Socialist competition

Socialist competition or socialist emulation (социалистическое соревнование, "sotsialisticheskoye sorevnovanie", or "соцсоревнование", "sotssorevnovanie") was a form of competition between state enterprises and between individuals practiced in the Soviet Union and in other Eastern bloc states.

The first variant is a literal translation of the Russian term, commonly used by Western authors. The second form is an official Soviet translation of the term, intended to put distance from the "capitalist competition", which in its turn was translated as "капиталистическая конкуренция", "kapitalisticheskaya konkurenciya".

Implied was that "capitalist competition" only profited those that won, while "socialist emulation" benefited all involved.

In Soviet practice, according to Victor Kravchenko and Mikhail Heller, the competition between workers and industries was, however, not voluntary and much fiercer than the Western one. It was enforced by the collective pressure orchestrated by state security services (KGB) and local communist party representatives using collective responsibility and laws on dronery or wrecking. The race between teams and team members for overcompletion of the plans led to increasingly unrealistic targets, which could be only satisfied with cheating, double accounting, hoarding of resources, and shturmovshchina (last-minute cramming)—which, in the long term, led to a collapse of the supply chain in the economy. This was the dark side of Stakhanovism, udarniki, and the subbotnik. In 1987, Soviet economist Nikolai Shmelov estimated that out of 450 billion roubles worth of inventories of raw materials and parts, around 170 billion was kept as surplus, with the sole purpose of securing the successful completion of plans.

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