In discussing the events of today with my daughter, she said, “I guess it’s a bad time to be living in Russia?” Which lead to a discussion of whether there ever was a good time to live in Russia. When was the best time to live in Russia?
I think that depends on where in the class structure you fit.
In a recent poll 75% of Russians said the Soviet era was the best time to be a Russian. The most prosperous years were the late 1940s to the mid-1960s which also came with prestigious achievements in Science, the Space Race, and international athletics.
Before 1237. Not that it was particularly good, but rather same as rest of the world.
Arguably the early Putin years were a time of great economic advancement for the middle / upper-middle class. As long as they didn’t fall foul of the authorities or the highly ambitious.
Those of us who lived through the West’s real estate / stock market crash of 2008 recall the sudden miraculous gains in everything, including people’s attitudes once the corner turned. Russia had that, and a major reduction in general locked-downedness all going on at once. More permitted travel, more money to do it with, more and better goods, etc.
It might not have been objectively as nice as what, e.g., Sweden had that same year, but it contrasted hugely with the privation that had come just before. It was morning in Russia. Shame it proved to be a brief false dawn.
Already as a boy, living next to Russia, I came to the conclusion that there never was a good time to live in Russia. Nothing in the past 30+ years has given me reason to revise that conclusion: if Russia has seen positive development, others have seen more, faster, better.
Answers above, with “depends on who you are” and “relative to themselves earlier” do not hide the fact that compared to its peers, neighbors and contemporaries, it’s been a shit show, at least since the Mongol invasion.
I’ll bet that was a poll of only Russians, and not all the people in the old Soviet client states. The Soviets famously plundered their client states and shipped goods back to Russia to keep the population from rising up against them.
If you were a party man in Moscow, life wasn’t terrible. A pale shadow of the standard of living in the west, though. And if you were a poor farmer in Ukraine or a dissident in Czechoslovakia, well…
…can I ask what country you and your daughter are living in?
Because it all really is a matter of perspective. Like if you are trans and living in the UK, was there ever a good time to live in the UK? Or if you are a person-of-colour stuck in the student-to-prison pipeline in the United States. Was there ever a good time for them to live in the US?
For plenty of people, you are gonna be fine no matter what is happening to other people in your society. So for them: is it a good time to live in Russia right now?
Sure.
It all depends on who you ask.
Even now, you can look at Moscow and see a beautiful, modern city, great infrastructure, goods and services available at reasonable prices, culture, and so on. However, all that comes at a cost. Imagine if Russia were to break up, and all the resources east of the Urals were no longer theirs to “plunder”: all of a sudden that standard of living might become unsustainable.
For instance, if you are LGBTQ, now is not a great time to live in Russia (maybe also parts of the USA, but most definitely Russia).
The NYT ran an excellent piece about 10 years ago that really hit home for me. Having driven the exact route (St Petersburg to Moscow) several years ago, we saw firsthand some of the misery described in the piece. It may have been a ‘good’ place to live at some point in history, but not for most working people. No one that we spoke privately with (mostly local independent guides) had a good opinion of the country or the leadership for many, many years. What was shocking also was crossing from Russia into Belarus and seeing the difference in the amount of farmland and agriculture from Russia (which essentially seemed to have very little at the time).
If you want to read an account of what life was like for a fairly high status Russian, I suggest “MiG Pilot”, by Viktor Belenko, the Soviet pilot who defected and flew his MiG-25 to Japan.
To give you some idea of the difference in living standards, when he was shown his first western supermarket he thought it was a potempkin store, a propaganda setup to convince him the west was superior. He simply could not believe the wide variety of foods and goods that were available for average people to buy.
A friend of mine used to work for the UK Foreign Office dealing with Russia and has the same story. A diplomat arrived in London and wanted to see a shop. They took him to one and he thought it was a setup. So they let him pick a few shops at random as they drove around London. They had to visit a few before he was convinced it was all true.
There’s definitely some inherent bias in that poll. Survivor bias for one. Only those who weren’t “disappeared” in the Soviet era are left to reminisce about it. Also, I’ve generally heard that it was easier being poor in the Soviet Union than today (yeah yeah everyone was poor, etc. etc., but not really). Those with the means either emigrated or they became the small group of oligarchs that plundered what was left after the fall of the Soviet Union. So only the dirt poor and pensioners are left to pine for the days when they could at least afford their apartment and didn’t need to grow vegetables in the back yard just to survive.
Well, it beat hell out of the 1930s to 1940s. Much lower chances of being purged/disappeared, exiled to labor camps under horrendous conditions or used as cannon fodder. And I hear that average living space per person in those luxurious Soviet-era apartments increased from 7 x 7 feet to 9 x 9 feet.
The owner of the “Bald and Bankrupt” YouTube channel visited Moldova a few years ago. Since the breakup of the USSR, Moldova has had a series of elected officials who have absconded with huge chunks of the nation’s wealth while also doing not much at all to govern the place - infrastructure is rotting, the economy is in a shambles, and so on. He spoke to one elderly resident who insisted that, yes, life definitely was better when they were a part of the Soviet Union.
Bald and Bankrupt is one of my “cites”, as well as Ushanka Show. Again though, it must be remembered that the elderly pensioners he finds out on the streets are an already select group. He’s not going to be able to interview someone driving around in their Mercedes, or someone who had the means to leave the country and is long gone. So most of who’s left are the people that were at least somewhat better off under the Soviet system. Sad that what little wealth they had was pilfered by a select few for their own self-aggrandizement.
The government has apparently fixed those deteriorated stairs in the meantime, which is a plus.
True of just about every society everywhere any time, I think.
I saw a Letterman show with Pat Sajak from 1989 on YouTube recently. This is soon before Sajak tried his hand as a CBS talk show host.
Sajak recently spent a couple of weeks in the then about to dissolve USSR. He wanted to visit while it was opening up.
He had a miserable time. E.g., a restaurant would have just one dish available and it was awful.
I don’t think things got much better during the Yeltsin years and the Putin years are scary.
I vote for no good time.
3 posts were merged into an existing topic: Ivan_Denisovich Troll posts
Arguably the early thirties were the best time to live in Russia.
Because the Soviet Union was isolated from the world financial market, they suffered no ill effects from the Great Depression. This was also the period of Stalin-ordered industrial expansion. People who looked at the results and ignored the means saw that the Soviet economy was advancing while western economies were falling. This gave some people the idea that communism was a better economic system than capitalism. There were people who emigrated to the Soviet Union from the United States and western Europe.
Of course Stalin was running the country and it’s never good to be living in a place run by somebody like that. But in the early thirties, the average Russian wasn’t feeling the effect of Stalin’s brutality. He was killing off Ukrainians but not Russians (outside of political rivals as he consolidated his power). It was only in the late thirties that he began large-scale purges against Russians. And then in 1941, things actually got worse.