This is simply not true and is main reason that superior education in USSR did not materialize in economical and technological prosperity.
Your career advancement in USSR was affected by many factors with your actual performance being near the bottom. Being Jewish was a huge handicap, not being member of the party was another one. Coming from peasants/laborers family was a plus, for there were quotas for advancement of the "hegemony" classes. Bribes as well as your network (or your relatives') could land you better job much easier than hard productive work that nobody values.
Existence in USSR was dull, many talented people drunk themselves to death (drugs were hard to get by). These distinct bright spots like superior education did not change the overall picture.
The problem is, such an utopic system where everyone works on whatever they want and gets free housing from the state was economically unsustainable long term. Which is why it collapsed and most of those people working in science immediately packed their bags and move to the US when it happened because talented people working on interesting things don't like living with shortages in a strict oppressive environment where you had to constantly watch your mouth or risk having your career or life ended swiftly.
It was only sustainable back then due to the massive natural resources the SU had, while enduring shortages and exploiting the forced/slave labor the SU had access to. Not something replicatable or desired in free societies today, though plenty of modern slave labor practices exists in rich western nations today where some industries only survive due to access to cheap labour willing to work below market rate and live in worse conditions than the locals.
In reality that was more a queue for basically anything including apartments, all the high position jobs were taken by party members where you had no chances hence why nobody misses that.
(1)
I grew up in the GDR (East Germany). During the standard ten year "polytechnical secondary school" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polytechnic_Secondary_School) when it came to deciding what I wanted to become I chose... officer in the East German army, specifically, engineering, airplane maintenance. It never came to that because the wall came down and I switched target to computer science and the civilian sector - for the exact same reason why I wanted to go to the army: A civilian engineering job seemed quite useless.
During school we had lots of contact with real world jobs. Apart from summer jobs, where I usually ended up in some food production factory (brewery, chocolate, sausages - everything was very clean and sanitary, not a single bad anecdote here in any of them), we had "lessons" where we went to the factory and did some limited production of household goods ourselves, learning factory life, processes and various machines. It was a lot of fun and an unambiguously good experience by the way.
Anyway, during my time in the (huge, extremely run-down chemical fiber) factory I saw engineers with shovels digging. That was the last straw, for good pay, good advancement, good social standing and better job satisfaction than the pretty much non-existent one one of an engineer in the GDR (as far as I could witness) the army was the only real option. Ironically, for the exact same selfish reason I switched to desiring a company job immediately after reunification, to the dissatisfaction of the guy in the recruitment office who still hadn't realized how everything had changed around him including his own citizenship.
(2)
The German equivalent of "Business Week", which is called "Wirtschaftswoche", even before the actual reunification had a thick special edition for students about to leave high-school, for the first time issued for both East and West Germany. It included some really big test that one could fill out to get some free advice for oneself based on the result.
It was popular enough that tens of thousands of results were available from both West and now also from East Germany, I had submitted one of them (by letter). It had taken a whole afternoon to fill out.
The result was that overall the East Germans were better than the West Germans in the STEM fields, worse in languages (East German language education sucked, mostly rote learning - even though I had had not just Russian but English too) and in text interpretation.
Modern people must remember that they were told what to work on, when, and how much they would get paid. There wasn't the concept of Sundays or vacations as we have today. There were no choices, only the government's choice.
> how much they would get paid
Most people in capitalist countries have very limited control over how much they are paid.
It's a relic from the past where the eastern socialist block was very preoccupied with projecting an image of power superiority over the "dumber" and "weaker" west, so investing massive resources in prepping a few younglings in STEM olympiads, along with sports olympics and chess were a way to assert that superiority over the west. As such, back then, if you studied hard and got into a good STEM university you were set for an easy and stable carrier in a big city where the government would provide you with a nice apartment and great school for your future kids. It's how my dad managed to escape one of the poorest villages in the country and move to a big city with a nice job, until everything collapsed in '89 that is and everyone was now broke.
Now it's a pointless endevour as those olympiad medal winners immediately go to ivy league universities, propping up the US economy instead, who doesn't need to invest much in its lower education system as it gets the best students from abroad anyway.
Preferably nonfiction, but fiction would be good too.
Struggle to get the basics for life: heat, food, clothing, books, disposables. It all took queues, friends, relatives, and black markets.
No hope for the future: no matter what you did, how hard you tried, there was no way to improve your lot in life. It was all outside your influence, all controlled by The Party.
The only dream we had was to somehow escape to the Free West. It was dangerous and you could lose your (or your loved one's) life in the process, but for many it was worth it.
My grandfather was repressed (forced labor) in Stalin times, but later became a worker at very large steel mill and made very good money there, even traveling to Egypt as a consultant. He had a good car — Volga (white, the black ones were reserved for party VIPs), moved to a new apartment couple times. We spent enjoyable weekends on dacha (a small plot of land with a house and a garden) or went to a nearby lake to swim or to fish. Spending a week or two in sanatorium in the mountain area was also possible (I think this was sponsored by trade union — still a thing in some large companies in Russia).
My parents were engineers back then, they also had a good job, separate apartment (no morgage, no expensive payments) and dacha. Travel abroad wasn’t really accessible (my father was in Hungary once), but within the country it was a normal thing, flights were relatively cheap.
This was the lifestyle of many our family members and their friends. Of course, there were many people which lived much worse, but for sure life in SU was not eternal suffering of everyone and you did not have to be a party member to live well.
That's still not the norm in Russia. Instead, there are agreements between the schools and the nearby public swimming pools that their instructors will teach school children at a certain predefined time of the week. E.g., "between 10am and 11:30 am, the first three lanes in this pool are reserved for school number 42".
Is that that different to the Western model: I have a masters degree in physics. I either have to give up on having a family and buying a house and do research / teach. Or I can go work at a bank doing something with no real social value and have an Ok life.
Even down to "if my parents were rich and connected I would have more options" our system mirror the soviet one in actual opportunities and outcomes. We just have better marketing...
Under communism you'd just get told what to do, by others.
In capitalism, if the system is not providing you opportunities, you can go out and attempt to make your own opportunity. It's damn hard, near impossible, but nobody is stopping you try. Under communism, it was illegal and they would shoot you for it.
My mother told me she left the women's front because it had been "couped" by socialists. In particular, they opposed pension rights for unpaid care work, because they believed that would encourage women to stay at home, and my mom thought it was a lot more important to value the work women had done than to push them into the wage economy.
Looking into it, though, I think maybe the women's front was socialist dominated from the start, and it was 68er, second wave-ish women like her who were "entering".
This way they can use their top expertise to explain how 3.8 roentgen is not great but not terrible.
Or how did they didn't need to worry about ethics since obviously "boss knows better"
That was compensated by a great push towards exact sciences, accompanied by the fast pace of industrialisation, electrification and mechanisation.
