Everyday Soviet Nostalgia | Hacker News Reader

Everyday Soviet Nostalgia

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36 pointstintinnabula65 comments

I live in ex-USSR, in Central Asia precisely. The life before the fall of USSR was in many ways much, much better than it is now, and before the Soviet rule it was a medieval swamp. There is still respect towards Russians here, a plenty of Russian schools, despite the fact that the Russians are a small minority here.

Well what keeps your country from uplifting itself?

My own country is one of the safest, wealthiest and politically stable on the planet but just a hundred years ago there were slums with child prostitution and cholera. As recent as the 1950s there were people LITERALLY living in holes under the ground.

This comment crosses into a nationalistic swipe, which is not allowed here, so please don't do it again.

Why on Earth are you saying this? What the OP says is that their country was very poor and now it's now thriving. I was just about to ask what advice he could give to the grandparent when I read your comment and it made me speechless. What do you mean by "nationalistic"? I really, completely have no clue whatsoever what you mean. Maybe you wanted to use a different word?

What keeps your country from doing admirable X so that it can be more like mine is a loaded, patronizing question. It's also ahistorical and therefore unsubstantive, as if one simply chooses to make things better and then they are. That argument is disrespectful to make about another person, let alone a whole country. Also, to my ear, prefixing the whole comment with "well" is a trivializing gesture, as if to say: "well, what's the matter with you? Pull yourself together and you could be more like me."

I realize the comment didn't land with you that way, but I can guarantee you that it would with others, and that is how we get nationalistic flamewars. Moreover, the account has a pattern of making ideological comments. Such accounts are by far the most prone to flamewarring, so when we see signs of that we err on the side of replying.

Oh I see. I just saw it as a honest question, encouraging discussion. If someone asks me "what keeps you from doing X?", when X is something I want to do, sometimes it's an a-ha moment for me, something actually very useful.

Thanks for this! It's always something of a miracle to me when one of these loops gets closed with mutual understanding.

> This comment crosses into a nationalistic swipe

Can you back this statement up, please?

It might be true for this part of the world. I certainly believe you.

But the picture was different for the western part, that was taken back by 50 years under the occupation. Modern societies were destroyed by murder and deportations.

There certainly exists some level of nostalgia but the life for an average person is much better if you honestly think about it.

You can actually buy yourself a living place, you can actually buy a car. You actually have an access to proper food and convenience goods (like something elementary like dish washing clots for example). Pair of jeans is not a luxury.

I think that there were certain aspects that provided more securities for the future (if you managed to align yourself with the system) but we know now that it was in fact not sustainable and the security only was an illusion.

The only problem is that the life in the west is still in many aspects so much better.

This is an argument on the level of "Mussolini made the trains run on time". Why not blame your local corrupt dictator for making life even worse than it was under Soviet rule instead?

I hate USSR, communism and socialism but I'm very nostalgic to late years of USSR (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perestroika) and early 1990s. It was time full of hope for new capitalist Russia (inspired by Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher). Unfortunately, all these hopes fell short when Russia fell under control of clans which later transformed to Putin's Russia.

Anyway, here is my 2 cents of nostalgia:

https://www.shrimptoncouture.com/blogs/curated/80026817-reds...

(I got this while listening new Retro Wave music :) )

It's interesting to see the binary view of the world even here, in HN comments. It should be clear that there is no one prevailing, unanimously accepted perception of the Soviet past. There are people who long for it, and there are those who hate it; some people don't have any strong feelings about it. They all have their valid reasons to do so, whether being young and associating pleasant memories with the past epoch or losing a family member in repressions etc. It makes no sense to impose one's views on others and trying to explain it to them why they should perceive the past in a different way than they already do.

I agree with your comment.

But the reason why people are discussing the subject, and for that article to be published now in 2018, is not the past. The reason is Russians have recreated much of that past. KGB rule, human rights issues, military aggression towards neighbor countries, cold war rhetorics and propaganda, state sponsored terrorism, it’s all right now in the present.

And it looks like the world either doesn’t care, or doesn’t know what to do about that. Both options are kinda scary.

The world has yet to find out what to do with the US's version of all those issues.

Once we solve that, we might turn to Russia, or perhaps we find a solution for both at the same time.

The article feels very much agenda filled. The past was not all so terrible. And remembering the past is just history. It’s good to know history, whatever it is. I know it’s hard for the west to understand that where history has been rewritten numerous times to fit the narrative.

Solzhenitsyn would say otherwise.

Having lived pieces of that and seen survivors, I’d say it was pretty bad and quite a bit worse than the article describes. Unless you belonged to the nomenclatura and were ok with being at the mercy of the Aparat.

> I know it’s hard for the west to understand that where history has been rewritten numerous times to fit the narrative.

Or the East. Or any civilization.

It was not all so terrible indeed. It was much worse. A couple of American journalists in 1940s USSR? They would see as much of real Soviet life as modern tourists would of North Korea.

USSR even had a special programme targeting famous artists/writers etc. They'd invite them to Moscow or Leningrad and give them a majestic tour about how nice Soviet life is.

We had an interesting situation in Lithuania. A lot of local inteligentsia took the tour in 1930s and initially supported Soviet occupation. Quite a few of them quickly backpedaled when they saw how real day-to-day soviet life looks like.

That programme is one of the reasons why a lot of famous people in the West supported USSR during cold war. Old the bad things must be bourgeois propaganda anyway..

On the flip side: in 1935–36, two famous Soviet humorists, Ilf and Petrov, did a road trip around the US and chronicled their experiences in "Odnoetazhnaya Amerika", or "Little Golden America" in translation. Vignettes from the book include encounters with Henry Ford, Upton Sinclair, Ernest Hemingway, and even FDR; amused descriptions of a rodeo, wrestling match, and football game; several captivating conversations with hitchhikers on topics ranging from health care to racism to religion; a visit to the Hoover Dam and a chat with one of the little-known and undecorated head engineers; awe-inspiring looks at the Grand Canyon and the Petrified Forest; and a ferry ride between the still under-construction Golden Gate and the Bay bridges. (More in my Goodreads review[1].) It's a fascinating, fantastic book, and especially stunning in how so much of the authors' bemused commentary on American culture remains completely relevant to this day — though I feel much of the charm and humor is lost in Charles Malamuth's translation.

[1]: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/2114423486

One significant error: "2017: Circus performances are now held in Moscow’s Dubrovka Theatre, where Chechen militants took theatergoers hostage in 2002, killing 130."

The majority of those deaths were actually due to Russian special forces, who controversially decided to flood the theater with an unnamed chemical agent...

Seems like these new 2017 photos just don't match quality and don't capture same depth compared to 1947.

Agree. Capa had what Cartier-Bresson or Weedgee had. You can't bottle it, its either there or it isn't

However the USSR might have been good in some ways, it doesn't really matter. That's because its economy was fundamentally dysfunctional and so it was bound to crash at some point.

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