Yes, Russia is suffering now, and many people were better off during the Soviet Union-so what?
That’s like when people say that blacks in South Africa were better off under Apartheid, or that India was better off under British rule.
:rolleyes:
This won’t help with the Soviets in the 50’s, but if you want to get one person’s impressions of what Communism was like in Yugoslavia, check out Slavenka Drakulic’s “How We Survived Communism and Even Laughed”. Drakulic is a Croatian feminist and journalist, and the book is a collection of essays looking back on the old system. It’s a really good book, with essays on everything from her first trip to New York, to the doll from Italy she wanted more than anything when she was a kid, to the time she was on the phone with a friend and they decided to try to talk to the security agent who was wiretapping them.
Monty, I am not sure where you get the OP “wants society to follow the Soviet system” as I see it nowhere in the OP. OTOH, on rereading the OP I find this little gem which no one has addressed:
Maybe they thought they were in some American University Campus?
sailor: I get it from his other posts.
Times have been tough in Russia, but you know what? The Russian economy is one of the fastest growing in the world right now. Standards of living are rising very quickly. And it’s getting better as more and more capitalist reforms take place. For example, the flat 15% income tax caused the government’s revenue to skyrocket as more people came out of the black market and joined the tax roles. The same reform program is starting to take place with business taxes.
I fully expect that Russia’s standard of living will rise to match the rest of Europe’s fast enough for the children in that country to grow up in a wealthy, prosperous, free society.
I’d say that was worth a few years of dislocation and pain as a totalitarian regime was dismantled and slowly replaced by a modern, progressive democracy.
Schnitte: I believe the GUM or parts of it were for the exclusive use of permit holders, but if not I stand corrected. It doesn’t change the fact that there were MANY exclusive shops that were not available to the average Soviet citizen.
The Master addressed this issue in one of his columns (reprinted in “The Straight Dope”, ISBN 0-345-42291-0, 1984, but not (yet!) available on-line). He refers to “Section 100, a special elite-only clothing store on the third floor of Moscow’s GUM department store…”. But most, if not all, of the books will refer to the special stores.
I’ve been in GUM. Nowadays it’s filled with European chain stores and is mostly too expensive for average Russians. It could do with a bit of a cleaning/sandblasting, but it’s gorgeous. For Torontonians, think of the Eaton Centre in stone.
http://www.mre.gov.br/unir/WEBunir/RESENHAS/rel99/re02799.htm
I found the above references … but, amazingly, unable to find any pictures, of either GUM or the Toronto Eaton Centre! Mind you, this is starting to drift somewhat from the OP’s question…
I still need more detail, this has all been very good so far, but it looks like we have strayed from my original question.
Actually alcohol abuse has always been common in Russia.
OK, Komsomol:
The gist of the posts is that life for the average people was not good. Distribution of consumer goods was uneven at best. Quality was low in any case.
Wages for work, like everything else, were decided upon by the Center (Moscow); the fact that you might be exceptionally talented or relatively incompetent at your job didn’t much matter, the system thus encouraged mediocrity at best. Imagine a world where everything is D- [just barely passing] grade! The common saying was “They pretend to pay us, we pretend to work.”
Also consider that there was no private industry or enterprise. Everything was state-run and state-owned. You may have seen the bumper sticker “Drive it like you stole it.” Imagine an industry, a nation, or an entire economy being run like that. No sense of ownership, stewardship, accountability, or responsibility.
To paraphrase PJ O’Rourke again, the seediest things you can imagine are all preceeded by the word “public”: Public restrooms, public housing, public transit, etc. Now imagine that your whole world is “public” in that sense of the word, and you have the USSR at its BEST.
Then of course, there was mandatory psych treatment for those who have the illness of not being able to think in accordance with the party line, no rights or legal protections, no free press, etc.
And there was nothing to keep the USSR under Brezhnev or any of his successors from going back to the frim, sure hand of Stalinism. There were also those who said that the changing demographics of the late USSR (declining slav proportion of the population relative to the non-slavs) would have been very easily addressed via a Stalinist type solution.
Breifly, consider what it means to the average Joe or Jane to have no say at all in the apparatus that makes the decisions in their lives. What you do or do not want is of no relevance.
What were consumer goods like? EG cars tv refrigeration food what were they like?
They were crappy, and hard to find. If you were really elite and important, you managed to get your hands on American or Western European stuff. If you had any pull at all, you’d get Eastern European things, but nobody who could avoid it bought Soviet goods.
Excellent suggestion, Mr. Bowe. That is what I would have suggested had you not beat me to it. The New Russians, also by Hedrick Smith is worth a look, too.
All examples below are 1970’s era:
Cars: I have driven in several Ladas (Russian made Fiats). “Suck ass” would be charitable in the extreme. Does “worse than a Fiat, as if that were even possible” work for you? Or maybe “not legal to import to the US”.
Consumer Electronics: I heard but cannot substantiate (cite) that during the 1970’s the leading cause of residential fires in Moscow was exploding televisions. (Note to python fans: This is w/o the penguin.)
Food: You will recall that the cover story for the Anthrax outbreak in Sverdlosk (sorry about the spelling) was “spoiled meat, sold via the black market”. It turned out to be a bio-warfare plant accident (ref: Ken Alibek, “Biohazard”), but the fact that they’d have used such a cover story as plausible even to cover numerous fatalities should tell you something.
Consumer Safety: Chernoybl. The story was broken by the international press before the local people knew about the danger.
Consumer Safety II: Until “glasnost”, civil aviation disasters were classified information. Such information reflected poorly on the worker’s paradise and provided fodder for capitalist propaganda machines, or so they reasoned.
Public Safety: Until glasnost, even crime statistics were officially classified for the same reasons as above. There is no crime in the worker’s paradise, of course. And certianly there were no serial killers, like Andrei Chikatilo, etc. (There were quite a few we know of now, and likely there were many others no one knows of.) Even if you lived there then, you didn’t need to know such things; it would only promote hysteria.
I wish people like Balor would please remember that Russia’s current miseries are not a result of Capitalism, but of Communism. It is like complaining that I am bed ridden for several months after having an operation to repair a broken back. The horrible transition now facing Russia is a direct result of the oppressive Communist system that the freedom of Capitalism is now replacing.
I wish people like Muad’Dib would please remember that Russia’s previous miseries are not a result of communism, but of capitalism. Russia has never experienced communism; even in the period of Soviet rule it had a market economy with money and wages. Furthermore the ruling class never claimed that the system was communist; as far back as 1902, Lenin (in his book “What is to be done?”) declared that Russia should implement state capitalism (capitalism where the state, rather than private businesses, control industry), and when he rose to power he set about doing just that. By all outward appearances, the USSR was still in its state capitalism phase when it collapsed in the early 90s.
For the record, I agree that ultimately the Russians will probably be happier with capitalism. But a Russian instructor friend of mine who visited the USSR in the 80’s said that for the average person, things were quite OK: people had pretty much what they needed and the level of intellectual discourse was high (something I’ve also heard from others, but then they’re comparing them with mere Americans). Admittedly, her own needs consumer-wise are far below what the average American thinks she “needs”. And she’s a Green. :rolleyes:
Low quality and generic.
>> What were consumer goods like? EG cars tv refrigeration food what were they like?
>> Low quality and generic.
And a lot of the time, nonexistant.
Consumer safety 1986, Hungary: after the Chernobyl explosion, the party went on with the May the First rally as if nothing had happened, because, hell, celebrating May the First (Victory of the Glorious Proletariat Day) was more important than the filthy proles themselves. My parents (and many, many others - news travelled very fast informally and reading between lines was a very widespread skill) knew, and I didn’t go to school that day. Thanks God. Oh, and this was the 80s.