ABSTRACT
The transition to a market economy is closely connected with profound changes in the economic consciousness and economic culture of the entire population. The discussion in Russia today concerns not only the formation of an entrepreneurial class with the ethic characteristic of this social group, but also involves the formation of a full-fledged wage-earning class. The myth of the "Soviet worker-manager of production" that existed during the years of "developed socialism" was transformed during perestroika into the idea that the Soviet worker was merely a wage laborer. This idea is also divorced from reality. The definition of this worker as "state-dependent,"1 with an essentially traditionalist work ethic, seems more accurate. In his definition of this concept ("state-dependent worker"), Victor Zaslavsky wrote that it
on the one hand . . . relates to a complex of specific work habits and to a production ethic based more on the avoidance of work than on discipline and productivity, on a general scorn for work in the state sector of the economy, on the inability and reluctance to take risks and display initiative. The state-dependent worker always values guarantees more than success and views guarantees more as the absence of a threat than as the existence of a prospect for the satisfaction of his needs. On the other hand, the production and distribution of goods and services based on state-directive management are directly related to this type of worker.2
