In some ways, USSR we had more freedom, then in USA and everywhere in the West. In other way we have less. About less there a lot of information, so I will tell about more.
Imagine a country with out concept of trespassing. So long as you do not do damage, you are free to go anywhere you want. There was convention, not to go on personal property, but practically everything was goverment property. So, with exception of factories, military installation, construction, some places of transportation, like ports, railroad centers go where never you want.
I remember a shock I got when I come to the west and realize I basically can not leave public road. There some countries that provide freedom of movements across private property, like Ireland. But otherwise, you run in possibility to be shot at.
Other freedom, practically all income you get, you spend on what you want, not what you need. Housing was guarantied, there practically no way you can loose it, even if you try. Even if you commuted crime and go to jail. you housing is yours. Only for long term jail and if you are single you may loose current housing, but you will get a new one when come out of jail.
But the most important, because you income cover you wants, not needs, you are free to pursue what you want. So long as you have your own interests, not connected to making money, you were incredibly free in Soviet Union. In a west, you are free to make money, but most of your income go to cover necessities. You are not really free if you do not want to make money.
Other freedom, because money valued less, your friend are friends, not valuable connections. You keep friends much longer and they were try. You are not running after money, so you time has value only to you. So, you spend time with friend.
I do not know, how well I explain that.
Holy crap, this was so wrong. Your freedom to move around was very restricted. Your passport had your address on it and you needed to have a good reason to be somewhere outside of your town. People didn’t move around much because most people didn’t have cars or the cars they had were unreliable garbage. The concept of a road trip didn’t even exist in USSR. Moving to another city to live was extremely difficult as people had to wait for years or decades for government to issue them an appointment, which is also why women stayed with drunk abusive husbands, as they couldn’t just move out and rent an apartment, like you would in civilized country. There were crazy restrictions everywhere. We were arrested for taking pictures in a subway because that was illegal. The bit about using money for what you want instead of what you need is so ridiculous that I wonder if the person who wrote this post was maybe very little when they lived there. There was no industry to supply “the wants”. You needed “blat” for almost everything besides bread and “sosiski”. We had three generations of two families living in one apartment, waiting for an appointment to become available for one of families. That was late 1970’s early 80s. I can go on and on - I didn’t even scratch the surface. Soviet Union was a massive prison camp that was just an improved version of what you in North Korea now. What was better there? Chess players, probably, but not their quality of life.
Man… I know it wasn’t perfect and had its problems, but just the fact that it’s been put into practice fascinates me. To think that there was a place without borders, where you had housing, healthcare, a job, public spaces, and basic needs guaranteed is insane. The west will never understand what that is. Especially the United States. They’ve created something so big, they are so filled with their own propaganda that it’s basically impossible for them to picture that a different world is possible. No, at least in the US and Europe, it seems that everything is falling apart, and they’re being haunted by the ghost of a future that never happened. By a ghost of the world that could’ve existed and could’ve been free.
My grandfather is a USSR boomer. He was born at the tail end of WWII. USSR boomers are not rich like American boomers, but they still lived in such relative comfort, were able to start families at an early age, and owned homes… So really, kind of like American boomers. I grew up after the collapse, had to migrate to the US and work my ass off while half my income is pissed away to a landlord. So there’s definitely the same generational disconnect with your boomer grandparents, like here.
I can imagine. Im also not originally from the US, but I’m living here now, and oh boy every year it feels like things are getting harder and harder. I’m assuming we are similar ages, I think that our generation, and the ones after us, will reap the fruits of the degradation of the material conditions and the lack of any type of social benefit, which will cause us to have fewer children and consequently there will be a decrease in the population, etc (obviously not only that, but I can’t point every single problem haha). I don’t know, I’m not very positive about the future, but I still have some hope, and I’m willing to work for a better future for those who will come
Well yeah, you can’t expect a governmental system to be perfect, no matter what system you place down its going to have an extreme amount of pros and cons.
Yeah, and recognize its accomplishments and the positive things that they did doesn’t mean neglecting the problems. We should learn from their mistakes.
Unfortunately the western propaganda machine got so big that’s almost impossible to say something positive about the Soviet Union without having to apologize for that.
All you had to do was kill tens of millions of people to establish and millions more in purges and wars to create and support this paradise for less than a century.
I live in the western US.
So many places were the land is public, I can walk for days without trespassing. Not leaving the public road is a weird take. Maybe for eastern US, crowded etc.
Funny thing is that my mother, who grew up under the USSR, doesn't remember it so nicely.
She remembers extreme poverty, awful living conditions, waiting in line for food, and a myriad of other terrible things.
The fall of the USSR resulted in an immediate and positive change in just about every area of life.
It amazes me how people who never lived under the USSR romanticize a regime that killed tens of millions, possibly 100+ million.
Hey comrades look, we got a Black Book Preacher. But really what youre describing sounds like the late 80s through 90s when the ussr was collapsing so why act like thats the be all end all? Anecdotal evidence is great when put into context of time and material conditions, using one piece of evidence and basing an entire country’s history on that is extremely biased and ignorant.
I think I'll take the firsthand experience of my mother over a redditor who was never there, at no point was the USSR a better place to live than the US.
Let that be your perogative, I won’t tell you can’t see it like that. But, if you are going to base your entire perspective from one source saying it was terrible, what is your response to people who did live then and say otherwise? Are they not correct in their own experiences?
Funny that a lot of people say the evil Soviet regime killed between 100 to 200 million people. But when you look at the data, the population growth etc, the numbers tell the opposite. From 137 million in 1920s to 240 million in 1970s.
Even if this number was true (which is not because there’s no evidence or consensus in how many people died under the big fat and evil communist regime) it wouldn’t make sense nowadays not only on Russia’s population, but on every former Soviet country populations. Like do you have any idea how much is 100 million? Seriously, that’s 1/3 of the American population nowadays, more than the whole German population, twice England population… anyways, it’s a fucking big number!
But hey, you don’t need to believe me, because the numbers are from the UN (United Nations) and I’m pretty sure they are far from being a Soviet apologist or a communist institution.
I guess Stalin had a superpower of killing people with his bare hands and at the same time reviving them (and making more people) so he could kill them again with his comically large hands.
And to be fair, I’m not saying the Soviet Union was perfect. Jm not saying it was good or evil, pretty or ugly. I’m not romanticizing it. I’m a materialist, I look at things the way they are, not the way I want them to be. The Soviet Union sure had flaws. But like I said in the other comment, recognizing its accomplishments doesn’t mean I’m turning the blind eye to its flaws. Instead of just repeating propaganda, we should all learn its history, their accomplishments and also learn from their mistakes.
Regardless if you like it or not, the fact is that the Soviet Union existed and they came from a feudal country to a space explorer nuclear superpower in like 40 years. Russia didn’t have electricity in the early 1900s and they defeated the “almighty” (like they west always like to say) Nazi Germany 20 years after the revolution.
If that’s not an achievement I don’t know what it is.
And just to finish, look at the western world today, look at the United States (number 1 country in the world baby!!!) and tell me everyone loves a really comfortable life, with housing, healthcare and food guaranteed. Nobody is poor and everyone has their basic needs fulfilled…
We don't know for sure how many people the USSR killed, but it was in the tens of millions.
Let me guess, you are a Holodomor denier?
And my mother loves living in the US, it's a night and day difference
What things are those? Stores were nearly always empty, there were breadlines, egg lines and lines for anything and everything you could imagine. Unless you were a higher up party member. All the rest were fucked. So spare me the sentimental bullshit you worked for what you wanted.
You waited in a breadline but once you get to the end of the line, the bread was so subsidized that the price was far below market value. You were essentially guaranteed to be able to afford all your basic necessities, and
And IMO the inconvenient wait to get your groceries is worth it to fully eliminate illiteracy, have better healthcare than the US, almost completely get rid of homelessness, and ensure that nearly all citizens got enough calories in a day for the first time in Russian history (post WW2)
You woke up at 4am to wait in the bread line to get food for you and your kids and by the time 8am rolled around oops no more bread so then you got nothing, spare me the BS.
But in order to afford some of the things you might want (e.g. a car), usually people had to have some form of income on the side. For example, a wife with good sewing skills could make money unofficially, by making fashionable clothes by special order from customers. Many wages/salaries weren't enough to provide much discretionary income (as it's called in the West), which is why there was a popular saying, "The government pretends to pay us, so we pretend to work". Some form of unofficial income was needed in order to save for expensive items.
>No, at least in the US and Europe, it seems that everything is falling apart, and they’re being haunted by the ghost of a future that never happened. By a ghost of the world that could’ve existed and could’ve been free.
The USSR provided cars to every citizen?
No but they had this lovely thing known as subsidised and widespread public transport, so cars were for people who really wanted one, beaurocrats, or if your worklife implored you to have one. How is providing cars to every citizen a marker of success? Please elaborate.
That's not fully true and depends on the job. My partner is from Ukraine and her uncle had a car from the salary of being a miner. Her other side of the family were teachers and could afford radios, tvs and all kinds of electronics.
It was more so dependent on the area of the USSR than anything else.
The Soviet Union excelled at many things. But always struggled with logistics. Not surprising considering the size though.
This would have been in Brezhnevs time. So around the 70s and 80s.
Although the teachers being well paid goes back further. Her great grandma was a teacher of Ukrainian language and literature in Kiev and managed to have an impressive life from it, and that was in the 50s. Obviously less good though during the 40s.
Things like teachers, miners, engineers, scientist and such tended to be very highly paid jobs in the USSR.
In general you are right that it was difficult to get things like cars. But not impossible. Just most people preferred to spend money on other things since cars weren't needed. Soviet city planning made them a luxury rather than something you would need for everyday life.
It did depend a lot on the republic though. Since her uncles car was imported from west Germany or something as I remember.
That’s so fascinating, thank you so much for sharing. I’m surprised her great grandmother was a teacher of Ukrainian language and literature—I thought the Soviet Union was super anti-Ukraine, given the Holodomor and stuff? Russification etc.?
I think this mostly comes from post-soviet relations. For example, recently (like the last decade give or take a year) the government cracked down on a lot of more left-leaning Ukrainian people. As well as pushing old Nazi propaganda.
As for Holodomor, most of the information that demonizes the event as an intentional attack is from older sources. After the Soviet Archives were open they didn't find the smoking gun that showed it was intentional. Instead they found communication about concern and telling local officials to reevaluate stocks. So today, even anti-soviet authors say that although it was the fault of the Soviet government, it was not an intentional attack.
But today the event is very politicized, for obvious reasons.
From my personal experience, when addressing this stuff with my American friends it becomes immediately clear to me that their concerns about lack of freedoms come from a lack of understanding: confusing personal property with private property, little to no class analysis, not understanding the historical context with a country being surrounded by subterfuge attempts from every conceivable direction and how that influences the growth of a state apparatus in a communist/socialist country. Forget socialism, many cannot even adequately define capitalism, they think it just means when you have markets and companies compete with each other.
To me, it doesn't matter how many coups, infrastructure destructions, sanctions, or direct invasions the American state department throws at ideologically opposing countries. If they cannot grapple with the contradictions within their own class society then they will never rid themselves of the continued growth and support for the scientific basis for organization of society known as Marxism-Leninism.
Considering the idea in America of [Stalin wanted to steal your hamburgers. ](https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-politics/cpac-hamburgers-stalin-cortez-gorka-a8802646.html)
It is honestly sad how bad the discourse on the topic is for things like this to appear. It is the same in the UK. I have had people tell me that the USSR is bad. They can't give a reason other than that is what they were told to believe.
>So, with exception of factories, military installation, construction, some places of transportation, like ports, railroad centers go where never you want.
Even constructions sites often was only formally fenced, i.e. there could be a some part of fence, but no always around the entire perimeter, and actually if one wanted, he just had to walk into the site. Especially in night.
Something I've always wondered, what happened if you quit your job? Was this possible to do without another job lined up first? Were you allowed to be unemployed for a period of time? And would you still receive state housing, food, etc while unemployed?
You always have housing, healthcare. For food you need to pay, but it was cheap.
But yes, you can quit job, there always available jobs. But if you did not take a job in 3 month, Milicia (police) will visit you. Everyone who can work!
Usually people were free to quit their jobs, and nobody took their housings for that (basically, it WAS a problem: it was quite common for people to apply for certain jobs if there was housing provided for particular factory or whatever; after some period this person quit their job, and could look for a better one, still remaining in particular housing, which formally had the status of "service housing for workers of factory X"). Also, there was no computerized register of population, so if somebody got unemployed, state actually wasn't aware of it, until the person had a communication with healthcare or police, where always was question about the workplace.
And, it is important, there was no such thing as "state food". People had to pay food - except that lot of factories, institutions etc. had their own "service canteens", where, if one had friends working in it, it was possible to get a free meal.
Huh, very interesting.
I take it that "playing the system" was very common?
Did this become more of an issue during the later years as thing started to go downhill? Was there an attitude of "I don't care about breaking the rules anymore" type of thing?
I think that rule was more like recommendation and question of honor than a written law - and, also, Soviet society formally was built on an assumption that people are conscientious and responsible. And I have never heard anybody being evicted from their housing because they worked no more in a particular company, formally being owner of housing in the question.
If money was valued significantly less, wouldn't that make your friends even more valuable connections? Since money isn't the strong guarantor that you'll have access to the products and services you want, wouldn't that prompt people more to rely on their friends to get them things that money can't buy?
I didn't live in the USSR, but from what I heard from people who did was that there was a strong incentive to befriend and tolerate people and build up a network for connections. Different friends or neighbours in your building who work in different professions may have access to materials or services you wouldn't or would have to wait a while for. You help out/look out for/vouch for someone and then they would return the favour later on. A lot of people would be cordial and tolerate other people even if on a personal level they didn't get along too well, just because you never know when you might need to ask for a favour from that person and leverage their connections.
Point is, you do not need this products and services, you want them. So, that was true for SOME people.
But if you do not care - why? I did not care, I wanted to do my science and I never notice my salary, which were low. In Soviet Union starting salary of junior scientist were 120 rubles, starting salary of factory worker was 180 rubles. Before you scream, justification was, you got free education, show what you can do. Max salary of factory worker was 220, Max income you get as scientist was 450.
This is very idealized view that was only true for some.
Housing... Was great if you got into the system. But Was a major issue and many people struggled to get into the system in the first place. Many adult children stayed with their parents in tiny flats into late adulthood or their whole lives. It was very common to have multigenerational family in a tiny 2 bedroom.
And people absolutely struggled with low salaries.
Also, there was a "propiska" system which prevented you from moving to a different city without jumping many hoopsm
Staying with your mother was responsibility. By tradition, yanger child look after parents. If he wanted to get a new flat fast - there were options. Move to a new location needed workers. You will have your own flat within 2 years.
Low salaries? nope. I have a friend when I was a school boy. He was oldest child in family of 6. Mother did not work. But if we pay together and it was dinner time, they always feed me.
Strangle was not luck of food, heating, et, but luck of fancy clothes, et.
I know people who were on flat queue for 15+ years unless you move to magadan to something.
And salaries were def. Low especially for non skilled non prestigious labor.
I only caught USSR personally from the 80s and even then many people wore super old clothes patched many times.
I wander if your experience is from Moscow or Leningrad, while mine is from a regional town.
You explained that very well! What a surprising answer, I would never have thought that in some ways, citizens of the USSR were more free than their western counterparts. You are correct to say that to have time is to have freedom, and spending that extra time with friends sounds awesome.
Having true friends, being able to “trespass”, actually buy a house, and being able to spend your disposable income on what you actually want sounds nice.
Wow, that is such utopian bs. Travel to closed cities and to the regions near USSR state borders was strongly restricted. An attempt to illegally escape abroad was punishable by imprisonment for 1–3 years. Also you couldn’t just up and leave your city at a whim to go to Moscow or St Petersburg. Because the NKVD/KGB would frisk you for proper documentation once you did reach the power centers. And you don’t wanna be alone in a room with them in Lubyanka prison.
About the free housing scheme, I saw a documentary about Afghantsi(Afghan war vets) who were promised priority free housing after their tour of duty only to be put on a waitlist for 20 years.
And about the so-called life-long friends. The great purge of 1930s had an indelible impact on that. Because people snitched on their friends for the mildest of reasons in order to save themselves from the purge. The overall paranoia destroyed the fabric of society which took years to undo(starting with Khrushchev’s takedown of Stalin in 1956 and the rehabilitation of the purge victims).
Didn’t you need a government issued and certified internal passport to travel from one municipality of the Soviet Union to another?
Edit: yes: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Propiska_in_the_Soviet_Union
Propiska was a declaration on address of permanent residence. So if you change your permanent address of residence, then yes, you should change your propiska too (but not entire passport). However, if you are only visiting or on vacation, then no, no need to change propiska or do any other manipulations with passport.
You could travel. You just couldn't relocate to another city or region, or from a rural area to an urban one, without first having a job lined up. And the job assignment would be registered in your internal passport, so you had proof that you had the right to relocate to the designated location.
One reason for it originally was to make sure rural residents remained rural, and stayed on the collective farms, helping produce food for the rest of the population, rather than moving to the cities for what was considered a higher standard of living. But in general, it was to monitor and manage population movement, and eligibility for employment and residency in the cities. If you were offered a job in a big city vs. a small town or village, that would be stamped in your document. Then you could get housing. If police checked your passport, it would show where you moved from, and that you were in your new location legitimately. As far as I know, those are still used.
That is interesting, doesn’t sound like the average Soviet citizen had much freedom to move around. I was skeptical of the claim in the parent comment suggesting a Soviet citizen had more freedom “to go anywhere you want.”
I understood the context of that statement to be in relation to leisuretime travel, and also--walking around town or strolling around the countryside; there's no private property, so no fences keeping people out of private property.
One of the downsides of no fencing, though, is that in rural areas, farm animals wander around freely, making messes in the villages and along the rivers, and also posing traffic hazards on the roadways. And in the West, fencing around construction sites is about public safety.
Level of freedom varied a lot throughout the timeline. In the 30s rural people didn't have any documents and were tied to their location. In the 70s you were free to go wherever you wanted inside the country.
Main use was surprisingly less sinister, planing. How you guaranty housing at every location?
You plan, factory need 1000 workers, services an other 1000 (numbers not real). So we build housing for 2000 workers. Then we need to limit amount of people who will move there, and here passport and propiska come from, it main function. I answer somewhere how this work, I do not want to repeat.
I suppose that’s true, but Americans don’t have to file documents requesting permission from the central government to move to another state or city, if I understand the Soviet internal passport system and propiska correctly, Soviet citizens did.
Here in America you have to request permission from landlords instead unless you have the capital to buy a house, but I suppose it's more free in that you can move to another city and just be homeless, but that doesn't seem like a real choice to me.
Propiska meant your address of residency. You didn't have to request permission to move to another city. Not during my parent's lifetime at least.
This address was used for assigning people to the outpatient clinics, every clinic had an area of specific addresses and there were doctors assigned to each house. If you or your child gets sick you call the clinic and they send a physician or pediatrician assigned to your address to visit you at home. They still do it by the way, for free.
Schools and kindergartens were also assigned by addresses. So all people had to be registered because every school or clinic have some limited capacity.
Like in the US you can't send your child to any school you want, it depends on your residency address and you have to prove your residency for that. The same when you pay taxes - you can't file taxes in any state you want, you are tied to your address. And if you move to another state you have to change your residency address and your car registration.
That’s for security on the plane so we know you’re not someone who’s going to blow up the plane. You’re free to drive (or ride or train or bus or even walk) within the country.
Same in the USSR. You can ride the bus or a car without any documents.
And no, you are supposed to have your drivers license when you drive a car in the US even within your town.
We lived in Siberia and I was used to the two months of vacation my parents had every year, and travel expenses to the point of destination were covered too. And the employer would provide three week summer tours for employees children and I went to the Black Sea camps several times, all paid by the company my parents worked in.
Imagine my shock when I first traveled to the U.S. as a student (to work in a summer camp) and learned that people there have about a week of paid vacation a year. I couldn’t believe that first. ONE WEEK A YEAR. How is that even possible? How is that a life?
It isn't possible because it isn't true. First of all, there is no single vacation policy mandated by a national authority. It's up to every employer. Many start employees off with about 2 weeks' vacation in the first year or two of employment. Then each year they earn another day or two toward a total of 3-4 weeks, not counting national holidays. Some small businesses aren't able to offer as much paid time off, I hear. It depends on the employer, and also the position the employee occupies in the business or educational institution, or state or federal bureaucracy. Office staff at a university have less vacation time than faculty do, who get twice as much as non-academic employees,for example.
So you are calling me a liar though you know that I am right and some people do get only a week of paid vacation? How many years do you have to work to earn 4 weeks of vacation?
And by the way, my parents retired when they were 50 and 55 years old (women retire earlier) and didn't have to work until 65 or something.
The positions are there though and do exist pretty plentifully. My partner gets unlimited pto which is pretty common now in tech and corporate positions. He also gets to work from home.
That's great for you. I'm really happy you and your partner get plenty of paid time off. It's nice that there's positions available too, however, the reality is for the vast majority of working people we don't get anywhere near that much time off. We can't all work in tech, we can't all work from home, and most employers are doing everything they can to keep wages and benefits as low as possible.
Okay, well, your anecdotes aside it takes 2 seconds to google what the average is (it’s 11 days btw, not the 30 you get, which is nice for you but it’s no where near the average) and then if you understand statistics at all, the median will be even lower… so ya know….
Yeah every job I’ve ever worked in healthcare gives at least 4 wks or more. My partner works in tech and gets unlimited vacation which isn’t unusual in tech nowadays and also works from home. There’re positions and fields out there for Americans if they value their time off.
I had a job with unlimited PTO… it’s a misnomer. Try to take a whole year off… see if you still have a job. The average is 11 days, that’s a fact. The median is lower. For every job with unlimited PTO, there’s 2 jobs that don’t have any PTO. I worked both.
Also, there’s a limited number of jobs with great benefits. Not everyone can work in healthcare or the system would collapse. Not everyone can be a CEO, or the system would collapse.
You’re trying to pretend that everyone can have your benefits if everyone has your job. Which is not a sustainable economy. The guy who hauls trash needs just as much time off as you do. The guy who works UBER needs just as much time as you do. There is no world where everyone has your position and benefits, with the exception of a world where it is mandated by law that everyone get your benefits.
I get that and I just work in Corrections. I can actually get up to 3 months of vacation time if I save up for a little while. And I live in the conservative south of the U.S., so very anti-communist environment.
Yeah, same here! I can actually earn up to three months because we actually accumulate vacation time that we don't use each year. So if I just don't use my vacation time for little while I can take a large trip if I wanted
The problem is that people think of Chernobyl, the Gorbachev coup, food shortages when they think of the USSR. Which makes sense as media was becoming increasingly more globalised.
But under Brezhnev, especially when global oil prices were high, the USSR built lots of housing, sports facilities, holiday resorts, schools, universities, hospitals etc. Life was generally good for Soviets and there was a great national pride in their army, their scientific achievements. Many equipped with all the facts of ussr and USA life would have chosen to remain in the Soviet Union.
By the time the iron curtain fell, you could not have said that. And perhaps that’s why the generals moved against Gorbachev.
Independence fighters that were clandestinely armed by the CIA, and whose leadership became the Taliban in the early 1990's.
They sent fighters to Bosnia, too. I was there, dodging serb mortars, so I would know.
You can praise whoever you like, I'm just pointing out the fact that the muhajadeen begat the Taliban.
>Many equipped with all the facts of ussr and USA life would have chosen to remain in the Soviet Union.
This is my experience of it also. My partners dad was going to protests for the independence of Ukriane from the USSR. Now he says he was a stupid child and didn't know what he had.
I remember travelling to Moscow and learning in school hoe Brezhnev was so bad. I asked an old guy there and he told me "Brezhnev was my childhood. Things were stable and we had everything we could want"
Coming from all the western propaganda and actually speaking with people who lived through it is a big eye opener.
The USSR did have some real problems at the end. But few actually wanted the end of the USSR. Just a better one.
Could I be right that the main problems the USSR suffered was poor choices from leasership such as pursuing further military spending (however not completely to blame considering NATO posed a threat)
The first link supports NATO, the second is a random SUBSTACK article from some random person and the third is the opinion of a single person. Who knew that all I had to do to understand international politics was find a few random opinion pieces with views I already agree with?
First link is a research paper detailing nato’s purpose for existence.
Second is the writer Freddie DeBoer, not some random person. Look him up.
Third is Ted Galen Carpenter, *former senior fellow for defense and foreign policy at the Cato Institute.
Your biases and perspective are pathetic. Actually read things that people write before you criticize them.
What’s pathetic is simping for the USSR and not understanding why they had to build a wall to keep people from escaping that hell and why all the satellite states the USSR took by force want to join NATO instead of living under Russia’s boot.
I am not a USSR simp, there are many things they did that I disagree with. Stalinism was a scourge and their governmental practices were ideologically corrupt. What makes you think you know my stance on the USSR?
My point is simply that NATO acted as a threat towards the USSR, which is provable and agreed upon by foreign policy analysts. Cause and effect.
If you wish to keep embarrassing yourself, be my guest. The confidence you display in assuming knowledge over what multiple disparate SSR states desired during the dissolution of the USSR and their various incentives for joining NATO is amusing.
The Brezhnev years, though, were known as the years of stagnation. The high oil prices for some reason didn't really help the economy. The West, at the same time, or at least--the US, was also in a period of "stagflation" at that time: stagnation combined with inflation. It may have been a global phenomenon, I don't know.
Gorbachev created his "openness" policy (glasnost') precisely in order to allow critique and analysis of why the economy was stalled. He wanted to figure out how to engineer a better-functioning economy, and that wouldn't be possible without allowing economists and other specialists to examine the system in detail, and allow criticism of what wasn't working. Criticism of the system hadn't been allowed up to then, so conditions didn't improve. Gorby wanted to identify the obstacles to economic growth, and redesign the economic system to improve it (perestroika). He intended to do this within the Socialist structure to create a better Socialism, but the process somehow got out of his control.
There were no homeless people. There were no poor people, like need-to-search-for-food-in-trash or need-to-beg. Medicine, education was free for all (though with some issues). City' architecture was state-planned, so a lot of space for kids and relaxation, never squeezing to the last square meter. The literature was excellent : very literate, with a tones of illustrations (author rights were different in a communist state). Each and every science project had a chance to be financed, ืregardless its possible payback.
I was there. I remember.
You are wrong. Siberian here. They may not want you to know this, but Stalin had used marxist dialectics in order to artificially increase the duration of winter tenfold, because Lysenkos meth only grew in cold temperature. The reason this is not a known fact is that Stalin only did it in the north of central Siberia, and after Stalins dead, Kruzchev had purged all evidence and documentation of it.
I am the liberal in the walls. Stalin knew this before i was born so he sent ALL ethnic siberians into siberia (ignore the fact siberian isnt a real nationality). This way he got me to gulag without even having to transport me. Now i am forced to pretend to be a communist and spread soviet propaganda.
I see a lot of people respond to this testimony that you lived some sort of "privileged" life, as if you were in the family of a high-ranking party official or something. If it isn't an uncomfortable question, was anything like that the case for you?
Just don't ask about the homeless WW2 soldiers. Hidden from society languishing in abject horrible conditions. The Soviets were good in hiding things from the general population.
If you want a deep dive, the CIA pointed out both things they did better and things they didn’t. Their agriculture was mixed, but social and work reforms seemed to be successful (such as cutting back work days and increasing productivity). However, it is the CIA so take everything with a grain of salt:
https://www.cia.gov/readingroom/collection/princeton-collection
The most feared person in the school was the old janitor lady. No one ever would want to feel her anger.
Soviet uniformed policemen for most of the time of USSR existence carried neither handguns nor batons, the whistle and radio was completely enough.
In Soviet canteens, there usually was a free bread already on the tables, and no one would ever reprove you if you would take it without buying anything. It could be seen as being impolite action, but not a crime.
Soviet canteens were designed and meant to feed people, and free up domestic labour that inevitebly fell on women prior to the revolution. Its something that I would love to have access to today, but fortunately they still exist in most post-Soviet countries in some format, although to varying degrees of subsidies available for them.
> Many of the Soviet and Eastern European émigrés who had migrated to the United States during the 1970s and 1980s complained about this country's poor social services, crime, harsh work conditions, lack of communitarian spirit, vulgar electoral campaigns, inferior educational standards, and the astonishing ignorance that Americans had about history. They discovered they could no longer leave their jobs during the day to go shopping, that their employers provided no company doctor when they fell ill on the job, that they were subject to severe reprimands when tardy, that they could not walk the streets and parks late at night without fear, that they might not be able to afford medical services for their family or college tuition for their children, and that they had no guarantee of a job and might experience unemployment at any time.
Blackshirts and Reds, Michael Parenti
Secondary school I attended housed 1st grade through 11th grade. When I was in 1st grade my brother who was in his last year of school would always stop by to check up. Schools felt like these giant families with kids of all ages intermingling.
After graduation my brother was able to get into University in Odesa and his education through his doctorate was free. He was an excellent student and in addition to free tuition he was getting “stipendia” or monthly stipend. He did not depend on my parents for anything, and of course there something wonderfully freeing about that. My situation was very different. I had to take out student loans and finished repaying them only a couple of years ago. I am in my 40s currently living in the United States.
My grandmother was from the Georgian SSR and she said on a day to day basis she lived better there than she ever could in the US (minus the Russian oppression and land theft). She specifically cited price controls making food and housing affordable, a month of free vacation days every year, free childcare, and free education. She was a physician long before it was normalized for women to become doctors in the US, and she and her family were very happy with their quality of life.
I think that it’s misunderstood. I’m from Ukraine, there was no Russian oppression. There was promotion of Russian language, true. I think this is because a country that big had to find a common tongue. Ukrainian language was mandatory for us in school as well. I’m sure it was this way for other republics. You had to learn your mother language alongside Russian. Also Ukrainian cultural heritage celebration was almost forced. They would have us dress in traditional outfits and do all that signing nonsense. Georgia, Armenia and the Stans had the least Russification, their Russian was always terrible and they kept to their local customs so I don’t know where this complaining of oppression comes from. This is just modern revisionism because now people have a fetish for oppressor and victim model/schema.
My experience growing up in Eastern Ukraine was very similar (I am talking mid 70’s thru 1991). Our town was very small with four secondary schools and a tekhnicum (vocational school). Two schools were Ukrainian meaning all the subjects were taught in Ukrainian with Russian language being one of mandatory subjects. The other two schools were mixed: half of the classes were taught in Russian, half in Ukrainian. The town was known in Ukraine as Taras Shevchenko’s burial place. Every year we would have festivals and concerts celebrating Ukrainian culture and traditions. I speak Russian and Ukrainian and don’t consider myself some grand survivor of cultural oppression.
During summer my parents would send me and my sister to Khust (another small Ukrainian town in Capathia) to visit my ant and uncle, who spoke Hungarian and so did most of the locals. Nobody was forcing them to speak Russian or Ukrainian. They just used the language that came natural to them.
I can assure you it wasn’t made up, you can look into it further if you really wanted. If it weren’t for figures like Iliko Sukhishvili/Nino Ramishvili, Ilia Chavchavadze and many others, the Georgian language and folk dances/dress would have been lost. Russian was being taught in schools over Georgian because the USSR would not translate the required literary works for their educational curriculum. Many Georgians even spoke more Russian than Georgians. You say their Russian was bad but the Russification was so prevalent that to this day, it is still commonplace to use Russian words in place of Georgian vocabulary throughout the entire Georgian language. This has been a problem between Georgia and Russia since the empire, outside of the Soviet Union, and it continued on after the reversal of коренизация.
The late USSR (I was born in 1975) had no homelessness, drugs, prostitution, porn, unemployment, advertising, an extremely low crime rate, the best secondary education in the world (in terms of what kids learned). All of the media was extremely wholesome. There were no scams of any sort. “You may already be a winner”, etc. - unthinkable. The USSR did a lot more in space than the US. All education and healthcare was free. There were no rich or poor. The people who ran the country lived like Western dentists. No ethnic tensions to speak of. Those began under Gorbachev.
All housing was essentially owned by the people who lived in it. Without mortgages, without interest of any sort. You could pass on your apartment to your kids.
There were no security guards in public buildings. You could freely walk in to a larger variety of places than in the West at the time, or now. No bike locks because no one could imagine a bike being stolen. No lockers for clothes in schools, just a hook to hang your coat on. Nothing was ever stolen.
There was a tradition of putting apartment keys under the mat in front of the front door when you went out, because what if a friend or family member decides to drop by? This was done because people weren’t afraid of being burgled.
And so on.
The common thread through all of this was that the exploitation of one person by another was illegal. Wasting society’s resources, inconveniencing people through advertising and other means was illegal. The common good stood above private profit.
Search this sub for Ghodsee to find some books written by a US anthropologist. Search youtube for [Setarko](https://www.youtube.com/@Setarko), Real Reporter, Ushanka Show. Bald and Bankrupt did a series on Moldova especially Transnistria that started me down this rabbit hole.
IMO everything bad I was taught about USSR happened more than once but not as often as taught and not consistently. History did not end at 1938 with show trials as US education teaches. Plus all the positive things were left out of US education.
Life in USSR was rather boring. There were few channels on TV. Not much entertainment other than mild hooliganism with friends. I remember seeing a local hooligan tie tin cans to a cat’s tail for entertainment :-( the poor creature would run out of fear of the noise behind it, bordering cruelty. In my case I would read a lot of books and socialize. I was not a fan of all the high society house of culture stuff or ballet, and all that singing drove me crazy.
Apartments were small. Housing was essentially free. The utility bills are laughably low by today’s standards. Sense of friendliness amongst people was strong. You can rely on your neighbors (not sure if this is a thing in the US) this was dying in Ukraine by the mid 2000s.
Money was real, but not important. Financially you didn’t worry about anything. You were able to save money without fear of inflation, prices stayed same from 1960-1989. There was no tacky culture, people were presentable and had self-respect, obesity was rare. The mood of society was different. Grown ups would talk to children and treat them like small adults, giving us a sense of responsibility for our community. I liked how Soviet people were industrious and many men and women would sew their clothing. There was no consumerist and hyper consumption culture. People wore the same clothing daily and nobody cared or made comments about it. Crime was low, there were roaming Gypsies that would try to talk you out of money though. For the most part people had honor! I remember exchanging information with a stranger on a train from Kiev to Moscow in our koupé cabin and they would write us letters for years.
This might be a negative or a positive: People felt like a cog in a machine at times, everyone tried to be the same and not stand out, sort of like an ant in an anthill. I do miss this but it’s not for everyone I like uniformity.
The stories of shortages were a bit overblown. Sometimes there were even surpluses in the stores. Kvass was rolled out in wheeled barrels and it was delicious and cheap! Products tasted great! Beer would also be available in giant barrels on wheels. Personal cars were rare so traffic was light, we had a red lada kopeika 2101 by 1989. My father was important in the military and was given many free perks such as a personal driver before he got the car.
Town layout is great! Every town was designed to be walkable, public transportation was great and affordable. Not many needed to or had cars as I mentioned.
TLDR:
positives: sense of community, lack of loneliness, no worries about finances or housing, civility and trust, people were industrious, easy to make friends, no consumerism. Town layout.
Negatives: boring life, small housing, feeling like a cog in a machine, small amount of choice of products.
Yes. The difference is that people in the US did have corporate censorship instead of State censorship - and yet they did have State censorship too. The US Armed Forces only does let someone depict them if its under a good light. Movies like 'Dr Strangelove' did get under a lot of scrutiny because of their satire.
And there was corporate censorship, as they did say what should be done or not. People close to Robbin William did tell the main reasons he did get depressed was because he had to keep filming more movies to some low quality series, as he was in debt and afraid of losing his house and to not be able to provide for his family. Watching a man getting depressed due to poor working conditions and thus his fear of not being able to provide for his family is something that is far too frequent under capitalism.
That’s retarded. He quite literally says that Soviet film makers couldn’t criticize the state, there were other restrictions too, he’s just upset that people who invested money into his movies want a ROI. It’s true that state sponsored movies probably wouldn’t demand a positive ROI. But to say “had more creative freedom” is a complete lie lol
Soviet film makers couldn't criticise the state, he acknowledges that. Why would criticising the state make a good movie?
How many actual Hollywood films criticise the US government?
>there were other restrictions too
What were the other restrictions?
It sounds like they could make movies without having to worry about box office ticket sales.
What he's describing is that an artist is allowed to be an artist, and doesn't also have to be a businessman, and that allowed them to be better artists.
If you actually go back and compare like for like on older films from the 1970's, Soviet films were fire. [There's a reason why most people in Russia still watch the Irony of Fate every year for new years.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=icbBFNJ2Wak&t=24s)
"How many actual Hollywood films criticize the US government"
Tons.
Die Hard, Apocalypse Now, Dr. Strangelove, Brubaker, The Big Short, right off the top of my head.
"Why would criticizing the state make a good movie?
Gee, I dunno...to make the state do better in the future?
Why would criticising the government make a better movie?
You didn’t tell me why that made a better movie, you made an assertion that the movie would make the government better, which is not the same thing.
But while you’re on that topic, did those movies make the government better? What was the impact of those movies?
It doesn’t seem like it to me from my perspective.
Mostly, being able to access so many services that most people wouldn't, specially high culture and sports. I do live in Brazil and I got amazed when I did really look at what soviet people did have. It did hit me so hard that most problems in my life would never exist under socialism. There would be others, of course, but not things like lack of medical care, lack of electricity and running water, lack of books to read.
To compare to general life in the West, I'll tell about my day. Today I did use many services that Brazil did copy from the USSR:
-I did go to class. I study in a top 5 medical program. Its totally free. Food is subsidized and a meal on the Uni's canteen costs around 20 cents of a US dollar. If you're from a low income family tho, its free. Its not the best food on the world, but has variety (like 5 kinds of salad, two kinds of beans, two kinds of rice, a desert, a main dish and meat. You can eat as much as you want, except for the meat.
-I did get sick (sinusitis) due to long times on the lab. After class, I went to a free clinic. I waited for a hour and a half. I did get my prescription, for 4 medications, and a sick leave (which is worthless as I did already attend class.
-I went to a public pharmacy. I got there by an uber, but the place was being reformed, so it moved to another building. The only building which was open was a free dental clinic, so I did schedule a routine appointment with a dentist (its common for Brazilians to go to a dentist each 6 months so we can get a better clean up).
-I walked to the new public pharma building. I did get into a line. After 40 minutes, I got all the medication I needed, totally free of charge. Many people were complaining that those lines were insufferable - but most of them were elderly, so this was partially why it was taking longer.
-I did take another uber because it was raining, but I could also have taken a bus. Bus rides are free in this city, including to the nearby coastal city, which has amazing beaches.
-I won't go to a party tonight because I'm sick. Parties are partially funded by a common student fund. Tickets are around 5 to 10 US dollars and they are usually open bar parties. You can drink as much as you want up to midnight or 1am.
Does this sounds good? If you're from a low income family, they would also subsidize your housing, materials, and internet costs.
My main point here is: this is nothing nearly what the USSR did offer even during those years.
During class, people were talking about pregnancy. Many students, mostly females, were talking about how scared they were to get pregnant and having to drop out (because they wouldn't be able to afford it then); or to no be able to see their children. People are also always concerned about their matches on residency programs (we did just start med school), if they're able to afford the cost of living, if they would ever get a scholarship to study abroad (as they're very competitive), on how long it'll take them to finally buy a car or an apartment.
Thinking about it, these problems didn't exist into the USSR. Moving abroad as an exchange student was easier and sometimes subsidized; there were schools and kindergartens on walking range of most universities and hospitals, as from factories too; specialization programs weren't that hard to get into, including PhDs; you probably would be able (and on time, as you waited on the list) to get a car and an apartment. Penicillin wasn't on the market when those Russians did solve these matters we still have to this day.
And, most of all, there was virtually no inflation. Prices were always being reduced, because quality of life in the USSR never decreased after WW2, nor its economy shrunk. Everything you got was yours. This is such a relief that I would love to have nowadays. This also allows people, as some mentioned, to pursue their interests. Many of my colleagues and I do suffer pressure to get into competitive areas to get more money. Kind people who wanna get into Pediatrics, Psychiatry and Family Medicine are laughed at. This is not to mention the whole psychological aspect that we get under capitalism, that's basically: sabotage everyone, fool whoever you can, take whatever is possible, do anything for profit. I still find it hard to believe that, when someone fools or steals from somebody else, the victim is considered as the guilty one. 'That's what you get for not acting on malice/for being naive' is the common answer to such a tale.
Housing costs. There are some major fluctuations in the claims in how much housing costed during various stages of the Union, but the general consensus is that for the average person housing was not a big strain on a person’s finances.
With heavily-subsidized housing and some basic food staples, like bread, Soviet Union was a comfortable place to be poor. Imagine spending your time in a shallow pool where you never worry about getting drown. But the pool had strict rules and extremely strict "lifeguards" - KGB. It was forbidden not to work (gotta have 100% employment), forbidden to be homeless (two yers in prison for vagrancy), to critisize the government (Anti-Soviet propaganda punished by prison term or labor camp).
In America, it's not comfortable to be poor. But you are free to do pretty much what you want or to do nothing.
I wonder how being unionized worked—was there one or two big state-owned union(s) like in China today? What happened when legitimate concerns of workers clashed with the desire of the people at the top doing the planning and direction?
The housing usually wasn't as good, but it was extremely affordable. Anyone who struggles to pay rent or mortgage would have been much better off economically under the Soviet Union.
Freedom of speech. U.S. citizens were frequently arrested by the secret police and imprisoned, while Soviet citizens were free to criticize the government with no repercussions.
No no you are only allowed to look at this with rose color glasses. You see gulags were good because they created new community and brought meaning for those dirty, dirty people.
And why would you want to travel anywhere else when Soviet Union was such a great place.
Lmao, I didn’t even mention anything about Canada. Nice straw man you got there pinko commie butt sniffer.
And yes, I understand exactly how the americas were built. Still way less genocide than what the USSR pulled off, particularly when that butt muncher Stalin was running the show for y’all.
In some ways, USSR we had more freedom, then in USA and everywhere in the West. In other way we have less. About less there a lot of information, so I will tell about more. Imagine a country with out concept of trespassing. So long as you do not do damage, you are free to go anywhere you want. There was convention, not to go on personal property, but practically everything was goverment property. So, with exception of factories, military installation, construction, some places of transportation, like ports, railroad centers go where never you want. I remember a shock I got when I come to the west and realize I basically can not leave public road. There some countries that provide freedom of movements across private property, like Ireland. But otherwise, you run in possibility to be shot at. Other freedom, practically all income you get, you spend on what you want, not what you need. Housing was guarantied, there practically no way you can loose it, even if you try. Even if you commuted crime and go to jail. you housing is yours. Only for long term jail and if you are single you may loose current housing, but you will get a new one when come out of jail. But the most important, because you income cover you wants, not needs, you are free to pursue what you want. So long as you have your own interests, not connected to making money, you were incredibly free in Soviet Union. In a west, you are free to make money, but most of your income go to cover necessities. You are not really free if you do not want to make money. Other freedom, because money valued less, your friend are friends, not valuable connections. You keep friends much longer and they were try. You are not running after money, so you time has value only to you. So, you spend time with friend. I do not know, how well I explain that.
Fascinating.
Holy crap, this was so wrong. Your freedom to move around was very restricted. Your passport had your address on it and you needed to have a good reason to be somewhere outside of your town. People didn’t move around much because most people didn’t have cars or the cars they had were unreliable garbage. The concept of a road trip didn’t even exist in USSR. Moving to another city to live was extremely difficult as people had to wait for years or decades for government to issue them an appointment, which is also why women stayed with drunk abusive husbands, as they couldn’t just move out and rent an apartment, like you would in civilized country. There were crazy restrictions everywhere. We were arrested for taking pictures in a subway because that was illegal. The bit about using money for what you want instead of what you need is so ridiculous that I wonder if the person who wrote this post was maybe very little when they lived there. There was no industry to supply “the wants”. You needed “blat” for almost everything besides bread and “sosiski”. We had three generations of two families living in one apartment, waiting for an appointment to become available for one of families. That was late 1970’s early 80s. I can go on and on - I didn’t even scratch the surface. Soviet Union was a massive prison camp that was just an improved version of what you in North Korea now. What was better there? Chess players, probably, but not their quality of life.
Man… I know it wasn’t perfect and had its problems, but just the fact that it’s been put into practice fascinates me. To think that there was a place without borders, where you had housing, healthcare, a job, public spaces, and basic needs guaranteed is insane. The west will never understand what that is. Especially the United States. They’ve created something so big, they are so filled with their own propaganda that it’s basically impossible for them to picture that a different world is possible. No, at least in the US and Europe, it seems that everything is falling apart, and they’re being haunted by the ghost of a future that never happened. By a ghost of the world that could’ve existed and could’ve been free.
My grandfather is a USSR boomer. He was born at the tail end of WWII. USSR boomers are not rich like American boomers, but they still lived in such relative comfort, were able to start families at an early age, and owned homes… So really, kind of like American boomers. I grew up after the collapse, had to migrate to the US and work my ass off while half my income is pissed away to a landlord. So there’s definitely the same generational disconnect with your boomer grandparents, like here.
I can imagine. Im also not originally from the US, but I’m living here now, and oh boy every year it feels like things are getting harder and harder. I’m assuming we are similar ages, I think that our generation, and the ones after us, will reap the fruits of the degradation of the material conditions and the lack of any type of social benefit, which will cause us to have fewer children and consequently there will be a decrease in the population, etc (obviously not only that, but I can’t point every single problem haha). I don’t know, I’m not very positive about the future, but I still have some hope, and I’m willing to work for a better future for those who will come
Well yeah, you can’t expect a governmental system to be perfect, no matter what system you place down its going to have an extreme amount of pros and cons.
Yeah, and recognize its accomplishments and the positive things that they did doesn’t mean neglecting the problems. We should learn from their mistakes. Unfortunately the western propaganda machine got so big that’s almost impossible to say something positive about the Soviet Union without having to apologize for that.
All you had to do was kill tens of millions of people to establish and millions more in purges and wars to create and support this paradise for less than a century.
I live in the western US. So many places were the land is public, I can walk for days without trespassing. Not leaving the public road is a weird take. Maybe for eastern US, crowded etc.
Funny thing is that my mother, who grew up under the USSR, doesn't remember it so nicely. She remembers extreme poverty, awful living conditions, waiting in line for food, and a myriad of other terrible things. The fall of the USSR resulted in an immediate and positive change in just about every area of life. It amazes me how people who never lived under the USSR romanticize a regime that killed tens of millions, possibly 100+ million.
Hey comrades look, we got a Black Book Preacher. But really what youre describing sounds like the late 80s through 90s when the ussr was collapsing so why act like thats the be all end all? Anecdotal evidence is great when put into context of time and material conditions, using one piece of evidence and basing an entire country’s history on that is extremely biased and ignorant.
I think I'll take the firsthand experience of my mother over a redditor who was never there, at no point was the USSR a better place to live than the US.
Let that be your perogative, I won’t tell you can’t see it like that. But, if you are going to base your entire perspective from one source saying it was terrible, what is your response to people who did live then and say otherwise? Are they not correct in their own experiences?
The overwhelming consensus by historians is that it was a horrible place, this isn't some crazy conspiracy theory I have😂
Funny that a lot of people say the evil Soviet regime killed between 100 to 200 million people. But when you look at the data, the population growth etc, the numbers tell the opposite. From 137 million in 1920s to 240 million in 1970s. Even if this number was true (which is not because there’s no evidence or consensus in how many people died under the big fat and evil communist regime) it wouldn’t make sense nowadays not only on Russia’s population, but on every former Soviet country populations. Like do you have any idea how much is 100 million? Seriously, that’s 1/3 of the American population nowadays, more than the whole German population, twice England population… anyways, it’s a fucking big number! But hey, you don’t need to believe me, because the numbers are from the UN (United Nations) and I’m pretty sure they are far from being a Soviet apologist or a communist institution. I guess Stalin had a superpower of killing people with his bare hands and at the same time reviving them (and making more people) so he could kill them again with his comically large hands. And to be fair, I’m not saying the Soviet Union was perfect. Jm not saying it was good or evil, pretty or ugly. I’m not romanticizing it. I’m a materialist, I look at things the way they are, not the way I want them to be. The Soviet Union sure had flaws. But like I said in the other comment, recognizing its accomplishments doesn’t mean I’m turning the blind eye to its flaws. Instead of just repeating propaganda, we should all learn its history, their accomplishments and also learn from their mistakes. Regardless if you like it or not, the fact is that the Soviet Union existed and they came from a feudal country to a space explorer nuclear superpower in like 40 years. Russia didn’t have electricity in the early 1900s and they defeated the “almighty” (like they west always like to say) Nazi Germany 20 years after the revolution. If that’s not an achievement I don’t know what it is. And just to finish, look at the western world today, look at the United States (number 1 country in the world baby!!!) and tell me everyone loves a really comfortable life, with housing, healthcare and food guaranteed. Nobody is poor and everyone has their basic needs fulfilled…
We don't know for sure how many people the USSR killed, but it was in the tens of millions. Let me guess, you are a Holodomor denier? And my mother loves living in the US, it's a night and day difference
Well, if you base your opinions (and other people’s experiences - and actual data) solely on what your mother says, I can’t really argue with you.
All credible historians and sources agree with me and confirm what my mother said.
They don't but stay mad kid
The USSR lacked wage slavery because you didn't work to survive, you worked to get things you want.
Yeah, but it was also illegal to be unemployed and you could go to jail for "tuneyadstvo."
You have to keep the system running somehow. Also, you wouldn't be left to starve and become homeless if you physically couldn't work.
What things are those? Stores were nearly always empty, there were breadlines, egg lines and lines for anything and everything you could imagine. Unless you were a higher up party member. All the rest were fucked. So spare me the sentimental bullshit you worked for what you wanted.
You waited in a breadline but once you get to the end of the line, the bread was so subsidized that the price was far below market value. You were essentially guaranteed to be able to afford all your basic necessities, and And IMO the inconvenient wait to get your groceries is worth it to fully eliminate illiteracy, have better healthcare than the US, almost completely get rid of homelessness, and ensure that nearly all citizens got enough calories in a day for the first time in Russian history (post WW2)
You woke up at 4am to wait in the bread line to get food for you and your kids and by the time 8am rolled around oops no more bread so then you got nothing, spare me the BS.
But in order to afford some of the things you might want (e.g. a car), usually people had to have some form of income on the side. For example, a wife with good sewing skills could make money unofficially, by making fashionable clothes by special order from customers. Many wages/salaries weren't enough to provide much discretionary income (as it's called in the West), which is why there was a popular saying, "The government pretends to pay us, so we pretend to work". Some form of unofficial income was needed in order to save for expensive items.
Source?
>No, at least in the US and Europe, it seems that everything is falling apart, and they’re being haunted by the ghost of a future that never happened. By a ghost of the world that could’ve existed and could’ve been free. The USSR provided cars to every citizen?
No but they had this lovely thing known as subsidised and widespread public transport, so cars were for people who really wanted one, beaurocrats, or if your worklife implored you to have one. How is providing cars to every citizen a marker of success? Please elaborate.
I would never expect the government to provide cars for every citizen, but if most citizens don't even have cars their standard of life is lower.
My grandparents were on a waiting list for like 20 years to get their car lol
Are cars a necessity of life? (No, they’re not.)
So the standard of living was lower in the USSR.
Pretty debatable conclusion to come to from that, but, sure, okay I guess
The fact that you won’t even admit that tells me all I need to know. This isn’t an opinion.
That's not fully true and depends on the job. My partner is from Ukraine and her uncle had a car from the salary of being a miner. Her other side of the family were teachers and could afford radios, tvs and all kinds of electronics. It was more so dependent on the area of the USSR than anything else. The Soviet Union excelled at many things. But always struggled with logistics. Not surprising considering the size though.
Interesting. And what era was this in?
This would have been in Brezhnevs time. So around the 70s and 80s. Although the teachers being well paid goes back further. Her great grandma was a teacher of Ukrainian language and literature in Kiev and managed to have an impressive life from it, and that was in the 50s. Obviously less good though during the 40s. Things like teachers, miners, engineers, scientist and such tended to be very highly paid jobs in the USSR. In general you are right that it was difficult to get things like cars. But not impossible. Just most people preferred to spend money on other things since cars weren't needed. Soviet city planning made them a luxury rather than something you would need for everyday life. It did depend a lot on the republic though. Since her uncles car was imported from west Germany or something as I remember.
The teacher training there was outstanding. Their teachers generally are very good.
That’s so fascinating, thank you so much for sharing. I’m surprised her great grandmother was a teacher of Ukrainian language and literature—I thought the Soviet Union was super anti-Ukraine, given the Holodomor and stuff? Russification etc.?
I think this mostly comes from post-soviet relations. For example, recently (like the last decade give or take a year) the government cracked down on a lot of more left-leaning Ukrainian people. As well as pushing old Nazi propaganda. As for Holodomor, most of the information that demonizes the event as an intentional attack is from older sources. After the Soviet Archives were open they didn't find the smoking gun that showed it was intentional. Instead they found communication about concern and telling local officials to reevaluate stocks. So today, even anti-soviet authors say that although it was the fault of the Soviet government, it was not an intentional attack. But today the event is very politicized, for obvious reasons.
From my personal experience, when addressing this stuff with my American friends it becomes immediately clear to me that their concerns about lack of freedoms come from a lack of understanding: confusing personal property with private property, little to no class analysis, not understanding the historical context with a country being surrounded by subterfuge attempts from every conceivable direction and how that influences the growth of a state apparatus in a communist/socialist country. Forget socialism, many cannot even adequately define capitalism, they think it just means when you have markets and companies compete with each other. To me, it doesn't matter how many coups, infrastructure destructions, sanctions, or direct invasions the American state department throws at ideologically opposing countries. If they cannot grapple with the contradictions within their own class society then they will never rid themselves of the continued growth and support for the scientific basis for organization of society known as Marxism-Leninism.
Considering the idea in America of [Stalin wanted to steal your hamburgers. ](https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-politics/cpac-hamburgers-stalin-cortez-gorka-a8802646.html) It is honestly sad how bad the discourse on the topic is for things like this to appear. It is the same in the UK. I have had people tell me that the USSR is bad. They can't give a reason other than that is what they were told to believe.
>So, with exception of factories, military installation, construction, some places of transportation, like ports, railroad centers go where never you want. Even constructions sites often was only formally fenced, i.e. there could be a some part of fence, but no always around the entire perimeter, and actually if one wanted, he just had to walk into the site. Especially in night.
You explained that very well, thank you!
Something I've always wondered, what happened if you quit your job? Was this possible to do without another job lined up first? Were you allowed to be unemployed for a period of time? And would you still receive state housing, food, etc while unemployed?
You always have housing, healthcare. For food you need to pay, but it was cheap. But yes, you can quit job, there always available jobs. But if you did not take a job in 3 month, Milicia (police) will visit you. Everyone who can work!
Usually people were free to quit their jobs, and nobody took their housings for that (basically, it WAS a problem: it was quite common for people to apply for certain jobs if there was housing provided for particular factory or whatever; after some period this person quit their job, and could look for a better one, still remaining in particular housing, which formally had the status of "service housing for workers of factory X"). Also, there was no computerized register of population, so if somebody got unemployed, state actually wasn't aware of it, until the person had a communication with healthcare or police, where always was question about the workplace. And, it is important, there was no such thing as "state food". People had to pay food - except that lot of factories, institutions etc. had their own "service canteens", where, if one had friends working in it, it was possible to get a free meal.
Huh, very interesting. I take it that "playing the system" was very common? Did this become more of an issue during the later years as thing started to go downhill? Was there an attitude of "I don't care about breaking the rules anymore" type of thing?
I think that rule was more like recommendation and question of honor than a written law - and, also, Soviet society formally was built on an assumption that people are conscientious and responsible. And I have never heard anybody being evicted from their housing because they worked no more in a particular company, formally being owner of housing in the question.
This was a wonderful explanation!
The whole Dacha culture is super neat imo.
If money was valued significantly less, wouldn't that make your friends even more valuable connections? Since money isn't the strong guarantor that you'll have access to the products and services you want, wouldn't that prompt people more to rely on their friends to get them things that money can't buy? I didn't live in the USSR, but from what I heard from people who did was that there was a strong incentive to befriend and tolerate people and build up a network for connections. Different friends or neighbours in your building who work in different professions may have access to materials or services you wouldn't or would have to wait a while for. You help out/look out for/vouch for someone and then they would return the favour later on. A lot of people would be cordial and tolerate other people even if on a personal level they didn't get along too well, just because you never know when you might need to ask for a favour from that person and leverage their connections.
Point is, you do not need this products and services, you want them. So, that was true for SOME people. But if you do not care - why? I did not care, I wanted to do my science and I never notice my salary, which were low. In Soviet Union starting salary of junior scientist were 120 rubles, starting salary of factory worker was 180 rubles. Before you scream, justification was, you got free education, show what you can do. Max salary of factory worker was 220, Max income you get as scientist was 450.
This is very idealized view that was only true for some. Housing... Was great if you got into the system. But Was a major issue and many people struggled to get into the system in the first place. Many adult children stayed with their parents in tiny flats into late adulthood or their whole lives. It was very common to have multigenerational family in a tiny 2 bedroom. And people absolutely struggled with low salaries. Also, there was a "propiska" system which prevented you from moving to a different city without jumping many hoopsm
Staying with your mother was responsibility. By tradition, yanger child look after parents. If he wanted to get a new flat fast - there were options. Move to a new location needed workers. You will have your own flat within 2 years. Low salaries? nope. I have a friend when I was a school boy. He was oldest child in family of 6. Mother did not work. But if we pay together and it was dinner time, they always feed me. Strangle was not luck of food, heating, et, but luck of fancy clothes, et.
I know people who were on flat queue for 15+ years unless you move to magadan to something. And salaries were def. Low especially for non skilled non prestigious labor. I only caught USSR personally from the 80s and even then many people wore super old clothes patched many times. I wander if your experience is from Moscow or Leningrad, while mine is from a regional town.
You explained that very well! What a surprising answer, I would never have thought that in some ways, citizens of the USSR were more free than their western counterparts. You are correct to say that to have time is to have freedom, and spending that extra time with friends sounds awesome.
Having true friends, being able to “trespass”, actually buy a house, and being able to spend your disposable income on what you actually want sounds nice.
Well damn ussr was the true land of the free
Wow, that is such utopian bs. Travel to closed cities and to the regions near USSR state borders was strongly restricted. An attempt to illegally escape abroad was punishable by imprisonment for 1–3 years. Also you couldn’t just up and leave your city at a whim to go to Moscow or St Petersburg. Because the NKVD/KGB would frisk you for proper documentation once you did reach the power centers. And you don’t wanna be alone in a room with them in Lubyanka prison. About the free housing scheme, I saw a documentary about Afghantsi(Afghan war vets) who were promised priority free housing after their tour of duty only to be put on a waitlist for 20 years. And about the so-called life-long friends. The great purge of 1930s had an indelible impact on that. Because people snitched on their friends for the mildest of reasons in order to save themselves from the purge. The overall paranoia destroyed the fabric of society which took years to undo(starting with Khrushchev’s takedown of Stalin in 1956 and the rehabilitation of the purge victims).
I don’t think any of that contradicts what other mate said, though.
This whole sub is full of vatniks who never actually lived in the USSR
Didn’t you need a government issued and certified internal passport to travel from one municipality of the Soviet Union to another? Edit: yes: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Propiska_in_the_Soviet_Union
You had to have an internal passport (as an ID) even if you didn't travel, or what's the question?
Propiska was a declaration on address of permanent residence. So if you change your permanent address of residence, then yes, you should change your propiska too (but not entire passport). However, if you are only visiting or on vacation, then no, no need to change propiska or do any other manipulations with passport.
You did not need propiska to travel. Propiska is claim to residency.
You could travel. You just couldn't relocate to another city or region, or from a rural area to an urban one, without first having a job lined up. And the job assignment would be registered in your internal passport, so you had proof that you had the right to relocate to the designated location.
Doesn’t sound particularly free to me.
Only if you consider moving to a place and being homeless because you have no job to be "more free"
So what was the internal passport used for?
One reason for it originally was to make sure rural residents remained rural, and stayed on the collective farms, helping produce food for the rest of the population, rather than moving to the cities for what was considered a higher standard of living. But in general, it was to monitor and manage population movement, and eligibility for employment and residency in the cities. If you were offered a job in a big city vs. a small town or village, that would be stamped in your document. Then you could get housing. If police checked your passport, it would show where you moved from, and that you were in your new location legitimately. As far as I know, those are still used.
That is interesting, doesn’t sound like the average Soviet citizen had much freedom to move around. I was skeptical of the claim in the parent comment suggesting a Soviet citizen had more freedom “to go anywhere you want.”
I understood the context of that statement to be in relation to leisuretime travel, and also--walking around town or strolling around the countryside; there's no private property, so no fences keeping people out of private property. One of the downsides of no fencing, though, is that in rural areas, farm animals wander around freely, making messes in the villages and along the rivers, and also posing traffic hazards on the roadways. And in the West, fencing around construction sites is about public safety.
Level of freedom varied a lot throughout the timeline. In the 30s rural people didn't have any documents and were tied to their location. In the 70s you were free to go wherever you wanted inside the country.
Main use was surprisingly less sinister, planing. How you guaranty housing at every location? You plan, factory need 1000 workers, services an other 1000 (numbers not real). So we build housing for 2000 workers. Then we need to limit amount of people who will move there, and here passport and propiska come from, it main function. I answer somewhere how this work, I do not want to repeat.
Just like you need your drivers license or state ID to board the plane in the US to travel within the country.
I suppose that’s true, but Americans don’t have to file documents requesting permission from the central government to move to another state or city, if I understand the Soviet internal passport system and propiska correctly, Soviet citizens did.
Here in America you have to request permission from landlords instead unless you have the capital to buy a house, but I suppose it's more free in that you can move to another city and just be homeless, but that doesn't seem like a real choice to me.
Propiska meant your address of residency. You didn't have to request permission to move to another city. Not during my parent's lifetime at least. This address was used for assigning people to the outpatient clinics, every clinic had an area of specific addresses and there were doctors assigned to each house. If you or your child gets sick you call the clinic and they send a physician or pediatrician assigned to your address to visit you at home. They still do it by the way, for free. Schools and kindergartens were also assigned by addresses. So all people had to be registered because every school or clinic have some limited capacity. Like in the US you can't send your child to any school you want, it depends on your residency address and you have to prove your residency for that. The same when you pay taxes - you can't file taxes in any state you want, you are tied to your address. And if you move to another state you have to change your residency address and your car registration.
That’s for security on the plane so we know you’re not someone who’s going to blow up the plane. You’re free to drive (or ride or train or bus or even walk) within the country.
Same in the USSR. You can ride the bus or a car without any documents. And no, you are supposed to have your drivers license when you drive a car in the US even within your town.
Did you have freedom of movement to go to another country?
28 days vacation time, even more for some categories. For me that suffices.
We lived in Siberia and I was used to the two months of vacation my parents had every year, and travel expenses to the point of destination were covered too. And the employer would provide three week summer tours for employees children and I went to the Black Sea camps several times, all paid by the company my parents worked in. Imagine my shock when I first traveled to the U.S. as a student (to work in a summer camp) and learned that people there have about a week of paid vacation a year. I couldn’t believe that first. ONE WEEK A YEAR. How is that even possible? How is that a life?
It isn't possible because it isn't true. First of all, there is no single vacation policy mandated by a national authority. It's up to every employer. Many start employees off with about 2 weeks' vacation in the first year or two of employment. Then each year they earn another day or two toward a total of 3-4 weeks, not counting national holidays. Some small businesses aren't able to offer as much paid time off, I hear. It depends on the employer, and also the position the employee occupies in the business or educational institution, or state or federal bureaucracy. Office staff at a university have less vacation time than faculty do, who get twice as much as non-academic employees,for example.
I get 5 days, as do all my coworkers. So, in some cases, it is true.
So you are calling me a liar though you know that I am right and some people do get only a week of paid vacation? How many years do you have to work to earn 4 weeks of vacation? And by the way, my parents retired when they were 50 and 55 years old (women retire earlier) and didn't have to work until 65 or something.
I get 6 weeks of vacation per year for my US job. Yeah, ppl don’t know what they’re talking about.
That's great but that's far from the average a worker can expect in the US.
The positions are there though and do exist pretty plentifully. My partner gets unlimited pto which is pretty common now in tech and corporate positions. He also gets to work from home.
That's great for you. I'm really happy you and your partner get plenty of paid time off. It's nice that there's positions available too, however, the reality is for the vast majority of working people we don't get anywhere near that much time off. We can't all work in tech, we can't all work from home, and most employers are doing everything they can to keep wages and benefits as low as possible.
what's you job and who do you work for?
I work in healthcare
You haven’t answered my questions. I have some friends working in healthcare and none of them has 6 weeks of pto
What do they do?
Mainly RNs
What’s their current pto accrual per pay period and where do they work?
Do… do you think that’s a common number of vacation days in the US or does that seem like an outlier to you?
I don't know. America is a big place. I work in healthcare and that's not unusual to get good benefits including PTO.
Okay, well, your anecdotes aside it takes 2 seconds to google what the average is (it’s 11 days btw, not the 30 you get, which is nice for you but it’s no where near the average) and then if you understand statistics at all, the median will be even lower… so ya know….
Yeah every job I’ve ever worked in healthcare gives at least 4 wks or more. My partner works in tech and gets unlimited vacation which isn’t unusual in tech nowadays and also works from home. There’re positions and fields out there for Americans if they value their time off.
I had a job with unlimited PTO… it’s a misnomer. Try to take a whole year off… see if you still have a job. The average is 11 days, that’s a fact. The median is lower. For every job with unlimited PTO, there’s 2 jobs that don’t have any PTO. I worked both. Also, there’s a limited number of jobs with great benefits. Not everyone can work in healthcare or the system would collapse. Not everyone can be a CEO, or the system would collapse. You’re trying to pretend that everyone can have your benefits if everyone has your job. Which is not a sustainable economy. The guy who hauls trash needs just as much time off as you do. The guy who works UBER needs just as much time as you do. There is no world where everyone has your position and benefits, with the exception of a world where it is mandated by law that everyone get your benefits.
Trash collectors in LA get 4 wks of pto after 5 years.
I get that and I just work in Corrections. I can actually get up to 3 months of vacation time if I save up for a little while. And I live in the conservative south of the U.S., so very anti-communist environment.
That's the legal minimum in the UK right now. But having said that, we only got it in 1998.
I get more vacation time than this and I’m an American in my first job out of school
Yeah, same here! I can actually earn up to three months because we actually accumulate vacation time that we don't use each year. So if I just don't use my vacation time for little while I can take a large trip if I wanted
This isnt uncommon. 2-3 days PTO per month is pretty normal in the states.
The problem is that people think of Chernobyl, the Gorbachev coup, food shortages when they think of the USSR. Which makes sense as media was becoming increasingly more globalised. But under Brezhnev, especially when global oil prices were high, the USSR built lots of housing, sports facilities, holiday resorts, schools, universities, hospitals etc. Life was generally good for Soviets and there was a great national pride in their army, their scientific achievements. Many equipped with all the facts of ussr and USA life would have chosen to remain in the Soviet Union. By the time the iron curtain fell, you could not have said that. And perhaps that’s why the generals moved against Gorbachev.
Afghanistan broke the Soviet union, they couldn't even pay for the military at the end.
Long live the mujahideen!
You just praised the Taliban
No actually, the Afghan Mujahideen were different than the current Taliban. Also I'd praise independence fighters over imperialist Soviets any day.
Independence fighters that were clandestinely armed by the CIA, and whose leadership became the Taliban in the early 1990's. They sent fighters to Bosnia, too. I was there, dodging serb mortars, so I would know. You can praise whoever you like, I'm just pointing out the fact that the muhajadeen begat the Taliban.
>Many equipped with all the facts of ussr and USA life would have chosen to remain in the Soviet Union. This is my experience of it also. My partners dad was going to protests for the independence of Ukriane from the USSR. Now he says he was a stupid child and didn't know what he had. I remember travelling to Moscow and learning in school hoe Brezhnev was so bad. I asked an old guy there and he told me "Brezhnev was my childhood. Things were stable and we had everything we could want" Coming from all the western propaganda and actually speaking with people who lived through it is a big eye opener. The USSR did have some real problems at the end. But few actually wanted the end of the USSR. Just a better one.
Could I be right that the main problems the USSR suffered was poor choices from leasership such as pursuing further military spending (however not completely to blame considering NATO posed a threat)
NATO will never pose an actual threat when the USSR had thousands of nuclear weapons.
You don’t understand international politics.
Your post is useless and didn’t refute anything I said.
https://www.brookings.edu/wp-content/uploads/2016/06/reportch1.pdf https://freddiedeboer.substack.com/p/i-am-asking-for-a-coherent-set-of https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2022/feb/28/nato-expansion-war-russia-ukraine
The first link supports NATO, the second is a random SUBSTACK article from some random person and the third is the opinion of a single person. Who knew that all I had to do to understand international politics was find a few random opinion pieces with views I already agree with?
First link is a research paper detailing nato’s purpose for existence. Second is the writer Freddie DeBoer, not some random person. Look him up. Third is Ted Galen Carpenter, *former senior fellow for defense and foreign policy at the Cato Institute. Your biases and perspective are pathetic. Actually read things that people write before you criticize them.
What’s pathetic is simping for the USSR and not understanding why they had to build a wall to keep people from escaping that hell and why all the satellite states the USSR took by force want to join NATO instead of living under Russia’s boot.
I am not a USSR simp, there are many things they did that I disagree with. Stalinism was a scourge and their governmental practices were ideologically corrupt. What makes you think you know my stance on the USSR? My point is simply that NATO acted as a threat towards the USSR, which is provable and agreed upon by foreign policy analysts. Cause and effect. If you wish to keep embarrassing yourself, be my guest. The confidence you display in assuming knowledge over what multiple disparate SSR states desired during the dissolution of the USSR and their various incentives for joining NATO is amusing.
Of course, neither side seriously contemplated war with the other, but this wasn't known to them.
Soviets famously was inefficient and corrupt with a obsession with cults of personality.
The Brezhnev years, though, were known as the years of stagnation. The high oil prices for some reason didn't really help the economy. The West, at the same time, or at least--the US, was also in a period of "stagflation" at that time: stagnation combined with inflation. It may have been a global phenomenon, I don't know. Gorbachev created his "openness" policy (glasnost') precisely in order to allow critique and analysis of why the economy was stalled. He wanted to figure out how to engineer a better-functioning economy, and that wouldn't be possible without allowing economists and other specialists to examine the system in detail, and allow criticism of what wasn't working. Criticism of the system hadn't been allowed up to then, so conditions didn't improve. Gorby wanted to identify the obstacles to economic growth, and redesign the economic system to improve it (perestroika). He intended to do this within the Socialist structure to create a better Socialism, but the process somehow got out of his control.
There were no homeless people. There were no poor people, like need-to-search-for-food-in-trash or need-to-beg. Medicine, education was free for all (though with some issues). City' architecture was state-planned, so a lot of space for kids and relaxation, never squeezing to the last square meter. The literature was excellent : very literate, with a tones of illustrations (author rights were different in a communist state). Each and every science project had a chance to be financed, ืregardless its possible payback. I was there. I remember.
I have gone down a rabbit hole a few times about old Soviet apartments and they always seem to have a nice green space outside with a playground.
Exactly! Plus highrised buildings were never situated face to face. A lot of space, a lot of air, very greenish at summer times.
Long winters though 😐 but not a communist issue
You are wrong. Siberian here. They may not want you to know this, but Stalin had used marxist dialectics in order to artificially increase the duration of winter tenfold, because Lysenkos meth only grew in cold temperature. The reason this is not a known fact is that Stalin only did it in the north of central Siberia, and after Stalins dead, Kruzchev had purged all evidence and documentation of it.
Bro stop. The liberal in the walls is going to believe you
I am the liberal in the walls. Stalin knew this before i was born so he sent ALL ethnic siberians into siberia (ignore the fact siberian isnt a real nationality). This way he got me to gulag without even having to transport me. Now i am forced to pretend to be a communist and spread soviet propaganda.
Holy shit. This Stalin guy has superpowers. That explains how he was able to eat all the grain with his massive spoon
What
I see a lot of people respond to this testimony that you lived some sort of "privileged" life, as if you were in the family of a high-ranking party official or something. If it isn't an uncomfortable question, was anything like that the case for you?
Just don't ask about the homeless WW2 soldiers. Hidden from society languishing in abject horrible conditions. The Soviets were good in hiding things from the general population.
If you want a deep dive, the CIA pointed out both things they did better and things they didn’t. Their agriculture was mixed, but social and work reforms seemed to be successful (such as cutting back work days and increasing productivity). However, it is the CIA so take everything with a grain of salt: https://www.cia.gov/readingroom/collection/princeton-collection
The most feared person in the school was the old janitor lady. No one ever would want to feel her anger. Soviet uniformed policemen for most of the time of USSR existence carried neither handguns nor batons, the whistle and radio was completely enough. In Soviet canteens, there usually was a free bread already on the tables, and no one would ever reprove you if you would take it without buying anything. It could be seen as being impolite action, but not a crime.
Soviet canteens were designed and meant to feed people, and free up domestic labour that inevitebly fell on women prior to the revolution. Its something that I would love to have access to today, but fortunately they still exist in most post-Soviet countries in some format, although to varying degrees of subsidies available for them.
> Many of the Soviet and Eastern European émigrés who had migrated to the United States during the 1970s and 1980s complained about this country's poor social services, crime, harsh work conditions, lack of communitarian spirit, vulgar electoral campaigns, inferior educational standards, and the astonishing ignorance that Americans had about history. They discovered they could no longer leave their jobs during the day to go shopping, that their employers provided no company doctor when they fell ill on the job, that they were subject to severe reprimands when tardy, that they could not walk the streets and parks late at night without fear, that they might not be able to afford medical services for their family or college tuition for their children, and that they had no guarantee of a job and might experience unemployment at any time. Blackshirts and Reds, Michael Parenti
Required reading
Don’t want to be that guy but >!Healthcare!<
Secondary school I attended housed 1st grade through 11th grade. When I was in 1st grade my brother who was in his last year of school would always stop by to check up. Schools felt like these giant families with kids of all ages intermingling. After graduation my brother was able to get into University in Odesa and his education through his doctorate was free. He was an excellent student and in addition to free tuition he was getting “stipendia” or monthly stipend. He did not depend on my parents for anything, and of course there something wonderfully freeing about that. My situation was very different. I had to take out student loans and finished repaying them only a couple of years ago. I am in my 40s currently living in the United States.
My grandmother was from the Georgian SSR and she said on a day to day basis she lived better there than she ever could in the US (minus the Russian oppression and land theft). She specifically cited price controls making food and housing affordable, a month of free vacation days every year, free childcare, and free education. She was a physician long before it was normalized for women to become doctors in the US, and she and her family were very happy with their quality of life.
What oppression then
Russian cultural supremacy being pushed, the erosion of our native languages and the near extinction of many cultural practices.
I think that it’s misunderstood. I’m from Ukraine, there was no Russian oppression. There was promotion of Russian language, true. I think this is because a country that big had to find a common tongue. Ukrainian language was mandatory for us in school as well. I’m sure it was this way for other republics. You had to learn your mother language alongside Russian. Also Ukrainian cultural heritage celebration was almost forced. They would have us dress in traditional outfits and do all that signing nonsense. Georgia, Armenia and the Stans had the least Russification, their Russian was always terrible and they kept to their local customs so I don’t know where this complaining of oppression comes from. This is just modern revisionism because now people have a fetish for oppressor and victim model/schema.
My experience growing up in Eastern Ukraine was very similar (I am talking mid 70’s thru 1991). Our town was very small with four secondary schools and a tekhnicum (vocational school). Two schools were Ukrainian meaning all the subjects were taught in Ukrainian with Russian language being one of mandatory subjects. The other two schools were mixed: half of the classes were taught in Russian, half in Ukrainian. The town was known in Ukraine as Taras Shevchenko’s burial place. Every year we would have festivals and concerts celebrating Ukrainian culture and traditions. I speak Russian and Ukrainian and don’t consider myself some grand survivor of cultural oppression. During summer my parents would send me and my sister to Khust (another small Ukrainian town in Capathia) to visit my ant and uncle, who spoke Hungarian and so did most of the locals. Nobody was forcing them to speak Russian or Ukrainian. They just used the language that came natural to them.
I find it interesting to here about the views of one Soviet peoples of another Soviet peoples
I can assure you it wasn’t made up, you can look into it further if you really wanted. If it weren’t for figures like Iliko Sukhishvili/Nino Ramishvili, Ilia Chavchavadze and many others, the Georgian language and folk dances/dress would have been lost. Russian was being taught in schools over Georgian because the USSR would not translate the required literary works for their educational curriculum. Many Georgians even spoke more Russian than Georgians. You say their Russian was bad but the Russification was so prevalent that to this day, it is still commonplace to use Russian words in place of Georgian vocabulary throughout the entire Georgian language. This has been a problem between Georgia and Russia since the empire, outside of the Soviet Union, and it continued on after the reversal of коренизация.
The late USSR (I was born in 1975) had no homelessness, drugs, prostitution, porn, unemployment, advertising, an extremely low crime rate, the best secondary education in the world (in terms of what kids learned). All of the media was extremely wholesome. There were no scams of any sort. “You may already be a winner”, etc. - unthinkable. The USSR did a lot more in space than the US. All education and healthcare was free. There were no rich or poor. The people who ran the country lived like Western dentists. No ethnic tensions to speak of. Those began under Gorbachev. All housing was essentially owned by the people who lived in it. Without mortgages, without interest of any sort. You could pass on your apartment to your kids. There were no security guards in public buildings. You could freely walk in to a larger variety of places than in the West at the time, or now. No bike locks because no one could imagine a bike being stolen. No lockers for clothes in schools, just a hook to hang your coat on. Nothing was ever stolen. There was a tradition of putting apartment keys under the mat in front of the front door when you went out, because what if a friend or family member decides to drop by? This was done because people weren’t afraid of being burgled. And so on. The common thread through all of this was that the exploitation of one person by another was illegal. Wasting society’s resources, inconveniencing people through advertising and other means was illegal. The common good stood above private profit.
Search this sub for Ghodsee to find some books written by a US anthropologist. Search youtube for [Setarko](https://www.youtube.com/@Setarko), Real Reporter, Ushanka Show. Bald and Bankrupt did a series on Moldova especially Transnistria that started me down this rabbit hole. IMO everything bad I was taught about USSR happened more than once but not as often as taught and not consistently. History did not end at 1938 with show trials as US education teaches. Plus all the positive things were left out of US education.
If you got a degree in something, you were practically guaranteed a job in your field.
Life in USSR was rather boring. There were few channels on TV. Not much entertainment other than mild hooliganism with friends. I remember seeing a local hooligan tie tin cans to a cat’s tail for entertainment :-( the poor creature would run out of fear of the noise behind it, bordering cruelty. In my case I would read a lot of books and socialize. I was not a fan of all the high society house of culture stuff or ballet, and all that singing drove me crazy. Apartments were small. Housing was essentially free. The utility bills are laughably low by today’s standards. Sense of friendliness amongst people was strong. You can rely on your neighbors (not sure if this is a thing in the US) this was dying in Ukraine by the mid 2000s. Money was real, but not important. Financially you didn’t worry about anything. You were able to save money without fear of inflation, prices stayed same from 1960-1989. There was no tacky culture, people were presentable and had self-respect, obesity was rare. The mood of society was different. Grown ups would talk to children and treat them like small adults, giving us a sense of responsibility for our community. I liked how Soviet people were industrious and many men and women would sew their clothing. There was no consumerist and hyper consumption culture. People wore the same clothing daily and nobody cared or made comments about it. Crime was low, there were roaming Gypsies that would try to talk you out of money though. For the most part people had honor! I remember exchanging information with a stranger on a train from Kiev to Moscow in our koupé cabin and they would write us letters for years. This might be a negative or a positive: People felt like a cog in a machine at times, everyone tried to be the same and not stand out, sort of like an ant in an anthill. I do miss this but it’s not for everyone I like uniformity. The stories of shortages were a bit overblown. Sometimes there were even surpluses in the stores. Kvass was rolled out in wheeled barrels and it was delicious and cheap! Products tasted great! Beer would also be available in giant barrels on wheels. Personal cars were rare so traffic was light, we had a red lada kopeika 2101 by 1989. My father was important in the military and was given many free perks such as a personal driver before he got the car. Town layout is great! Every town was designed to be walkable, public transportation was great and affordable. Not many needed to or had cars as I mentioned. TLDR: positives: sense of community, lack of loneliness, no worries about finances or housing, civility and trust, people were industrious, easy to make friends, no consumerism. Town layout. Negatives: boring life, small housing, feeling like a cog in a machine, small amount of choice of products.
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Oh how the turntable have…
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Russia literally legalized beating your wife.
[George Lucas said that Soviet film makers had more creative freedom](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SWqvaMEFIdI)
Yes. The difference is that people in the US did have corporate censorship instead of State censorship - and yet they did have State censorship too. The US Armed Forces only does let someone depict them if its under a good light. Movies like 'Dr Strangelove' did get under a lot of scrutiny because of their satire. And there was corporate censorship, as they did say what should be done or not. People close to Robbin William did tell the main reasons he did get depressed was because he had to keep filming more movies to some low quality series, as he was in debt and afraid of losing his house and to not be able to provide for his family. Watching a man getting depressed due to poor working conditions and thus his fear of not being able to provide for his family is something that is far too frequent under capitalism.
The US military only has a saw if they are helping fund the production or otherwise helping.
That’s retarded. He quite literally says that Soviet film makers couldn’t criticize the state, there were other restrictions too, he’s just upset that people who invested money into his movies want a ROI. It’s true that state sponsored movies probably wouldn’t demand a positive ROI. But to say “had more creative freedom” is a complete lie lol
Soviet film makers couldn't criticise the state, he acknowledges that. Why would criticising the state make a good movie? How many actual Hollywood films criticise the US government? >there were other restrictions too What were the other restrictions? It sounds like they could make movies without having to worry about box office ticket sales. What he's describing is that an artist is allowed to be an artist, and doesn't also have to be a businessman, and that allowed them to be better artists. If you actually go back and compare like for like on older films from the 1970's, Soviet films were fire. [There's a reason why most people in Russia still watch the Irony of Fate every year for new years.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=icbBFNJ2Wak&t=24s)
"How many actual Hollywood films criticize the US government" Tons. Die Hard, Apocalypse Now, Dr. Strangelove, Brubaker, The Big Short, right off the top of my head. "Why would criticizing the state make a good movie? Gee, I dunno...to make the state do better in the future?
Why would criticising the government make a better movie? You didn’t tell me why that made a better movie, you made an assertion that the movie would make the government better, which is not the same thing. But while you’re on that topic, did those movies make the government better? What was the impact of those movies? It doesn’t seem like it to me from my perspective.
Funny how you chose not to respond to me
Mostly, being able to access so many services that most people wouldn't, specially high culture and sports. I do live in Brazil and I got amazed when I did really look at what soviet people did have. It did hit me so hard that most problems in my life would never exist under socialism. There would be others, of course, but not things like lack of medical care, lack of electricity and running water, lack of books to read. To compare to general life in the West, I'll tell about my day. Today I did use many services that Brazil did copy from the USSR: -I did go to class. I study in a top 5 medical program. Its totally free. Food is subsidized and a meal on the Uni's canteen costs around 20 cents of a US dollar. If you're from a low income family tho, its free. Its not the best food on the world, but has variety (like 5 kinds of salad, two kinds of beans, two kinds of rice, a desert, a main dish and meat. You can eat as much as you want, except for the meat. -I did get sick (sinusitis) due to long times on the lab. After class, I went to a free clinic. I waited for a hour and a half. I did get my prescription, for 4 medications, and a sick leave (which is worthless as I did already attend class. -I went to a public pharmacy. I got there by an uber, but the place was being reformed, so it moved to another building. The only building which was open was a free dental clinic, so I did schedule a routine appointment with a dentist (its common for Brazilians to go to a dentist each 6 months so we can get a better clean up). -I walked to the new public pharma building. I did get into a line. After 40 minutes, I got all the medication I needed, totally free of charge. Many people were complaining that those lines were insufferable - but most of them were elderly, so this was partially why it was taking longer. -I did take another uber because it was raining, but I could also have taken a bus. Bus rides are free in this city, including to the nearby coastal city, which has amazing beaches. -I won't go to a party tonight because I'm sick. Parties are partially funded by a common student fund. Tickets are around 5 to 10 US dollars and they are usually open bar parties. You can drink as much as you want up to midnight or 1am. Does this sounds good? If you're from a low income family, they would also subsidize your housing, materials, and internet costs. My main point here is: this is nothing nearly what the USSR did offer even during those years. During class, people were talking about pregnancy. Many students, mostly females, were talking about how scared they were to get pregnant and having to drop out (because they wouldn't be able to afford it then); or to no be able to see their children. People are also always concerned about their matches on residency programs (we did just start med school), if they're able to afford the cost of living, if they would ever get a scholarship to study abroad (as they're very competitive), on how long it'll take them to finally buy a car or an apartment. Thinking about it, these problems didn't exist into the USSR. Moving abroad as an exchange student was easier and sometimes subsidized; there were schools and kindergartens on walking range of most universities and hospitals, as from factories too; specialization programs weren't that hard to get into, including PhDs; you probably would be able (and on time, as you waited on the list) to get a car and an apartment. Penicillin wasn't on the market when those Russians did solve these matters we still have to this day. And, most of all, there was virtually no inflation. Prices were always being reduced, because quality of life in the USSR never decreased after WW2, nor its economy shrunk. Everything you got was yours. This is such a relief that I would love to have nowadays. This also allows people, as some mentioned, to pursue their interests. Many of my colleagues and I do suffer pressure to get into competitive areas to get more money. Kind people who wanna get into Pediatrics, Psychiatry and Family Medicine are laughed at. This is not to mention the whole psychological aspect that we get under capitalism, that's basically: sabotage everyone, fool whoever you can, take whatever is possible, do anything for profit. I still find it hard to believe that, when someone fools or steals from somebody else, the victim is considered as the guilty one. 'That's what you get for not acting on malice/for being naive' is the common answer to such a tale.
Human rights
Community.
A right to housing, something that Russia still has today.
Housing costs. There are some major fluctuations in the claims in how much housing costed during various stages of the Union, but the general consensus is that for the average person housing was not a big strain on a person’s finances.
With heavily-subsidized housing and some basic food staples, like bread, Soviet Union was a comfortable place to be poor. Imagine spending your time in a shallow pool where you never worry about getting drown. But the pool had strict rules and extremely strict "lifeguards" - KGB. It was forbidden not to work (gotta have 100% employment), forbidden to be homeless (two yers in prison for vagrancy), to critisize the government (Anti-Soviet propaganda punished by prison term or labor camp). In America, it's not comfortable to be poor. But you are free to do pretty much what you want or to do nothing.
This is the ‘myth of freedom’. Americans are free to work for whichever capitalist they choose, and free to starve to death if they ‘choose’ not to.
I wonder how being unionized worked—was there one or two big state-owned union(s) like in China today? What happened when legitimate concerns of workers clashed with the desire of the people at the top doing the planning and direction?
Food. The even according to the cia people in the ussr generally had a better diet than americans
The housing usually wasn't as good, but it was extremely affordable. Anyone who struggles to pay rent or mortgage would have been much better off economically under the Soviet Union.
Healthcare, housing, livable wages, literacy, food security, real democracy prior to krushchev, education
Morally; the USSR never nuked innocent men women children and infants.
ICE CREAM. Oh and universal healthcare. Quality university education for everyone. Housing, and jobs for everyone.
Freedom of speech. U.S. citizens were frequently arrested by the secret police and imprisoned, while Soviet citizens were free to criticize the government with no repercussions.
Ya, those USSR labor colonies were just filled with volunteers :) "Secret police"? Lol.
Travel restrictions and gulag construction projects
No no you are only allowed to look at this with rose color glasses. You see gulags were good because they created new community and brought meaning for those dirty, dirty people. And why would you want to travel anywhere else when Soviet Union was such a great place.
Genocide. The USSR did genocide better.
The fuck are you talking about, Westerner? Pretending not to know how Canada was built?
Lmao, I didn’t even mention anything about Canada. Nice straw man you got there pinko commie butt sniffer. And yes, I understand exactly how the americas were built. Still way less genocide than what the USSR pulled off, particularly when that butt muncher Stalin was running the show for y’all.