Why did Soviet citizens buy things for a lifetime?
rbth.com
rbth.com
Yes, it was possible to fix one with a hammer because well into the 1990’s they had barely any electronic components, but sit in one before you believe the truly bizarre take of this article.
Soviet consumer goods were _famously_ shitty. I don’t know what this writer is smoking. Not Soviet cigarettes for sure, since those also sucked.
Central planning crap can make great products for very, very narrow definition of "fine" that sometimes just so happens to line up with what someone needs. It's really crap at figuring out what to make or what combination of subjective attributes make for a thing people want.
The author is definitively smoking soviet paint factory fumes though.
Yep.
> that could be easily maintained and kept ready with the state of infrastructure and supply chains in the 1970s USSR.
Which chains? Even gas was hard (impossible) to buy by a civilian without «blat».
This wasn’t a deliberate, careful choice by Gosplan to pick a car that would work well given the primitive state of the Soviet economy. Those crappy rust buckets were the best design that they could buy and implement from someone else.
There is occasionally weird nostalgia (or something like it) for certain aspects of the Soviet period and I do not get it at all!
I'm not well versed on the Fiat they copied but knowing how these things usually go I can see where they'd have made changes to fit their situation (e.g. revising trivial things to use off she shelf parts already known to be available in high volume, like the soviet equivalent of spec'ing a roller blade bearing instead an odd bearing).
There are a lot of cars of that era that are like the Lada in terms of features (or lack thereof), specs, ownership experience, etc. I don't think it's anything particularly specific about the Lada that makes people like it though certainly there's some things about it that makes people with a certain worldview want to like it more than they would otherwise. I think people are nostalgic for it because it was so prolific and well cared for (or at least they were maintained) because cars weren't treated as disposable by the people who had Ladas so that makes them easy to come by and keep using today. Basically it was a decent car that got lucky in terms of when and where it existed and who it was sold to that run into a lot of staying power.
the best maintenance is no maintenance
these cars required 10x more work than counterparts from abroad
Imagine Japanese cars from the period. You'd drive for 20kkm without oil change and will be sure it will start next morning at -20C.
Planned obsolescence 'feature' is a terrible tragedy of commons in capitalism that turns the world into waste machine.
Also one thing to remember is the sense of style was bit off at that time anyway. Just look what people were wearing up to 90's.
Combined with spirit of utilitarianism and brutalism you get, 'ugly' products.
The group-think is "Russia = bad".
That old car must not have a catalytic converter either, a godsend for our environment.
Keeping old things around is good for the environment. Keeping an old fridge and car from the 60s, I'm not so sure.
No planned obsolescence or failure sounds like respect for the consumer. I wonder how well their light bulbs held up.
Kind of ironic (intentional) that you brought up lightbulbs since the lightbulbs are the first known syndicate to establish and enforce planned obsolescence.
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[1] https://appliance-standards.org/blog/how-your-refrigerator-h...
[2] https://bigchill.com/inspiration/blog/refrigerators-through-...
> But this longevity wasn’t just a matter of thrift. Soviet goods were more about quality than quantity.
hahahaha. Just one random example - Russian made Rubin 714 color TV had the tendency to overheat, catch fire or straight up blow up, and burn down whole apartment complexes. From the very same source as this PR piece comes: https://www.rbth.com/history/329086-why-soviet-tv-was-danger... It was so bad even official Paper controlled by central committee was allowed to write about it https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1987-02-01-me-580-st...
"fires caused by defective color television sets that explode totaled 5,490 in 1985".
https://www.globalsecurity.org/military/world/russia/tv.htm
"sixty percent of all apartment fires in Moscow are caused by mass-produced Soviet television sets, which had a tendency to explode. Of the 715 apartment fires in Moscow in November 1987, 90 were blamed on exploding television sets, a statistic the Soviet press viewed as an alarming commentary on Soviet technology."
I tend to do things that same way. I have a philosophy of "Buy twice as good. Buy half as many."
My cars I tend to buy new, but keep them for 12 years or more. The same with household appliances. Better ones last longer, and can be more economic to repair rather than replace.
My Miele dishwasher is approaching 16 years old. My Miele clothes-washer and heat-pump dryer I bought 12 years ago because I was so happy with my Miele dishwasher. All three have been repaired once during their lifetime but continue to work, and work well. Very likely they'll see me out.
The impression you get from history books is that people were literally queuing for hours not only for perishable things, but also as in the article for things like fur coats. How did people find out where and when the queue started for a fur coat? If the store was about to get a delivery of fur coats, couldn’t they have a lottery instead of endless queues?
Let's try it.
Cuban healthcare. Venezuelan musical education. Soviet aerospace engineering. Chinese middle class.