My first visit to Eastern Europe was a three day college-student-group trip to Prague. This was 1969, a year after the Soviet overthrow of the Dubcek government and his “Prague Spring.” My lasting memory is of a spontaneous hook up one evening between a group of us and a group of Prague University students. We tried to share what we had in common. Materially that was a love of rock’n’roll and beer. This was boot-leg western rock, some of it illegal, and great Czech beer, Pilsener Urquell. At the end of the night, what I remember is a common feeling, however, that our particularly self-conscious generation was not going to let the killings at Kent State and Jackson State and the Soviet clampdown (all culturally devastating, be we all unspokenly knew that the latter was unutterably worse) keep us from believing that things were going to get better. It took 20 years in Prague, and then the chaos of the transition.
In the early 80’s I was able to make several trips to Moscow. My first impression, upon landing at Sheremetyevo Airport, was that the landing, navigation, and ramp lights that pilots used at the airport were about half as bright as those in the US and Western Europe. The next was the lack of maintenance of the buildings and the infrastructure, and the lack of care. A combination, I suspected of a lack of resources, and a lack of incentive. Upon my return, almost all the Soviet experts I encountered had already come to the same conclusion. One real question at the time was whether this maintenance issue extended to the Red Army, for instance, and if so, how deeply.
As for retail stores, for instance, none of them were very large, of course. Mostly one or perhaps 2 large front windows. I was led to understand that the windows and the interior were usually filled with massive displays of the one or two items they consistently had in stock–salt, for instance. Nothing was self service, so the stores didn’t have to be filled with items. The shopper went to the counter, and was served. Goods, if they were available, were kept in a back room in many or most cases.
The stories Bill Door heard were basically true. Muscovites legendarily always carried a net shopping bag with them, in case they discovered some good unexpectedly available. Some were known to get in line at a store even if they didn’t know what the line was for; it had to be for something worthwhile and not always available.
One other eye-opener. When you parked your car, if you had one, you detached the windshield wipers and took them with you so they wouldn’t be stolen.
But the worst part wasn’t the material stuff. It was the oppression by the state, and the awful things it made people do. School teachers turning to prostitution to get some Western currency, for instance.
An interesting and easy way to pick up on some of this is to read some of Martin Cruz Smith’s “Arkady Renko” novels. In the early ones Renko is a homicide cop in the Moscow police department during the 80’s.
Lastly, I was able to tour East Germany for two weeks in 1985. All the Warsaw Pact countries were different, of course, but East Germany in many ways was remarkable. The old line was that if anyone could make such a wacky economic system work, it would be the Germans. And the economic situation there was indeed the most provident I saw in the Eastern bloc.
The other side of that was the evil of the internal security system. Schools might deliberately poison the relationship between a child and a parent. In some cases a person might inform on their spouse. I can give you details, but for me, this internal security business was the real evil of the system in the DDR.
