http://englishrussia.com/?p=5492#more-5492

I think this one will give me nightmares, but I love the rest of them.

Here, I've translated a couple for you:

Not only was Arm and Hammer actually a radical left wing political party in the US, the tycoon Armand Hammer, (who was actually named after the political party, was rumored to have laundered money for the Soviets.

An neat contrast in the style and subjects can be seen if you compare those above to this collection of what are apparently pre-Communist posters.  They have less of that 'drawn by committee' look.

Soviet products were never "issued" to the population. People's jobs paid just the way they do in the West, and they chose for themselves which products to buy. There wasn't any competition among ice cream brands, but you could still choose to stay at home and eat momma's cookies instead. Obviously, if you're a ministry with targets for ice-cream consumption to meet, that's a bad thing.

By the way, if you're interested in what that ad for pencils says, it's:

A. Hammer (not transliterated)

[picture]

American commercial concession "A. Hammer"

Pencils and [can't remember this word]

Moscow, New York

So basically, the USSR was a Blade Runner style MegaCorp?

To be perfectly honest I haven't seen it or read the book it's based on either, though everyone in family says I have seen the movie, which is quite odd I must say.

Not really.  For one thing, there was no profit motive.  Price controls were everywhere, so that even a dude reselling his car to another dude could only charge a certain fraction of the already-below-market-value original selling price.  Which led to the fun phenomenon in late 80's east germany of people buying their car on the black market  for fair market value and then suing to recover the chunk of the sales price above state-sanctioned value.  Eventually the GDR's high court got wise and started being a little less sympathetic to the buyer in black market price gouging suits.

Also unlike a single corporation, the "state" didn't make everything as one organisation, the way a company might.  Instead, different state owned but relatively independent firms made a lot of shit (independent of the state, not the party), contracting with each other within the context of plan goals. 

The problem was contract breaches.  If a firm breached a contract to supply coal to a powerplant, say, the state could not just award money damages: all the other coal produced in the country was assigned to someone else under the plan and had already been contracted for, so the injured party couldn't buy replacement goods on the market.  So arbitraz courts became extremely flexible, focusing on finding a practical solution that would allow both parties to reach plan goals rather than a legal solution that would award both parties their contract rights, which made contracts themselves little more than blame-assigning documents for when plan goals weren't met.

Meanwhile the whole thing was supported by an undergirding of massive black market activity.  Every firm had an employ whose job was to buy needed supplies on the black market; the USSR was fed by food grown on private plots, sold to the state, and then sold back to the people at subsidized prices; whole black market factories existed; etc. 

I'm taking a class on eastern european law right now; I don't normally have a desire to spout barely-relevant information about the soviet union.