Pictures from the Eastern Bloc in the 80s

International Championship for Tonsil Removal is held among USA, UK, and DDR teams. Results: US 5 min, UK 4 min, DDR 4 hours.

“Well you see in DDR you can’t open your mouth, so they had to go in the other way”

That actually reads like a sort of meta-joke, on the central planner’s obsession with efficiency.

As with cryptography, a critical part of a good shaggy dog story is the padding.

Several years ago I rented an apartment in which you could hear people through the walls, and the cherry-on-the-top was a neighbor from below who early on weekend mornings played wartime songs on a bayan.

I'm not an early bird.

Indeed Kodacrhome really "pops." Might you or anyone else know what the dominant film stock would have been in the Eastern BLoc during this time?

Maybe all the market in East Germany but in USSR proper Zenit (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zenit_(camera)) was the absolute market leader.

>CD distortion, the jitteriness of digital video

What

I was, but I lived in east Silesia in the south which had the best infrastructure of Poland because of the coal mines and a lot of industry. As far as I remember only really old farmers still had horses. My parents once borrowed our neighbors (who must have been around 70 years old) horse to plow their field because they didn't have the money to pay someone to do that with a tractor. But the poor horse was old too and not used to such hard work, so after a couple of rounds he was so exhausted that he needed to lay down and their were afraid that it would die of exhaustion. So at least in Silesia you would rarely see horses used for transportation.

Instead both of my granddads bought this weird half a mini-tractor https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RoGGe9PBQWo but they both changed it to a custom version with 4 wheels, they came up with totally different designes for it. Actually I have a home video which showcases the one which my dads dad designed: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vN0J7Wg_V54

The first time I was in Romania, in 2013, we drove on a provincial road and there were people in BMWs driving 100km/h taking over horse carriages going 10km/h. It was "pretty surreal" to me (I'm Dutch) and it also seemed extremely dangerous.

From memory as a western kid on vacation in 1980's Hungary: transportation use of horses existed, but as a bit of an outlier. But photogenic outliers tend to be wildly overrepresented in travel photpgraphy, I know what I would have aimed my camera at, had I had one.

In big cities, the sight of horses was not common at all and horses were actually banned in Warsaw (except for tourist carriages). Overall, the cities were fairly modern, but gray and in constant state of mild disrepair. On one hand most big cities had electrified suburban trains, trams and very extensive bus network, while on the other hand, small towns and villages operated steam locomotives and people commonly used horse carriages. Also, the country side was quite diverse. Most small village farms operated with 19th century technology, even into the 1990s (in a style that we would today call organic). However, the large collectivized govt owned farms were fully mechanized. Overall, it was quite a 2nd world experience - we had a bit of the 1st and a bit of the 3rd world all crammed into one!

Selection bias. Photographer primarily captured the unusual/interesting things that stood out to him.

No horses in cities, tons of mostly domestic cars. New sedan was ~$1500-2000 in the eighties/early nineties. Average 1986 wage was $350/year, but by 1992 went up to ~$1500, so the cheapest Polish sedan, Fiat 125P, was 60 to 12 monthly wages. Western sedan would cost >$15000 before 1989 (end of Russian occupation). Officially only a handful of people made enough money to afford a car. You had privileged blue collar jobs like miner, foundry worker, sailors on border crossing ships, airplane crews. Then there was totally separate, protected class - high ranking party officials, directors of state run companies, security apparatus, diplomats etc. Unofficially almost everyone had an angle, smuggling, making moonshine, running unregistered slaughterhouse, farming on a side, stealing from state owned enterprises, taking bribes etc. My father got first car, brand new domestic sedan, as a present from his parents, paid by bribes (undertaker). Crashed it promptly and was forced to start working, we moved to Silesia for a year which made enough money to buy another new car and rent big apartment in the capital city. After that he started smuggling crystal glass, jewelry and furs to Germany/Turkey, making ~100x average official wage, but that ended quickly after communism fell.

Parts of Poland were under Prussian rule and had some accumulation of industry, infrastructure and expertise. Russia was an agrarian country before communism.

They were “independent” countries, so they had more freedom. Of course, no travel to the West, lots of bullshit, but still free. Countries incorporated in Soviet Union were blindly following orders from Moscow.

More strict version of socialism. E.g. private business was flat-out outlawed in USSR until the very end. Other eastern bloc countries had more lax rules.

On top of that, USSR was actively trying to incorporate newly acquired territories and assimilate non-Russian people to build the Soviet Man. Significant part of population wasn't very happy about it. Meanwhile satellite countries were busy building nation states and had less internal struggle.

IIRC, Soviet budget was much more military-oriented as well. More money towards budding regimes in Africa, Asia and South America too. Meanwhile satellite countries in eastern bloc were neutral or even received some resources from Moscow.

There was more economical freedom in Eastern European countries compared to those incorporated in Soviet empire. At least small private initiative was somewhat tolerated. Also, in countries like Poland communists weren't able to completely suppress religious attachments of populace. They had to accept the existence of alternative, competing moral, and cultural values, and it had the general effect of less-controlled cultural, and private space. Very unlike the strict USSR model where everything had to be in line with central-planned norms.

I think that there is a lot of confusion between what was actually forbidden and what was merely making people more suspect of getting recruited by enemy intelligence and the like. And that this confusion wasn't at all exclusive to outsiders looking back, but was present, or even dominant, within Stasi itself.

"Make a list of people to check in the emergency of a CIA counterrevolutionary project" can quickly turn into "Make a list of people to crack down on for lack of ideological commitment", particularly in an organization in the spy game, where need-to-know must be the norm.

The photo caption says Food stamps, Warsaw, 1980s, Poland.

It did not disrupt the supply chain, it was already non-existent. At no time in USSR's history were there full shelves anywhere except for Beryozkas (stores for party members.) It was a political system without any credit of legitimacy and political credibility.

The state system of Bloc countries was completely unredeemable.

Food stamps appeared before the collapse of the USSR. Most places in USSR proper had them in late 80s, and a few even in late 70s.

I imagine the downvotes are for your generic use of "socialism" instead of a more descriptive "Eastern Bloc Communism" or similar. Socialism can be implemented in many ways, just as capitalism can.

But, your point still stands. The flavor of socialism encountered in the Eastern Bloc from post-WWII to the 90s was by all accounts completely dysfunctional.

This is a historic city centre, a change there would actually be bad.

The bell tower is rebuilt, incomplete in the first photograph.

Except Warsaw metro has 1.5 line, 32 stations, compared to Paris 16 lines and 300 stations