Truth: the early leaders, Lenin, Trotsky, and Stalin, were atheists who strongly believed in the Marxist doctrine that religion must be eliminated. Thousands of priests and officials in the Russian Orthodox Church were killed or dragged to the gulag. However, the state’s position towards religion relaxed during the 1930’s, and by the end of 1930’s a truce of sorts had been reached. Churches could operate openly as long as they registered with the right government bureaus and followed certain regulations. In return, the Orthodox Church issued statements and pamphlets instructing believers that Comrade Stalin had been chosen by Jesus to lead the Soviet Union. In the 50’s, Khrushchev briefly staged another persecution of the church, but after that ended, the Soviet government made no more attempts to stifle religion.
2. Myth: everything was nationalized.
Truth: While the early leadership certainly hoped to nationalize all private businesses eventually, it never reached that point. If I recall correctly, there were 700,000 privately owned farms that lasted for the entire length of the Soviet period, versus about 2,000,000 farms under government control. By the seventies, it was clear that the private farms were outproducing the government ones, so the process of nationalizing them basically stopped.
The other communist block countries also didn’t nationalize totally. My mother grew up in East Germany; not a single communal farm was ever set up near her region of Sachsen-Anhalt.
3. Myth: everyone called each other “comrade” during normal, day-to-day conversation.
Truth: Nope. Neither my mom nor anyone else I’ve talked to ever used the term. It may have been different in the Soviet Union proper, but I think the term was usually restricted to official situations.
I think that depends on your definition of “ordinary criminal”. From what I’ve read about the gulag system, it was used as a source of cheap and disposable labor. The demands on the system led to quotas for arrests, and many people were incarcerated on the flimsiest of pretenses.
[QUOTE=ratatoskK]
[li]Any time you have to buy anything, including food, you have to wait on a long line, and when it’s finally your turn, the dour salespeople treat you like dirt.[/li][/QUOTE]
One joke we heard in the US at the time was that if you saw a line, you joined it, because no matter what everyone was in line to buy, you were sure to need it as well.
Absolutely true, though more so near the end of the USSR than under, say, Stalin. Most of the other stuff mentioned above was true, too, though to varying degrees at various times/places. Moscow was generally far better-supplied than small villages; one item that pops to mind was my roommate’s mother visiting us from her smallish town in Ukraine (Romny), and being very excited to see butter. Apparently she hadn’t seen butter in a store in weeks, in spite of the fact that Ukraine in general was a huge agricultural area.
Medical care was also a nightmare, unless you could pay under the table for decent treatment and/or buy medicine on the black market. I had the joy of an impacted wisdom tooth, and even after the assistant director of my program bribed the best dental clinic in town 2 bottles of French cologne to see me (though as students, we were supposed to have free medical care), they properly diagnosed to problem, but told me to wash my mouth with warm (and rationed) black tea three times a day. No mention of antibiotics, as they were practically impossible to acquire anyway.
Eva Luna
Leningrad State University, fall 1989
Novosibirsk State University, summer 1995
There are lots more stories, but you probably don’t have that much time…but I will recommend some general books that will give you a feel for what life was like in the USSR and during its breakup:
Hedrick Smith, The Russians and The New Russians
Francine du Plessix Gray, Soviet Women: Walking the Tightrope
David Remnick, Lenin’s Tomb
And the wonderful recommended reading list compiled by my M.A. program - that ought to keep you busy for a while!
I wonder if someone is making a book or documentary about all this. Someday, in maybe 40 years, most living memory of everyday life in the USSR will have faded. It might make a darn good oral history.
It is indeed. The proper term for it is “Sergianism”, after Patriarch Sergius, who was the first Orthodox bishop to make his peace with the communist authorities and give his support to them. The collaboration of Orthodox clergy with the communists is one of the darkest episodes in the Church’s history, and the wounds and divisions left by it are only just beginning to be healed.
Well, Europe has a long history of monarchs claiming divine right. The difference here is that the ruling regime was ostensibly virulently atheistic, and the church apparently “sold out” to them in order to avoid further persecution. At least that’s how I read it.
My understanding, from a class on Soviet Russia taken back in college (and taught by a professor who was, I suspect, not entirely unsympathetic towards the regime) was that for most, life was perhaps difficult and bare, but not impossible. Of course, this depends on exactly who your ‘average Russian’ is; a peasant caught in the middle of a forced collectivization drive is going to tell a very different story than a worker in a tractor plant or a Ukrainian during Stalin’s repression of that area. (Mind you, the worker in the tractor plant would not be completely unfamiliar with some of the hypocrisies that went with the regime, such as productivity drives and Stakhanovites and the preference given to Party members…)
You might be interested in John Scott’sBehind the Urals, which is the story of an American engineer, I believe, who moved to the Soviet Union during the Depression to work in Magnetogorsk. The picture, as I recall, is perhaps somewhat rose-tinted–but this may be in making excuses for Stalin more than any censorship of the facts, from what I see in the reviews over at Amazon.
Of course, another point of view can be found in Solzhenitzyn’s One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovitch, which is a slender novel telling the story of one man’s life in the gulag.
We had a refusnik in my Hebrew School (For those unaware, refusniks were Soviet Jews) when I was a kid. His descriptions were of a huge bureaucracy which largely didn’t work, and which really didn’t like Jews.
I now live in a neighborhood full of Soviet immigrants. Based on common behavior, they are used to-
long lines
big crowds
having to shout to get what they want
stealing to survive*
bargaining like crazy
Some of the seniors do indeed miss the old country and the old days. The food is indeed foul by common US standards (Mom’s grandparents were Ukrainian so alot of it is comfort food to me).
Eva Luna You need to either do an Ask The thread, or prepare for a bunch of e-mails from me. I have a thousand questions about the USSR then and now, Russian and other languages, folklore, pop culture, and other things.
I am not implying that these people are somehow more inclined to kleptomania. If the system cannot give you what you need, you either die or learn to work outside the system.
For clarity’s sake do you really mean ex-Soviet states such as Estonia & Kazakhstan or ex-communist block countries such as the Czech Republic and Hungary ? It’s not exactly the same thing. What age are your friends ? In my experience people under thirty have about as much idea about the reality of life under communist rule as I do about living thro’ WW2 (I was born in '71).
I worked in Tallinn, Estonia in autumn/winter '94. The last Soviet troops left the month before I arrived. What I noticed
Food
Bananas ! Bananas on every street corner, like newspaper or hot dog stands. In “the former times” they were only available at Christmas (& sometimes Easter).
in the one small “supermarket” ie small convenience store you could pretty much get what you wanted but … there was no choice, it was the rubbery yellow cheese or the soft white cheese. The scruffy apples or no apples. One week they had tuna fish - in rusty tins with hand written labels.
menus in restaurants or bars were still mainly for show; most of what was written there was unavailable.
food was seasonal - one week there were mushrooms everywhere, the next none.
didn’t see a grapefruit for 2 months, then came home one day to a flat full; my landlady’s Dad had been paid in Grapefruit, kilos of them !
People (I had language students ranging in age from 17 to 57)
unwilling to share personal information and ask each other questions (even in the context of language lessons).
often wore the same clothes day in day out.
rigid - I was told off for trying to walk up the wrong side of the stairs coming out of a pedestrian underpass in the evening when no one else was around.
Then I spent two and a half years in Warsaw, Poland.
Food
After Estonia I was prepared but I was still struck by the lack of variety and the seasonality of fruit and vegetables.
People
more open than the Estonians but then my first students were university age
they stared, they stared at you and stared at you … the reason ? To see what you had. But actually it wasn’t aggressive - you could go up to a complete stranger and ask them where they’d bought their bag for example and they would tell you where, how much they paid and possibly even offer an alternative location.
they thought ‘westerners’ naive - believe what you read in the newspapers ?
customer service ? not really, the salesperson was always right.
When ex-communist minister Alexander Kwasniewski was elected president they joked about the past - “Go out and buy toilet rolls” they told me and elaborated on the old days one pair of shoes for winter, one for summer; a voucher which could be redeemed either for a bottle of vodka or chocolate; one bar of soap per person per month etc…
Working recently in Leipzig (in the former East Germany) I was invited by the group of managers to spot the West German among them - even now over fifteen years after unification it was easy.
The reality of living thro’ the transition is worth a whole other thread I’d have thought.
PS I also visited St. Petersburg in Dec. '94. We stayed in a friend’s flat, what stuck in my mind was that four flats shared a communal kitchen, toilet and bathroom, it can’t have been easy. There’s a scene in The Saint which seemed pretty realistic too me. I also think Martin Cruz Smith does a good job conveying the atmosphere in his Gorky Park books. I don’t know what Eva Luna thinks ?
I realise I haven’t related my posts to the American Misconception part of the OP but I’m not American so all I can do is offer my experiences for you to compare.