The Nazis did create a national work program that helped reduce unemployment to very low levels. However there was little choice of profession and workers were likely to end up as laborers or in factories for the war effort. Anybody who refused to participate in the work programs would be subjected to horrific treatment by the Gestapo, or sent to the concentration camps.
And how is that different from the USSR? Yes, statist socialism looks like that, so what?
The Soviet Union did many things that benefitted workers. Free education was provided at world-class universites, with guaranteed work after graduation. These weren't just industral or labor jobs, they included jobs in the arts, higher education, science, engineering, anything.
Ah, I see. So you're saying that the forced jobs in the USSR were different than the free jobs in Germany? I don't know the details, but of course Hitler's revolution was much more gradual, and he had much, much less time (6 peace years, in fact).
What I know is that being unemployed was a criminal (?) offense in the USSR, and that people were given the most random jobs, like you go to the middle of nowhere to teach English in Kalmykia, or else. Which I would have liked myself, don't get me wrong, but it was still a controlled, totalitarian system.
《By mid-1964, 37,000 people had been exiled under this decree. In particular, the following were recognized as parasites and exiled: an engineer-technologist who stopped working, equipped a rabbit farm and began to live off the income it brought in; a fireman who worked on his land plot and sold vegetables and fruits at the market. Sometimes the courts made decisions to evict the disabled.》
ru.wikipedia.org
It's weird to bring up war effort when Germany had to fight a war for half of its fleeting existence.
Another perk of the USSR was guarateed housing.
Germany didn't like multiple-storey apartments, so that's why they tried to genocide the Ukrainians, to build American-style suburbia in the Slav Lands (and failed).
Although the USSR had some serious flaws, I think communism did have a lot of advantages, and I would rather have seen Russia improve the communist model to fix the flaws instead of abandoning it and transitioning to the capitalist model in such a corrupt and painful way.
True, the entire thing puzzles me to no end. My personal schizo working hypothesis is that Russia simply didn't have enough cultural sovereignty and pride to exist separate from the wider Christendom. And the centre of Christendom was obviously to everyone in America. So one day the KGB woke up and farted a wind of change, with Glasnost and Perestroika (Gorbachev = Trump?).
Conversely, I contend that the best scenario for the survival of EVROPA would be if Rosa Luxemburg had a dynastic union with Lenin. Russo-Germanic Union in the 1920s might have given them enough cultural confidence to preserve the European kind.
...And full employment opportunities, yes.
