Alternative title: Trotskyite gets put in charge, tries to push communism button, finds out the material conditions of a fucking ice age may not be conducive to declaring a final victory of the 5th internationale over Stalinism in a videogame.
My favorite quote in the article
Everyone was incredibly happy with me and all my kept promises right up until the coal ran out, which I’d kind of stopped paying attention to as I got ensnared in a thicket of political manoeuvring and ideology. I wasn’t overwhelmed—the game does a good job of not bombarding you with too much information and mechanical complexity, and Stokalski says it’s a conscious effort by the devs to make sure you’re never “doing notes, doing maths on the side just to not die”—I’d just gotten wrapped up in ideas without paying much heed to material reality.
Wage flattening was a persistent talking point in Soviet politics and IIRC was one of the hair-brained things Gorbachev tried to implement after he ran out of Andropov’s policies to continue and before he started hanging out with revisionist liberals and enacting their anticommunist agenda. It’s just apart from Gorbachev Soviet policies were generally more grounded in material necessity than idealistic gestures, so even though it was a thing that was talked about no one else was foolish enough to actually try it.
Gorbachev was a comprador liberal so I take any batshit thing he tried to implement as intentional sabotage to divide the population and push towards reform.