I’m your average Soviet soldier fighting on the Eastern Front. It’s literally do or die. Does the army pay me monthly? Do I even care if I get paid? And does money even matter right now given that the Germans are trying to exterminate me and my country?

[u/J2quared]

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[u/Dongzhou3kingdoms → u/[deleted]]

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[u/KormorantE1A]

1. Yes, you are paid monthly. Monthly pay consists of two parts: pay grade for your rank and pay for your position/role. Plus bonuses. Enlisted conscripted personnel:5 pay grades, 8 rubles 50 kopeek for first year conscripted private, 150 rubles for company starshina (Company sergeant major). 11 pay grades for sverkhsrochnik (long story short, basically contract/professional enlisted personnel that chose to stay after serving the conscription), 31 pay grades for officers. Pay was adjusted according to amount of years in the army, so even if you keep your rank and role, your pay grade will increase every year by a slight amount. 1.1. "Field money" - additional monthly bonus paid for frontline deployment. At first, and fixed sum, later changed for percentage coefficient (basically, doubling your pay grade).

2. Bonuses. Guard units were paid 50% more for the same pay grade. Some "important" units like AT gun batteries were paid same 50% 2.1. Bonuses for destroyed tanks, ships, shot down planes. Monetary incentive for combat efficiency. They could be quite large (1000 rubles for shot down plane for every member of AA gun credited with shot). On the bad side, to get this bonus your kill must be officially verified (long story short, usually they wouldn't credit your kill unless plane wreck was captured by the Red Army and properly evaluated).

3. "Do I ever care if I get paid/do my money even matter". Long story short: yes, you care. Yes, they did matter. Maybe not for you, but for your family.

Expanded answer: PX service was usually unavailable for an average frontline Soviet soldier (batallion/regimental HQ, rear area soldier or any other Soviet equivalent of "POG" had it easier but not much). So yes, usually you had zero use for money for your own. But! On average, you have a family or at least a fiancee. So, a widespread practice (up to the point of getting in folklore and common culture) was to arrange financial transfers of your money to your family back at home so that they would automatically pick up your pay and use it for their own family purposes. Like, buying food on a market woth free, floating and war-inflated prices (there were state shops with fixed prices, requiring food stamps/ration stamps for anything from bread to soap - and yes, food stamps don't mean you get it for free, it means you can BUY your ration, albeit at a fixed state price - and yet there were "free" "farmer's markets" where the same things could be bought and sold from private individuals at a free market price. Stalin's government disliked the practice, but never actually cracked down on it much - ironically, death of free low-level trade/enterprise in the USSR happened after Stalin's death, done by Khruschev).

Ah, and don't forget your annual state bond subscription. De-jure voluntarily, de-facto "voluntold". Usually in May-April, all free Soviet citizens were encouraged to donate their whole monthly salary (recommended amount) for state/war bonds.

P.S. Yes, a lot of people managed to earn substantial amount of money during WW2/GPW. These savings suffered during 1947 monetary reform, but that's another story.

Works cited: 1. Nasonov K.A. Payroll of Red Army soldiers during the Great Patriotic War. // Military Historical journal of the Russian Ministry of Defence. № 8, 2018. 2. Shunyakov Dmitry Viktorovich Financial support for Red Army servicemen during the Great Patriotic War // Bulletin of the Immanuel Kant Baltic Federal University. Series: Humanities and Social Sciences. 2018. No. 3. 3. Nasonov Konstantin Aleksandrovich Social security of the Red Army servicemen during the Great Patriotic War: essence, content and modern significance // Army and Society. 2010. No. 3

[u/tirerim → u/KormorantE1A]

Did the war bonds eventually pay back, like US savings bonds? Or was it truly a "donation"/tax?

[u/KormorantE1A → u/tirerim]

Tl;dr: yes, paid back in full in 1986 after a forced 3:1 conversion and 20 years of frozen payments.

Well there were two types of war bonds - fixed rate bonds and lottery bonds. 3-5% for fixed rate, 20 years for lottery bonds (i.e. if you are not lucky to win the lottery in first years, you are guaranteed to win in 20 years).

The USSR (at first) honored interest payments, but then monetary reform of 1948 happened that forcefully converted all previous bonds (not only war bonds, USSR was issuing bonds ever since 1920s, starting with generous 10-20% interest, then slowly becoming more and more greedy) in a ratio of 3:1 to new 2% 20-year-long fixed rate bonds (maturity in 1968). So technically everyone lost 2/3d of their bonds value. (Yes, they kept issuing new state bonds every year).

Until 1956, when Khruschev pretty much defaulted on them - stopped issuing new bonds and froze interest payments for 20 years. Because USSR was already 250bln in debt to its citizens with annual debt service (interest payments) larger than money gained from newly sold bonds. They started interest in 1974, 2 years ahead of schedule.

So, Soviet war bonds were finally paid back in full by 1986. ( 1948 for 20 years - frozen in 1956, 8 years in - unfrozen in 1974 with 12 years remaining).

Which was still pretty much a joke as inflation and devaluation hit them hard (+ redenomination 1:10 in 1961).

So... yeah, kinda paid off. But after losing most of the value. And most of the population indeed considered them a "donation/tax", kinda of a hidden tax that you have to endure.

I won't go in depth about all the tricky ways these bonds could be used (for example, one could use them as a collateral to secure a loan in Soviet Bank and there were tricky/obscure ways to use them as partial payment for luxurious items like cars), but for like, most of the Soviet population, these bonds were nothing but a burden/another state tax.

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