After graduation, students were allowed a month's vacation before beginning their mandatory two - to three-year work assignments. From 1928 to 1991, the law required college graduates to repay the country for their education by accepting an assignment in their special field. When new graduates arrived at their job sites, they were assigned housing and reimbursed for travel expenses. By this requirement the state hoped to supply less popular areas with badly needed professionals. In 1985, 98 percent of all new graduates who had been full-time students were given job assignments. But getting these newly minted specialists to follow through on assignments was another matter. Generally the best students got first choice of jobs. Many graduates, such as married couples who would be separated and those with health problems or dependent relatives, were exempted from being sent away from home. Others managed, whether through good connections, bribery, or sheer determination, to squeeze themselves into those loopholes. Staying close to the comforts of family and home was important, especially if home was in a city. Graduates from Moscow were especially reluctant to leave for fear of permanently losing their residency permits. Many graduates failed to turn up at their assignments or quit long before their time was up, knowing they would probably not be punished, especially if they had under-the-table support from someone with clout. Purposely getting oneself fired was another method of cutting short an unwanted assignment. Sometimes assignees who did report for work were turned down because the enterprise had no job for them in their specialty, could not provide housing, had asked for more specialists than they really needed, or did not want someone from a particular geographic region or ethnic group. Rather than turn down an assigned specialist flat, managers frequently, albeit illegally.
Gave unwanted graduates menial jobs or failed to provide them with an apartment, hoping the newcomer would disappear, sooner rather than later. On the other hand, many bosses were glad to (illegally) hire needed specialists who had fled an assignment elsewhere. The job assignment program (called raspredelenie) sometimes led young people onto weird paths. In The First Circle, Solzhenitsyn describes how young Simochka and nine of her fellow Institute of Communications Engineers graduates, not qualified for any scientific work, are inducted wholesale into the secret police, given the rank of lieutenant, and assigned to a secret scientific laboratory, whose scientists are political prisoners forced to work on voice-identification technology. Whether or not the assignment was as morally tainted as Simochka's, raspredelenie offered virtually all new graduates a shelter from menial work. When in the 1980s the program started to fall apart, students were at liberty to find their own jobs, if they could, and thousands could not.“
World History
