Some of the buildings look quite decrepit but if you look at photos of Britain or France or Germany from the 50’s you will see many similar buildings that need painted and cleaned.[0] People don’t look like they are dressed in rags. If anything I was surprised by the number of cars in some of the photos.
I didn’t think they illustrated what it felt like to have secret police looking over your shoulder. If you weren’t in trouble with the state or an upper class westerner I don’t think there was a huge difference in lifestyle between East and West Europe for most people until the late 60’s / early 70’s
Remember state housing was common in Britain as well. E.g 80% of the population of Glasgow lived in state owned housing until the 1980’s.
[O] E.g. look at 1960’s London in the film ‘The Ipcress File’.
Moscow isn't representative for Russia and wasn't representative for the Soviet Union. The quality of living of a farmer in Ukraine or an oil-field worker in Turkmenistan would have been significantly lower.
This is still true today... eg. an average n-th generation parisian vs someone who lives in a small village in the south of france... their lifestyles, fashion choices, house design and access to "stuff" (culture,...) differ a lot. "The internet" is a great equalizer, where you don't have to travel half a day to paris to buy something not available elsewhere, but you can order it online, but otherwise a lot of other differences remain.
Even the poorest NUTS1 zones in continental France trend above 0.850 (ie. "Developed"/"First world").
Most Russian regions excluding the region around Moscow is above 0.800 but below 0.850 at the macro level (microlevel Caucasian Oblasts and Far Eastern Oblasts are around 0.750-0.800 but not too bad).
By most standards, at a developmental level Russia is definetly developed, but then again it is roughly comparable to Turkiye or Thailand developmentally, so it is by most standards 15-20 years behind living standards in Western Europe, but none of this is too surprising tbh.
If we're being honest, it is a country in the Middle Income Trap. It almost became a developed country (the gains before the Ukraine War began in 2014 were amazing and broke into the Developed category), but a decade of economic development was lost after the post-Crimea sanctions and the subsequent war from 2014-Present.
Then again, a country like Russia has significantly narrowed the gap from a quality of life standpoint, but conversely, this also makes countries like Russia much more susceptible to a brain drain a la Poland or Czechia.
This needs to be repeated 100 times. People in Moscow and Sankt Petersburg to an extent were the elite and had much better living standards than those from smaller cities. Better loving, better education, better healthcare, less shortages, more access to goods.
Compare New York or Washington and some random small town of USA. Repeat 100 times.
Repeat that for other western countries.
I had a chance to visit oil and gas production town in Siberia slightly north of Northern Polar circle not long ago after USSR collapse. I have to say the work and life conditions there were quite good, I spare you of long anecdote comparing Yugorsk with then contemporary Moscow.
If it was after USSR collapse, we are talking about different countries. Like comparing the Mao China, with millions starving, and the 90's China.
Moscow after the USSR was just a city anyone could go, even the poor. During the USSR you couldn't travel freely, much less go to Moscow and look for a job. Getting a job in Moscow was a serious promotion.
The countries are mostly the same due to inertia and, frankly, there were no million excess deaths per year in USSR as there were throughout 90-s in Russia.
The inertia of lifestyle is such a massive thing, you cannot overturn it overnight, you cannot change it completely even in ten years.
During the USSR era you were able to travel freely. Even more freeer than today - you didn't even needed any passport to travel to huge distances, to Moscow or from it. You need one now.
Most of my childhood friends were children of Moscow newcomers. Their parents went to Moscow, got a job and then got an apartment to live there.
> During the USSR era you were able to travel freely. Even more freeer than today - you didn't even needed any passport to travel to huge distances, to Moscow or from it. You need one now.
NO! This is a HUGE fallacy (if not a lie). A "kolkhoz people" (kolkhoz stands for "collective farm") had no passports at all till 1974 and they had NO right to leave their living territories without identity documents. Sort of a slavery. As of 1970 the "kolkhoz people" were ≈20% (or ≈50 millions) of the population.
> Most of my childhood friends were children of Moscow newcomers.
This explains. Moscow always was a sort of "another world" than the rest of USSR.
You did not needed a passport to travel anywhere. Really. You go to bus/train station, you buy yourself a ticket and then you can go.
The need for passport to travel was introduced well into 90-s because of speculants who bought out tickets of whole trains/planes of popular destinations. I travel by myself from 1988 or so, and did not need any passport until mid '90s.
And yes, let us first go after "applying to the study was restricted" lie, then we go after a "applying for a job was restricted" and then we go after that "without passport" condition.
A non-negligible percentage of corresponding members of Academy of Sciences of the USSR were born in rural areas [1] (look at these who were appointed at around 1970-1980, they most probably born in USSR).
You could travel for vacations, see family and such. But it wasn’t as simple as get up and move to a new city. You needed a job. The place you lived was often allocated based on your workplace.
> Almost 80% of the population enjoying freedom of movement, minus expenses, still seems reasonable.
That's not how a math working in a communist country: it doesn't mean that the rest 80% were able to do so freely.
If you think that you was able to move freely from one city to another "because I wish to try luck at a new place", then think about: how can you move to another city if you can't sell/buy apartments as they almost all owned by the state? You only can move if you got a job at a new place. Given that by the law you can't be unemployed (you could even face a criminal case if not), so you can't just go to "somewhere".
If you are usual worker that somehow managed out to get a new job in another city, then you highly likely (not always) will get an apartment from a factory/state for free, but… What was a chance for you to get a something good by being from another city? Provided apartments almost always were tiny, usually no amenities, and overall living conditions were terrible. Often people were getting just rooms in communes. To get a normal apartment you had to "get into a queue" and wait for 10-20 years. Thus in every city was a huge amount of people waiting for their apartment. When in the city a lot of people are waiting their apartments for years, why someone will give something decent to a newcomer? Yeah, highly skilled/experienced managers or scientists were a bit more privileged, so they could expect of getting something good without queueing.
Some people were trying to swap apartments with those who wanted to move into their city. Needless to say about chances of getting something in this way.
International tourism. It was available mainly to party management and leaders. From time to time a best "workers of socialistic labor" were able to visit other "friendly" (from socialistic block) countries as a "reward", but only after party's approval and only in groups. Never individually. Also such tourism had a strict rules for travelers (what you can bring back with you or what you can visit there). Thus more than 90% of people never were abroad.
The only 100% freedom to move was an inner tourism. You was able to visit almost 100% of territory inside the country as a tourist. You also can't travel across the country for a year like modern bloggers because (as I said above) you can't be unemployed.
During the USSR era you were able to travel freely. <- that’s not true. The newcomers in moscow got job and then went to moscow. And got an apartment from the institution that offered the job. Going to moscow without a job would make you бомж (lowest caste of homeless) there.
If I'm reading the article correctly, the pics are taken around 1950, probably around april 1953. None of them after 1954, when the author was kicked from the USSR. And you compared USSR post-collapse (a minimum of 35 years after the pictures) with USSR still run by Stalin, or at least not still de-stalinized by Krushev.
I'm from Spain, and nobody here would say that Spain society in the 50's is remotely comparable with Spain in the 80's. Lifestyle turned upside down in the late 70's just swapping peacefully from a dictatorship to a democracy and opening to outside information. Our borders were never too tight: we were 100% free to change residence and to go abroad, and we receive a lot of tourism from Europe and the world. I can't start to imagine the change of an USSR that suddenly opened to a world that most of the people never saw.
The most simple search would give you info about the USSR inner passport (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Passport_system_in_the_Soviet_...). You can read that from 1933 to 1991 "According to the 1926 Soviet Census 82% of the population in the Soviet Union lived in rural areas. Kolkhozniks and individual peasants did not have passports and could not move into towns without permission". Also "On 21 October 1953 [...] rural residents could not leave their place of residence for more than thirty days, and even for this leave a permit from a selsoviet (rural council or soviet) was require". You can read also about https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Propiska_in_the_Soviet_Union, "Propiska was both a residency permit and a migration-recording tool, used [...] in the Soviet Union from the 1930s. [...] A propiska was certified via local police (Militsiya) registers and stamped in this internal passports. Undocumented residence anywhere for longer than a few weeks was prohibited." The current inner passports used in Russia are inherited from those years.
I don't think the average small town in USA really ever suffered grocery stores with empty shelves which was extremely common throughout the former Soviet Union. If they even had a grocery store at all. The quality of living was significantly different.
The premise of cult classic USSR movie Guest From Future [1] is that a boy walks for a kefir with the bottles for exchange and then gets into time travel adventure.
Some products like sourcream and milk were sold into buyers' containers. Which reduced amount of thrash significantly, compared to the "predictable availability" of today's world.
Yeah, I heard about it, people waiting in queues overnight to get whatever they could put their hands on, needed or not, then stuffed into their fridges/freezers.
Can I disagree? Having moved to a small town in south France after living in Marseille I can't say I miss the big city that much, on the contrary. Of course, there are some aspects like museums etc. but it's not like I was visiting them every day. The quality of my current apartment is superior to the one I had in the city. Sure, there will be exceptions, but overall I don't think your example holds for Western towns and cities.
You are disagreeing from the place with warm completely-non-continental-climate of southern France, which is exceptionally warm and mild even for France.
Can I see your disagreement as an exception that supports general rule?
>Some of the buildings look quite decrepit but if you look at photos of Britain or France or Germany from the 50’s you will see many similar buildings that need painted and cleaned.[0] People don’t look like they are dressed in rags. If anything I was surprised by the number of cars in some of the photos.
You don't have to go back to the 50's. You can see buildings like that in any european capital today. Moscow from the 50's looks very in line with most european capitals by the way.
>I didn’t think they illustrated what it felt like to have secret police looking over your shoulder. If you weren’t in trouble with the state or an upper class westerner I don’t think there was a huge difference in lifestyle between East and West Europe for most people until the late 60’s / early 70’s
Sometimes I have the impression that Hollywood movies gave people a permanent wrong perception about what it really means to live in a dictatorship with a secret police. For the urban middle/upper class it didn't mean much except if you were involved in politics. That was the case in Latin America at least.
I guess the biggest losers in the Soviet Union were the poor farmers and the industry workers who were forced to work, but you will barely hear about their drama because people don't really identify with them. It's much easier to sell police states from the past as low tech minority report scenarios for an urban middle class even if that was not really the case.
The big losers were the farmers - industrial workers (in the later years) had reasonably good pay for the work they were doing.
The farmers did not. They worked incredible hours, for little pay[1], and had very few options for leaving for a better life in the city.
Access to non-staple consumer goods was, of course, very uneven. The party gets first crack at it, and if anything's left, there's a dograce to pick up the scraps.
[1] Gosh, that part sounds just like being a farmhand today. Weird how farming is universally a shitty job.
> Sometimes I have the impression that Hollywood movies gave people a permanent wrong perception
yes, people have a very strange image of the soviet union somehow. the 90s have been the worse period by far in the ex-soviet union. before the system was in crisis, but sort of worked for most. and in the 50s, 60s was working fairly well. 70s decline, 80s crisis.
Which, of course, encompasses the majority of Soviet history. (Speaking of which, Anne Applebaum’s “Gulag: A History” is an excellent introduction to a camp system and culture whose scale and cruelty is little appreciated in the West.)
On the scale that the CIA said the average citizen of the USSR ate better than their counterpart in the US[1], while still having a lot of science and engineering going on. Material conditions in the USSR improved dramatically after WW2. A lot more than, say, here in Brazil, where we never had a communist regime though we did have a US-backed dictatorship
CIA notoriously overestimated the USSR by assuming competence within (what seemed to them) reasonable bounds. Bananas were luxury items and this sad thing was the most popular ice cream, fondly remembered to this day, because there was nothing better: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/2/25/Plombir_...
In some select border regions that could pick up foreign TV channels (Karelia and Estonia), authorities told that the grocery stores shown in commercials were a CIA psyop. Soviet citizens up to to the highest levels of party elite were deeply shaken when they could finally travel and experience them in person: https://www.chron.com/neighborhood/bayarea/news/article/When...
Imagine coming from that pathetic ice cream and suddenly seeing huge shelves full of everything you can imagine, and not only ice cream, but all other categories too. That was a tremendous cultural shock to anyone who had grown up in the USSR, beyond wildest imagination.
The idea that US and USSR were equals or even anything near it is totally absurd. You can see the same tradition continue in how Russia's potential in Ukraine was ridiculously overestimated, and how mundane things like toilet bowls and washing machines are deemed by Russian soldiers and officers as worthy of looting.
The choice of bananas as a benchmark seems really bad given that the US invaded and supported coups throughout Latin America specifically to keep the price of bananas low.
> The idea that US and USSR were equals or even anything near it is totally absurd
That's not what I said. I said the material conditions of the population improved markedly more in the USSR than here in Latin America following WW2
Bananas have a symbol status, given how mundane they are in countries that are open to international trade and how infamously difficult they were to get back then (among many other similarly mundane products). In mid-1950s, USSR imported 2000 tons, and by mid-1980s, peaked at around 80 000 tons. Present-day Russia has half the population, but imports 1 500 000 tons.
It's beyond imagination to westerners I've spoken to that people used to queue for hours on the rare occasions when bananas were available, and that most people lived to their 30s and 40s without ever tasting a banana (despite wanting to).
Statistics glance over this "human experience" side of things when making comparisons.
In the defense of the "plombir" ice cream, I still think that there is no better ice cream. Plombir is still made in that region and whenever I go back there, I eat it in industrial quantities. I could not find anything close to Plombir in the western world.
“Sweet Cream” is the closest to plombir, fyi, if you can find it locally made. Otherwise look for an Eastern European grocery - most carry a few varieties of plombir, though not the best brands.
The “sad thing” was so good it made its way to other countries outside of the USSR and is to this day served in many places. I can confirm from the first hand experience that it has no equals in the western world.
Stockholm syndrome. My father swears by rock hard toffee candy, because that's how they were by the time they reached his local store. Modern iteration that stays soft as intended and melts in mouth is blasphemy according to him.
No,in this case it's different, the ice cream is still made in the ex-URSS countries and you can still try it and you can still not find anything like this outside.
Every Lidl has it in Europe I guess. Here in random Lidl on Adria shore it’s being sold by Monolith group (some Eastern Europe company shell) and made in some far far away ex-soviet country. Nothing special, but nostalgia. On other hand other products in the same freezer were not better.
It's a basic ice cream without any artificially added flavors, even without the vanilla flavor. It's dense and soft.
The special part for me is that it's basic, vanilla how it's called in the US, but even without vanilla. However it's hard to explain to someone who grew with all the ice cream having some sort of added flavour.
Sorry, but plombir isn’t USSR’s achievement at all. The “plombir” in USSR first appeared in 1937 produced by using US equipment after Stalin has visited USA and tasted the ice cream there. No ice cream was there prior to that. Next, the plombir’s name and recipe were “borrowed” (as many things in USSR) from French dessert “glace plombières”.
Yeah, idk why everyone's trying to say the SU was so great when the dissolution of the SU happened after Boris Yeltsin went into an American supermarket in Houston and "Yeltsin admitted the visit made a profound impression on him. It cemented his growing view that the Soviet state-run economic system had left the Russian people far behind Americans, forcing them into a much lower standard of living."
Pretty much every time someone pipes up who lived through the SU era themselves, they set the record straight that people weren't really having a great time.
My parents’ house has two NATO air bases in a 100-kms radius (one of them very often mentioned on US news because it’s very close to Ukraine and it has US soldiers stationed there), and yet said house doesn’t have indoor plumbing and I do my stuff while visiting them in a hole dug up at the back of the garden. What’s nice is that while I’m doing it I have a splendid view over a Danube branch and over the Dobruja hills, beats navigating social media on my phone.
My grandpa worked as an engineer at one of the freezer-warehouses where they also produced ice-cream. It was end of 80s - mid 90s in USSR. He brought a lot of it home, and my fridge was always filled with 1-3 sorts of it. Sweet childhood time :)
During the years after WW2, the USSR has stolen huge amounts from East Germany and from the other East European countries, in various forms, from factories moved tool by tool from Germany to Russia, to huge bogus war reparations paid by other countries, to mixed companies owned by USSR and the local states, supposedly for cooperation in agricultural production, mining operations or forest exploitation, where the Soviets contributed nothing, except some general manager to oversee the local workers, but they took most or all of the production, exactly like it was done in the past in the colonies of the "imperialists" that the Soviets loved to criticize.
So there is no wonder that "Material conditions in the USSR improved dramatically after WW2".
However, after 1960 the flow of stolen valuables from the occupied countries has progressively dried and eventually the internal corruption made impossible to maintain the previous material conditions of USSR, much less improve them.
Do you claim that Soviets has actually moved that factory someplace else; or are you blaming that factory for continuing to be where it was built, producing stuff it was built to produce, likely paying wages to the same people who worked there from the start?
I know that Soviet Union has took e.g. Opel manufacturing line as reparations to form Moskvitch plant, but that's a different story.
I just replied to you at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36207426 but need to add that attacks like this are completely not ok on HN and if you continue to do it we are going to have to ban you again. I don't want to ban you, so if you would please fix this and stick to the rules from now on, we'd appreciate it.
HN offers no long-term benefits for having old accounts - the only signs of distinction an existing account can get is being throttled or shadow banned.
So practically it is better for you to warn me and hope that I compel, than ban me and have me getting a new all-good account promptly with no prior convictions.
I can see how I could worded both of these better, though.
I appreciate the last sentence in your reply, so thanks for that.
Old accounts have lots of benefits. One is that age confers credibility in the community and thus enhances your presence here. Account age, in fact, is one of the few sources of status on the internet that can't be faked. Another is that new accounts are subject to extra restrictions, and new accounts that break the rules get banned more quickly.
> I was surprised by the number of cars in some of the photos.
It is very unlikely that any of those cars was owned by an individual.
Most likely all cars were state-owned and they were used by various important-enough officials. During that time in USSR, many of those who made efforts to ascend through the hierarchy of the Communist Party hoped to reach a position high enough to be provided with a Pobeda car. Even if the cars were claimed to be "property of all the people of the USSR" those who received them as an official car frequently did not hesitate to use them for their personal interests. It was one of the main perks of such positions.
Only a couple of decades later, after a few more car factories for cheap cars, like "Lada", started production, cars owned by individuals became common in the USSR.
> For the urban middle/upper class it didn't mean much except if you were involved in politics.
This was not the case in the Soviet Union, certainly not under Stalin. The secret police was not only a means of subjugation but a means of extraction - if you had a house, a job, an apartment, or even a wife, that someone in the system wanted, you would be accused, tried, and repressed.
> what it really means to live in a dictatorship with a secret police. For the urban middle/upper class it didn't mean much except if you were involved in politics.
18 million people were sent to gulags. 1.6 million died.
I doubt they were all "involved in politics" beyond expressing an opinion Stalin didn't allow.
> Russia's Gulag History Museum says a researcher has discovered a secret Moscow directive in 2014 ordering the destruction of some of the last remaining documents on Soviet-era prisoners -- a move it described as "catastrophic" for historians.
Every source I've seen says about 18 million, including that one:
> As many as 17 million people were sent to the Gulag, the notorious Soviet prison camp system, in the 1930s and 1940s, and at least 5 million of them were convicted on false testimony.
RFERL, I guess, is a Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty.
It is a propaganda machine, not an objective history research institution.
These 18 (and up, sometimes up to 40) millions of people in GULAG (notice all caps) numbers are taken from Solzhenitsin's works, if you go through the chain of sources long enough. And Solzhenitsiin's works are not based on any facts or documents.
I also wonder where does this "at least 5 millions of them were convicted on false testimony" come from? How this interesting and significant number was obtained? Did the resource you cite analyzed every and all records of these 17 (18, sometiimes up to 40) million people?
Do you really think that 18 million people were sent to gulags for being antagonists of Stalin? Don't you think that it's much more plausible a scenario where the regime needed a lot of cheap work and because of that kept sending people to gulags for lower crimes like petty theft or even customary crimes like not holding a job?
The educated middle/high class in Moscow was probably quite critic of Stalin's policies and nothing would happen to them as long as they were not loud enough with their criticism.
> Don't you think that it's much more plausible a scenario where the regime needed a lot of cheap work…
It’s pretty clear that in at least a couple periods of Stalinist history, extreme paranoia led him to imprison or otherwise dispose of enemies in great numbers, e.g. 1937 and again with the Doctor’s Plot toward the end of his life. The late 30’s intensification is, after all, know as the Great Purge and not the great worker shortage.
Anne Applebaum’s scholarly account of the gulag is a great read on the subject. I think she would probably agree that the it wasn’t an either/or issue. Labour demands for industrialization were a driver as were Stalin’s own delusions.
I've been reading up on Soviet Rocket history and both Kurolev and Glushko were sent to Gulags for suspicion of organizing against the government. On the other hand they did do dome engineering work while there, so I suppose there were facilities that didn't conform to today's image of a Gulag
Yes I really do think that the Soviets sent people to gulags for "being antagonists of Stalin".
Even before Stalin, under Lenin (who was not nearly so bad as Stalin) about 100,000 people were executed for being "counter-revolutionaries" during the Red Terror.
Analyzing the look of external things near the center of the capital of a country obsessed with centralizing power, leads to the wrong conclusions.
At the time of the taking of these pictures, somewhere else in the Soviet Union my mother, who was still a child, developed a number of health conditions due to malnutrition. She is still psychologically scarred from that and has, like many of her generation, a strange relationship with food.
Her parents, both educated, lived at the poverty level we usually associate with poor places in Africa. That's how the country lived outside even the possibility of western cameras taking a picture.
Maybe talk to someone that lived in Glasgow in the 80s before deciding it was a utopia rather than starting with an ideology and choosing your facts to match?
"According to Water Aid, less than a quarter of Russian households have a centralised sewage system (where their toilets empty into a publicly owned treatment system). Of these households, less than 17% are connected to pit toilets (equivalent to Aussie outdoor dunnies), whilst the remainder aren’t connected to any type of sewage system at all."
Sounds like nonsense and also does not seem to relate to the rest of the article.
Whatever real problems Russia might have, toilet access is not one of them.
The Russian army is infamous for looting toilets. Why toilets? Most likely because the referenced graph is correct. They want them and the government is more interested in war than providing basic things like water.
As far as I can tell, all of these photos are taken in Moscow's center. It was (and still is) the wealthiest and most privileged place of all the nation. And Russia is a much more centralized country than US/UK, with bigger wealth disparity which is very correlated with geography, so even if I told you to compare to Manhattan or London of the same time, it would still be apples to oranges.
Even then it's hard to compare because different places go through different culture shifts. Since moving to London I've learnt that several time through history that "living in London" has shifted from unpopular to unpopular and vice-versa many times.
Through history sometimes you'd find the extremely well-off people in London, other times they'd not be caught near the place, it seems.
USSR was more centralized than US but definitely less than UK. For starters, it had Leningrad, Kiev and Baku, which were large cosmopolitain cities with their own culture, whereas UK has its second city slot vacant.
People definitely come to London to get a job, whereas in USSR this was never an issue and in fact discouraged.
Being able to buy all the food you want is nice, but not when you're not making enough to pay for food and rent, or cannot find a job that does. I've not been to UK but I can see people complaining about poor job prospects outside London regularly.
For people in the first quintile (ambition wise), it was definitely a problem. For the third? Soviet Union offered job stability like no place else with no need to pack their things and chase the job market. I'm not saying fourth or fifth because that's where vodka will probably get you.
Overall, both systems are widely recognized to be badly broken.
> I don’t think there was a huge difference in lifestyle between East and West Europe for most people until the late 60’s / early 70’s
For what it's worth, the difference was huge.
At the consumer, daily-grind kind of level the whole country was basically living just above the poverty level. Very few struggled, but the quality of things was shit as was their availability. Those who lived well and had access to the luxuries were still barely on par with the middle Western class. The only way up the ladder was through the party line, which required faking belief in the bright communist future in order to advance. It also restricted what you could and couldn't say, even if the truth was blatantly obvious. Everyone knew that everyone was faking it and that left a profound imprint on generations of people. It wasn't 1984 exactly, but it wasn't that far off either.
I think that's what ultimately did them in - the fundamental dishonesty in the system as everyone told lies about their productivity. And this happened all the way up the reporting line, so any amount that was claimed above the plan got magnified. By the time the numbers arrived at Gosplan, Soviet farmers were the most productive in the world (despite widespread hunger).
Study demonstrating the steady increase in quality of life during the Soviet period (including under Stalin). Includes the fact that Soviet life expectancy grew faster than any other nation recorded at the time:
A large study using world bank data analyzing the quality of life in Capitalist vs Socialist countries and finds overwhelmingly at similar levels of development with socialism bringing better quality of life:
This study compared capitalist and socialist countries in measures of the physical quality of life (PQL), taking into account the level of economic development.
> levels of development with socialism bringing better quality of life
If this study really has that result then it collides pretty hard with the experience of people who actually lived there (like me having grown up in Eastern Germany).
TBF, East Germany did have a pretty good health care system, which in turn may lead to a life expectancy similar to other countries at the time, but at the same time the level of environmental pollution was (literally) breathtaking.
And for 'real-socialist' standards, East Germany was still pretty well off, but at best comparable with poor capitalist European countries like Portugal or Greece.
Also, you simply cannot trust any public data about socialist countries from that time, because those numbers are almost certainly sugarcoated and had little to do with reality (that might at least partly explain how those studies above come to those 'unbelievable' results).
Those studies would have to explain why for 40 some years care packages (clothing, food items, small household goods, etc) sent from emigrees in the West to relatives left behind in Soviet sphere were highly prized in the black market.
I don't think there were any care packages sent the other way around from USSR to US..
Although my father did a brisk trade trading Soviet records for Western records via western penpals - eventually bartering enough Western records for the highly prized Lada car. - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VAZ-2101
I grew up in USSR and it doesn't collide with my experience in the slightest. Nor does it collide with experience people report in polling after getting to live under both communism and capitalism.
* A remarkable 72% of Hungarians say that most people in their country are actually worse off today economically than they were under communism. Only 8% say most people in Hungary are better off, and 16% say things are about the same. In no other Central or Eastern European country surveyed did so many believe that economic life is worse now than during the communist era. This is the result of almost universal displeasure with the economy. Fully 94% describe the country's economy as bad, the highest level of economic discontent in the hard hit region of Central and Eastern Europe. Just 46% of Hungarians approve of their country's switch from a state-controlled economy to a market economy; 42% disapprove of the move away from communism. The public is even more negative toward Hungary's integration into Europe; 71% say their country has been weakened by the process.
* The most incredible result was registered in a July 2010 IRES (Romanian Institute for Evaluation and Strategy) poll, according to which 41% of the respondents would have voted for Ceausescu, had he run for the position of president. And 63% of the survey participants said their life was better during communism, while only 23% attested that their life was worse then. Some 68% declared that communism was a good idea, just one that had been poorly applied.
* Glorification of the German Democratic Republic is on the rise two decades after the Berlin Wall fell. Young people and the better off are among those rebuffing criticism of East Germany as an "illegitimate state." In a new poll, more than half of former eastern Germans defend the GDR.
* A poll shows that as many as 81 per cent of Serbians believe they lived best in the former Yugoslavia -"during the time of socialism". The survey focused on the respondents' views on the transition "from socialism to capitalism", and a clear majority said they trusted social institutions the most during the rule of Yugoslav communist president Josip Broz Tito. The standard of living during Tito's rule from the Second World War to the 1980s was also assessed as best, whereas the Milosevic decade of the 1990s, and the subsequent decade since the fall of his regime are seen as "more or less the same". 45 percent said they trusted social institutions most under communism with 23 percent choosing the 2001-2003 period when Zoran Djinđic was prime minister. Only 19 per cent selected present-day institutions.
* 75% of Russians have expressed increasingly positive opinions about the Soviet Union over the years. Only a small portion of those surveyed said they had negative associations with the Soviet Union. The economic deficit, long lines and coupons were named by 4% of respondents each, while the Iron Curtain, economic stagnation and political repressions were named by 1% each, the Levada Center said.
> Glorification of the German Democratic Republic is on the rise two decades after the Berlin Wall fell.
Oh boy oh boy, I don't even know where to start... of course the past is glorified, because people tend to selectively remember only the good things and they are always afraid about the present and an uncertain future
And of course I too have plenty of good memories of my childhood, until my mid teens when the great disillusionment set in about having to live the rest of my life locked up in this petrified country. I don't owe those good childhood memories to East Germany or socialism, but to my family alone.
Of course pre-teen kids don't grasp the reality around them, because they are shielded from it by their families.
And of course there are still die hard communists who led a comfy and safe life in East Germany who then suddenly found themselves without power and purpose in unified Germany (and it's the loss of power which really gnaws on them, not the money, because even the unemployed in West Germany were much better off than a highly qualified factory worker in East Germany).
In the 60's and 70's you would also find enough Germans both in East and West who still said in private that their time in the "Hitler Jugend" or "Bund Deutscher Maedels" was the best of their life. My grandmother was one of them.
If life in East Germany was so great, why do you think people went to the streets in '89 to finally overcome this miserable and bleak existance despite the real risk of being gunned down and rolled over by tanks like in 1953? Not even the police and army loved this state enough to defend it from those so called "counter-revolutionaries".
>people tend to selectively remember only the good things
East Germany suffered less during the recent pandemic because of residual investment in social services and infrastructure. Socialism built a more human-centric society.
>why do you think people went to the streets in '89
Propaganda is a hell of a drug.
Technology changed everything, and people felt like they were missing out on the future. That was the power of television broadcast, like TikTok today, or the Facebook and Twitter of yesteryear.
My family was involved in getting the portable news camcorders designed, the broadcast satellites up, and the reporters into the field of the US's largest national news network by 1980. Suddenly, the entire world could see itself in stunning detail and color.
America made the market and sold the world on the consumption of "newness". We've got it, and you don't! (Topple your government for some fruit!)
I don't think either world was truer than the other, but one was certainly better at making people feel unhappy with what they had.
> East Germany suffered less during the recent pandemic because of residual investment in social services and infrastructure.
You should consider finding different news sources. 4 of the 6 states on the territory of the former GDR are at the top of the 'COVID-related deaths per capita' statistics, in Saxony and Thuringia twice as high as the German average, and Mecklenburg-Vorpommern was only saved by its low population density:
> ...investment in social services and infrastructure
This investment mainly happened after the reunification in the 90's, and dwarfs anything the GDR invested in 4 decades of its existence.
> Socialism built a more human-centric society.
Even if that were remotely true it wouldn't have any effect today. The Eastern part of Germany is still poorer than the Western part (even though it caught up quite a bit compared to the difference right after the reunification), which leads to more political extremism (both left and right) and less immunity towards anti-democratic propaganda, like the anti-vaxx bullshit.
Also, back in the 80's East Germans didn't need "US propaganda" to see what's up. Many had relatives in West Germany, and could see the difference of quality of life, and much more important, of personal freedom, with their own eyes.
There are academic papers and there are realities of life under the Soviet rule. Life was substantially shittier than on the West and you didn't need a slide ruler and statistical analysis to see that.
It doesn't mean that it wasn't improving, but the focus of the state was, as others already said, on the industrial development rather than on consumer goods and services, leading to various curious facts such as the lack of mass-produced toilet paper until late 1960s. PQL that.
Stalins reign was one of the largest genocides in human history. Torture, starvation, slave labour, execution, was the fate for millions upon millions of innocent people. The horrors of Stalins regime is beyond any imagination and you can easily look it up if you wish.
Think about what kind of spiritual dammage you are doing upon yourself with the lies you are trying to convince yourself and others of. That damage can be irrevocable.
Meanwhile in the real world, Russia went from a backwards agrarian society where people travelled by horse and carriage to being the first in space in the span of 40 years. Russia showed incredible growth after the revolution that surpassed the rest of the world:
USSR doubled life expectancy in just 20 years. A newborn child in 1926-27 had a life expectancy of 44.4 years, up from 32.3 years thirty years before. In 1958-59 the life expectancy for newborns went up to 68.6 years. the Semashko system of the USSR increased lifespan by 50% in 20 years. By the 1960's, lifespans in the USSR were comparable to those in the USA:
Quality of nutrition improved after the Soviet revolution, and the last time USSR had a famine was in 1940s. CIA data suggests they ate just as much as Americans after WW2 peroid while having better nutrition:
And if they had instead chosen free market capitalism instead of communism they would have had all that and much more without the enormous human sacrifice. Do you know of anyone who would try to run from the west to the eastern block countries behind the iron curtain? What you are saying is basically the same argument used to argue Nazism was great because it brought the 'autobahn' and the 'Volkswagen' to the common people.
You've been posting tons of ideological, political, and nationalistic flamewar comments, as well as attacking other users egregiously. If you keep this up, we're going to have to ban you.
Also, you're way over one important line at which we ban accounts, which is when they're using HN primarily for political or ideological (or nationalistic) battle. Accounts using HN primarily for this are abusive accounts that destroy what HN is supposed to be for.
I don't want to ban you because you've been around a long time and haven't always been abusing the site, but please seriously fix this if you want to continue posting here.
> backwards agrarian society where people travelled by horse and carriage
This is socialist religious bullshit, Russian Empire had a dense network of rail tracks, not to mention Transsib. Large Russian cities had aerodromes by 1917.
I can see how you have flagged three people who opposed to it with reasonable comments, but you did not flag the original page-long Communist copypasta.
Which makes me think that, amusingly, the HN moderator dang is an open communist.
It's pride time of the year, after all, so whom am I to judge.
I replied to that commenter here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36207435. We're equal-opportunity moderators, but I agree with you that dang being a secret communist (let alone an open one) is pretty amusing.
Attacking another user will get you banned here, regardless of how wrong they are or you feel they are. You've unfortunately been doing this more than once (e.g. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36143537). Please don't do it again.
I think it is my duty to speak out against the terror and genocide of the Soviet Union, lest it becomes forgotten. Millions were executed or sent to concentration camps for speaking out, so I guess getting silenced on HN is a cheap price to pay. My own people were genocided in Stalins Soviet Union, how could I be silent?
At another level, I completely appreciate how the atrocities and tragedies of the past are still affecting people today and thus I understand and appreciate how you feel.
At the same time, that doesn't make generic ideological battle (which "speaking out against the terror and genocide of the Soviet Union, lest it becomes forgotten" is definitely an example of) on topic for HN. We want curious conversation here. The state you're describing, of battling for people who were genocided in the past, is entirely justified but it is not a state of curiosity. It's therefore off topic for this site.
To say that something is off topic for this site is not a criticism or judgment. Many legitimate, valuable things are off topic for this site. That's because we're trying to have a very specific kind of forum here. It's not a place where "anything goes" - it's a place for a specific kind of interaction.
Keep in mind that these photos are from just a bit less than a decade after the WW2 ended. It took a lot out of the region in both the capital and human terms.
Just think how long it took to recover from the 2008 crisis and then multiply that by 10.
It is particularly interesting to track the use of the bright colors. Pre-consumerist societies did not have a marketing sector so everything was more natural color tinted (which to our eyes looks drab).
So if you focus for example on the color red you find it is used extensively in political signaling context (not totally surprising given the location and era :-), to differentiate gender clothing and, in one instance, a religious building.
I think it’s more that Victorian fashions (and later) favoured those drab colours. Compare to eg medieval dress which was colourful (though limited by dyes) or the way old (catholic) churches were decorated.
You can see the brightly coloured roofs from Red square for example. It was just taken on an overcast day with a 70+ year old camera. I think part of the drabness is limited by the technology, in the same way that Turner’s paintings are less colourful than those by Van Gogh.
Another thing is the soot in the cities making everything generally dirty and perhaps also causing people to prefer darker outer layers.
The bright colors made me wonder they are partly a result of the photos having been shot in early Autochrome. I didn't see mention of it in the article but the photos definitely remind me of photos in this YouTube video about the early color (and particularly Autochrome) film processes:
Autochrome was a much earlier process used around the turn of the century. These are most likely Kodachrome, a legendary slide film from Kodak with a very particular, pleasing color palette, whose colors hardly fade for decades.
How does this consumerist-society-color-theory explain that car colors have mostly converged to drab black, gray and white though instead of distinguishable 'brand colors'? ;)
Cars used in marketing context (advertising some brand) are definitely not gray :-)
People generally like color in some measure and it obviously serves as sending a more intense signal. But in various contexts other factors may prevail (e.g maximizing the market for eventual sale)
The interesting question is when does color get used more extensively (above average) and why.
If anything it's the communists that turned everyone into a gray mass, mostly because you had a very limited number of items of clothing that the state manufactured and you could buy, and the state decided on the color, and second because standing out in any way was at best frowned upon, and at worst dangerous, especially during stalin's times.
> I think you maybe seeing things from a capitalist perspective.
The argument is that marketing has made cities more intensely colored. Its not a value judgement (maybe calm natural colors are better for the soul).
It is also not a universal rule, there are places here and there that have a tradition of painting, e.g., house exteriors in intense colors (these days they are invariably tourist attractions - precisely because they are exceptions).
> For example west African counties have always used bright colors in fabric due to culture
Red appears in these photos in clothing context so not sure what this (dis)proves. Sourcing dyes for clothing has been a global trade mainstay from the earliest days of human civilization.
At least some of those buildings are houses. Do you think what color homes are painted has more to do with marketing or culture and geography?
How about the clothing choices. I see a lot of grey. Do you think that’s an unconscious choice due to lack of marketing for bright clothes?
The red in clothing does stand out, but as other posters and the article say: red was closely associated with the communist party so using it is a political statement of solidarity, not a free fashion choice.
Marketing may have an effect on making western cities more catching than they otherwise would be, but communist era Russia isn’t a good example of what that would look like. Due to other constraints (e.g. government control of factories and design industry) people were not really given free expression. This is an economic factor forcing an aesthetic. Similarly, if you live next to a quarry, you’ll have a lot of polished marble buildings in your town. This isn’t because you love white marble, but because it’s far cheaper than trees to you.
Woman doing such manual labor would have been highly unusual in Western countries at the time (and still are). They probably were assigned these jobs by the system.
Really? When travelling in Northern Portugal in the late 90s I saw women manually pulling ploughs on their allotments with their husbands, female builders, rubbish collectors and taxi drivers.
In the 2000s saw very similar sights in Bulgaria - gender roles seem far less fixed than you might imagine if you only watch TV or films.
Tbf, Portugal in the 1990s wasn't comparable to other countries in Western Europe.
In the 90s, Portugal's HDI was comparable to Poland and a number of other Eastern European states and still is to this day.
Salazar's dictatorship did a severe number on Portugal's development.
And ime, housewife type experiences definetly skew towards those who can afford a household on a single income - especially looking at countries c. 2010-2023 with similar developmental indicators as Portugal and Eastern Europe in the 90s.
That seems to be the general case for most countries.
It's only in a few countries where there's a large gender difference for outside labourers, ironically it seems to be inversely proportional to how much it's talked about in a given society.
In Italy ice cream is sold in winter too in all Gelateria.
The good thing about winter ice cream is that it is better, it doesn't melt that fast and artisans tend to do it with more care and quality while in summer there's an offset for quantity.
Women are more than able to do manual jobs and it’s very common that they do. Strange ideas about gender roles are coloring your perception of what is normal.
I think this is still true of the West though. I have spent many, many years in Southeast Asia, and construction sites there are 50% female — I think it’s a stretch to suggest that’s normal in the West though.
That said, certainly in Thailand commercial driving is still very, very male dominated, and job ads will explicitly insist on men; I’d estimate less than 1/100 motorsai drivers I’ve seen were female, and 90% of those were “Tom”[0].
Thailand's construction workers generally come from Cambodia or Myanmar. Not even Thai. Gender not relevant if they do the hard work for low pay.
Female motosai (motorbike taxis) more than 1%. Really only a thing in Bangkok, where organized gangs run the motosai according to territory. Definitely mostly men doing that, and food/parcel delivery. I would guess that results from Thai women finishing school and attending university at a higher rate than Thai men, which leads to better jobs. Motosai sit close to the bottom of Thai jobs in prestige, pay, and education requirements.
Yup on point. When I worked in Singapore their workforce seemed to be exclusively Indian/malay/indo transitory workers, saw them loaded into the back of big wire-cages utes every morning driving to their worksites, don't think I saw a single chick on those trucks.
It's a complex issue though, and the reasons for and current state of play varies _so_ much between countries that it's not even really worth comparing tbh.
"Very common" not from what I've seen. Would be awesome if they did get more involved, from my perspective.
https://careersmart.org.uk/occupations/equality/which-jobs-d... and plenty of other sources if you search for it. Which is kind of interesting because most searches result in the "gender pay gap" stuff, yet they kind of answer their own question with the stats.
I think there are a couple of outlying issues even these days:
1: "boys clubs" some men trying to get women to not work in certain industries (although sometimes just men working together is perceived as a boys club, in the tech industry I've seen male friendship/camaraderie killed because it's seen as "boys club-y" even though anyone's free to join)
2: women may or may not choose to work in certain industries, even if it's 100% possible for them to do so
3: societal pressure (from both men and women) on women (and men) to fill certain roles/be perceived certain ways in society.
Perhaps partly due to much more severe loss of men during ww2 which at the time of these photos was only ~8 years in the past. But also still trying to catch up to the west in overall wealth (tools in use are fairly crude).
The UK and Australia both utilised women in WWII and post WWWII "Land Army" roles to replace the essential manual labor roles on farms and infrastructure vacated by men off at war and left vacant post ware due to death and injury.
AWLA (Australian Women’s Land Army) was formerly disbanded 31 December 1945 but women stayed on as farm workers in some number for a good few years following.
With the men sent away to go die (for freedom/to fight evil, at least). The same thing is happening to male Ukrainians unfortunately; no choice in the matter (though many of them do want to fight, it's not my belief that one should be forced to just because one has a penis).
But in the UK they unreplaced them post war too though; both of my grandmothers in the Land Army were unceremoniously dumped out of it after the war, in preference to Commonwealth immigration
Never heard of "eating cold in winter warms you up" while growing up in Siberia. We had an ice cream factory in my town, which sold cheap and delicious ice cream all year round in very ubiquitous ice cream stands, my neighborhood had four of these. All the kids I knew used to buy ice cream all year round, I remember eating a can when it was -25c outside.
> Never heard of "eating cold in winter warms you up"
"Science and Life" reprinted some article on a comparison between a sandwich and an ice cream for the useful energy output in a cold environment. Guess you missed it. *grin*
This sounds rather counterintuitive. It seems to imply drinking hot drinks in winter would make you even colder, not warmer, which doesn't seem true. But this source indeed claims drinking hot tea under certain conditions can cause rather strong sweating, more than compensating the effect of the hot drink:
I like the photo with the trash: except for the bike which is in steel and probably a few bottles in glass, I bet the rest of the f the pile would be completely compostable and gone in 2-3 years.
Today a pile of trash is 50% plastic and will linger around for centuries
I lived in an older city for a while and met an antiques dealer who turned me on to old maps. "Honey pits", as they called them, were not just informal garbage dumps, but the local latrines!
Today, we separate them, but in the not so distant past (our family's house in West Virginia, not excepted, didn't get telephone or electricity until the 1970s), you just dug a new outhouse when it got full.
When I asked if that meant the rare bottles he dealt in had been fished out of former toilets, the antique dealer just gave me an amused smile.
Yeah, and glass isn't toxic. It's just a mineral, essentially a rock which is shaped funny.
Plastic degrades to microplastics and goes into the water cycle and the air, where we breathe it in and drink it. There is suspicion that microplastics could contribute to cancer, autism, obesity, and gender dysphoria. Partly directly, partly because some of the chemicals in plastics resemble hormones, changing prenatal hormone levels, affecting the development of kids as they grow up.
This stuff is hard to study academically, as microplastics is everywhere nowadays. Particularly in household dust due to textiles made out of synthetic fibers.
Another great glimpse into the everyday life of the Soviet Union of an earlier period, the 1920s, is the movie "Man with a Movie Camera" from 1929: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7ZkvjWIEcoU. It is an experimental documentary which is considered a classic of cinema.
(amusingly enough, I'm pretty sure the first picture of the first part is on the other side of the north american continent from New York, but I didn't notice any other obvious howlers)
Surely it should say his "espionage was detected" if he's a spy as per the title?
Although the article does not suggest he is a spy. Perhaps the title should be changed his deportation might have been a sore spot and it seems unfair to label him definitively a spy if it's not so certain.
> Spy Or Artist? / Part Four / The timing and location of Martin Manhoff's work suggest spy. The artistic images he left behind suggest something else. ...
> There is no direct evidence that Manhoff was a spy during his time in the U.S.S.R. His military records contain no indication that espionage was a formal part of his duties. After the Soviet newspaper Trud alleged that the Americans had been taking note of various infrastructure while traveling the Trans-Siberian Railway, U.S. authorities declined to comment. And to this day U.S. intelligence agencies refuse to discuss the issue.
Трудящиеся Советского Союза! Ещё теснее сплотимся вокруг коммунистической партии и советского правительства, мобилизуем наши силы и творческую энергию на великое дело построения коммунистического общества в нашей стране. Да здравствует нерушимое единентне партии, правительства и народа!
Workers of the Soviet Union! Let us unite even more closely around the Communist Party and the Soviet government, mobilizing our forces and creative energy for the great task of building a communist society in our country. Long live the unbreakable unity of the party, the government, and the people!
I dont speak russian but I speak another slavic language and know cyrillic. Its more or less about solidarity with communism and unity of the communist peoples or smth like that
"Workers of the Soviet Union! Let us consolidate ourselves even more around the Communist Party and the Soviet Government, mobilize our forces and our creative energy for the great work of building a Communist society in our country! Long live the unbreakable union between Party, Government, and People!"
So, where is the "fun"? is it about going to other countries to make "regime" changes? I bet, Yasha, that also your grandparents wanted to build a just and equal society. Do you think that their dream was less noble than the "american dream"?
The bias in the writer is so absurd. It's like in order to talk about the enemy you constantly have to remark how ebil they are compared to us. Obviously, we modern liberal democrats possess none of their defects.
This juxtaposition of BBC reporting on DPRK overlaid on the british queen funeral procession[0] brilliantly demonstrates the kind of bias I'm talking about, and how it's more often than not a form of projection of one own issues on others.
A few examples of the bias I'm talking about and how it can as easily be applied to "liberal" societies:
One notable event chronicled in Manhoff’s diary is his participation in the May Day parade of 1953. He vividly describes the grandiosity of the event, with its elaborate displays of military might and the orchestrated enthusiasm of the Soviet people.
It becomes evident that the parade was a carefully choreographed spectacle, designed to showcase the Soviet Union’s ideology and power to the world.
Literally any parade involves a "choreographed spectacle" as it's always about showcasing power to the world.
Despite the pervasive atmosphere of control and suspicion, Manhoff’s diary also reveals moments of genuine connection and warmth between him and the Soviet citizens.
This pervasive atmosphere is nowhere to be seen in the pictures, but of course they had to remind you that these are the ebil commies. The pictures alone look too human otherwise.
The secret police played a crucial role in maintaining the conformity necessary for the survival of the socialist regime.
Easily reversed: The NSA and FBI played a crucial role in maintaining the conformity necessary for the survival of the capitalist regime.
Understanding life in the Soviet Union during this era requires delving into the intricacies of the state-controlled society, the hardships faced by ordinary citizens, and the pervasive ideology that permeated every aspect of life.
Easily reversed: Understanding life in the USA during this era requires delving into the intricacies of the capital-controlled society, the hardships faced by ordinary citizens, and the pervasive ideology that permeated every aspect of life.
If you think that’s bad, read or watch any western coverage of anything to do with Russia - pre or post invasion. And I mean topics even far outside the realms of politics or war. It’s being happening since the Great Game geopolitical competition.
Interesting to me that the French have no issue at all with military parades, but it would raise a lot of eyebrows in the US, and in the UK any such thing is much more a silly hats and swords affair. I wonder if the French take on the military is more that it’s a tool of the people and in the Anglosphere it’s considered more a tool of the state.
> This pervasive atmosphere is nowhere to be seen in the pictures, but of course they had to remind you that these are the ebil commies.
My mother was an avid polish communist born and raised in communist Poland and there isn't a communist country that she didn't travel from east Germany to Uzbekistan and Yugoslavia.
Yes, as you point out, people living in the Soviet Union were just normal people with their everyday problems: the boss, the colleagues, groceries, buying some new tech (e.g. radio), family, health, etc.
I think it is very false to depict secret police as having such a huge role in everyday's Russia life. What was slightly different in Soviet Russia compared to other countries members of the Warsaw Pact is that there was more control on movement.
She and my father too recollect how going to some village 80 miles from Moscow had them stopped and controlled for documents and purpose of their trip like 4 times.
That tended to fade the further you went and increase around major cities like Moscow.
I wouldn't really say secret police had such a huge role in day by day, but the "police state" of control did. Other things that were quite heavily controlled were phone calls. People had all kinds of secret codes when communicating with people abroad because everyone assumed someone was listening and recording.
But I really cannot stress how average Ivan didn't really care or felt all of that control nor cared unless he did something heavily (politically) risky.
I often ask my family that lived in the Warsaw Pact countries, either in Russia, mostly Poland and Ukraine if they didn't feel there was a lack of freedom, etc, and they all said they didn't care nor think about it at all. They were thinking where to go to vacation, what to prepare for lunch or sporting activities, etc.
It should also be noted that all of those countries never experienced a much "different" state of affairs. My grandmother was born in Nazi Germany, her mother under the Haubsburg's Austrian empire, her husband was born in Prussia. And they all were born in a 30 miles radius. There was always a ruler, repression and control.
If anything, for those people, communist regimes brought the most freedom and best standard of lives they ever even dreamed of. It only got in the late 70s and early 80s that the system started tracking, people weren't blind and could see that people in western countries had it much better and kept growing while communist countries capped in their economic and social evolution. New generations didn't even remember the Tsarist or Prussian times, they looked at America, at West Germany at France and thought the situation was bad.
The kinds of freedoms that your family members don't remember worrying too much about often only become visible along the edges of behavior. Sure, if you're an average person living an average life of non-political, squared-away activity, you probably won't notice many of these absences. This applied in the USSR as it did in Nazi Germany. But if you do anything to stand out, move against the system or complain outside of official channels, and especially complain very publicly, then you'd quickly notice the repression. In the west, you'd have and still have far, far more leeway for doing all of these things. Insinuating that a country isn't so bad on authoritarian strictures just because someone can visit relatives or go grocery shopping and enjoy a vacation is flatly disingenuous. These aren't the qualifications that really matter for definitions of freedom. They're a blandly complacant sideshow for distracting from what does.
> This pervasive atmosphere is nowhere to be seen in the pictures
You could have just asked any survivor of these times.
As yourself: would you write a similar comment about Nazi Germany? May be you would consider it insensitive to the millions of its victims? Well, your comment about USSR is insensitive exactly for the same reasons.
I was born in that country, many members of my family have had to survive through it, and many didn't — just as many others have been killed by the Nazis. And westerners who, out of mistrust to their government, begin to whitewash Soviet union make my blood boil. You're as bad as holocaust deniers.
> would you write a similar comment about Nazi Germany?
This is spot on, if anything, the 'grandiose' May-parade photos remind me of 1930's Nazi Germany (and back then - before Germany invaded Poland - there was a similar fascination in some corners of western society with this sort of aesthetics).
The more you study fascism and communism, the more you realize it’s exactly the same thing with different branding. Of course, they're also each other's worst enemies, just like Coca-Cola and Pepsi are.
> it’s exactly the same thing with different branding
Yet capitalists will consistenly pick fascism, when given the choice. Pretty weird, considering it's exactly the same thing.
You are conflating fascism and communism with authoritarianism. A more in depth and unbiased study might give you the ability to grasp such subtle differences.
How does that idea fit with real-world China which runs a state-capitalist economy under an authoritarian communist rule?
China has done what needed to be done to realize what is an unprecedented economic miracle, especially considering it's a socialist country surrounded by a hostile capitalist world. They chose to be pragmatic and it worked incredibly well.
While China certainly has capitalists and bilionaires, they are kept in check. China also set a 2050 target to fully transition to socialism.
You are right though that authoritarianism seems to be a pre-condition both for communist and fascist regimes.
Every society has a ruling class. In fascist societies it's the military together with the capital, in liberal societies it's the bourgeoisie, in socialist societies it's the working class. Authoritarian societies use force to maintain order, liberal societies use the illusion of choice. When that doesn't work, they promptly revert to force as everyone else.
Their economic miracle was created by Henry Kissinger and globalization. Building a fascist regime was not a prerequisite for it, but is for problems that they are facing now.
How do you square the existence authoritarian party elite, which does include the billionaires, the idea that socialist societies are ruled by the working class, and that China is ostensibly socialist and going to be “fully socialist” in just 27 years? They’re going to eliminate the billionaires?
How does it manifest itself? Did the Eastern Bloc working class have the best access to education, medicine and goods? Was there no party elite with dedicated hospitals and exclusive stores open only to them? Did the working class have any say who and how ran the countries? Could a working man even plant their version of a "Biden blows" sign in front yard without imprisonment?
Do you really believe this? All socialist countries so far ended up very quickly (or more likely: started with) being ruled by a very small elite comprised of the top of a single political party.
Ah but of course I know - those weren't actually socialist societies but authoritarian regimes in diguise, but next time it will work you'll see!
The title is literally "2050 China - Becoming a Great Modern Socialist Country".
Did you even read before insulting me? Since you couldn't possibly have read those 100 pages since I shared the book with you, I must conclude you simply CTRL+F for "full socialism", which is the funniest thing I've witnessed in a long time.
Also I'm really curious to know what is your definition of "full socialism". Can you provide one without resorting to Wikipedia?
> Yet capitalists will consistenly pick fascism, when given the choice.
No, capitalists choose laissez-faire. What you are referring to are state capitalists, and they are essentially the same everywhere: whether it’s Mikoyan in the USSR, Gustav Krupp in Nazi Germany, or Dick Cheney in the United States. They all utilize the state’s monopoly on violence to maintain their economic control.
Shame they don't mention the film used, the tonal range here is super! Of course it looks like they were shot well, never the less... The quality of whatever film was used here is great!!
The picture captioned "Driving down Novinsky bulvar, Moscow" does anyone know the automobile brand from the hood ornament? Search engines spat out Ford Victoria or Fairlane from the '50s (text not image search) but the wings don't quite match.
"It becomes evident that the parade was a carefully choreographed spectacle"
You don't say?
I visited St. Patrick's day parade in SF and it was definitely choreographed. It's not like people just walked as they see fit. If it isn't it's not a parade.
This period is interesting because of the incorrect perceptions that dominated in the West. The US vs the USSR, two giants of roughly equal strength. Never was that the case and the US was always much more powerful than the USSR. The view was maintained by red scare propaganda, western communists (who exaggerated the benefits of socialist economy), and "shows" the USSR put together to impress. For example, the Afghan war was a much heavier burden on the USSR than the Vietnam war on the US. One can imagine that the West currently holds similarly distorted views of the relative strength of the US vs China.
During the Start II treaty compliance process, we also learned that much of the Soviet strategic forces were not operational. I knew someone who was on one of the inspection teams and a Soviet Strategic Forces officer involved let him look in the missile silos at some of the sites, which he wasn't supposed to do. There was standing water at the bottom of the silos. This means that the missiles were not launch ready and were not being maintained.
Which agrees with how the text mentions May Day 1953 several times, including in the caption of a picture taken from the new US Embassy building, opened shortly after that May Day.
The "parade in front of the former U.S. Embassy building on Manezhnaya ploshchad, Moscow" would be from the old embassy, but could still be after Stalin's death.
FWIW, Manhoff was in Russia when Stalin died. "From a balcony with a view to the Kremlin, Major Manhoff shot the only known independent footage of Stalin’s funeral." "U.S. Army Major Martin Manhoff had been in Moscow for more than a year when on March 5, 1953, after several days of ominous reports in the Communist Party mouthpiece Pravda, Josef Stalin died." - https://www.rferl.org/a/manhoff-archive-part-one-stalins-fun...
Many of the Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty images are the same as those on Rare Historical Photos. That's because at the bottom of the Rare Historical Photos page you'll read "Photo credit: Courtesy of Douglas Smith, via Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty / Martin Manhoff’s Archive / Bored Panda / Pinterest".
So if you want more old pictures of Moscow, and video, see the RFE/RL link too. Then go to part 3 and see places outside of Moscow - after Stalin's death, travel was easier.
Mirriam-Webster says that it is probably shortened from Russian "agitatsionnyĭ punkt", literally, "agitation center".[1] Regarding the etymology of Russian "punkt" Wikitionary tells us: "Through Polish punkt and/or German Punkt from Latin punctum."[2]
I didn’t think they illustrated what it felt like to have secret police looking over your shoulder. If you weren’t in trouble with the state or an upper class westerner I don’t think there was a huge difference in lifestyle between East and West Europe for most people until the late 60’s / early 70’s
Remember state housing was common in Britain as well. E.g 80% of the population of Glasgow lived in state owned housing until the 1980’s.
[O] E.g. look at 1960’s London in the film ‘The Ipcress File’.