stealing wheelbarrows."
That's a good one.
=)
@@masstv9052 Every communist block country had their own version of this joke.
The one I heard a while back was a Mexican working in the USA and commuting across the border every day with a wheelbarrow full of mud.
There is a local version of this joke/story. Every Friday a certain worker would be seen going out the gate with a wheelbarrow. The security guard on the gate would check, but all he had in it was his workboots, his dirty overalls, taking them home to wash, his thermos drink flask and his lunchbox. Some Fridays the wheelbarrow was full of sawdust (a waste product from the Wood workshop, which staff were allowed to take home for their fires, or for garden compost). The security guard was suspicious and felt all through the sawdust with his hand. Nope, nothing in there. Nothing but sawdust. This continued for YEARS. Eventually both the worker and the security guard had grown old and retired. One day bumping into each other at the local pub, they shared a drink together. "Look we're both retired from there, and we're old men now, but I always thought you were stealing SOMETHING. Level with me and tell me PLEASE". "Yeah, alright, the worker said, yeah I was stealin' wheelbarrows !"
They pretend to pay us, we pretend to work.
"My boss makes a dollar, I make a dime, that's why I shit on company time".
Lol
@@alexcarter8807 You read somewhere.
There's an early 20th Century American proverb used by the Industrial Workers Of The World(IWW or "Wobblies") that was along that line,-"A Poor Day's Work For A Poor Day's Pay", which was a play on an old American cliche proverb, "An Honest Day's Work For An Honest Day's Pay".
@@DonaldRilea That was before the rights of workers allowed unions, and labor laws passed. In the Soviet Union, there were no rights to organize outside "company " organizations. The state and corporation were one and the same, at the same time the reds claimed to be for the workers. There were the nomenclatura, who lorded over the workers like the robber barons of the early 20th century. The communists always talk about being "nice," while at the same time, they've got The Plan to fulfill. Add to that the forced labor gulags, the deadly canals, mines, and dams to further abuse the proles. Face it; governments have a greater ability and power than businesses, and they have the guns. This attracts those hungry for power, and excuses the insane abuses, because after all, the end justifies the means. Sickos get to be the torturers and killers. The Nazis hired similar sadists. Never allow government to run rampant. This is why we have our Constitution, and it hasn't been adhered to, especially by the hated left wing donkeys. The end justifies the means, and cuts loose the dogs of greed, cruelty, and lust for power, by any means.
In the 1980s, I met a world class mountain climber, who managed to get permission to climb a peak in the USSR. He climbed with a group of Russians, and they really liked a lot of his equipment. He traded some of his gear for the only interesting item they had, which were ice climbing spikes made out of titanium tubing. At the time, consumer items manufactured from titanium were rare even in the west.
He declared them when he came back through customs, and didn’t give it a second thought. Some months later, a government agency contacted him, and asked to examine the spikes. It turned out they were stolen from a Soviet shipyard, where the tubing was intended to be part of a submarine’s nuclear reactor.
Wow, We used to trade them in Chamonix begining of the 90-ties.
@@thomasvilhar7529 oh the 90-ties
Very sexy.
i call bullshit
@@boxedproductions_4221 you’d be wrong, but since IDGAF what you think, it hardly matters.
here in Czech republic there was a saying "Kdo neokrádá stát okrádá rodinu" which basically means "he who does not steal from the state is stealing from his own family". So this problem was not only in the soviet union but in all of soviet block too.
I'm confused. Aren't all Soviet blocks part of the Soviet union? Wouldn't Russia, Poland, etc, etc, all each be a Soviet block, but together be the Soviet union?
Like in the USA, each state is separate (has its own local laws, local leaders/politicians, etc) but together are the United States (which have federal politicians who handle foreign affairs, and interstate issues like trade between the states, but they don't set local state laws like speed limits, building regulations, etc)?
@@masstv9052 Soviet Block - Countries that were not part of the Soviet Union but were very heavily influenced by it. Each country in the Soviet block had its respective government. Ie. Czechs were ruling over Czechs, Poles over Poles and so on. All of those governments were allied and supported by the government of the Soviet Union and vice versa. Consider the Soviet Block to basicallly be an alliance of communist states in Europe. Also each country had a different level of reliance on the Soviet Union, for example us Czechs had a huge arms and car industry, because unlike Poland the country wasnt bombed into oblivion during 2nd WW and thus we were allowed to make our own weapons such as the Vz.58 Samopal, instead of being only allowed to make licensed Kalashinkovs like the Poles did. Same goes for Škoda cars. The Soviet block also wasnt unified in its approach to western culture. For example if you went into a regular shop in Czechoslovakia in 1983 you could buy yourself an "imperialist" coca cola, Tabasco , Camel ciggies and other western products whereas none of this was available in Poland at the time. It is said that out of all the Soviet Block countries the best quality of life was to be had in Yugoslavia where literally everything western was available.
@@zelosmiman5533 FYI, Poland had their own officially franchised production of imperialist coca-cola and pepsi-cola since early 1970s for the local market, so it's not like they weren't available to buy. Also stating that Poland could only produce knockoff Kalashnikows is largely incorrect, although military and car industry of Czechoslovakia was way ahead for obvious reasons that it needn't be organized from scratch.
@@guesswho6038 Indeed, Browary Warszawskie launched their bottling plant in 1972, one plant for a country of 33 milion people at the time. Coke in Poland was available in two stores, and two stores only (If you are not counting Pewex) namely Supersam on Union of Lublin square and Sezam on Marszałkowska. Just 8 years later the Polish government ran out of foreign currency and were unable to buy coke syrup from Italy anymore and thus the production stoped, which brings me to my original statement, that Coke just wasnt available in Poland in 1983 and I fully stay behind this statement.
@@zelosmiman5533 Well if you care so much about 1983 for some reason. Anyway I remember pepsi being available in a local bar in 80s' and it wasn't Warsaw
This brings to mind the story of the Soviet worker in a baby carriage factory. One day, his wife has a kid, so he starts taking parts home from work to build a baby carriage. But no matter how hard he tries, every time he attempts to assemble them into a baby carriage, he gets an AK47...
Amusing!
This remids me of a joke that was popular when I was a kid: The Americans get the plans of the latest soviet plane, they call their best experts to replicate the plans but after 6 months of hard work they keep ending up with a tank no matter how they try to asamble it. So they say “let’s put the Germans to build this, they are the best mecanics in the world”. The Germans come work for 1 year and after that the chef mecanic comes all nervous and frustrated to say they quit, they can’t build that, they keep ending up with a tank no matter what. In the end somebody comes with “let’s get the Romanians, they are comunists also, maybe they can do it”. Everybody laughs but after no alternative was found they say f@€k this let’s give it a try, what can we lose, at the worst we end up with another tank. So they fly in a team of Romanians. When they land the workers are all drunk and making chaos, but are sent to the hangar to work nevertheless. Before the last one enters the hangar, he turns arround and asks that they recive a crate of tuica (we’ll call it alchool) every day. 1 month into this the American general sends his second in command to check on the Romanians, when he gets to the hangar he pokes his head through the door and finds the Romanians drunken as hell, partying and the soviet plane all built. When the general finds out he comes, congratulating the workers all happy and asks when did you finish this, and is told like 3 weeks ago. Then curious he asks how they did they not end up with a tank (thinking there was a secret in the plans)? So he is told: ooo, the first time we got a tank but we filed it till it was a plane.
@@joeaverage The tank will always get through? War requires a lot of everything.
Man, I started getting mad about you picking on electrician, but then I realized how much copper goes "missing" at work, and I was like, yeah, makes sense.
With demand for copper to spike w/ the electrification of everything, for example an EV uses 2x to 3x more copper than ICEV, and new mines have great difficulty gaining approval, mineral resource scarcity will become more common. Prices increase as well as pilferage temptation.
ga gamba great news for chile, though
Dishonored players be like....
I think electricians are paid too much where I'm from. When I visit job sites there's always copper everywhere. Can grab a pound of copper just checking the dumpsters and trash cans, most of it doesn't even need to be stripped. Of course I would never steal, just doing my part to recycle.
@@gorkyd7912 I used to work at a place that rented warehouse space. Some pallets were really dusty and may even been "abandonded" by the other companies. One pallet had about 100 boxes, and in each box was a 3 foot copper cable, that was as thick as a Banana. Needless to say I found out I could scrap them for $55 a piece. You can assume correctly that a few of them were removed at my bosses approval. I took about 7 of them over a few weeks time. Definitely helped out when I needed it. Almost lost my hand working for them on a faulty wood saw, got my hand snagged into a pulley and shot out around the other end of the roller, almost ripped it right off my wrist
my old department boss back when i was workin at this heat treating plant in germany was from poland & came over in the 80s. he used to say, "the difference between the communist east & capitalist west is, in the communist east, if ya need a hammer to fix things around the house, ya gotta steal one from work. in the capitalist west, if you need a hammer at work to do your job, ya gotta bring your own from home."
watch how fast tools disappear when everyone knows they belong to the company and not their coworkers lol
It doesn’t seem like it, but that is actually quite flattering to the west. The place where everybody has hammers in such abundance that they can just bring them from home.
@@theany9765 ever work in a shop? people don't care if a tool belongs to a coworker- they take it anyways
How true as this ( bringing a hammer to work to complete a job task) I have personally experienced while living in the “capitalist west”!
"Unintentional liberation of office supplies"
Privitization
@@andersbodin1551 To own a toothbrush or bucket of paint for yourself isn't privatization, as some guy with his personal use paint bucket isn't the private sector.
To steal a television piece and fix you friend's TV with it is collectivism.
And often, with privately owned business driven by profit, someone might buy an entirely new TV if the privately owned Electronics shop doesn't sell parts, and makes an effort to keep any parts shops that might ruin it's business away from town.
I have a dozen or so boxes of pencils “liberated” from the US Government. They were inherit d from my father who was in the Navy. He retired in 1976!
It wasn't unintentional they knew what they were doing with that office supplies
S.T.E.A.L
Strategic Transfer of Equipment to Alternate Locations
From each according to his abilities, to each who had access to goods...
Pretty much
Hardly a crime when the workers own the means of production
Exactly my thought!
@Jack Obrein My brother there is no middle ground there is only our side or their side because being passive means allying with the group in power, and the bourgeoisie will never give up the means of production, it's a nice thought but the reality is that an uprising will be needed in order to liberate the working class and the rest of the masses, before capitalism collapses under the weight of its own unsustainable contradictions, both on an environmental and economic basis
Eric the Punk the only way capitalism will collapse is if people like Liz Warren and Burnie Sanders have their way. To your environmental assertions AOC has a plan to destroy the best hope for liberty the world has ever known. Communism is voluntary; you can go to Venezuela or Cuba any damn time you like...
@@walterkersting1362because 70% privately owned industry is the same thing as a classless moneyless stateless society, ok boomer
walter kersting Lol capitalism already creates the means of its own destruction, through overproduction, outsourcing and chronic debt. Capitalism has already failed as economic system and is merely kept in a state of limbo through tax cuts, negative interest rates, and printing of new money.
The situation is unsustainable, A crash is inevitable. The only question now is if the people will bailout the corporations or unite for a better future together
This habit is not limited to the Soviet Union. Every country had it to some extent. It was so easy for Soviet blue collar workers to take stuff home, because the companies books were also cooked with false inventory and production quotas. The who system was a sham.
@Jack Obrein Hard to say since theft from work was systemic starting in the 1960's to 1990's where there was no RFID. Plus in the Soviet system there were no computers that did inventory in local factories. It was all done by hand.
@@orim298s Punch card collation, like old IBM punch card data collation. Data encoded on 'paper punch card', can be 'retrieved'/read/decoded by same machine.
Jack Obrein , ever hear the term "Technocracy"?
Search up "Technocracy Rising", it ties in nicely to your comment.
@@corvusduluth Not in the USSR, computers made factory's worse as the books couldn't be cooked as easy.
There was a plan to computerize there economy, all the supply, transport and production could all be , that put the fear of god in the CIA an every manager from Berlin to Vladivostok
So there was gap, by the 80s they had more programmers then computers.
Give examples that you can cite, on a wholesale basis as in USSR , the 1st country to enact anti-semitic laws immediately after the Bolshevik Revolution, by the way.
I grew up in the US in the 1950s and 60s. The only thing that we knew about the USSR was what we saw on TV, and in the movies. I know now that it was all just propaganda, so I find these little titbits of real life in the USSR very interesting. It has been my experience that the more you learn about other peoples cultures, the more you realize what you have in common. The differences are magnified by people who just want power.
Umm, Gerald, what do you mean it "was all propaganda"? People rightfully feared and despised the USSR in the 1950s and 60s, and this guy and his videos depicts the rotten elements of that society----------your post doesn't make any sense. Were you watching pro-USSR propaganda, and now that you see these videos you realize that was all lies?
@@JK-br1mu i think he means that the soviets were dehuminized but he later realized that we are actually all alike... And chill out bro watch how you talk to my boy. Respect
@@lancelotkillz tell em solo!
@JK ...." talkin to my man's all wrong.....do it again; and I'll stab u in the face with a soldering iron"
~Christopher Walkins Voice...
@@YELLTELL hahaha thats actually what i was thinking about when commented, that Christopher Walken quote... You rock 🤠
My grandfather worked in a storage warehouse. One day he asked for a raise. He was denied, because according to his boss: "he steals enough to make it up for it". The funny thing, he wasn't stealing, but he could still not get a raise, because he was expected to steal some of it.
The key word is ''some of it". One of the people my family used to know indirectly worked in diary factory. One day he stole a lot of cheese and presumably other products. He stole so much of it all at once that he went directly to Riga from Lithuania to sell those products in a market. However, his boss noticed thievery quickly and went to Riga to expose him. He got fired immediately and goods seized.
This experience in the Baltics shows that while stealing from work was expected in Soviet Union, a person still could not steal beyond his lot in life. The higher the ranks you go, more you could steal. However, if a factory worker would start stealing orders which factory has to ship, factory nor Soviet economy would work. Thus there was of course some unwritten rules to how much one person could steal. Same would apply even to highest ranking party members or even up to this day in China. Steal all what you can, but the project still has to be completed.
True story - my grandfather was a carpenter in a furniture factory. He wanted to make him self a chest set. So instead of working all day he kind of just made a chest board for himself and all it cost him was making the same for his supervisor. That board is a piece of art. 4 types of wood inlays, backgammon on the opposite side nice fittings. Probably took him 3-4 days each.
In the book, "Chicken Hawk," about helicopters in the Vietnam War, it documents how stolen equipment was written off. Anything that was lost in combat, could be taken off the inventory. At a major base, a battle damaged helicopter crashed as it trying to land. Officers who had equipment stolen, took it off the inventory by claiming it was destroyed in the helicopter crash. By the time the process was over, that crashed helicopter "carried" many dozens of tons of cargo.
Many years ago I worked with a colleague that came out from the districts, and he told me about the local village idiot that had got some road work of some kind, and had managed to steal some paint meant for the road, which the guy used to paint his house, and since the paint was reflective, every time a car drove by at night his whole house lighted up the whole nabour hood, it was not so popular as I understood
Hilarious!
not the smartest stealer lol
In America there was a similar sort of thing, at least in song. One of the most famous American musicians, Johnny Cash, made a comedic song called “One piece at a time” about a poor American worker who would “nesuni” out parts of a Cadillac car, over a period of thirty some years, since he knew could never afford it on his salary. I suggest you give it a listen if you haven’t heard it already!
Listen to King Missile Take Stuff From Work
My dad worked for the Gas Board here in the UK. Our garden looked like a stores yard, full of pipes and fittings. He would use the stuff for what they called "PJs"; private jobs. Some people in the military had businesses based entirely on "liberated" equipment.
@@Peasmouldia hmm some good NAAFI rum!
@@MacakPodSIjemom it's called salami slicing or penny shaving here. In college, you're taught to expect everyone will steal pens now n then, which may add up to thousands over a year; but only crack down if it's threatening your business or is actual intent, not just 'ope forgot to return a pen'. Tradespeople dgaf and take home leftover supplies or thrown away material all the time- especially plumbers where technically the trashed copper piping should be sent to a company yard to be sold for the company-, it's expected. Still leads to a lot of arrests. White collar generally are forgiven- the recession of the 2000s was partially due to penny shaving schemes and other forms of fraud. Only Iceland actually prosecuted those who were responsible.
This actually happened at the big Ford factory in Liverpool (still there but now Land Rover / Jaguar )
There is a network of tunnels underneath that lead out into an area of social housing (council estate). Workers used to steal wings, bonnets, and any other parts to sell onto dodgy back street garages. Apparently one guy stole every part and eventually built a whole car(Ford Escort) but he did not realise that unless it was made at the factory it did not carry the correct ID log so he could not register it with the licensing authority.
I spent some time in Cuba a few years ago and I was told by the locals that the first question one asks when one gets a job is : ¿Aqui qué se puede arreglar?"... "What can we embezzle here? (the Spanish word is more euphemistic though). So it seems that what Sergei describes in this video is a common feature of every communist society.
@Taiwanlight When I was in Cuba a few years ago, I met with a surgeon who taught plastic surgery at the university of La Havana. She told me her monthly salary was around US$30. With that in mind, you can understand that they may want to get some extra...
Back in communist Poland we used to say "to arrange", or "to organise". "Stealing" was a different thing altogether - is was reserved for "full-time criminals" - regular thieves like house breakers, those who break into post offices/ warehouses or stores at nights, pickpockets, muggers, and such. Regular honest people merely "arranged for" whatever stuff they needed and/ or could "carry out" from their workplace, because all to often you just couldn't get them in shops.
For instance back in early '80s when I needed some chlorinated rubber paint (nothing fancy, one typically used for painting over concrete or "outdoor" steel structures) for waterproofing walls in some shower "cabin" ("corner with a vinyl curtain", rather - ceramic tiles were a luxury item, available only for better-off folks, or... for those "who knew the right people"), the only way to get such paint was to "arrange" for it, since it just wasn't available "in stores".
Same went for even simplest hand tools like screwdrivers, hammers or files were in the "unobtainium/ scarcium" category, ditto for regular every day items like shoes, toilet paper, and what not. Power drill? Bench grinder? In your wet dreams...
Also, whenever you actually "could arrange" things in your workplace which you didn't really needed for yourself, you took them anyway, at every opportunity - because then you'd have something to "barter for" with others.
And then it was (the whole "carry out" game, that is) also a "getting even" or "tit for tat" of sort, with the state that paid you peanuts ("they pretend they're paying us, we pretend that we work" as someone quoted it in some other comment - that was the saying/ justification back then), and - even worse still - cannot provide its citizens with those everyday items. And should you try to set up your own business, you effectively became the undeclared enemy of the socialist state, and you'd spend MOST of your time not on manufacturing or service, but on "arranging" things and goods you needed for keeping your business alive (sorta...).
So yes, "they pretend they pay us, we pretend that we work", and the only thing here not "pretending" is time passing by - you work all your life and never achieve anything. When I was 19 yrs old I was doing my "substitute military service" (aka "alternative civilian service" - mind you, that wasn't available "by request", it had to be, erm... "arranged for" as well) in some hospital, and while there back then I happen one day to overhear soem old guy who was about to retire, and he complained "what kind of life is that - I worked hard through my entire life, never blow my money on booze or lassies, and now all I got is a bicycle and a two-room flat in that concrete-panels block" - and it kinda struck me, even though I was aware of "how things are here".
Also, when this guy said "I have a two-room flat" he DID NOT mean "I own" - no, the state owned it, all he had was "an allocation of a flat" - basically for a lifetime, but nothing like "my OWN".
So, this is how it was.
Communist or Capitalist, ever hear of stealing office supplies?
What can be "fixed" here?
@@Fridelain I think the idea is "what can be fixed, improved, in our life from that job?".
In Eastern germany my father told me the motto was "everything is for the people, so you don't steal a sack of cement you use it for the people and the people just so happen to be you and friends"
His families house needed a new roof and all the tiles came from the same factory and just so happened to be "faulty" as inspected by uncle Uwe.
And later my family home was renovated by my father and friends (a plumber, painter and some other people involved in construction) and they always just so happened to have some spare materials from "other projects" whenever there was a scarcity of anything they needed for the renovation.
But then again even today such things happen. Afterall when I was working in a Biergarten our motto was "you only work for a minimum wage if you don't steal enough from work"
My Hungarian friend told me how when his father worked at a railroad yard, the workers would "liberate" metal train brake pads and sell them to recyclers.
Both my paternal grandparents were pharmacists for the railroad in Budapest, I will have to ask dad if they ever ran out of medicine.
I have a single set of stainless utensils somewhere bearing the logo MALEV from a flight on the now defunct Hungarian airline.
Now you can't even eat with a decent set of plastic when flying.
They'd be thrown to the recycling scrap anyways
I was also born in the USSR. It wasn't called stealing since the factory you are working in technically belonged to workers. Also, I've heard from my mother, who worked in a confectionery factory, that it was impossible to make products following recipes exactly, so some materials had to be taken away.
after the war my mother emigrated to canada . as an 18 yr old she worked in a chocolate factory. they let you eat anything you wanted,. she said after a week you never wanted to eat another chocolate again and they let you take some home as well. this is like 1948
I'm not trying to say my plight is similar to that of the citizens of the USSR, but I had a similar situation that came to mind.
When I first started working at McDonald's, the job was great. It was corporately owned, so we had plenty of uniforms, there was always lots of people working, we got free food and drink, regular decent pay raises, the atmosphere was light, cheerful, and welcoming. After about a year of working there, a private small company bought the store. The change was night and day overnight. No free food or drinks. If you want to drink something, drink water. If you want to eat something, you can get a 10% discount (I am not wasting my meager pay on McDonald's), 1 shirt and 1 pants, skeleton crews, managers were a revolving door. We probably stole more food than we ever got free before. We felt slighted and that we were owed this as added compensation for us going above and beyond. Before, they would have you taking orders in drive-thru, and that was it. There was another person to collect money. There was a person to make drinks and hand out food. There was a person to put orders together. Not with Dashmac llc. One person to take orders, handle money, make drinks, bag the order, and hand it out. Also, to keep the drive-thru times low on the books, they would have you clear the order as fast as possible, but in reality the drive-thru was full and you pulled cars to parking spots, so you have to remember each order and who goes outside to deliver, you do. If you have downtime, it is resupply and clean. All while you are working on a work permit because you are a teenager and they are violating that by making you work 1½ to 2 shifts. I am taking a bag of nuggets home, and if you got a problem with it, find someone else to open the store tomorrow!
I hate when someone has to make a quick buck like that. There's no long term thinking. I eat at McD more than I want to and will drive out of my way to go to one on my favorites list ie a good one. And only during mealtimes when the turnover is high. Otherwise it's not worth it. I'm like that with a lot of business, if I have a bad experience they don't get another shot.
The same thing happens in Canada. I'm a carpenter by trade recently retired from a commercial contracting business. Everything that isn't bolted down goes missing off jobs. I've witnessed a laid off plumber, in the August heat, going to his car on the last day of work wearing a 3/4 length raincoat with the end of a garden hanging out from under his rain coat. Welding rigs worth thousands of dollars regularly disappear, in my own estimating I calculate in a number for "shrinkage" of small tools and consumables. It's long been known that the tough steel from 36" gas pipeline pipes makes for excellent snow plow blades. I've worked in meat packing plants where whole tenderloins worth a hundred dollars can be bought for $10 in the parking lot. I regularly get offers from other sub trades "I need some steel studs for a renovation .... I'll give you a couple of coils of in floor heating tubing if you turn your head and let me take some studs home"
This is just the petty everyday stuff. The superintendent of a large general contractor I worked for was found to have in his possession a $50,000 tractor that was reported missing years earlier and the day after he was caught a flat bed truck the company didn't know they owned turned up abandoned on a city street. Then there's white collar crime which eclipses anything a working man can pick up and carry home.
So what your saying is, communist or capitalist, were a bunch of thieving vermin that can’t be trusted as far as we can be thrown over the fence and picked up later?
@@cpmenninga What's with this binary zero sum response? Either you've got a developmental problem and don't understand reason or you're an asshole ..... see, two can play at that game.
Greed is a human trait not an ideological one. People of every political system and every socio-economic class steal. That's why they still have to build country club prisons and still have to audit tax returns.
He had a garden under his raincoat?
A secret garden?
Slang for pot smuggling. That's how El Chapo got started, one raincoat at a time.
My father was a bricklayer in WEST-Germany his whole life. When he needed electric cables, the electricians lost some. When he needed tubes, the plumbers lost some. When he needed wood, the carpenters lost some. When the plumbers/electricians/carpenters needed bricks/cement etc. ... you guess it. I was not called stealing, it was called "to organize something".
My father was born 1934, I assume the hard years after the war formed his generation.
Ah yes, the NYC euphemism for this was "things falling off the back of the truck". let me tell you, most of the nice, new things I had growing up had somehow "fallen off the back of a truck" and made their way to our family. Great video, subscribed!
I've heard the very best job in the Soviet during the Cold War was Hydraulics Tech for Artic-run bombers because their hydraulics were filled with grain alcohol. This was much more cheap and plentiful than other forms of anti-freeze, although much more dangerous. It is said such systems "leaked" mightily and needed constant refilling.
I've seen a video on that! Awesome story
Hello there!
I lived in the post-Soviet Czechoslovakia with my family being spread aaaall the way from the Ukrainian border to Prague.
My fondest memories from my childhood are of me stealing corn with my grandfather, from the Collective farms. I wasn't even a schoolboy yet and already I learned that from my granpa. He had this attitude that 'this field was ours before they took it - so we collect only what's ours' and he had stories of wives bringing lunches to their husbands in the collective farms while wearing tall rubber boots and their husbands filled them with grain so that they could carry it out. He laughed that there were clouds of flour dust coming from them as they marched... or stories of tractor drivers and harvest workers driving past their houses on purpose and throwing sacks of potatoes over the fences.
Yeah, communism. Taught us how to lie and steal real good.
What happened when those guys were caught by the Commies?
@@theronin365 people tried to steal little amounts (but frequently) so that they wouldn't get into big trouble if caught. The cops weren't called almost never because everybody was stealing at their workplace and nobody wanted to deal with it because they'd all get into trouble. Also - bribing the cops with whatever was very common (frequently they asked you for a bribe straight up to 'make the problem go away'), so unless you were stealing something like ammunition or such - you were usually let free with a warning.
@@jakubhamari974 wow crazy and interesting.
Did a lot of the "carry out " attitude still continue after the collapse of USSR?
@@theronin365 Didn't really 'carry on', but it was a mad dash to grab up everything immediately following the collapse
@@theronin365 i'd imagine that where it was possible it was still going on deep into the 90s (out of habit and out of the bitterness that not so much changed for the ordinary folks) - the bribes sure stayed a big problem during my whole childhood after the collapse.
I can't speak for all the post-soviet countries but it wouldn't surprise me if it was similar everywhere.
One of the reason why the workers stole from their workplace, and it was socially accepted, was that the goods were near-impossible to get in a legit way. This was often the case with tools and building materials, since hardware stores were very rare, and it's not like homes in communist countries needed any less repair or improvement. A more subtle way of stealing was to claim that workwear, safety boots etc. wore off, then sell them as second hand goods at the local market. Not all of it was clandestine or malicious though. Sometimes the workers would use their work equipment and facilities to improve local schools, parks, health centers etc. at no cost, and this was actually encouraged by the management.
My problem is the same in the US today in 2020. But if something breaks, we don't repair it - we replace the entire thing. If my fridge breaks where do i get the parts to fix it? Same problem.
@@t.gallagher2635 spare parts for name brand appliances are pretty available even my small city has an appliance parts house, it's directly behind the auto parts store.
@@t.gallagher2635 buy online or from an appliance parts place. You can get parts new or used. I just repaired my washer last year and my fridge a few years back.
Many Soviet workers couldn't barely live on the tiny amount they were paid so " stealing" was a matter of survival.
@@maxmccullough8548 that store is a relic of the past. go to any metroplex nowadays you'll find 30 stores like that all decrepid and boarded up. there's a reason you find stores like that in small towns. i'm not saying it's right, just a fact of the present. it's downright criminal that we've been gated away from repairing our own electronics.
Ha-ha, when I was like 10 my father sent me once to the construction site with a 3 liter jar to look for some diesel fuel. And the guy there asked what I wanted, siphoned some diesel out of his excavator and sent me home. At the time I thought it was weird, but apparently a common practice. It was in Ukraine at the end of the Soviet Union. We had one gas station in a town of 7000 and it was always out of fuel.
Sasha retired after 30 years on assembly line in a vacuum factory.
During his retirement party boss asks him if there anything he want for 30 years of loyal service?
Sasha replies he wants new vacuum cleaner
Boss surprised asks him: you mean in 30 years you didn’t carry out enough parts to make vacuum cleaner???
Sasha says… oh I did… but every time I try to put it together I end up with RPG.
I grew up in Poland, but mentality of people was very similar.
Best story I heard from my family was from my aunt (that worked in car plant) about lady that got caught trying to carry out 8 starters (12kg each!) under her coat.
My grandpa worked at a Navy shipyard just after WWII. One of his buddies worked in the wood shop making mahogany planks for the decks. He said every day he would take a piece home in his lunchbox. It wasn't until after he retired that he invited all his friends over to see the beautiful polished mahogany outdoor deck he had made.
Sort of like building a patio with one stolen brick at a time.
It would actually have been teak, most likely. They used teak for ship decks because it did not become slippery when wet. While mahogany is used in small amounts in some luxury watercraft, nobody would cover a whole warship's deck with it.
Big lunchbox to get enough to build anything
@@captainchaos3053 You gotta have a hell of a lunch box, and finish your lunch to get ahead.
I’m gonna build a car.. one piece at a time..
70s,80s,90s, it was also EXTREMELY common in Australian factories. When I was a kid, I had every tool that existed. My mum worked in a tool factory. Everyone at the factory had the best tool boxes. It was the same for a huge local packaged food factory they let the staff take whatever they wanted, and we had endless packaged snacks. There were many others. We were a working class family, so we were well resourced.
What is left of Australian manufacturing now?
I used to dumpster dive at a community college where I worked as a custodian. I didn't have to steal. The things they would throw out!
School teachers see all the pens, pencils, erasers, staplers, binders that students throw out at the end of the year.
@PAUL LECKNER The things we would find in student lockers at EOY. Food was common. High-priced calculators. Teachers would quit or retire after thirty years. Tons of paper. Had to segregate that stuff for commercial shredding.
When I worked at a aerospace company, there was a guy who tried to steal about 20 feet of large gauge electrical cable. He wrapped it around his body and secured it, then put on his jacket and went walking to the exit area - which had guards all around. He got so nervous and excited, and the cable was wrapped around so tight around his torso, that his breathing was restricted, and he passed out right at the exit. He got immediately fired.
That's hilarious. Almost made it d'oh!
My brother used to work for British Leyland. One day a worker leaned his bicycle up against the fence when he went into the 'clocking-out' shed on his way out of the Works. The bike fell over so a helpful Security Guard went over to pick it up. He could hardly lift it. It turned out the bike frame had been specially adapted for holding Mercury (quite valuable) and this chap had been stealing the stuff one bike-frame load at a time.
Theft from work might have been more common in the Soviet Union, but it was common enough in the USA for us to have jokes about it. Like the guy taking a wheelbarrow full of sand out the gate every day, and the same guard always checked the sand for goods and never found any. After thirty years and they both were retiring, the guard asked him what he had been steeling all those years, and the fellow told him "wheelbarrows."
Johnny Cash song "One Piece At A Time" was about sneaking home a car from the plant piece by piece.
Longshoremen had a saying, it isn't your take home pay, it was what you took home that paid.
This is something familiar the world over. I live in a town just outside the Kennedy Space Center. I was a roofing contractor in the eighties and nineties and spent my days measuring people's roofs. I always knew when someone worked at KSC because they would have a monstrous homemade aluminum barbeque grill or other thing made of space junk in their backyard.
Growing up in the late 70’s and mainly 80’s it’s fascinating to listen to this.
Very interesting videos about everyday life in the USSR. It reminds me of:
The Bisbee Copper Mine in S.E. Arizona also contained the world's finest examples of turquoise, malachite and azurite. Considered a byproduct low quality malichite and azurite were often thrown into the crusher as told to me by a former miner. The best examples of gem quality Bisbee turquoise, malachite and azurite that survived are reported by the same miner as having been taken out of the mine by workers in their lunch pales over the years. The mine is long since closed. An example of "taking home" that has actually preserved some of a scarce gemstone.
Thanks - great video. In Hungary this mentality is still very much alive - with similar economic results. Just a few years ago I overheard a 20ish guy on a bus complaining, that the sweet job he had at a small sandwich place is going bust. He was very sorry, that he has to start buying food again and can't treat his buddies to free stuff any more :D
I grew up using pens, pencils, and notebooks stamped with “Property of U.S. Government.” We kids used them in school with no problem because at least half of the parents worked on base (US Navy/Airforce) or were somehow connected with it. Same case with many of the spouses of the teachers. I still have a few boxes of the pencils although the base closed in 1989. No doubt a lot of other things vanished from there, as well. My father once told of the disappearance of a government car. He’d unfortunately been the last person to sign it out, but he’d also returned it. There was a record of him returning it to the motor pool. Two other workers vouched for him that they were with him when it was returned. (They’d gone together to a supplier off base.) He wasn’t charged, and he knew nothing about the car’s disappearance. I don’t think they ever found it. Taking a box of pencils is one thing; stealing a government car is entirely in another category!
That's not the same thing. Those types of resources are given to the military personnel. They aren't stealing them out of the factory they worked at for pennies a month.
My locks I used on my school lockers my whole life said property of U.S. government.
lol, my dad worked for the
U.S. COAL MINES.
@@Unknown_Ooh That's what I thought. No one cares when you take the shampoo from the hotel home with you.
Post office’s had the same stuff.
It was not given away for personal use.
The black pens made by lighthouse for the blind in the 80's
At the opposite extreme, there was Lockheed, when after a government bailout, employees had to sign out ball-point pens. At a place I worked at, a real dog's breakfast of a workplace, you could only get paper and pens from the supply office, on Tuesday, between 2 and 3 PM, and under supervision. That place had like 80% profit margins making medical equipment, yet they watched every BIC pen.
Probably the people in charge of supply had filched them all and put the system in place to hide that fact there were no pens XD
How do you think they got those 80% margins
I worked for Whole Foods for $10 an hour. They kept me working 36 hours a week to keep from having to give me benefits. I would steal a bag full or more of food every day.
Smoked salmon here I come!
😢😂
My friend on the jobsite in England use to take 2 bricks home in his lunchbox every day and add them to the wall around his yard on the weekends. We worked on a huge building site that took over 4 years to finish, so all the bricks were the same kind lol - they call it "playing the fiddle"
Seems so bizarre. Essentially risking to be fired every single day to save....what...21 working days a week, 30 cents a brick...so 12 pounds a month?
It's not about money. It's about getting one over on 'the man'
This reminds me of a story I have heard from my home country of Slovenia. I am unsure if it takes place in Slovenia or in Yugoslavia, but it revolves around a worker employed in a car factory. One day a his neighbor noticed his barn was full of car roofs. Those were sheets of metal stamped in shape of a Renault 5 roof, before they were welded onto the chassis. Neighbor asks him in astonishment why is his barn full of roofs. And the man answers: “every time I am returning from work and it starts to rain, I don’t even need an umbrella. I just grab a roof, hold it above my head and walk home! And when I don’t need it any more, I just toss it into the barn”. And that’s how over the years his barn became filled with Renault 5 roofs.
One thing stood out to me in all the stories: the social cohesion between people who were stealing and helping one another steal. The story about the little boy on the construction site, for example.
Thankyou for the video. It was fascinating
Stealing was different back then. What these guys did was called "Living from where you work". In my town, there were three factories next to each other: A slaughterhouse, a bread factory (bakery but a lot bigger) and a lathe factory. You should see the goods flying over the fences between factories... What is more interesting, is that both the bread factory and the slaughterhouse never had any maintenance issues. If something mechanical or electrical broke down it was repaired in record time by the technicians from the lathe factory, those guys could repair or manufacture absolutely anything. They even made a small sausage packing line to process all the meat leftovers for the workers of the three factories.
@@sobolanul96
I've never experienced or witnessed anything quite like that in my lifetime. Thanks for sharing
We had a similar situation working at the mines (NCB) in England in the 1984 strike, my mine already had an overtime ban issued by the local NUM office, we knew the strike was coming so we stockpiled some gun metal valves used in the pumping of gas which we serviced and fitted during our worktime, we took one home every day and when the strike came we cashed them in as scrap metal, the wages were poor in those days so before and after the strike you had to try and make whatever money you could, we did car and motorcycle repairs in our lunchtime, made gates and any other fabrication that our workmates or friends required, the management were implicit in this also, the union had a shop that sold everything and anything at near cost price, large items like washing machines had to be ordered in from their main warehouse, we would order items for non employees and charge less than market value but made ourselves a profit, everyone had what we called a "fiddle"
Very interesting, thank you!
Stories like this always reminds me of what the Roman historian Tacitus wrote about the ancient Slavs. He said that they were mostly like their Germanic neighbours in that they were a settled people and practiced agriculture, but that they were called "wanderers" (Veneti, Wends) by their Germanic neighbours, because this practice of going on large plundering forays by foot. So basically they covered great distances walking in order to steal from their neighbours.
Nope, not just blue-collar at all. I used to work in the Kiev Institute of Material Science, which was chock full of - you've guessed it right, materials (some of them quite expensive and rare), not to mention supplies from the chemical warehouse (like chemically pure sucrose and salt) that would come quite handy at home. The people who would "carry out" any of those things they could lay their hands on were all white-collar crowd quite literally, all wearing white lab robes.
You should have seen what went on in the steel mills in the US..Lots and lots of hand tools and a few times I remember things disappeared that required a tractor trailer to move
A tractor trailer?! Must have been some juicy equipment that was liberated.
I was a union electrician, and worked with older guys who did some of the massive new steel mills of the 1960s and 70s. They told stories of an electrical supervisor who stole a new backhoe out of the steel plant. He disassembled it, and had security take it out the gate, in pieces, over months. Another supervisor built a huge, all steel fishing trawler. He fabricated all the pieces at the plant, then took them back to a barn on his personal property and welded the whole ship together. It was so big that the end wall of the bar was disassembled to remove it. Another supervisor used thousands of hours of stolen labor, building a vacation home about an hour from the plant. He would load a company Suburban up with the right laborers, carpenters, plumbers, etc. They would drive to the home site, work a six hour day, then drive back to the plant in time to clock out. I know of two guys who were convicted of crimes when they stole so much copper wire at once, that their trucks failed. One was a pickup that broke an axle and was sitting on the shoulder of a major highway, with a two ton spool of wire crushing the thing to the ground, when the state police decided to investigate. Another was a dump tractor trailer that was leaving the steel plant, overloaded with stolen copper wire to the point that it was 20,0000 to 30,000 pounds overweight. The clutch on the truck grenaded as the truck left the gate, and plant security responded and figured out what was happening.
I remember my father carrying salami out in his pants and selling it.
Олeжек technically that’s prostitution.
Someone to Olezhek's dad: "Is that a salami in your pants or are you just happy to see me?"
I knew a Czech guy who was an olympic wrestler. His team had very high quality leather jackets, but when abroad he felt that his jacket was backwards and rustic compared to the Americans' cool Adidas track suits - so he traded his leather jacket for an Adidas track suit. Later, when he got out and into Canada, he realized how horrible that deal had been for him and was really angry about it.
Taking ownership of the means of production literally
I worked at a factory in the US where the maintenance department was super corrupt. For every project they would buy maybe 20% more than they needed and take the extra home. One of the managers confirmed it when he saw that one of the maintenance guy's new shed was made of the exact same gage steel as the project the manager had overseen. Nothing was done about it for years, including by the manager, because that was just the price of doing business
When I lived and worked in Vallejo, Ca I got to know a number of retired workers from the Mare Island Naval Shipyard. I heard stories about theft and using facilities to manufacture car parts as a side hustle.
A true story from post-Soviet times (early 1992). We needed to obtain rubber cement to reinforce our collapsible canoes (another story in itself) and not being able to find any, approached a worker at a shoe factory and arranged to trade a half-liter bottle of vodka for three liters of rubber cement.
He told us to come with him around to the back fence, where his friend on the inside would meet us. with the goods (obviously the controls were stricter at that point)
Three plastic bottles of rubber cement came over the fence, and we handed the bottle over. It was one of those old classic versions with the tear-off top, so in order to share, his confederate held his mouth up to a gap in the fence and his buddy just poured it into his mouth.
Awesome story, thanks! Just like I purchased my weights!
Definitely one of the most Soviet stories I've ever heard.
And this is how they manned their ammunitionfactories and how the worker's wheel rotated! Liquor and crime😂😂😂
speaking of which. We needed the rubber cement to glue reinforcement to a three-seat canoe.
We wanted to get a three-seat canoe so I could come along on a boating trip. Three-seaters were impossible to find in any store or market, but my buddy found out that they were being manufactured at the Saljut defense works. That's right. a military plant. Part of Gorbachev's plan to have all military plants dedicate part of their production to civilian purposes.
So we pulled up to the gate, I was driving a company car with foreign plates, I paid the cash Ruble equivalent of $50 and they came out the gate with a forklift and loaded the canoe into the back of car.
That left me wondering what I could have purchased there for $1,500 or $15,000 dollars...
@@Ralphieboy You are basicly describing the plot of The Jackal😂😂😂 when worlds collides😂😂😂
I had two roommates in college who were from the USSR. It was a great experience. They laughed about American's impressions of Russians. The propaganda is in 1979 they were still lining people up and shooting them. Everyone was scared etc.
We had a similar system in our home. We had 2 TV Sets complete with VCRs ,borrowed' from mums work even still with identification plates from the office she worked in. Idea was, should there be a unexpected inspection of all the video equipment, she would call my dad who would in hurry swiftly bring TVs and VCRs back to her office, as we lived some 3 minutes of running away..
Never in 20 something years that situation happened, and now some nearly 30 yrs later (this happened in 1993) we still have that equipment in our home now long forget by original owner - state :D
U have any more interesting stories like that?
in Poland we also had "deputaty" so people get some of goods that place of work was producing, let's say in paper mill people would get salary plus some toilet paper, notepads etc to prevent people from stealing
Yeah, that seems proper. This policy should probably have been adopted elsewhere. It is at odds with ideology to give the workers at this specific factory some advantage in possessing some given product, when the products in principle belong to all the people, but in practice people will carry stuff off with them anyway, so who cares! :D May as well make it systematic and reduce unknown losses.
True story: when returning from work in the west during the eighties, my former boss jumped into the back of a taxi to go from the Berlin Wall back to where he lived. The driver asked him what he did for work. My boss told him that he worked in the movies. The taxi driver replied with disappointment: "nothing useful there".
My wife and her family 'escaped' the Soviet Union in the later 1970s. I get to hear stories of life under soviet style socialism from her parents but your videos are much more thorough with the research etc. Thank you for the videos. As for a translation to English for nesum, I am thinking maybe 'appropriator' might work.
In the USN, we sometimes had to go foraging for something at the tender. I called it stealing, but a coworker corrected me and said it was appropriating.
Very interesting. It's cool to see how resourceful people are, but sad to see they had to go to such lengths to hide making ends meet. In the USA as a kid, I found tons of tools lying on the side of the road, presumably fallen from work trucks. Dumpster diving for used microwaves and construction materials was also a college pastime.
Still happens, got a boiler installed in a maintenance room, next morning the thing was gone.
I like the story from the Soviet Union about the man reconstructing the TV, because there wasnt a patent on things. So he just had an exploded wiring diagram of a TV and put it together one piece at a time with very limited knowledge of electronics, the plans were so wide open, he just basically put it together like legos.
If I was caught doing this I'd just argue I was avoiding alienation by retaining possession of the product my labor time produced.
Your labour time production depends on everyone else's labour time production. you don't get to "refuse alienation" at the expense of making more alienation for your comrades ;)
lul
I think this topic is fascinating and find it very interesting. Back in 2006 I developed a problem where I needed money quickly very often. I was in charge of a particular Department and I had the final count for a certain material and it was extremely valuable at that time over $3 a pound. I carried many many of those home. Years later I became a network engineer in the technology field and it took a long time to get rid of that mindset of always scheming and trying to steal expensive products I wasn't raised like that
I love your channel, one of my best friends was an older Russian guy who use to tell me stories like this all the time, till he moved to canada, this makes me smile and think of him when i watch, and i always learn something cool :)
In England a distant relative of mine worked at a naval shipyard (70's I think) and 'acquired' some paint to paint his coal bunker with; apparently it looked fantastic in battleship grey and never rusted XD
I heard a story in Australia about a manager in one the state's department of main roads. This guy was a real ShOneT to those under him and was 'liberating' equipment as well. At the appropriate moment when he was being investigated for corruption, those who worked under him supplied the authorities with minute details of his stolen equipment which was found at his home, so that his "ship" was definitely sunk. His employees had marked star-pickets* with identifying numbers so that there could be no mistake. *stakes used for fencing.
"Carrying Home" isn't just unique to Soviet culture. I've worked two different factory jobs here where carrying stuff home happened fairly regularly.
The first expressly permitted it, placing rejects unable to be reworked, and extras from orders into a box that workers were free to take with them if they desired. All that was asked was to not attempt to resell them, and to be courteous of others. Unfortunately, this got abused, and it was much more strictly-limited and rationed.
The other didn't allow it as a rule, but the workers wouldn't rat each other out, and you could rarely get a supervisor's okay to do it more openly. That site worked with canned food, and so only cans that didn't make a complete box at the end of a run were considered (rejects were thrown away for safety reasons). These were also thrown away, so carrying them home was seen more as saving perfectly good product from the dumpster and wasted.
Thanks for sharing these stories. It’s very interesting to see the human condition under all circumstances.
I was born in 1987 in Lithuania, so I missed most of this, but I've heard a lot from my parents and it was the same here as well. There are even people who managed to build stuff from stolen bricks. I once helped my brother renovate his apartment built in the 70s and after we removed the plaster we saw quite a few missing bricks. They were replaced with a mixture of sawdust and concrete...
People stealing... ehem, taking, stuff from work was a completely normal part of life. Buying stuff that's impossible to get otherwise from people you know, from "under the counter", "pa blatu", was a large part of the shadow economy as well.
Don't know who would miss stuff like that.
In the 80's and 90's if you went to the flea markets they had in military base towns you could always find stuff that had pretty clearly been stolen. The govt tightened it up after 9/11 but I 100% garuntee you there will still be atleast 1 military surplus store in every military base town with shelves full of stuff that walked off the base.
My wife's grandfather was the boss at a food storage warehouse. The whole family came to stay with them because he always had food.
Steal just stands for strategic transfer of equipment to alternate location
As my grandmother said: A grocery shop worker could feed one family by himself, but when he tries to feed two, both families will stay hungry. Mind you thats from a woman that worked in 5 or 6 places in her life. From a scrapyard where she put 60kg pallets of aluminum in a press for 8-10 hours a day (she herself weighed around 50kg), as a server working 12 hour shifts, as a barber, a cook all kinds of professions. As long as you want to work, there will always be a place to work. If you can't find a job (if you don't want to), the state will find work for you, but that won't be pleasent. I wonder how she will feel if I tell her that people from my generation get depressed for working in an air conditioned office for 8 hours a day for 5 days a week...
Easy jobs aren't the same as fulfilling jobs. A job where I get 20 dollars an hour to do some menial task in an office like counting sheets of paper and tacks would be very easy, but it would also drive most people crazy. Would rather work construction for the same wage and feel like I'm actually doing something.
I think the 8 hour office job thing is more about soul crushing mental prisons. I'm glade the woman was such a hard worker that doesn't mean we should eat shit sandwiches and be happy. Just like we don't owe the government nothing we owe corporate companies even less.
@@michaelpelzek8882 You said it. You especially right on with that last sentence. Amen to that.
In latin America it's totally normal. Salary are very low and people take "lo que estaba mal puesto" (things that were in a "bad place")
I believe it's more normal in the US than any one let's on.😊
its not stealing, they just redistributed the goods
Yuri Maltsev once told this anecdote about a young lady working at his office stealing paper clips and when asked why is she stealing the paper clips she answered "what else is there to steal?".
I just discovered your channel this afternoon and I really enjoy the material. I'm looking forward to exploring the rest of your content. Thanks, man! 🤠
Awesome, thank you!
Even here in the USA, stuff goes missing on construction sites all the time. Not huge amounts of stuff but things here and there, a pallet of bricks, couple windows, reel of wire, that kind of stuff
Yeah this isn't just a Soviet thing, my friend who works for a meat cutter gives me fancy meat for free that I would never be able to buy. my friend who works at a bike shop can get me a new chain if I need it, my friend who works for a company that roasts and packages coffee brings big unlabled bags for all her friends. People just don't talk about it, and a lot think they are the only person doing it.
@@unicornosaurus514 johnny cash wrote a song about it lol, "Cadillac, one piece at a time"
@@jordanhicks5131 Yes, I've heard that song.....hilarious!
That last story about the anvil had me roaring with laughter. Thanks for another great video, Sergei! Your content has been both hilarious and very informative.
In a related story, I worked a powerplant shutdown in SC where a guy claimed he was bit on the toe by a black widow at work, word was that he was renovating an old house. I believe he was trying to get workmanship comp.
Thank you for great content! You are teaching people real life.
My pleasure!
my grandfather was roofer he would always come home with pockets full of nails. i work as a fireman now and ive seen 1-3 liter glass bottles of mercury when fighting fires in peoples garrages. people didnt know what it is for and that its dangerous, but they would still steal it from the workplace and store it in their garrage because thats what you are supposed to do lol. i have at my possesion a bunch of stuff handed down from those days:)
I love it! I have a friend from East Germany and back when it was still communist, everybody did the same thing. Like his mom said, "They pretend to pay us, so we pretend to do our job"...
Sounds like Boss/worker dynamics of any age including today...
@@jimbob-robob No. Very different working under authoritarian communists
That is a polish joke
“One piece at a time. And it didn’t cost me a dime.”
A friend bought a huge hip flask at the "black market" in Tambov. He didn't have a use for it, but just thought it was interesting. I think it could carry a litre of liquid. One of his Russian friends explained what it was for. There was an electronics factory that produced guidance systems for one of the USSR's missile systems, possibly the SS20. My friend said that the factory cleaned the circuit boards with pure ethanol. People used these huge hip flasks to smuggle the alcohol out of the factory.
That was most likely isopropyl.
I knew a guy who worked in a huge warehouse with me - he wanted a large torque wrench, so towards the end of the shift he took it out of the packaging, went into a dark corner and with some packing tape, taped the wrench around his body to align with his spine (more or less) and then for the head part that was poking out a bit, he threw his jacket on it over one shoulder. Security saw his jacket over his back (jackets/heavy sweaters were not allowed inside, you put all that into lockers outside the gate), he showed it to them, they patted it down, cleared him, gave him a warning about not having coats in there, and he threw it back over his shoulder, covering the tip of the wrench, and walked right out.
$200 torque wrench, through the door. I was impressed by the balls he had.
It's not stealing. It's "liberating goods"
There is an excellent book on the reality of life of Soviet block people. It's called 'Rosa Luxembourg Contraceptive Cooperative, or Civilization of Communism' by L. Tyrmand.
Very fun to read.
In the late seventies I returned to the country of my birth, Canada. IN the UsA growing up (yeh, I know it doesn''t seem that way now) STEALING was just south of murder and kidnapping in most US based cultures. What surprised me was the level of outright THEFT in my Canadian business. It was overlooked, seemed almost ok as long as you didn't do it outright. Man.
Thats a fact. Thieves are thieves no matter how much they're paid. Canadians have a general attitude of if I show up for work, I've earned my wage. Many businesses shut down from overpaid underproducing & thieving employees from management down. I worked for a huge concrete mfg that went bankrupt primarily due to management/human resources hiring too many "ghost" employees.
@@deadmanriding1118 That sounds like organized crime was involved. No show jobs (ghost employees) was a regular racket for the mob
@@masstv9052 No, it was regular old white collar greed. They were caught through auditing, the company was eventually restructured & still in business. Number 1 theft in Canada was probably work time theft. Why work when the boss isnt watching attitude? Had friends that made 15-18 dollars an hour in the late 70s. Asked what they did for a Living- "Nothing". 1980 hit, company pulled out to the US, & the fortunate ones took any job they could at half wage or less. Canadians are very good at pretending to be honest, from the top down.
Thats the melting pot vs 'cultural mosaic' methods for ya.
awesome workers paradise - Bernie.. My dad worked at the Kiev meat plant and my grandfather owned a tractor trailer and a Zhiguli and we still decided to take our chances to leave everything behind and come to the US back in 1979
Interesting to hear how it was in the USSR, although it happens everywhere else, too. In the UK, there is a town near a military port, called Blue Town. The name comes from the fact the houses were often painted blue. The blue paint was used at the docks and "carried" home by the dock workers. Stevedores, as they are called. These days the navy is long gone, but Sheerness is still a port, and Blue Town still exists, although repainted other colours.
Johnny Cash's song "One Piece At A Time" is about a man who works at a car factory and slowly builds a car out of parts he steals from work. It ends up looking rather strange though. 🤣
My dad would also tell me similar stories from the Soviet Union. It was commonplace to steal and to get a job somewhere. Not just to help friends and family. Also to sell since you barely made any money.
If you could not sell your stolen merchandise for cash, you could barter with someone else for the goods they had stolen from their workplace. Stolen potatoes for stolen eggs.
Like rationing time US,
"Where did you get that?"
"Oh, it fell from the back of a truck!"
In '92 I drove a diesel van across Europe to St Petersburg. I was there for a couple of months. I discovered that there was no official provision for private motorists to buy diesel, only with commercial/military vouchers. So it could only be bought on the black market for cash. Not that we ever had any real problem filling up. Cans acquired from a bus station, fuel syphoned from a truck by the driver, bribe the petrol station attendant, whatever.
This is the funniest episode of Ushanka show so far.
I worked at a plant in the UK where a guy rode out one day on his bike. It fell over at the gatehouse, the guard bent down to help him with the bike and couldn't pick it up .The rider had disassembled the frame and slid brass bars inside. Another friend told me of the royal mint where the worker's welfare sold concentrated fruit drink in gallon jugs and someone was caught trying to smuggle coins out in the concentrate.
The beginning of the Soviet Simpsons parody Homer steals a lamp from the plant, makes sense now, thanks👍
Absolutely fascinating!! Thanks so much for sharing this history!