Why do we have a small pension?

2024 Author: Seth Attwood | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-16 15:55

Is it because the length of service for the Soviet period was counted, and the salaries of that time were forgotten?

Until retirement, as they say, you still need to live (God forbid, everyone), but I decided to be curious about what awaits me in my bright retirement future, if it takes place, of course.

It is not difficult to satisfy such curiosity nowadays - it is enough to request through the state services "Information on the state of the individual personal account of the insured person". Translated into normal language, this is, in fact, the only piece of paper that can give an idea of your pension at the moment, even if it is still (by age) not due.

So, delving into the study of my pension paper, received at the request of the Pension Fund (PFR), I got a little bored. The amount that the state guarantees to me for the time being, you don’t really eat much - this is several times less than my current salary with a total continuous work experience of three decades.

It is curious that the FIU somewhere dug up information about absolutely all of my places of work, including the distant Soviet times, when I was still a schoolboy contrived to work as a locksmith at a construction site. True, here sadness awaited me. Throughout my Soviet labor past - from an electric motor repairman with a salary of 70 rubles to the head of a department and a member of the editorial board of one of the main central newspapers with a ministerial salary of 500 rubles - I was entitled to round zeros as a pension. That is, it turns out that under the USSR I didn’t actually work and didn’t make money on my old age.

For the sake of fairness, I must say that the FIU does not assert this, since it indicated all my specific jobs. The nature of the accrued pension zeros, he explains, according to the piece of paper, "the lack of information about earnings" in the USSR. I had to strain my memory to remember how Soviet pensions were formed in general, and the first suspicions crept into my soul that our current beloved Pension Fund was holding back something or being cunning.

If anyone does not know, the Soviet pension provision was formed almost on the same principle as now - at the expense of deductions from enterprises and organizations, or, in a modern way, employers. The only difference is that in the USSR there were no specialized funds, as well as, of course, there were no gray wages, employers-capitalists, and even the spirit of any crooked schemes that allow you to bypass the rigid accounting and control system, which, in fact, was strong socialist system. Pensions to ordinary Soviet pensioners (if necessary) were charged on a single scale, representing the percentage of the pension itself to a specific wage with a certain minimum and "ceiling".

I mean, in a state of strict accounting and control, information about the earnings of citizens could not disappear somewhere, as the PFR apparently believes, having reset my Soviet past. And the awareness of the Pension Fund about my work biography during the USSR period (I myself never applied to the Pension Fund of Russia and did not provide any documents), as it were, hints: you got this somewhere. Where? Was it not where the information about my earnings was concentrated, which you do not want, but government organizations and enterprises (there were no others) regularly transmitted through their accounting channels?

However, the chest opens simply. About 10 years ago (or a little more), the FIU puzzled the payers of pension contributions to dig deeper into the work books of their employees with the corresponding transfer to the FIU of everything that was found in these books. Thus, pension officials got an idea of the work experience of each of us in order to calculate some pretty penny for old age, including a pretty penny for the Soviet past. For this past, future retirees, of course, were combed with one comb in terms of accruals. How else? There is no information about the salary of that period, therefore, get a fig, but a little with butter, so as not to be offended. Few people probably know that it is still possible to knock out money for aimlessly worked years in the USSR by running through the archives and typing information about your earnings. The result of this really hellish work with upholstering thresholds, trips to other cities and even to the now former Soviet republics is sometimes amazing. Particularly persistent, with appropriate legal support, managed to double the pension calculated by the PFR! But these are very few, because our people are mostly gullible: how much the state, represented by the PFR, has charged - and thanks for that. Those who study their pension files rarely ask themselves the question: what is the PFR doing so grandiosely with its bloated states and appetites for self-sufficiency that citizens themselves have to look for information about earnings and prove something in pension offices?

A small epiphany hatched when, after studying my Soviet period of working life, I switched to the nineties - the era of universal confusion and the initial accumulation of their capital by cunning citizens. Since the collapse of the USSR and until 1997, I again found myself in zero for the same reason - the employer did not provide information on earnings. Theoretically, since most of the organizations of this period were sharashkin's offices, this can be assumed. I don’t know what was on the minds of my employers in the liberty of gray wages and tax schemes. But here it is, lo and behold! One of my employers transferred to the Pension Fund of the Russian Federation in 1997 crazy money by now - almost seven million rubles! The FIU, however, dumbfounded me: this money does not count. For inexplicable reasons, he is not going to take into account everything that happened before 1998.

However, what is inexplicable here? Seven million rubles of contribution to my pension were paid before the denomination of the then stiff ruble. At the current "rate" - this is only seven thousand, although the pension paper continues to show seven million. How can this money be counted? By their purchasing power at that time? And what if the question of the return of Soviet "pension savings" to the purchasing power of the Soviet ruble arises? Of course, it's easier to say, “We don't know anything,” without explaining why. Sberbank told me this when I decided to close the account, which was opened in the Soviet Savings Bank! For 20 years there has been money that is equivalent to the cost of a Zhiguli at the time of opening the account. Sberbank gave me three (!) Modern rubles with kopecks.

Fortunately, there is something to be satisfied with in the Russian pension issue. The world is full of countries where pensions, as such, do not exist at all at the state level. Rejoice! But also envy, of course. My youngest daughter recently spent two weeks in Berlin with a modest German retired teacher to improve her language. They became so friends that the question of my daughter, what is the pension of a modest German teacher, sounded somehow by itself and somehow by the way. Well, now, after deducting all the taxes due, a modest German teacher in our money receives about 130 thousand rubles. Pensions! Can you imagine that our ordinary pensioner would receive at least a quarter of this amount? That's just it!