Postcards from Big Brother: The Curious Propaganda of a Brutal Soviet Era | Hacker News Reader

Postcards from Big Brother: The Curious Propaganda of a Brutal Soviet Era

collectorsweekly.com

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I know we're meant to look at the subjects of these postcards and marvel at how horrible they are, but some of them actually look quite interesting.

You've got plenty of your standard dreary Soviet-era monumentalism, of course, but the Flower of Life memorial is humble and affecting, the Armenian Writer's Union guesthouse annex is straight out of The Jetsons, and the Soldier's Field Memorial is one of the most creative war memorials I've ever seen. Compare the latter to the new-ish, thuddingly literal World War II Memorial in Washington, DC (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_World_War_II_Memorial), for instance, and it's no contest; as a way to remember both war and what war really is, the Volgograd memorial wins hands down.

That postcard with an aerial shot of housing blocks in Novi Beograd must represent a regional trend. In Romania after the turn of the millennium, I found some old postcards from the 1980s in a bookshop that were still, though covered in dust, for sale. Several of them were the same: aerial shots of new residential neighbourhoods with buildings of not particularly impressive architecture. I don’t know if Communist officials actually thought that Western tourists would be interested in these kind of shots, or if postcards were just exploited as one more disingenuous propaganda medium for boasting about development statistics. Probably a mix of both.

I can assure that people who lived in the wooden shacks found this picture amazing. An obvious demonstration that the country is moving into the future at neck-breaking speed.

Most propaganda I believe is targeted to their own population.

Would there have been sufficient Western tourists for that to be a market?

I think it's more likely they were produced for the residents of those places, to send to friends and relatives. "Look how nice our new home is!" — and it was nice, in 1980, compared to what it replaced.

Well, seeing the sorry state of housing development in the Bay Area, that does seem rather impressive to me...

zzzzzing!!

That postcard with an aerial shot of housing blocks in Novi Beograd must represent a regional trend.

Reminds me very much of what I saw in Brno, in what is now the Czech Republic. Also, modern-day Seoul, and many other large Asian cities.

I think it's just a different mindset. Where the West puts a high value on uniqueness, conformity is prized in other cultures.

See also: Vancouver's skyscrapers, and suburban tract housing, both of which are ridiculed for their sameness.

And yet, pre-soviet Russian architecture doesn't seem to share that trait.

Pre-Soviet Russian architecture served tens of thousands of highly privileged people in metro areas and estates. Meanwhile everyone else lived in izbas with no electricity, running water or sanitation, or worse.

The khruschyovkas and neobrutalist apartment blocks, for all their faults, lifted tens of millions of people out of medieval living conditions. They made extensive use of mass production and prefab.

Well, khruschyovkas and neobrutalist apartment blocks were started some 40 years _after_ Soviet rule was established.

So their primary target before that was not to take millions out of mediocre living conditions, but world revolutions and such.

Their primary target of those apartment blocks was to serve urbanization - to house millions that were moving (or were moved) out of rural villages, with their quite mediocre living conditions, to the industrialized cities. That process was quite ongoing 40 years after Soviet rule was established; lots and lots of peasants in 1950s-1970s USSR lived with a home environment that was quite comparable to early 1900s except with kolkhoz tractors and a propaganda radio. Moving to an apartment with running hot water, indoor toilet, and centralized heating was a major improvement for millions of people during Khruschev era, because their previous dwelling did not have those 'luxuries'.

Before they had khrushchyovkas they had komunalkas. Most everyone is familiar with Doctor Zhivago, aren't they?

That it was. I am under no illusion about the communists.

No doubt, but that just reinforces my point; the conformity was the result of trying to build them out rapidly, not due to some preference in Russian culture. I wasn't criticizing the architecture.

I suspect mostly second. For example, in Soviet Union housing was a huge pain point. Young (and not so young) residents who did not live with their parents lived in dorms for years (sometimes 10+ years) while the queue for their own apartment slowly moved on. Those postcards may be showing something to look up to only several short years away. I think.

Even in non-communist France these horrible concrete boxes were once hailed as the future of housing. When they were first built they had all the comfort the middle class yearned for at the time. The problem is that they degraded very fast and soon became synonymous with "poor people houses".

Here's a postcard from the 60's for instance: https://i.redd.it/3ofea4jd6k2z.jpg

Same in the U.S.:

https://duckduckgo.com/?q=cabrini+green+projects&t=ffsb&ia=i...

https://duckduckgo.com/?q=robert+taylor+homes&t=ffsb&iar=ima...

France wasn't communist, but it was heavily influenced by communist ideas. I believe it had the second largest communist party in the West (after Italy), and Le Corbusier was highly revered in the USSR.

You can find similar buildings in Britain, Sweden, Germany, Belgium and probably others.

Designs spread.

Hey! I live in one of those types of places. If they are kept up with the times and maintained properly they are a nice place to live

http://www.rentcompass.com/Rentals/Guelph/1407/2-Quebec-Stre...

>horrible concrete boxes

The cubic shape has the best utilisation of materials per unit of usable space. Houses must be cubical.

> > horrible concrete boxes

> The cubic shape has the best utilisation of materials per unit of usable space. Houses must be cubical.

I think parent was describing combination of box-like aesthetics with the unpleasantness that is concrete.

I think you may be mistaken - domes are perhaps a better utilisation per unit of usable space.

Also, it's definitely not the case that houses must be cubical, for any reason(s), let alone just to attempt to maximise the ratio of materials per unit of area / volume.

Humans need natural light. Big cubes have a low proportion of rooms with natural light.

The regime was terrible, but I enjoy the scale of some of these soviet monuments.

Why do you think it was terrible?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gulag

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holodomor

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Excess_mortality_in_the_Soviet...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KGB

How is it terrible compared to other similar in scale countries?

The Soviet regime was so terrible that they had to build a wall to keep people in.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berlin_Wall

The other similar in scale countries have performed much less atrocities against their own population.

China has a bit larger total numbers, but they're not similar in scale.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whataboutism

I don't get the logic: if you do it, you are a terrible person. If we do it, we are fighting for freedom or some such.

If you use the term "whataboutism", you are either ignorant or a shill.

If we disregard the geopolitics and foreign interventions, cold war UK, France or USA was a decent regime to its own people.

If we disregard the geopolitics and foreign interventions, cold war USSR was a horrible regime against its own people.

There are all kinds of horrible things done by those regimes to their own people as well, but they aren't comparable in scale.

It's terrible no matter who does it. You tried to claim that it was less terrible for the USSR to do it, because other countries did it too.

Worse than no justice is only selective justice: one set of rules for us vs. another set of rules for them

True, but no justice is still pretty bad, and you're advocating for it vigorously.

Maybe the fact that it murdered more people than Hitler's Reich?

In Bulgaria out of 8 million peple between 100000 and 300000 people were killed during the communist regime.

Aside from the millions of deaths, you mean?

Can’t say it’s much more than the US caused, when you count slavery, the extermination of native people, CIA backed coups, the prison complex and capitalism among others. But if the US does it it’s called “bringing freedom and democracy”, so those deaths dont seem to count.

You people have really terrible arguments.

History?

I'm kinda lost on the question here.

Just to add a different kind of answer from atrocities (which most major countries have committed), the USSR was terrible because it collapsed and exists no longer.

Hmm, I was in Bosnia/Herzegovina, Croatia and Slovenia this past summer, and saw many "spomenik"[0]... It is interesting to see these in person and their size is usually surprising. If you are traveling in the area there's a site dedicated to cataloguing the location & appearance of these monuments.[1]

0: https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/spomenik-memorials-yug... 1: http://www.spomenikdatabase.org/

That monument to the conquerors of space (it's on top of the Museum of Space) is as impressive today as it must have been in the 1960s. I was there just a few months ago.

As for the pictures of apartment blocks, I remember those kinds of postcards from the 60s and 70s myself in Western Europe, USA, Australia, Malaysia etc. In this regard the Soviet Union and Warsaw bloc were no different.

Something that fascinates and discourages me is how effective propaganda is even when it is transparently (at least to outsiders) propaganda. There is so much media today which is also transparently propaganda but somehow the people it's directed at fail or refuse to recognize it.

There seems to be a belief (in the US) that the United States stopped creating or commissioning propaganda at some point in the past. Most people might say around the end of WWII. It's part of a greater American exceptionalist belief system.

I am curious to know when people in this thread believe that American propaganda stopped. For me there are so many obvious examples, from misleading explanations on the news for military actions to giant blockbuster films and TV shows.

Yes, we switched to media. Easier to distribute.

I was on a flight and noticed a large number of modern war movies produced in China. They were quite like American "Blackhawk down" or "12 strong". Clearly meant to demonstrate the professionalism and ingenuity of their army vs the rest of the world.

The human mind is interesting. For example even when people know that they are getting a placebo it still helps them. Or I know commercials are BS but I still trust products I have seen in a commercial more than others.

Detractors aside, does anyone here think that we should build subsidized housing en masse for the homeless in, say, San Francisco? If so, how do we do it?

"Tax the rich" seems like a decent starting point.

I’d be particularly interested in solutions that do not involve taxation or any involuntary contributions. Can we change the law so that building housing for the homeless is cheaper, for example?

Do you have some ideas on how to make building housing cheaper? Make substandard housing for the homeless, no need for fire or seismic code compliance? Enslave the construction workers? Forced relocation to North Dakota to take advantage of lower land cost?

Building good housing is already very cheap, when you compare it to the actual market price.

The reason why price is so high is because the government makes it literally illegal to actually build stuff. AKA building height limit zoning laws.

Just go look at how much it costs to build a good apartment building in any place in the mid west. It's cheap. Cost has nothing to do with actual construction costs. Its zoning and government regulations that cause all this.

I almost thought you were serious.

Do you realize that some of these people literally sleep on the concrete sidewalk? It would be hard to build something below those standards.

But YES! Why not “substandard”? I see homeless people huddling under awnings. I think an enclosed space with some heating and a roof would be a wonderful place for someone who normally sleeps outside.

If you remove arbitrary limits like density(height) limits and requirement for parking spaces, and lower the minimum space requirements, then the same amount of construction costs can have much more small "housing units" that each would be much cheaper than now.

Another option that has been used elsewhere is 'dormitory-style' housing, where the residents have their own small rooms but shared communal dining/cooking/shower areas; it has it's own set of problems but it is much more affordable; for people who can't afford better living space it's much better than living on the street.

If you create benefits for the homeless, you get more homeless. Homeless people are surprisingly mobile. So thinking anything like this will fix a local homelessness problem is a fallacy; once every homeless person in the Bay Area is housed, you have just as many if not more homeless people showing up in SF with their hands out. You either have to solve the problem nationally or drive homeless people out.

That said, if you have to choose a part of the country as the designated homelessness magnet, at least pick someplace with cheap land and cost-efficient transport in and out. Eventually you’ll have a national hub for substance abuse treatment and unskilled labor, unless it gets so dreary that people would rather be homeless in SF than live in a home there.

Cleverly, I never asserted that this would “fix homelessness”, I only asked if anyone was interested in building housing for the homeless.

I see it more as an experiment in radical compassion (where it may only be “radical” because we lack more compassion). Perhaps it’s best to view it as setting an example.

Whatever you call it, I find it absurd that we are as wealthy as we are and yet we don’t build homes for the homeless. You may well be right. We could build homes for the homeless and find ourselves overrun with migrants looking for a cheap place to stay.

But so far, I see little direct work to help these people despite our extreme wealth. It’s disgraceful to me that we have all this wealth and are so unwilling to share it with those who truly need it. I want to find others who care enough to find a way to build a roof for those who would huddle under awnings.

You may be pleased to hear that I am a libertarian, and so I have no desire to force you to contribute. But I am also a socialist, and I believe we can build a better society if those of us born in to wealth help those who are less fortunate.

Surely you like that idea? Or should our society block out those who for one reason or another have no wealth for themselves?

Ok, so what are you going to do about it? Start donating to Habitat for Humanity or any of the other myriad of non-profits out there.

Not sure why you’re being so hostile; I’m just pointing out some complications to the idea.

Sorry, I guess I read too much in to your comment and took offense to it. I’ve grown up surrounded by people that would hate to spend $100 to help the homeless for fear that $5 will go to waste, all while they enjoy security and others sleep on the ground.

I’ve got a lot of frustration around this issue, but I apologize if I was harsh to you in my reply.

Distributed around the city. No more than one affordable-housing high-rise per neighborhood. Clustering them has been tried, and it usually ends with a concentrated low-income neighborhood with all the problems that follow.

Taking the idea further, wouldn't it be better to have a percentage of each building's apartments be affordable?

Well, step 1 would be for us to stop making it illegal for developers to do exactly what you are suggesting, ie we should get rid of building height limit zoning laws.

Sounds good. How can we convince people sympathetic to the plight of the homeless that burdensome regulations actually raise costs and hurt the disadvantaged?

Ugg, you are describing the problem of the century.

Unfortunately I don't have an answer to that. It is apparently quite easy for people to convince themselves that they are "protecting the character of the neighborhood" while also hurting other people, while not realizing it.

I think that the only solution is to get together a voting cohort of renters, that will fight and vote for their own benefit.

But this is hard work and there are no easy solutions.

Anyone know what to Google to see what the insides of those buildings looked like? They look interesting.

"Though most of the memorials were built from the 1960s through the 1980s, the most abstract designs harken back to the Russian Revolution of 1917, when Vladimir Lenin and his Bolsheviks promised to empower workers and take the reins from the Tsarist bourgeois." - the propaganda language of the article is illiterate as there were two revolutions in Russian Empire in 1917, Tsarist regime was overthrown by February Revolution and bolsheviks overthrew bourgeois regime in October revolution, thus talking about "Tsarist bourgeois" vs bolsheviks is simply not literate.

Historically, Russia has one revolution (February Revolution) and October coup (Putsch)[1], which was then renamed into Great October Socialist [bla bla bla]... Revolution much later.

[1]: http://grachev62.narod.ru/stalin/t4/t4_38.htm

Then you need to provide a credible source which provides an explanation why FR was a revolution and other is not, not a Stalin's article from 1918 you provided which is not about that at all. Left-leaning historians often define (a real) revolution as a change in ruling class, based on that definition both FR and OR were the very real revolutions (one was about passing power to bourgeois class, another about passing power to the working class), but if you are using other definitions, please provide them.

If direct speech of executors of coup are not credible source for you, then what I need to provide to convince you? Wikipedia article?

First hand evidence is enough for any court in the world.

I dunno, if the direct speech of say bank robbers claims that it was "account rebalancing" not robbery, is that sufficient?

That is, I don't think history is obliged to take the claims of historical actors at face value.

You are being disingenuously pedantic by making a distinction between synonymous words. From the linked document:

"Уже с конца сентября ЦК партии большевиков решил мобилизовать все силы партии для организации успешного восстания. В этих целях ЦК решил организовать Военно-революционный комитет в Питере"

Which translates to:

"From the end of September, the central committee of the bolshevik party decided to mobilize all party forces for the organization of a successful uprising. To these ends, the central committee decided to organize a Military-revolutionary committee in St. Petersburg"

Also note the reference to the counter-revolutionary plot. For Stalin, the October coup was clearly the continuation of the February revolution.

No, I don't. You need to understand that whole process, started in February 1917, was named "Russian revolution", while October episode was just part of it. They were separated in to two "revolutions" much later.

See [1] for more details.

[1]: https://pikabu.ru/story/ot_revolyutsii_k_perevorotu_i_obratn...

Did you even bother to read the article you linked to? The citations make it quite clear that the terms were synonymous, and it was multiple groups (not just the Bolsheviks) who referred to the October Bolshevik takeover as a revolution.

Yes, I read it. But I taken into account only claims backed by historical sources.

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