>One chain belonged to the Vneshposyltorg (Foreign Mail Order Trade) and was intended for Soviet citizens who received some income in foreign currency. Some of them were forced to sell their currency for ruble-denominated Vneshposyltorg checks, while others never laid their hands on foreign currency, receiving their pay from Western sources in Vneshposyltorg checks via Soviet intermediaries (which, again, allowed the foreign currency to stay in Soviet government hands). The checks were to be used to purchase goods in the Vneshposyltorg Beriozkas.
but like i said feel free to keep perpetuating these bad faith interpretations
wonderful! so then you must understand why these stores were orthogonal to communism right?
"a political and economic theory of social organization which advocates that the means of production, distribution, and exchange should be owned or regulated by the community as a whole."
Private enterprise isn't the community. I'll admit that the state isn't the only way these things can organize, but it is probably the most common (excluding groups like the Mennonites)
My parents have never been inside a Beriozka, nor any of my relatives. Shopping there presented an economic impossibility: you either had to have foreign currency (outright illegal for Soviet citizens, with severe punishment for possession, so that meant you'd be a foreigner) or convertible rubles ("invalutny ruble", not illegal, but impossible for a regular Ivan to acquire due to the aforementioned illegality of foreign currency). 99.999% of soviet citizens _did not_ receive income in "foreign currency", and by definition "invalutny ruble" could only be bought with foreign currency. Or just handed out to a party apparatchik through other mechanisms. Those folks weren't suffering at all, best everyone else could tell.
https://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D0%98%D0%BD%D0%B2%D0%B0%D0%BB...
Understatement of the century, quite literally.
like you're sitting here glibly dismissing something that's more nuanced than either yours or my hottake. what are you trying to accomplish?
edit: also how come you translated mine but not yours? and also why didn't you translate all the way?
>даже если мы согласны с тем что коммунизм не был идеальным это не значит что берёзки доказывают это
translation: even if we agree that communism wasn't ideal that doesn't mean beriozkas prove it.
Some countries put border with barb wires, walls, armed guards, etc. to keep people out. Other countries did that to keep people in.
The fact remains that migration flows tell us where people actually want to live.
Hell, Australia in the 1890s was richer than most of the world in the 1950s
The most strenuous, impassioned diatribes against the Soviet system come from older people, and from the non-Russian satellite soviet states.
Sign of the blessing cross does not look too authentic to me, but orthodox blessing _is_ given with three closed fingers IIRC (I'm not a person of faith myself), to signify Trinity, as far as I understand.
The pen was likely brought from abroad, as were some other stolen items. Soviet government would not allow such a frivolity to be manufactured.