2 the USSR), as well as generous sickness and maternity allowances and family benefits. Pensionable age was low, with many privileged groups enjoying even earlier retirement rights. Pensions were non-actuarial. In Eastern Europe, average pension as a percentage of average state-sector wage tended to be high (around 55-60 percent), while in the former Soviet Unions it was rather low (around 40 percent). ” The role of enterprises. A number of social functions devolved to enterprises. The enterprises provided housing for workers and, in the Soviet Union, they often provided and paid for workers’ utilities (heating, hot water). Enterprises ran their own canteens, health facilities, owned vacation houses that provided cheap holidays, and subsidized child care. Enterprises were often the conduits through which workers were supplied with scarce products at low prices. Although enterprises in the West also fulfill some of these functions, their importance was much greater in socialist economies. Not convenience, but ideological and political reasons explain the role played by the enterprises.

Ideologically, state sector was viewed as the backbone of socialist development. In consequence, the "good citizen" of the socialist commonwealth was the one who worked in the State sector. Toward him or her were to be directed all the benefits. Hence the role of enterprises which, by definition, insured perfect targeting of benefits. The enterprises were not regarded as mere producers of goods or (less valued) services, but rather as places where people were brought together to participate in the process of socialization and creation of a "new man". Indeed, this original, naive, blueprint gradually faded; few of the new entrants in the labor market in the late 1970s or 1980s thought of the firms where they worked in such terms. Yet the role of the enterprises continued to reflect that initial ideological bent, and cannot be, probably, adequately understood without it. In words of Russian writer Alexander Zinoviev: "I asked him [a Communist ideologist] how really important was the Great Construction Site [the enterprise]. Were the victims justified? The Construction Site—he replied—was without importance, meaningless from economic as from any other practical standpoint. But precisely this was its great historical meaning. This was, above everything else, a form of organization of human life, and only after that, was this a phenomenon of secondary importance in economics and industry".* In addition, anchoring social benefits in enterprises and linking them to working for a monopoly employer, the state, ensured political obedience. Those who did not want to work for the state were treated as non-persons’, left without sustenance for themselves and their family. Linking benefits to jobs and keeping money wage distribution relatively egalitarian had a further objective: to prevent accumulation of private wealth to which those who decided to ignore (or

> *Romania and Bulgaria are exceptions in Eastern Europe. Their pension-wage ratios were similar to those in the Soviet Union.

‘Quoted from Serbo-Croatian translation of Nashey yunostii polet [The elan of our youth], p. 145. ‘See Mozny (1994, p.220).