This is a perception of a lot of people who were kids or teens when soviet union dissolved (or when they left the country). In reality, most of these were from privileged households that had various party connections (coincidentally, the same connections often made it possible for their parents to leave the country in the first place). The parents don’t talk about it and the kids weren’t old enough (or sharp enough) to grasp it. To them, life seemed much better than it actually was for the average Ivan who didn’t have such connections.
As a pretty demonstrative example, you pretty much had to have solid connections and strings to pull to be able to get proper anesthesia for your kids snare and scalpel tonsillectomy. The average person got local novocaine if they got lucky (or, sometimes, nothing). If your parents knew some people, you got general, maybe even with post-operative painkillers.
I was born in Moscow and spent my childhood there, during the Brezhnev era. I also spent my summers in Sevastopol, a town on the Black Sea which was a Soviet naval base (my grandfather was a professor of philosophy at the officers’ academy for the Black Sea Fleet).
In Moscow, “glum” was the right word to describe life, with government-mandated cheer universally derided through hard-bitten Russian irony. Yes, there were long lines for many things, because at any given moment there would be something “in deficit” (i.e. unobtainable unless you were a Party official and had stuff sent in from the West, or unless you had “valuta” - foreign currency - and could shop in a few stores which were well-stocked but only open to foreigners or those who somehow obtained foreign money and had connections, or bribed their way in). Many items, even when available, were rationed. For example, I remember being taken along for grocery shopping because butter was only sold 500g to a person, so if I went along we could get more.
On the other hand, vodka was always available and price-controlled to the point where anyone could afford it. Constant drunkenness was a way of life for many people, and unless you were an intellectual (scientist, engineer, etc.) work was a place you showed up at every day to waste your time, since you could not gain promotion or pay raises by being a hard worker. Example - a building that was started under construction near the apartment where I lived still barely had the foundation laid when we left the USSR, 2 years later. The workers would come in the morning, sit around and occasionally do something productive, then at lunch they’d buy vodka (3 people to a bottle) and then they’d sit around and tell dirty jokes for the rest of the day.
It was well known that every work group and every university classroom had a KGB informer (a “stukach”) in it, and thus telling political jokes in “mixed company” was a significant risk. Banned literature (“samizdat”) was passed around among friends. No copy machines meant that every copy was valuable. A fixed national school curriculum meant that everyone knew a certain body of knowledge - classic literature, science, history (twisted to fit the demands of the Party, of course, so ancient history was much better known than modern history). There was much less specialization of knowledge than in the US - an engineer was expected (socially) to know poetry and art, and a linguist was expected to know a little about chemistry, etc.
OK… now I’ve spent too much time at work writing this. My old Soviet roots are showing.
I hesitated to mention it, because I am sure my exposure is limited, but all of the Russians (Who are old enough to have grown up in the USSR) I have met and worked with have been been quite well educated. It seems to me that many aspects of the USSR were broken, but the educational system seems to have been an exception. Again, selective exposure may have skewed my perspective, and I would welcome either refutation, or confirmation of this impression.
Home is where the heart is. Once you’re used to something as normal, you don’t perceive it as an especial hardship. Hell, the kids today have no idea how we old geezers got along without the internet, instant messages, and cell phones (“how could you live like that?”). I grew up wondering how the geezers then lived without TV. I’m sure my parents wondered how their geezers could possibly have lived without, oh, say, radio.
On the other hand, your sample is likely to be significantly biased, as follows. The people you worked with are very likely to have been Jews, because of a Soviet emigration policy that when it allowed people to leave at all, only allowed Jews (defined as an ethnic group, not as a religion) to leave (theoretically so they could go to Israel, practically so they’d get out of Russia, which never liked them much anyway). In the USSR, Jews were overrepresented among the intelligentsia, and due to cultural tradition tended to push their children to get as much education as humanly possible.
So yes, the Soviet education system was far more rigorous than the American system (algebra by 6th grade, chemistry by 8th grade, reading real literature rather than the PC-diluted “issue relevant” crap that infests US classes, etc.). However, not all of the people got that much out of the system. Among the ones who did, though, were some of the people most likely to have left the USSR, and thus to have become the ones you worked with.
Soviet/Russian education system is also much more tolerant of being sick. Any time I’d get a cold I’d be out for at least a week, and I think on average people in middle school would miss a month or two of class every year – everybody is sick a lot. This tolerance is built into this “Algebra in 6th grade, Physics in 7th grade” thing – subjects take many years. Physics starts in 7th grade, and is most likely about one hour a week, all the way through 11th grade. That way if you miss two weeks you’re only missing two hours of physics.
A typical American school will have 5-7 courses per semester that are all evenly spaced (middle and high schools at least) and typically either 4 or 5 times a week. A Russian school will have a couple hours of each subject a week, with a huge number of subjects that continue year to year.
The history you’d learn from an American high school history class is twisted, as well- for details, see James Loewen’s book Lies My Teacher Told Me.
It’s also not unusual to have more coverage of events in the distant past than in the recent past in an American history class. Part of that is just the fact that you start out a class covering the distant past and move forward in time, and the tendency is to fall behind schedule as the term progresses, so later stuff gets covered a lot faster or not at all. Loewen suggests that the lack of coverage of the recent past is partly because events that a student’s parents lived through are likely to be more controversial.
If Soviet history was distorted anything like American US history classes (I have no idea if it was), there probably wasn’t that much stuff presented that was factually untrue. But stuff that was less-than-complimentary to the Party might have gotten little or no coverage, or might have been spun to look more flattering.
The semi-famous defector Viktor Belenko (he was a MiG pilt who in 1976, “altered his flight plan” so that it included a landing spot on a commercial runway in Japan) has his rural childhood in the 50s, small city young adulthood in the 60s, and middle of f-ing-nowhere Siberian Air Force Service chronicled in the book “MiG Pilot” by John Barron.
He was a defector so it goes without saying he thought the whole operation was a clsterfck. He himself was fairly privileged by his job and family connections.
Ah, the Belenko clusterfuck. He gave such wonderful interviews. Some quotes from them:
On the other hand, America at that time had a hugely inflated opinion of what the Soviets were capable of. We were shocked when Belenko’s MiG was coasting on fumes at the end of its relatively short flight from eastern Siberia to Japan.
There was a Russian kid in High School whose family had moved to New Zealand as a result of the situation in Russia (his Dad was an engineer or something, and found himself out of work after the wall came down, hence the move to NZ- which was as far from Russia as you could get).
He was a good bloke, and one day some friends and I wanted to get his attention across the courtyard in relation to something for a class, so I yelled out one of the few useful (ie, not related to armaments, espionage, or WWII) Russian words I knew: STOI!
He went as white as a sheet and froze where he was; we got over to him and when he realised it was only us he calmed down.
He explained that, in Soviet Russia, the only people who would be shouting “STOI!” at you would be the KGB, and that it meant you were about to get hustled into a car with tinted windows by humourless men and would likely “disappear” to a labour camp in Siberia or something equally unpleasant.
I apologised profusely for the un-necessary causing of alarm, but he said it was quite alright and was actually impressed I knew any Russian at all beyond “Vodka”, but the incident still reminds me how lucky we are to live in a country where we don’t have to worry about the KGB detaining us or ending up in a Gulag for telling a joke about the Prime Minister…
My wife grew up in Kazakhstan which at the time was part of the former Soviet Union. Her memories of it are kind of mixed. She remembers that nobody really had anything of value. Her parents were both college educated and her father worked in the University.
From what she says, they never lacked food although they did have relatives who lived in the country who could provide things for them. She does remember eating a lot of caviar sandwiches as a kid because her uncle who worked as an oil engineer on the Caspian sea would send them large cans of it regularly.
She does complain that the medical care when she grew up was a lot better than what we have here. She routinely had doctor’s visits and when sick it was not uncommon to spend a week in the hospital.
She said that fresh fruit was almost never had out of season and would tend to be rare. Oranges were expensive and for special occasions. She never ate pineapple until she was twenty and the Soviet Union had fallen apart.
Is this so much different from countries without nationalised health care, such as the US? (I’m asking seriously, as I’ve never been medically treated in such a country.) My understanding is that the level of care you get depends on your social position (which, in turn, is roughly determined by your income, rather than who you know). The unemployed and those working low-paying jobs won’t get any, or as much, anaesthesia and medication as highly paid workers and the wealthy, who can afford better medical care (either out-of-pocket or through their employer).
You might also enjoy Slavenka Drakulic’s How We Survived Communism and Even Laughed. Although she grew up in Yugoslavia, she discusses the experiences of people, especially women, throughout Soviet Russia and eastern Europe. Francine du Plessix Gray’s Soviet Women: Walking the Tightrope is another fascinating look at women and families in the USSR.
IIRC, throughout much of Soviet history, there was no real access to contraceptives, so abortion (which was legal) was the most common form of birth control. In her book, Drakulic mentions how hard it was to get tampons or sanitary pads. A woman traveling somewhere with relatively easy access to them would stuff as many as she could in her suitcase to bring back to her female friends and family. That’s always stuck with me. Something so simple that we take for granted that was so valued by women behind the Iron Curtain.
I don’t think that is true anywhere in the US in those terms. Poorer people might not get elective tonsillectomies because they can’t afford them, or might have a limited choice of surgeon/hospital, or might have to wait longer or get crappier food during their hospital stay, or cheaper overall procedure (some other kind of tonsillectomy for example) , but if you’re getting a scalpel/snare tonsillectomy the procedure itself is not going to differ regardless of how much money you have. I asked my ENT surgeon (I just had a tonsillectomy done in the US last year) about this practice and she looked at me like I fell out of the dark ages – novocaine for such a procedure is sadistic.
Everything I’ve read about the USSR says that their economy was VERY inefficient-as was mentioned, it took years to put up a building. I talked to russian aerospace engineers who told me how hard it was to get basic stuff (prototype tools, screws, nuts and bolts, etc.) The industrial sector was hamstrung by poor quality and low productivity.
Yet the whole mess was portrayed as such a serious threat to the West! One ex-Russian army officer told me that much of the (impressive) military stuff (missiles, tanks, guns, etc.) carted around on May Day was non-functional!
It’s a mistake to believe that just because the economy was inefficient (which it clearly was) that the country was not a threat. Back in the late 'Fifties, the average American considered the Russians to be little more than a bunch of dumb peasants, which is why it was such a surprise when they launched Sputnik 1 into orbit. (This was not such a surprise to the American aerospace establishment, which was well aware that Soviet Rocketry was years ahead of the Americans, despite the U.S. Army having grabbed the best scientists and engineers in the Heeresversuchsstelle Peenemünde and the bulk of working A.4 and other Aggregat models, since the U.S. military funded ballistic missile research only at very low levels from 1945 through 1953.) The Soviets, even when the fictitious missile upon which gap that Kennedy campaigned to victory in 1960 became reality in the early 'Seventies, always had supply and quality control problems, but their designs were half again as clever for it; instead of relying on high quality, advanced technology, and cutting edge materials science, designed workable solutions with less capable materials that compensated for low build quality by building in extra allowances, and incidentally making the designs more robust and usable with minimal training.
It is true that some of the vast number of missile designs paraded around were “dimensional models” that never had a functioning design; it’s also true that, for disinformation purposes, the Soviets would occasionally float false or discarded design documents to the West. However, it’s also true that the Soviets tested and deployed the first Submarine Launched Ballistic Missile (SLBM), the first true MIRV-capable missile, the Fractional Orbital Bombardment System (FOBS), and arguably the first ABM system (the A-35, encircling and protecting Moscow). The Soviets were behind the curve with solid propellant boosters (in part because of a lack of experience and problematic issues with solids, and in part as a general design philosophy), with digital computer guidance systems, and surveillance satellites, but did and have continued to maintain the lead in long range cruise missiles, manned space platforms, and anti-aircraft missile systems. The Soviet Space Shuttle program essentially copied the goals and forms of the American STS, but there were a number of differences in which it was widely regarded as being functionally superior. (Unfortunately, a lack of funding and the percieved–and ultimately real–risks of the winged shuttle handicapped the program into achieving only a single, unmanned orbital flight.) Despite what Tom Clancy might write about Soviet weaponry, it was in fact formidable and very threatening to the West. Despite quality problems and difficulties in getting advanced technology into production, Soviet weapon capability was generally comperable, and in some cases ahead of that of Western powers. (Comparisons of U.S. capabiliity against obsolescent equipment and ill-trained troops in Iraq is an unfair assessment.)
The economy was very inefficient, of course, and especially in the post-Khrushchev years, sustained largely by imports of consumer products and agricultural foodstuffs that the Soviets couldn’t produce domestically in adequate quantities. The largest part of their domestic industry was dedicated to military production (which despite the claim of Reagan supporters that the Soviets became bankrupt responding to American military spending, had operated more-or-less continuously at a high level since Stalin’s era) and because of central planning and bureaucratic inertia it was difficult to produce other goods. As a result, the main cashflow into the Soviet Union, aside from petroleum and raw commodities, were from weapon sales, which is why the AK-47 and the Scud missile can be found in the inventory of every tin-pot dictator. Ultimately, the Soviet economy had been bankrupt long before it collapsed during Gorbechev’s attempts at market and political reform; this was not unexpected by Western scholars, but the degree to which it was unsustaintable was surprising to virtually all. In retrospect, the Soviet economy had been running on fumes since at least the beginning of Brezhnev’s reign if not before. So, while it’s true that the Soviets had difficulty building hardware to the kind of quality standards acceptable in the Western world, they were by no means a Potemkin village of military might. One might, in fact, make counter-claims against the U.S. military, which in a number of cases fielded equipment before it was operationally fit or based upon false or misleading evaluations of reliability and capability. (Can anyone say “Patriot Advanced Capability” missile interceptor?)
Ultimately, the Soviets fell down because their system sucked–economically, logistically, politically, and ideologically. They told the same lies everyone else tells about how great the economy is doing, only the Soviets raised the standard politician’s prattle to the level of uncontestable dogma, and failed to address the failures even when it was clear that the system was buckling in from all sides.
shortages and all