People working in TV manufacturing plants could not
> get fired no matter how badly they did (I may be exaggerating slightly,
> but not by much).
Soviet joke, "We pretend to work. You pretend to pay us."
On Soviet agriculture, one more cite, http://www.shevchenko.org/famine/73_81.htm , "Soviet Peasants: Or, the Peasants' Art of Starving." Armando Pitassio and Victor Zaslavsky, ed. Translated by Jean Alexander and Alexander Zaslavsky. New York: Telos Press, 1985. x + 156pp. ISBN: 0-914386-12-3.
Zaslavsky wrote, "The Neo-Stalinist State: Class, Ethnicity, and Consensus in Soviet Society."
-- Michael Pugliese