Help with SS Project: Need info on wages in 1935

[nobb]

Hi.
I am doing a really SS project on Stalin and his five-year plans. I know how much the average worker in Russia made in 1935 and I would like to compare it to the wages of Germans, or Americans during that time. I will be using that information to support how bad the living conditions were. My problem is that I cannot find any information at all. Ive done searches on Google, Wikipedia, and other online encyclopedias. I was hoping that someone knowledgeable here would be able to able me out. Thanks.

 

[imperium95]

Originally posted by: nobb
My problem is that I cannot find any information at all. Ive done searches on Google, Wikipedia, and other online encyclopedias.

I'd love to help if i could but i don't know the answer to your question. However, I would like to point out that real research requires libraries and scholarly works. The internet is an amazing tool but students rely entirely too much on it. Get offline and do some research. Get to the library. You can't google everything.



And of course there is the more philosphical debate of what happens when we rely too much on one method of searching for information? Anyway...

 

[nobb]

Yea...you're right. But I just do not know how to get started. There also doesn't seem to be any good social studies forums that I can post on.

 

[sonz70]

I didn't read through it, as I don't have time, but it has a few paragrpahs regarding working in Russia during the time you wanted

http://www.marxists.org/archive/dunayevskaya/works/1946/statecap.htm

^^^ 4th google page

 

[Infohawk]

Have you thought about asking a librarian. Some university librarians can be helpful.

 

[BBond]

I found some info on instructional salaries for the period from 1929 through 1998 at the link below. Maybe you can find specific info on other occupations. If I were you I'd check at the local public library.

Estimated average annual salary of instructional staff\1\ in public elementary andsecondary schools and average annual earnings of full-time employees in all industries: to 1997-98

 

[glenn1]

Wages for Americans in that time period should be relatively simple, try looking on the Bureau of Labor Statistics website for a start. Finding info on German and Soviet wages for the time period, you may have to do some digging in obscure economics books. You might want to try cribbing the footnotes from F.A. Hayek's The Road to Serfdom as it came out not long after that period, thus might reference some very good original source materials to go look at. You can probably do the same by getting something from John Maynard Keyes in the same time period.

 

[chcarnage]

I fear it's difficult to compare the nations by wages because the exchange rates weren't stable and the stock exchange crashed between the two World Wars. I for one would try to compare other factors of life standard.

I found a PDF file about the living conditions in Germany (the interwar Weimar Republic). It covers income, health and education, it's written in German though and it's too late here for me to translate the whole paper. You may try a machine translation. Living conditions seem to have stagnated or decreased in the 1930s.

 

[nobb]

Wow...thanks for everyone's help.