>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.
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.