Westerners hold several misconceptions about the nature of work under Soviet communism. One is that the government told everyone what to do and where to do it. Another is that everyone got paid the same, regardless of what type of work they did. A third is that entrepreneurialism was strictly forbidden by the Communist regime. In fact, none of these was true.

It is true that most agricultural workers were organized into either collective farms (kolkhozy) or state farms (sovkhozy). Kolkhozniki, the members of a kolkhoz, sold their produce to the state at predetermined prices, while sovkhozniki were little more than salaried employees of the government. Even so, by 1935 members of both arrangements were permitted to work private garden plots in their spare time and to sell the produce legally at farmers' markets, where the prices were determined by the laws of supply and...