So, I’m looking for a little help on a project. I’m working on some fiction set in the Soviet Union and America in the late 70’s / early 80’s, and in a chapter that occurs in 1980, a Soviet citizen is trying to ‘talk up’ his country to the media of the west. I’ve been google-fu-ing like crazy, but I can’t get a good, solid picture on what exactly the citizen would say in favor of his nation. Keep in mind that this was during the time of the Olympic boycott over Afghanistan, so the international picture was still pretty anti-soviet. What can our poor boy say that will make his nation look good?
I suggest you go to a university library and look at some old issues of Soviet Life.
Or Pravda. There’s a digest version I used to write papers with back in college. At my library, it came in big bound editions.
In English?
The one I used back then, yep. I honestly don’t know if there’s a digest in Russian.
Very occasionally in Britain one may come across a little [ english-language edition ] magazine called Sputnik, published by Novosti. Aimed mostly at the fellow-travelling tendency. A few sample covers of that and other magazines are included in this thread: Magazines from the Soviet Union. Clicking on the covers opens up the magazine at Scribe ( no copyright )
Despite combining [ the soviet ] piety of The Watchtower and the lecturing ethos of the various Libertarian Institutes now online, it was sufficiently racy to be censored by the Soviet authorities, and then re-censored by other Comecon governments.
That, or they were all paranoid little freaks.
I believe Sputnik was a more youth-oriented version of Soviet Life, just like the Sputnik travel agency is the young people’s (i.e., cheaper) alternative to Intourist.
The USSR had a big hand in helping to defeat Hitler. Until the 1980’s, WW2 was probably the time when the US and USSR were the closest (enemy of my enemy thing maybe?).
I lived in Moscow in 1977. Here is something that always struck me: buying a ticket on the bus or streetcar* was entirely on the honor system, and yet everyone did it.
You could get on a bus on the back, and there’d be a little machine for dispensing tickets, which cost about 3 kopieky (like, 5 cents at the exchange or the time, which was about 1/10 of what a but ticket in NYC cost). Everyone bought one. If the bus was SRO, people handed money up, sometimes more than necessary, if you didn’t have exact change, and eventually, the money, maybe half a ruble in change, got handed to the person closest to the ticket machine, and that person bought as many tickets as the money was good for, and then tore off the strip of tickets (the strip came out like tickets at Chuck E. Cheese), and the passed the strip around, and everyone who had handed up money took one. On the trams, the machine didn’t even dispense the tickets because you put in the money. You put it in, and manually rolled out a ticket, but you could roll it out without paying-- still, everyone paid.
I had a pass, so at one point, I didn’t pay individually, but I don’t think anyone ever asked to see it.
The subways were beautifully clean, and decorated with artwork and statuary. When I show people pictures, they guess it’s a church, or a museum, never that it’s a subway.
If you went to eat at a diner (something nicer that a fast food place, but with a more limited menu than a place like the waffle house, and where you’d go along a line with a tray. It wasn’t like a deli, though: no carry-out. Anyway, you would sit where there was room, even there were already people at the table. Usually, people would chat politely with their table-mates briefly, before assuming their own-group conversations. It wasn’t a big deal.
People were not xenophobic-- they were especially interested in strangers, and Americans in particular, who were exotic, but in people from any other country. There was anti-Semitism, don’t get me wrong, but we were just Americans to them.
Great art, like the Bolshoi, was not out of reach, financially, to average people. Going yo the ballet wasn’t something that a Muscovite could expect to do every weekend, but a several times a year was. A New Yorker can’t go to Broadway shows that often except through something like TKTS.
The crime rate was much lower than it was in most big cities at the time.
And Communist restriction didn’t really touch the average person’s life. Most people weren’t trying to get a book published that was being censored, or trying to teach some philosophy as the university, and getting threatened. What most people did have what free medical care from doctors who made house calls, and truly free public school. No one was food insecure, and they had grandparents who remembered what that was like.
Maybe it was just because people liked Americans, but I really remember people as exceptionally kind.
Again, freedoms were restricted, but they are here too. Sure, you are allowed to travel anywhere (Cuba is tricky, but you can get there), but you have to be able to afford to. It’s not that much different from having the money, but having your visa denied.
If you want more, PM me.
*there were buses, which were gas powered, and had tires, trams, which were on tracks, and had electric wires, and hybrids, with tires instead of tracks but still used electric tires.
Possible, but I doubt it, since according to the links Sputnik was a digest of soviet press crap, whereas Soviet Life seems to have been produced in Vermont — where later the great Aleksandr lived — under the auspices of the Party Line ( the Soviet one, not the American ).
It being American it prolly didn’t travel here but at a guess, judging by the Wiki commentary, Sputnik was = The Reader’s Digest to Soviet Life’s ( 1960s American ) Esquire or [ Time ]Life.
Geez it’s rather liking looking over Presbyterian Sunday magazines of the 1870s, not merely excessively tedious, but a lost world.
To ensure higher quality, I believe Soviet Life was indeed published in the United States, but strictly under control of the Soviet government.
A quick look at the topics covered in Sputnik reinforces my belief that it was targeted at younger audiences, and was definitely not of the same quality as SL (which always gave a nice chamber-of-commerce view of the USSR).
“We will crush you.”
“Your ‘Red Dawn’ with it’s Boy Scout Freedom Fighters. Your cowboy actor President. You are like chicken with head cut off. You are already dead, you just don’t know it. Soviet Union will outlast you all.”
I can’t picture an everyday Russian saying that. A gov’t propagandist, yes, but not an everyday Russian, or citizen of any other SSR.