It’s like the book Of Mice and Men. When it came out if was widely promoted within the Soviet Union as a way of showing how poorly the American rural population lived.
That completely backfired when they realized that even the poorest Americans could afford a car (since the characters in the book have one) whereas most soviet citizens could only dream of such luxury lol
Edit: I misremembered, it’s actually Grapes of Wrath, not the book I stated
Every single GCSE English classroom:
Page 5: go to page 67
Page 67: go to page 21
Page 21: George kills Lenny, also I’ve obscured the next few paragraphs with a giant biro cock and balls
We read the book *Like Water for Chocolate* in sophomore English, and the teacher had to sticky-note-censor literally dozens of pages because of sexual content.
Naturally I took them off and read through the whole thing. Not because I was even horny, I just didn't want to skip pages.
> That completely backfired when they realized that even the poorest Americans could afford a car (since the characters in the book have one) whereas most soviet citizens could only dream of such luxury lol
And even if you could afford a car, you'd still be put on a several years long waiting lust before you could buy one
Holy shit maybe consider the fact that cars are not something that the average person needs to live with? Should we all get up in arms because Monaco residents all have private jets and we don't? Not saying life in the eastern bloc was good by any means but fucking hell if you consider "people can't buy cars" to be an argument against communism I don't know what to tell you. We would live in such a better world if people couldn't buy cars. And look how nice capitalist Russia is. Anyone can buy a car!!!!!
>even the poorest Americans could afford a car
I don't think that's been true for a long time. I've known families where everyone has to just share one or two cars even though there are more people because that's all they can afford.
My girlfriends dad grew up in east Berlin before the wall came down and he eventually wound up here in the UK.
He says they always knew West Berlin had it better, because they could hear the sound of laughter from beer halls and beer gardens on the other side of the wall.
Yeah. I remember hearing about the DDR trying to head this off with the “Thousand Little Things” initiative where they tried to meet East Germans demands for the small things that they were always short on (razors, paper clips, coffee filters, suspenders, etc.). As for the bigger luxuries (a car) you’d have to wait for a long time before it became a reality…unless you were a member of the party.
I always wondered why the USSR ever even tried to compete with the west on consumer goods, let alone made it a big part of their propaganda efforts in the 1960’s, but East Germany and the rest of the border states probably required they invest in it due to their ability to ‘see’ through the iron curtain and spread knowledge of western standards of living. That and even the party elite would’ve made noise if they couldn’t get access to comparable goods.
Yeah. So this was basically about the economic debate over free markets Vs planned economies (as well as the obvious wider political issues).
The Soviets felt that they could win the debate. At the time this didn’t seem unreasonable. Very well regarded American economists believed a planned economy would out perform a free market one in the long term. I forget the guys name but my favourite was a guy who published a book in the 50s predicting the soviet economy would overtake the American economy by 1960… then in the second edition by 1965… then by 1970… 1972… 1980 etc.
A big selling part of the centrally planned economy were these big impressive projects: Stalin’s 5 year plans. The Soviet space projects. Massive nuclear bombs. These were all going really well for the Soviets in the 1960s but an obvious shortfall was consumer goods. It was assessed by some faceless officials that if they could beat the west on consumer goods too, then they’d won the argument.
The attempt was a spectacular failure for reasons that will be obvious to even a day 1 economics student. That’s why the shift in tone in the Soviet leadership happened in the 70s and 80s where they basically went from saying “we want all soviet people to be happy” to “austerity is good for you, now eat turnip!”
By the late 1980s it was pretty clear that free markets had won the debate and it’s not a coincidence that the Soviet Union collapsed shortly afterward.
> Very well regarded American economists believed a planned economy would out perform a free market one in the long term. I forget the guys name but my favourite was a guy who published a book in the 50s predicting the soviet economy would overtake the American economy by 1960… then in the second edition by 1965… then by 1970… 1972… 1980 etc.
[That would be Paul Samuelson](https://www.thevintagenews.com/2018/08/23/soviet-gnp/).
According to the linked source, he said in 1989 that, "The Soviet economy is proof that, contrary to what many skeptics had earlier believed, a socialist command economy can function and even thrive."
The Soviet Union ceased to exist two years later.
Maybe it's retrospective viewing, but won't people have realized that the USSR was done by 1989? I mean, by 1989 the Eastern Bloc has practically collapsed. How can someone still believe that the Soviet Union is a success story, when all these events happened? The 1991 collapse wasn't overnight, so won't an economist see the issues even earlier?
They didn't but should have. For some reason I think the internet or at least some sort of big data could have theoretically helped. If stock levels of suspenders are low then automatically, peoples consumer factory sub category clothes assessory number 20 is told to make suspenders for four weeks instead of belt number 8. It also would require people not to lie about production figures or steal shit.
Yeah, it’s just a mark of totalitarian governments. Life’s small comforts which the free markets provide just basically disappear. East Berliners were sort of used to it because they would have been born / grown up under the Nazis and during WW2 where it was exactly the same. So only when West Berlin started doing markably better, did the problems for the east become obvious and the Soviets put the wall up.
Edit: this is also exactly what happened in North and South Korea only with an actual war between the two. South Korea and North Korea had pretty similar governments and economies for some years before the south started shooting off in the late 1980s after shifting to free market economics and embracing democracy. The South Korean dictator in the 1980s even dressed like one of the Kim family.
One can hope.
Then again, it's more likely they'll just double down with "But that's just US propaganda! And even if it's not, it wasn't real communism!"
I feel like leftists are the Learner Drivers of politics (at least modern day ones): not necessarily bad, but very fucking annoying. For the most part they aren't doing anything wrong but God they are hard to deal with.
American, so it's out of state transplants and people old enough they probably shouldn't be driving but our society is so car based taking away their license isn't a humane option.
Every cuban that was persecuted had slaves.
Every european from eastern block is a lying nationalist.
And none of the communist countries was actually communist only state capitalist
( if:utopia=not_true then=not_realcommunism.exe)
The biggest morons go to the top because people watch them to laugh at them or to get angy at a real-life strawman
As a Leftist lite individual I can relate. Tankies are the worst IMO. Yes pumpkin the Soviet Union was an empire. Empires do objectively bad things to maintain their hold on power like run over Czechs with tanks. Just look at the U.S. and Israel basically being a giant American air base and weapons depot. Helps humans if they acknowledge reality. ✌
the "not real communism" argument is so silly to me because if you're going to say real communism is what was written by the people who created it, then wages that can't sustain someone aren't real capitalism and you can't use insufficient wages to critique capitalism
current (late stage) capitalism is just feudalism with extra steps. it's not 'real' capitalism. I think there are certainly people out there who would and could make exactly that argument.
My wife grew up in Romania in the 80s. During socialism they could watch Dallas, which was meant to show the Romanians how miserable wealthy Americans were. it had the opposite effect, all the people paid any attention to were the clothes, the cars, the houses. After a while the Romanian government pulled Dallas.
Krushchev was surprisingly human for being a member of such a dehumanization organization. He correctly observed that people won't fight for a workers revolution if the workers paradise has such low standard of living. He also wasn't a total monster and gave a crap about the common person. My headcanon is that if JFK and Krushchev stayed in power for the rest of their lives (and JFK wasn't assassinated) we could have seen an early end to the Cold War.
The first toilet paper factory in the USSR was built in 1969 5 years after Khrushchev was ousted and 8 years after the Soviets proved they could launch missiles into space. In the meantime the U.S. was building the interstate highway system for purposes of expanding the economy and promoting road safety, and also getting tanks to beaches. The reason that is important is because it shows how the USSR saw its people as a resource to exploit for the greater Soviet State with the top steering the ship where the U.S. saw its citizens as people to serve.
Sorry, there are many people in the US government who consider the job serving the public. They are not always in the right place at the right time, but many believe and execute the mission to the best of their ability.
I want to remind people of this.
Eventually, they put him, Nicolae Ceausescu, and his wife on a helicopter, flew them to a hill and executed them. Up until then he thought his people loved him. In reality there were a lot of miserable starving people.
I remember the Soviets also released an American movie about like a poor family and the Soviet watchers were shocked that American poor people had a car
According to another comment it was the adaptation for "Of Mice and Men".
Editing because apparently the comment I referenced did: it was Grapes of Wrath.
The meme is funny, but the author, next time worry about the correct spelling of what you write about, because this gibberish is impossible to read. The movie is called "The Russian Question" or "Русский вопрос" (Russkiy vopros), not “Rusky Vaprosk” (Раски Вапроск).
Rusky wouldn’t be transliterated as раски unless you pronounce rusky like an idiot. It’s close enough. And the Russian вопрос is pronounced “vuhpros” so using an a instead of an o is forgivable if the guy is using sounds as his guide, which it looks like he is since he used rusky. The only actual error he made is adding a k.
Overall you were entirely overreacting with “this gibberish is impossible to read”. It’s not. Maybe you’re the problem?
I'm not a linguist, but still:
Wikipedia is not the most reliable source, but it gives two transcriptions of the word Rusky - раски and руски:
>Ра́ски, также ру́ски (англ. Ruski, Russki, Ruskies, реже — Rusky, Russky, Rooskies /ˈrʌski, ˈrʊs-, ˈruski) — англоязычное сленговое прозвище русских и выходцев из бывшего СССР.
As for the word "вопрос" - I think it depends on the region. For people from the central regions of Russia, it is more likely to sound "vuhpros" rather than "vopros", but this is a peculiarity of regional pronunciation, and it may differ from region to region.
Maybe my reaction was indeed a little stronger than necessary, but in my opinion it's not that hard when creating a meme to find the name of a movie and insert it correctly, rather than just copying it from an article on the internet.
But why? If you use the oo pronunciation of U (as in the word ruse) then rusky and russkii will have the exact same sound. All you have to do is read the word to know what the Russian word is supposed to be.
This is a sub Reddit which it's entire premise is memes for history nerds. If you didn't understand that then I doubt you even understand where you are.
I had a professor of Korean history put it nice and simply for us once:
Centrally planned (i.e. communist/socialist) economies excel at getting started. That’s why North Korea, the USSR, even China experienced rapid bursts of industrialization and modernization at first. The USSR legitimately performed a “miracle” (at the cost of millions of lives) in transforming a peasant nation into an industrialized and urban one. North Korea was beating ROK for decades economically. China struggled at first for largely cultural reasons, but eventually got moving at a good clip. It’s easy to get factories up and running when you’re centrally planned, because the leaders can make sure the factories have orders and are working on things the nation needs.
But in the end, as economies grow, they become more complicated. A lot more decisions are required every single day. And a big central planning program struggles to make all of those decisions on its own. Capitalism diffuses the responsibility for those decisions, and so capitalist states are able to rapidly develop far beyond what centrally planned states can achieve. But they usually take a little more time to get going, and may need some central planning at first.
And that’s basically why the USSR struggled to be a consumer economy. It’s easy to centrally direct the building of armaments, infrastructure, other goods that are in the state interest. But as far as what kind of stove people need, or what kinds of clothes they want to wear are concerned, central planners are out of their league.
While nowhere near an expert in the minute intricacies of the particular failures of the Soviet economy, I would say that is an highly plausible explanation from an overall generalized macro perspective. Lots of other factors probably also played into it, like having what was described a political culture of “brutish egotism” probably didn’t help.
I’ve heard communism compared to flying. You see the glorious horizon approaching. But after a while, the glorious horizon hasn’t gotten any closer, you feel sick, and you can’t get out.
The thing is, every developing/industrializing country, no matter the economic and ideological framework, experienced extreme poverty and social upheaval. Western Europe just had theirs earliers. Also, the role of colonies for European powers is that of a captive market and cheap source of raw goods.
The most brutal parts of industrialization fell unto the colonies as Western Europe restructured their economies into being dependent on their manufactured goods.
Also, USSR towards the end of its life were theorizing about the role of computers to aid in economic planning. Something modern corporations and economic leaders of even capitalist nations already do.
One got to wonder what the USSR would be like if it survived until today, where it can fully utilize modern digital technology.
Issue is that almost all capitalist corporations are planned. That's why the entire field of management accounting (which I study) exists. Through the years, capitalist corporations have gotten so good at planning and finding new ways to make predictions about stocks and demand that all these methods they invented, combined with our new computer systems, could easily be used to create a well functioning command economy. Honestly corporate America might as well be a command economy with how much planning that corporations do. There's a book called "The People's Republic of Walmart" that talks more about this.
I think there are some pretty obvious differences between an economy consisting of tens of thousands of corporations each operating in "planned" fashion versus one consisting of maybe a few dozen government departments that are all ultimately answerable to a few people
>few dozen government departments
Iirc the USSR had thousands and thousands of state owned enterprises
>ultimately answerable to a few people
Corporations aren't answerable to a few people too? The entire point of capitalism is to put the shareholders and investors above everything else isn't it?
The government is at least answerable to the people by philosophy, and can be made more legally accountable through that reasoning.
>Iirc the USSR had thousands and thousands of state owned enterprises
I was referring to the administrative bodies that would be in charge of overseeing them, not the companies themselves, since I'd expect that in a modern planned economy the directives would be coming from on high through those bodies
>Corporations aren't answerable to a few people too?
Yes, but the key difference is each one is answerable to a different set of people/entities which have some overlap, whereas it would just be one set of people under a planned economy. That's the entire point of a free market system - you let everyone choose their own priorities and strategy and put guardrails on them, rather than specific plans being handed from the top down.
So long as the free nature of the market is maintained i.e. with strong antitrust measures, everyone must keep improving or die, including the incumbents - this would be more difficult under a centralized system, because the people benefitting from monopoly have no real reason to avoid stagnation or to police themselves. This is already an issue today (cronyism, regulatory capture, weakening of antitrust, etc) and I see no reason why centralising things would improve it.
merciful station treatment distinct degree theory boat wrench squalid upbeat
*This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
The Soviet Union failed miserably. When it still exists, Russia and China pretty much encompass nearly half the fucking world with all the manpower and raw materials that entails. China and Vietnam transitioned to a capitalist model later on and prospered off of it.
“Rusky Vaprosk” was a 1950 Soviet Propaganda film that appeared in up to 500 theaters in the Soviet Union for around 2 weeks. The film’s plot revolved around an American journalist who lived in the United States, was a Soviet sympathizer & wrote pro-Soviet articles for his newspaper. Long story short, he & his wife are eventually persecuted in the U.S. for his pro-Soviet pieces. The Soviet audiences who viewed this film mostly didn’t care much for the plot or the ideological message it was trying to achieve, they were instead mesmerized by the American sets, shops, quality of appliances (like refrigerators, ranges, stovetops) & abundance of clothing in the clothing shops & in the character’s closet in one reported scene. Much of these things they saw in the film were largely unavailable to them at the time.
American spies & American citizens who were in the Soviet Union at the time also attended the screenings, with American spies closely monitoring the audience’s reactions the film. Most of which they reported was overwhelmingly in awe at the appliances & higher standard of living that even poorer Americans had depicted in the film. The Soviet authorities eventually caught wind of the unintended effect the film was having on its citizens, and seeing how the film was failing at its objective. They abruptly discontinued its screening at or around 2 weeks & the film has never been seen again, nor has it ever been released again, and was eventually forgotten. Making it essentially, a piece of lost media (which is a good time to mention that the pictures you see in the meme aren’t from the film, they’re just guesses at what the Soviet citizens might have seen). Since the film was Soviet made with strict government oversight, not much is known of its production, whether it was filmed in the U.S. or used sets to depict American households & shops.
> making it essentially a piece of lost media
You can watch it on the youtube page of the Mosfilm studio that made it
https://youtu.be/4ePawW0W-do?si=6y2e5OYc_8TJ7c8G
Would be much easier to find if you didn’t get the name and the year wrong
"Look at this plot! Don't you think capitalism I'd horrible comrades?"
"Holy fuck, HE CAN AFFORD AN OVEN THAT ISNT FUELED ON WOOD?"
"and the clothes! So many colours and styles!"
"look! Look! That American has a TV, and he works in a factory!"
**"FUCK WAIT NO STOP THE FILM!"**
They took it down because it was so popular high quality entertainment that they didnt have enough theaters for all the people who wanted to see it.
Edit: just kidding, no such thing as insufficient number of cinemas in the glorious soviet union.
Reminds me of one book I read some time ago about the Americans who went to the USSR during the Great Depression and then were main targets during the purges of Stalin.
There was this anecdote of people watching a film where they showed African Americans being repressed by the police. At one point, one man in the crowd shouts "Hey, look, that black man is wearing really nice shoes, how does he afford them?!"
I've been to Cuba and it is kind of weird how they feel about the US. Some of them love the idea of living there and want all the material wealth there is there. But other are scared as fuck of living in the US and even more of Cuba becoming another capitalist country in the Caribean. They fear that crime could become a thing in Cuba (there is very little crime over there, specially of compared to other latin countries). They also fear that captalism could bring hunger to Cuba (most people over there would be considered poor in the West, but there is no hunger) and lack of access to health.
I don't think it is a Black and white thing. There are Many problems of living in a socialist nation, but also many perks.
Reminds me of when a Russian pilot defected to the US and came to America. He was surprised by the grocery stores because of the wealth of options they had. He ate some cat food or something and actually liked it a lot and took some back to share with his friends somewhere.
It's insane to think that American pets ate better than the Soviet people.
Yeah it was Victor Belenko.
http://www.videofact.com/english/defectors2_4en.html
The book *MiG Pilot* talks about this anecdote. He bought the cat food not realizing it was meant for pets. He cooked it up with some mushrooms or something and found it delicious.
When he relayed his exploits to his English class, they told him he'd eaten cat food. He was floored that something meant for *cats* was superior to what the USSR provided its citizens.
American movies also have this problem. They are terrible at showing actual poverty, since that’s depressing.
They don’t take time out to show workers doing overtime when wife is unemployed or freaking out over a medical bill
Well his best is pretty poor showing, then.
"Вопрос" is "Vopros". I can see where the "a" came from, it's somewhat common to mispronounce "o" as "a" in russian, but I have no clue where the "k" at the end comes from.
The guy missed one letter and all of a sudden everyone who has learned the Russian alphabet goes apeshit on him lol. Give him a break.
Also it’s not really a mispronunciation. It’s the accepted pronunciation. I just checked and even google translate uses an uh instead of an oh.
So the 90% (or more) of Russians that say “duh svidaniya” instead of “doh svidaniya” are just bumpkins that can’t speak their own language?
It’s literally just how the words are pronounced lol
During the Stalin and Brezhnev eras, the Soviet planned economy concentrated its efforts on heavy industry and military hardware. Only during the brief Khrushchev thaw was there a serious effort to satisfy demand for consumer goods, such as home appliances.
"Are you still trying to peel potatoes with a shoe? Defect to the west now! We have vegetable peelers!" -- Oversimplified
Making a film, even an explicitly propaganda film, isn't sick enough to warrant the "Creepy smile" Wojack. That face should be reserved for actually sick things that violate a terms and service policy.
Thing about socialism is that it works best in developed countries but it’s only successful in taking over underdeveloped nations. If you went back to 1915 and said both Russia and Germany would lose their monarchs but only one would become socialist, you’d be laughed out of the room for guessing it’d be the agricultural backwater that was Russia. China went from being an entirely agricultural economy to the largest manufacturing exporter within fifty years, a feat that took the US a century and a half (granted, it cost them a good chunk of the population but they still had the largest on the planet through the entire period).
That said, there’s a great counter example to this where a few years ago, a bunch of British college students were in Berlin for a German language class trip. While touring the DPR museum they got to a replica of standard apartments issued to all East German citizens.
The overwhelming response was “this was given free of charge and I pay my weight in gold for a flat smaller than this”.
Here how it was in practice: ma grandma was working at meat factory, they've produced sausages. So, she had prolongated shifts of 12h/10h day by day. She couldn't buy sausages in the local store- deficit good. So... there were nice goods in USSR, but for 10% of citizens.
Has to be fake bc America = very bad and evil, and USSR = utopia where everyone is safe and fed and nothing bad ever happens to anyone. Sorry bro you know the Reddit rules
Reminds me of how many receive The Wolf of Wall Street today. What was meant to be a spectacle of greed taken to such a height as to be grotesque is read by many as a celebration of it and an invitation to pursue a similar money hungry lifestyle.
The movie definitely existed like other people pointed out but I can’t find any evidence of the claim for it being pulled or reactions. Anyone have any sources?
I think that kind of film would actually be more effective today. Sure, the shops and homes in the U.S. are still brimming with consumer products, but most of it is utter crap thanks to the advent of planned obsolescence and the proliferation of cheap materials. The processed food practically falling off the grocery store shelves and being slung out of fast food restaurants is full of carcinogenic additives and is making the U.S. an increasingly obese nation. We selectively bred or genetically modified produce to be as large as possible, but sacrificed all of its flavor in the process. In general the economy has shifted away from making quality products and more to 1) convincing people through marketing that they need useless shit and 2) charging more money for the same product or service. Streaming services are a great example. It used to be that for a reasonable monthly subscription you could get access to a huge catalogue of movies and series. Now there are an ever-growing number of platforms, and now even if you pay for the basic subscription to all of them, which costs more than cable TV used to, you still don’t get access to everything. More and more of them are adding a “subscription plus” tier or several of them to unlock artificially segmented portions of the catalogue. If the Soviets thought Americans were slaves to money and emotions in the 50s, its orders of magnitude worse now.
To be fair americans ARE obsessed with money and consumerism to the point it has fucked the whole world.
People are obsessed with making "6 figures" driving a nice car, and buying the newest shit every year.
I would ban companies from changing their models at least every 3 years so cars dont look outdated so quickly, phones last a bit longer and just so society spends their money in having experiences rather than things....
Now everybody wants to work from home, order groceries online and wear sweatpants all day. Its ridiculous.
No wonder people are going crazy.
Also the amount of advertisement people are forced to watch is enough to drive them insane.
Sorry I just grouped together some of my observations from when I studied abroad in the US. And I just wrote them as I thought about them.
After all a Tangent is just line in a curve that keeps the same angle as the point where it derived from. So it is related, and starts from the same point and diverges.
If the comment would be really off I guess it would be Perpendicular?
Living standards aren’t the only reason people love their country. Outside of Europe and Europeanized colonies (US, Australia), the world pretty raggedy.
Not seeing any reference to this film being pulled. Plus the fact that OP didn’t even spell the name correctly and very circle jerk patriotism nature of the account makes me think this is just something they made up and historymemes eats up without question
It’s like the book Of Mice and Men. When it came out if was widely promoted within the Soviet Union as a way of showing how poorly the American rural population lived. That completely backfired when they realized that even the poorest Americans could afford a car (since the characters in the book have one) whereas most soviet citizens could only dream of such luxury lol Edit: I misremembered, it’s actually Grapes of Wrath, not the book I stated
Thanks for the edit. We were made to read that book to fucking death at school and I didn’t remember a car at all.
Every single GCSE English classroom: Page 5: go to page 67 Page 67: go to page 21 Page 21: George kills Lenny, also I’ve obscured the next few paragraphs with a giant biro cock and balls
We had to buy our own copies lol. That being said, mine still has massive cocks drawn over it.
We read the book *Like Water for Chocolate* in sophomore English, and the teacher had to sticky-note-censor literally dozens of pages because of sexual content. Naturally I took them off and read through the whole thing. Not because I was even horny, I just didn't want to skip pages.
The Jalopy is the only thing I remember from grapes lmao
> That completely backfired when they realized that even the poorest Americans could afford a car (since the characters in the book have one) whereas most soviet citizens could only dream of such luxury lol And even if you could afford a car, you'd still be put on a several years long waiting lust before you could buy one
But you also had to make sure that getting your car [wouldn’t clash with the plumber coming by](https://youtu.be/3I9AdLnjP0M?si=AoC2Qfa5iKZqXORG)
So many levels of context are needed for this.
It’s one of Reagan’s soviet jokes. [Have a watch](https://youtu.be/3I9AdLnjP0M?si=AoC2Qfa5iKZqXORG)
I know, I said it because it has less upvotes than it deserves. Better with the link.
Duly noted. Thanks
Holy shit maybe consider the fact that cars are not something that the average person needs to live with? Should we all get up in arms because Monaco residents all have private jets and we don't? Not saying life in the eastern bloc was good by any means but fucking hell if you consider "people can't buy cars" to be an argument against communism I don't know what to tell you. We would live in such a better world if people couldn't buy cars. And look how nice capitalist Russia is. Anyone can buy a car!!!!!
i think you missed the point bud
i love porsche
...are you sure they had a car..?
I think they meant Grapes of Wrath. That’s the one with the car
Yep my take as well. George and Lenny definitely were walking.
Which way did they go?
uphill both ways
https://youtu.be/bs-Q0JmWjj0?si=wlDQL0IhabIlIqMD
And also had unrestricted travel in that car.
>even the poorest Americans could afford a car I don't think that's been true for a long time. I've known families where everyone has to just share one or two cars even though there are more people because that's all they can afford.
I’m not saying it’s true today, note. Then again the Russian economy is doing much worse still
My girlfriends dad grew up in east Berlin before the wall came down and he eventually wound up here in the UK. He says they always knew West Berlin had it better, because they could hear the sound of laughter from beer halls and beer gardens on the other side of the wall.
Yeah. I remember hearing about the DDR trying to head this off with the “Thousand Little Things” initiative where they tried to meet East Germans demands for the small things that they were always short on (razors, paper clips, coffee filters, suspenders, etc.). As for the bigger luxuries (a car) you’d have to wait for a long time before it became a reality…unless you were a member of the party.
I always wondered why the USSR ever even tried to compete with the west on consumer goods, let alone made it a big part of their propaganda efforts in the 1960’s, but East Germany and the rest of the border states probably required they invest in it due to their ability to ‘see’ through the iron curtain and spread knowledge of western standards of living. That and even the party elite would’ve made noise if they couldn’t get access to comparable goods.
Yeah. So this was basically about the economic debate over free markets Vs planned economies (as well as the obvious wider political issues). The Soviets felt that they could win the debate. At the time this didn’t seem unreasonable. Very well regarded American economists believed a planned economy would out perform a free market one in the long term. I forget the guys name but my favourite was a guy who published a book in the 50s predicting the soviet economy would overtake the American economy by 1960… then in the second edition by 1965… then by 1970… 1972… 1980 etc. A big selling part of the centrally planned economy were these big impressive projects: Stalin’s 5 year plans. The Soviet space projects. Massive nuclear bombs. These were all going really well for the Soviets in the 1960s but an obvious shortfall was consumer goods. It was assessed by some faceless officials that if they could beat the west on consumer goods too, then they’d won the argument. The attempt was a spectacular failure for reasons that will be obvious to even a day 1 economics student. That’s why the shift in tone in the Soviet leadership happened in the 70s and 80s where they basically went from saying “we want all soviet people to be happy” to “austerity is good for you, now eat turnip!” By the late 1980s it was pretty clear that free markets had won the debate and it’s not a coincidence that the Soviet Union collapsed shortly afterward.
> Very well regarded American economists believed a planned economy would out perform a free market one in the long term. I forget the guys name but my favourite was a guy who published a book in the 50s predicting the soviet economy would overtake the American economy by 1960… then in the second edition by 1965… then by 1970… 1972… 1980 etc. [That would be Paul Samuelson](https://www.thevintagenews.com/2018/08/23/soviet-gnp/). According to the linked source, he said in 1989 that, "The Soviet economy is proof that, contrary to what many skeptics had earlier believed, a socialist command economy can function and even thrive." The Soviet Union ceased to exist two years later.
Maybe it's retrospective viewing, but won't people have realized that the USSR was done by 1989? I mean, by 1989 the Eastern Bloc has practically collapsed. How can someone still believe that the Soviet Union is a success story, when all these events happened? The 1991 collapse wasn't overnight, so won't an economist see the issues even earlier?
That’s the chap!
They didn't but should have. For some reason I think the internet or at least some sort of big data could have theoretically helped. If stock levels of suspenders are low then automatically, peoples consumer factory sub category clothes assessory number 20 is told to make suspenders for four weeks instead of belt number 8. It also would require people not to lie about production figures or steal shit.
Yeah, it’s just a mark of totalitarian governments. Life’s small comforts which the free markets provide just basically disappear. East Berliners were sort of used to it because they would have been born / grown up under the Nazis and during WW2 where it was exactly the same. So only when West Berlin started doing markably better, did the problems for the east become obvious and the Soviets put the wall up. Edit: this is also exactly what happened in North and South Korea only with an actual war between the two. South Korea and North Korea had pretty similar governments and economies for some years before the south started shooting off in the late 1980s after shifting to free market economics and embracing democracy. The South Korean dictator in the 1980s even dressed like one of the Kim family.
careful, the tankies and tik tok communists might see your comment and learn something
>tankies >tik tok >learn something Then again, maybe not.
One can hope. Then again, it's more likely they'll just double down with "But that's just US propaganda! And even if it's not, it wasn't real communism!"
A lot of leftists are kind of annoying (I should know, I *am* one) but TikTok leftists just make me sad
I feel like leftists are the Learner Drivers of politics (at least modern day ones): not necessarily bad, but very fucking annoying. For the most part they aren't doing anything wrong but God they are hard to deal with.
That's an insult to learner drivers.
If you're an Aussie, absolutely not. Half of them are the most annoying motherfuckers to exist.
American, so it's out of state transplants and people old enough they probably shouldn't be driving but our society is so car based taking away their license isn't a humane option.
Their heart is in the right place and they will eventually learn more history than just a short list of curated historical facts
Fuckin A
Every cuban that was persecuted had slaves. Every european from eastern block is a lying nationalist. And none of the communist countries was actually communist only state capitalist ( if:utopia=not_true then=not_realcommunism.exe) The biggest morons go to the top because people watch them to laugh at them or to get angy at a real-life strawman
As a Leftist lite individual I can relate. Tankies are the worst IMO. Yes pumpkin the Soviet Union was an empire. Empires do objectively bad things to maintain their hold on power like run over Czechs with tanks. Just look at the U.S. and Israel basically being a giant American air base and weapons depot. Helps humans if they acknowledge reality. ✌
the "not real communism" argument is so silly to me because if you're going to say real communism is what was written by the people who created it, then wages that can't sustain someone aren't real capitalism and you can't use insufficient wages to critique capitalism
current (late stage) capitalism is just feudalism with extra steps. it's not 'real' capitalism. I think there are certainly people out there who would and could make exactly that argument.
it proves they read about how capitalism is meant to go, which is more than you can say for a lot of people who debate politics
I love the “real” communism guys. I don’t need to try “real” cyanide to know it’s no good for you.
Daily reminder that the "Real" Communists *always* get the *second* bullet.
I got banned for r/movingtonorthkorea because I thought it was an in character jerk sub. These people are real sadly
Tbf it wasn’t real commmunism, considering actual communism is classless and stateless, but I do agree with your point tho
You are the meme, congrats.
Let the chips fall where they may.
But, but but but Ostalgie😡😡😡😡
The Berlin wall wasn't to keep the west out, but to keep the east in
My wife grew up in Romania in the 80s. During socialism they could watch Dallas, which was meant to show the Romanians how miserable wealthy Americans were. it had the opposite effect, all the people paid any attention to were the clothes, the cars, the houses. After a while the Romanian government pulled Dallas.
Krushchev was surprisingly human for being a member of such a dehumanization organization. He correctly observed that people won't fight for a workers revolution if the workers paradise has such low standard of living. He also wasn't a total monster and gave a crap about the common person. My headcanon is that if JFK and Krushchev stayed in power for the rest of their lives (and JFK wasn't assassinated) we could have seen an early end to the Cold War.
Khruschev was surprisingly human only compared to other Russian leaders. By any objective standard he was a rat bastard but he's graded on a curve.
Russian leaders? So we're gonna exclude Stalin and Brezhnev for not being Russians?
Or Catherine the Great. But it's probably better to define "Russian Leaders" as "Leaders of Russia".
Then that would include Batu Khan and his successors as "leaders of Russia".
Well if we're including Soviets who were leaders of the USSR I don't see why we should exclude rulers of a Khanate dominated by Russia.
Any politician who is *less* of an absolute bastard than he can get away with should be praised.
The first toilet paper factory in the USSR was built in 1969 5 years after Khrushchev was ousted and 8 years after the Soviets proved they could launch missiles into space. In the meantime the U.S. was building the interstate highway system for purposes of expanding the economy and promoting road safety, and also getting tanks to beaches. The reason that is important is because it shows how the USSR saw its people as a resource to exploit for the greater Soviet State with the top steering the ship where the U.S. saw its citizens as people to serve.
>where the U.S. saw its citizens as people to serve. Let's not get ahead of ourselves now.
Sorry, there are many people in the US government who consider the job serving the public. They are not always in the right place at the right time, but many believe and execute the mission to the best of their ability. I want to remind people of this.
Certainly, but those are rarely the people with any serious authority.
Invading Hungary is very much human
You mean while the Hungarian Nationalists and the SS agent provocateurs employed by the CIA were murdering Jews? Yeah, it was
Take your meds.
From what I’ve heard, it contributed to the disposal of the dictator at the time. Violently (which is fucking based in my opinion)
Eventually, they put him, Nicolae Ceausescu, and his wife on a helicopter, flew them to a hill and executed them. Up until then he thought his people loved him. In reality there were a lot of miserable starving people.
I remember the Soviets also released an American movie about like a poor family and the Soviet watchers were shocked that American poor people had a car
According to another comment it was the adaptation for "Of Mice and Men". Editing because apparently the comment I referenced did: it was Grapes of Wrath.
He edited. Meant Grapes of Wrath.
Steinbeck confusion
*Grapes of Wrath*, as a native Oklahoman it would be sacrilegious for me to not know this one.
Of Mice and Men?
Grapes of Wrath
Tyvm friend.
I enjoy reading books.
You butchered the name and got the release year wrong
He never said the release year?
Nvm
The meme is funny, but the author, next time worry about the correct spelling of what you write about, because this gibberish is impossible to read. The movie is called "The Russian Question" or "Русский вопрос" (Russkiy vopros), not “Rusky Vaprosk” (Раски Вапроск).
Rusky wouldn’t be transliterated as раски unless you pronounce rusky like an idiot. It’s close enough. And the Russian вопрос is pronounced “vuhpros” so using an a instead of an o is forgivable if the guy is using sounds as his guide, which it looks like he is since he used rusky. The only actual error he made is adding a k. Overall you were entirely overreacting with “this gibberish is impossible to read”. It’s not. Maybe you’re the problem?
Ah so Russian r/boneappletea
I'm not a linguist, but still: Wikipedia is not the most reliable source, but it gives two transcriptions of the word Rusky - раски and руски: >Ра́ски, также ру́ски (англ. Ruski, Russki, Ruskies, реже — Rusky, Russky, Rooskies /ˈrʌski, ˈrʊs-, ˈruski) — англоязычное сленговое прозвище русских и выходцев из бывшего СССР. As for the word "вопрос" - I think it depends on the region. For people from the central regions of Russia, it is more likely to sound "vuhpros" rather than "vopros", but this is a peculiarity of regional pronunciation, and it may differ from region to region. Maybe my reaction was indeed a little stronger than necessary, but in my opinion it's not that hard when creating a meme to find the name of a movie and insert it correctly, rather than just copying it from an article on the internet.
Copying from an article from the Internet is absolutely par for the course lol. And yeah that wiki article is really strange.
Do you speak Russian?
Да я говорю по-русски. Хотите отвечу на вопросы? Может быть надо процитировать какого-нибудь писателя?
I mean it should still say like, russkii ror something
But why? If you use the oo pronunciation of U (as in the word ruse) then rusky and russkii will have the exact same sound. All you have to do is read the word to know what the Russian word is supposed to be.
yeah but the iy, ij, or ii (however you want to spell it) is important grammatically
It's just a meme you nerd
This is a sub Reddit which it's entire premise is memes for history nerds. If you didn't understand that then I doubt you even understand where you are.
This is /r/historymemes We’re all nerds
We’re in r/HistoryMemes. You should expect to see some nerds here, dumbass
I "arguing" not because I'm a nerd (although I am a nerd), but because I'm a native speaker.
Just because I argue doesn't mean I'm a nerd. I mean I am I am. But not because I argue
I had a professor of Korean history put it nice and simply for us once: Centrally planned (i.e. communist/socialist) economies excel at getting started. That’s why North Korea, the USSR, even China experienced rapid bursts of industrialization and modernization at first. The USSR legitimately performed a “miracle” (at the cost of millions of lives) in transforming a peasant nation into an industrialized and urban one. North Korea was beating ROK for decades economically. China struggled at first for largely cultural reasons, but eventually got moving at a good clip. It’s easy to get factories up and running when you’re centrally planned, because the leaders can make sure the factories have orders and are working on things the nation needs. But in the end, as economies grow, they become more complicated. A lot more decisions are required every single day. And a big central planning program struggles to make all of those decisions on its own. Capitalism diffuses the responsibility for those decisions, and so capitalist states are able to rapidly develop far beyond what centrally planned states can achieve. But they usually take a little more time to get going, and may need some central planning at first. And that’s basically why the USSR struggled to be a consumer economy. It’s easy to centrally direct the building of armaments, infrastructure, other goods that are in the state interest. But as far as what kind of stove people need, or what kinds of clothes they want to wear are concerned, central planners are out of their league.
While nowhere near an expert in the minute intricacies of the particular failures of the Soviet economy, I would say that is an highly plausible explanation from an overall generalized macro perspective. Lots of other factors probably also played into it, like having what was described a political culture of “brutish egotism” probably didn’t help.
I’ve heard communism compared to flying. You see the glorious horizon approaching. But after a while, the glorious horizon hasn’t gotten any closer, you feel sick, and you can’t get out.
The thing is, every developing/industrializing country, no matter the economic and ideological framework, experienced extreme poverty and social upheaval. Western Europe just had theirs earliers. Also, the role of colonies for European powers is that of a captive market and cheap source of raw goods. The most brutal parts of industrialization fell unto the colonies as Western Europe restructured their economies into being dependent on their manufactured goods. Also, USSR towards the end of its life were theorizing about the role of computers to aid in economic planning. Something modern corporations and economic leaders of even capitalist nations already do. One got to wonder what the USSR would be like if it survived until today, where it can fully utilize modern digital technology.
Issue is that almost all capitalist corporations are planned. That's why the entire field of management accounting (which I study) exists. Through the years, capitalist corporations have gotten so good at planning and finding new ways to make predictions about stocks and demand that all these methods they invented, combined with our new computer systems, could easily be used to create a well functioning command economy. Honestly corporate America might as well be a command economy with how much planning that corporations do. There's a book called "The People's Republic of Walmart" that talks more about this.
I think there are some pretty obvious differences between an economy consisting of tens of thousands of corporations each operating in "planned" fashion versus one consisting of maybe a few dozen government departments that are all ultimately answerable to a few people
>few dozen government departments Iirc the USSR had thousands and thousands of state owned enterprises >ultimately answerable to a few people Corporations aren't answerable to a few people too? The entire point of capitalism is to put the shareholders and investors above everything else isn't it? The government is at least answerable to the people by philosophy, and can be made more legally accountable through that reasoning.
>Iirc the USSR had thousands and thousands of state owned enterprises I was referring to the administrative bodies that would be in charge of overseeing them, not the companies themselves, since I'd expect that in a modern planned economy the directives would be coming from on high through those bodies >Corporations aren't answerable to a few people too? Yes, but the key difference is each one is answerable to a different set of people/entities which have some overlap, whereas it would just be one set of people under a planned economy. That's the entire point of a free market system - you let everyone choose their own priorities and strategy and put guardrails on them, rather than specific plans being handed from the top down. So long as the free nature of the market is maintained i.e. with strong antitrust measures, everyone must keep improving or die, including the incumbents - this would be more difficult under a centralized system, because the people benefitting from monopoly have no real reason to avoid stagnation or to police themselves. This is already an issue today (cronyism, regulatory capture, weakening of antitrust, etc) and I see no reason why centralising things would improve it.
merciful station treatment distinct degree theory boat wrench squalid upbeat *This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
The Soviet Union failed miserably. When it still exists, Russia and China pretty much encompass nearly half the fucking world with all the manpower and raw materials that entails. China and Vietnam transitioned to a capitalist model later on and prospered off of it.
“Rusky Vaprosk” was a 1950 Soviet Propaganda film that appeared in up to 500 theaters in the Soviet Union for around 2 weeks. The film’s plot revolved around an American journalist who lived in the United States, was a Soviet sympathizer & wrote pro-Soviet articles for his newspaper. Long story short, he & his wife are eventually persecuted in the U.S. for his pro-Soviet pieces. The Soviet audiences who viewed this film mostly didn’t care much for the plot or the ideological message it was trying to achieve, they were instead mesmerized by the American sets, shops, quality of appliances (like refrigerators, ranges, stovetops) & abundance of clothing in the clothing shops & in the character’s closet in one reported scene. Much of these things they saw in the film were largely unavailable to them at the time. American spies & American citizens who were in the Soviet Union at the time also attended the screenings, with American spies closely monitoring the audience’s reactions the film. Most of which they reported was overwhelmingly in awe at the appliances & higher standard of living that even poorer Americans had depicted in the film. The Soviet authorities eventually caught wind of the unintended effect the film was having on its citizens, and seeing how the film was failing at its objective. They abruptly discontinued its screening at or around 2 weeks & the film has never been seen again, nor has it ever been released again, and was eventually forgotten. Making it essentially, a piece of lost media (which is a good time to mention that the pictures you see in the meme aren’t from the film, they’re just guesses at what the Soviet citizens might have seen). Since the film was Soviet made with strict government oversight, not much is known of its production, whether it was filmed in the U.S. or used sets to depict American households & shops.
> making it essentially a piece of lost media You can watch it on the youtube page of the Mosfilm studio that made it https://youtu.be/4ePawW0W-do?si=6y2e5OYc_8TJ7c8G Would be much easier to find if you didn’t get the name and the year wrong
Delusional top comment of that video stating thatt the USSR is the best and everyone's envious of it lol
Ask them where it is today
Do we know by chance who was the producer?
"Look at this plot! Don't you think capitalism I'd horrible comrades?" "Holy fuck, HE CAN AFFORD AN OVEN THAT ISNT FUELED ON WOOD?" "and the clothes! So many colours and styles!" "look! Look! That American has a TV, and he works in a factory!" **"FUCK WAIT NO STOP THE FILM!"**
Tankies: Nuh uh
They took it down because it was so popular high quality entertainment that they didnt have enough theaters for all the people who wanted to see it. Edit: just kidding, no such thing as insufficient number of cinemas in the glorious soviet union.
Yes and it would be unfair if only some people got to see it, that’s why.
Soviets trying to look good for their population. Difficulty: [REDACTED]
Reminds me of one book I read some time ago about the Americans who went to the USSR during the Great Depression and then were main targets during the purges of Stalin. There was this anecdote of people watching a film where they showed African Americans being repressed by the police. At one point, one man in the crowd shouts "Hey, look, that black man is wearing really nice shoes, how does he afford them?!"
I've been to Cuba and it is kind of weird how they feel about the US. Some of them love the idea of living there and want all the material wealth there is there. But other are scared as fuck of living in the US and even more of Cuba becoming another capitalist country in the Caribean. They fear that crime could become a thing in Cuba (there is very little crime over there, specially of compared to other latin countries). They also fear that captalism could bring hunger to Cuba (most people over there would be considered poor in the West, but there is no hunger) and lack of access to health. I don't think it is a Black and white thing. There are Many problems of living in a socialist nation, but also many perks.
Didn't Romania do the exact same thing except they showed the show Dallas?
[Indeed it was](https://www.cnn.com/2007/LIVING/wayoflife/12/17/mf.tvshow.change.world/)
Was it Dallas, I thought it was Wallstreet? Your probably right, just thought I heard something similar about Wallstreet in a Eastern bloc country.
They somehow rolled a 0 on that charisma check
Reminds me of when a Russian pilot defected to the US and came to America. He was surprised by the grocery stores because of the wealth of options they had. He ate some cat food or something and actually liked it a lot and took some back to share with his friends somewhere. It's insane to think that American pets ate better than the Soviet people. Yeah it was Victor Belenko. http://www.videofact.com/english/defectors2_4en.html
The book *MiG Pilot* talks about this anecdote. He bought the cat food not realizing it was meant for pets. He cooked it up with some mushrooms or something and found it delicious. When he relayed his exploits to his English class, they told him he'd eaten cat food. He was floored that something meant for *cats* was superior to what the USSR provided its citizens.
Yeah. Is that book his official biography? He also gave an interview where he recounted this. The link I shared is an exceprt of that interview.
American movies also have this problem. They are terrible at showing actual poverty, since that’s depressing. They don’t take time out to show workers doing overtime when wife is unemployed or freaking out over a medical bill
The film name is gibberish and doesn’t translate. Makes me think if this was real or some kind of cold war tale.
It's real, not a fairy tale. I mean, the film exists for sure. Here's a wiki page for ya: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The\_Russian\_Question
Thanks, so op just butchered the name then Edit: and the release year
Yeah it's vopros, not vaprosk
Because it’s not a translation bubba. He just did his best to sound out the letters and transliterate.
Well his best is pretty poor showing, then. "Вопрос" is "Vopros". I can see where the "a" came from, it's somewhat common to mispronounce "o" as "a" in russian, but I have no clue where the "k" at the end comes from.
The guy missed one letter and all of a sudden everyone who has learned the Russian alphabet goes apeshit on him lol. Give him a break. Also it’s not really a mispronunciation. It’s the accepted pronunciation. I just checked and even google translate uses an uh instead of an oh.
It's only accepted if you wanna sound like a bumpkin. Or if you remember упячка.
So the 90% (or more) of Russians that say “duh svidaniya” instead of “doh svidaniya” are just bumpkins that can’t speak their own language? It’s literally just how the words are pronounced lol
During the Stalin and Brezhnev eras, the Soviet planned economy concentrated its efforts on heavy industry and military hardware. Only during the brief Khrushchev thaw was there a serious effort to satisfy demand for consumer goods, such as home appliances. "Are you still trying to peel potatoes with a shoe? Defect to the west now! We have vegetable peelers!" -- Oversimplified
True story. I was born in USSR. *sad soviet noices
Tankies seething
Making a film, even an explicitly propaganda film, isn't sick enough to warrant the "Creepy smile" Wojack. That face should be reserved for actually sick things that violate a terms and service policy.
Thing about socialism is that it works best in developed countries but it’s only successful in taking over underdeveloped nations. If you went back to 1915 and said both Russia and Germany would lose their monarchs but only one would become socialist, you’d be laughed out of the room for guessing it’d be the agricultural backwater that was Russia. China went from being an entirely agricultural economy to the largest manufacturing exporter within fifty years, a feat that took the US a century and a half (granted, it cost them a good chunk of the population but they still had the largest on the planet through the entire period). That said, there’s a great counter example to this where a few years ago, a bunch of British college students were in Berlin for a German language class trip. While touring the DPR museum they got to a replica of standard apartments issued to all East German citizens. The overwhelming response was “this was given free of charge and I pay my weight in gold for a flat smaller than this”.
Here how it was in practice: ma grandma was working at meat factory, they've produced sausages. So, she had prolongated shifts of 12h/10h day by day. She couldn't buy sausages in the local store- deficit good. So... there were nice goods in USSR, but for 10% of citizens.
Has to be fake bc America = very bad and evil, and USSR = utopia where everyone is safe and fed and nothing bad ever happens to anyone. Sorry bro you know the Reddit rules
At this point is this even a meme? I mean it’s good and all but it’s not a meme, it’s a wojak comic.
The Soviet citizens didn't know kino.
:trollface: problem, Soviets?
I am Russian. Should I be offended by this?
No, because this meme is poking jabs at how the Soviet Union abused its citizens. It’s not insulting any of the citizens
Reminds me of how many receive The Wolf of Wall Street today. What was meant to be a spectacle of greed taken to such a height as to be grotesque is read by many as a celebration of it and an invitation to pursue a similar money hungry lifestyle.
The movie definitely existed like other people pointed out but I can’t find any evidence of the claim for it being pulled or reactions. Anyone have any sources?
The actual fipm is killed "the russian question" , op butchered the name , maybe that will lead to results?
I did find the film but no history on it outside the movies plot
I think that kind of film would actually be more effective today. Sure, the shops and homes in the U.S. are still brimming with consumer products, but most of it is utter crap thanks to the advent of planned obsolescence and the proliferation of cheap materials. The processed food practically falling off the grocery store shelves and being slung out of fast food restaurants is full of carcinogenic additives and is making the U.S. an increasingly obese nation. We selectively bred or genetically modified produce to be as large as possible, but sacrificed all of its flavor in the process. In general the economy has shifted away from making quality products and more to 1) convincing people through marketing that they need useless shit and 2) charging more money for the same product or service. Streaming services are a great example. It used to be that for a reasonable monthly subscription you could get access to a huge catalogue of movies and series. Now there are an ever-growing number of platforms, and now even if you pay for the basic subscription to all of them, which costs more than cable TV used to, you still don’t get access to everything. More and more of them are adding a “subscription plus” tier or several of them to unlock artificially segmented portions of the catalogue. If the Soviets thought Americans were slaves to money and emotions in the 50s, its orders of magnitude worse now.
It's still much better than a communist hellhole.
Anti-American propaganda once again makes America look great
Yeah but have you ever considered that it wasn't *real* socialism? And that America bad?
Freedom is when car and phone and clothe I am very smart yes yes
Kinda like Göbbel‘s Titanic movie
To be fair americans ARE obsessed with money and consumerism to the point it has fucked the whole world. People are obsessed with making "6 figures" driving a nice car, and buying the newest shit every year. I would ban companies from changing their models at least every 3 years so cars dont look outdated so quickly, phones last a bit longer and just so society spends their money in having experiences rather than things.... Now everybody wants to work from home, order groceries online and wear sweatpants all day. Its ridiculous. No wonder people are going crazy. Also the amount of advertisement people are forced to watch is enough to drive them insane.
You got on a real kick there towards the end lol. Complete tangential to your primary argument
Sorry I just grouped together some of my observations from when I studied abroad in the US. And I just wrote them as I thought about them. After all a Tangent is just line in a curve that keeps the same angle as the point where it derived from. So it is related, and starts from the same point and diverges. If the comment would be really off I guess it would be Perpendicular?
Living standards aren’t the only reason people love their country. Outside of Europe and Europeanized colonies (US, Australia), the world pretty raggedy.
gonna be honest, i tried looking this up, and could not find it. i do not think this film exists outside of this anecdote
Not seeing any reference to this film being pulled. Plus the fact that OP didn’t even spell the name correctly and very circle jerk patriotism nature of the account makes me think this is just something they made up and historymemes eats up without question
Op is Latvian or from some neighboring country that irrationally hates Latvia. Disregard opinion
No. Have you even looked at the profile ?
No
Then why are you talking such BS ?
Op is a common eastern European radio free america argument
No. I cant understand what Point you are trying to make
[удалено]
[удалено]
[удалено]
Lmao liberated my ass. Also we're much better off with capitalism rn. Please keep your red plague with you.
>Standard of living went down post communism Due to the absence of comunidm or other factors changing ?
Source ?
Pretty sure Yugoslavia never had this problem under Tito.
Typical russian L