Reddit mentions of The Political Economy of Stalinism: Evidence from the Soviet Secret Archives

I'm not sure I, or /u/PoblachtObrithe, really understand your question as you seem to be splitting it between two very different topics. One being the historical facts of how the Soviet Union organized and calculated the wages paid to workers and a second theoretical point as to how such a calculation is performed. Unfortunately both topics are pretty complicated and simply don't lend themselves to short answers.

On the historical question of wages within the Soviet Union, they were organized under a variety of different, often coexisting regimes. The broad, structural, differences between the economic policies of Lenin, Stalin, and Khrushchev has been discussed somewhat. However there were many elements contained within these broad policies that lead to differences between industries and even classes.

For example, during the NEP era it was rather common for local peasant communities to organize into what were called 'artels'. These were small peasant communes, often lead by local elders, that would negotiate for a collective wage between the state, other artels or local businessmen. During the NEP these were fairly common and were organized by what can only be described as fairly free market dynamics. Though, they did survive to some extent well into the Stalinist period as so-called Brigades.

Within the industrial working sectors of the economy it was rather similar to working in any nominally capitalist society with the exception of more state control. The state could essentially veto an industrialists policies or even place managers in their positions but the dynamics were largely the same.

During the industrialization period of the Stalin era we see a dismantling of the broader market, especially for industrial production and with it working class unions shifting position. Many were more or less absorbed in some form as an arm of the state and their character changing from a role of collective bargaining or working-class organization towards a distributive arm of the state which would handle issues of welfare distribution. The artel system was still fairly common. In 1932 we see the introduction of state incentives and benefits to so-called "Shock Workers" who regularly outperformed within industrial production.

Throughout this time period the higher order of planning was performed by Gosplan which developed the famous Five Year Plans which would then be enacted by the Politiburo. These were supposed to be broader frameworks outlining the aim of Soviet development. In reality this often fell apart to resource constraints that fell on the heads of resource managers to work out. From here on I'll defer to two previous /r/askhistorians posts that I think do the job of explaining Soviet economic thought in general seen here and here much better than I could.


That said my primary sources for this are The Soviet Experiment by Ron Suny and The Political Economy of Stalinism by Paul Gregory