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Comment by eps | Hacker News Reader

In Soviet Union there were a lot of people that lived very well, celebrities included.

You probably mean they thought they lived really well.

It's the same thing.

No, not well, just better than the nobodies in the same system. Plenty of things were unavailable to anyone. For example, you couldn't own a good car, no matter who you were. A party boss could use a luxurious government dacha, but could not leave it to his children because he did not own it.

> you couldn't own a good car, no matter who you were.

Well, theoretically you can. But you have to be a really high on the ladder.

Brezhnev had several good _imported_ cars. Gagarin had a sport car (gift from French, I believe). Vysotskiy (think of a Soviet Elvis Presley) had a good car.

But other 99.99%... no chance.

Of course, I'm not taking into accounts hundreds of "expropriated" German cars which appeared in USSR after 1945.

It wasn't impossible to get a good car - just quite hard. My grandfather was just an ordinary steel plant worker, who was so good, that he got a short term contract in Egypt and earned enough hard currency to buy one of the first Volga's in the city (a white one, because black was reserved for party apparatchiks). He was not even a member of the Communist Party, on the contrary, when he was young he was conscripted for a forced labor as German ethnic minority.

Well, after his first ever space flight, Yuri Gagarin was granted, by the order of the Soviet government, among other things, several pairs of underwear. That should tell you all you need to know about how well even celebrities lived in the USSR.

The key here is "among other things", with those things, according to the title of provided source, including an apartment, a house and a car.

Sure. But just to think -- a few sets of underwear were something that would be considered among things that you need to have gifted by the government, along with a car or a house.

Can you imagine John Glenn being presented with some underwear in the White House?

I don't quite see what's wrong with that part of Gagarin's award. Maybe some items could be of higher comparative value in USSR than they were elsewhere. Military uniform is usually provided by government, and it's not far from that to some element of underwear. What does it mean, in your opinion?

Only that it wasn't some martian silk underwear embroidered with gold and unobtainium threads. Just regular underwear, but even that was something that your regular Soviet citizen had great trouble finding. I can believe that those were of a higher quality than goods provided for regular citizens (elites in the USSR always had access to higher quality, and usually cheaper, goods) but seriously, isn't there something wrong with a picture where a country spends billions on a vanity project but can't even make it so that a well-paid fighter pilot can just go and buy himself whatever underwear he wants?!

You're exaggerating :) underwear wasn't that problematic to find in early-1960s USSR.

As for spending billions on vanity project, the manned flights have reasons other than political. Check here - http://www.lettersofnote.com/2012/08/why-explore-space.html .

Decent underwear was not that easy to find even in the 80's.

There certainly are reasons for space exploration. In a country where a year after Gagarin's flight army shot unarmed civilians who were demonstrating asking government to give them some food, it is far harder to justify.

There's definitely something wrong with the picture, where a small part of reward is taken as a proof of something. For a single flight Gagarin got more than $100k in today's money, plus a house, a car and some clothing including underwear which was more like a supply than a reward.

Umm, no, I think it is the other way around (it's not like it were a lifetime supply of underwear, although even that would have been pretty weird). There is definitely something wrong with a picture where several pairs of underwear are listed together with a car, house, etc., as a reward (yes, reward) for extraordinary achievement.

The other problem being, of course, that whether you were given $100K, or a million, you couldn't really go buy a car or a house anyway. And, apparently, underwear or a decent coat either.

Source required

https://www.kp.ru/daily/26061.3/2969912/ if you read Russian has even better descriptions of what cosmonauts were receiving.

Even a Volga, which was rare in private hands, was not as good as a Western car of the time, and there was (I think) only one model of each brand and a total of four (4) brands of cars you could buy.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ZAZ_Zaporozhets#Second_generat...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moskvitch_2140

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

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GAZ-24

There were a few models concurrently of the two popular brands, but they were not great.

It's not the point. They lived better than others because of their loyalty (or sometimes, simply proximity) to "dear leaders", not because of their outstanding skills.

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