there's so much literature about soviet people desiring democracy and the 'colorful' west. is there literature where the soviet people were happy with their lot in the soviet union?
They had one job for life, the state made sure. They had apartment or house, the state made sure (if you were young family expecting child, they would just give you one). The wages and pensions were enough to live on, the state made sure.
In their eyes, there were a lot less existential threats (like losing a job or the rent getting too high you lose place to live) than under the new regime, life was "fair", no fancy enterpreneurs making millions while working people struggle.
Jumping to a world where nothing is certain and you're two bad months from homelessness after a lifetime of working was quite a shock for them. The message (however not all that real) of the old system was "we're all in this together" and the new one was "everyone for themselves, no caring about others" especially in the wild years after revolution. Some people are still sad about that.
(They also turn to fascist and populist politicians now as a replacement which isn't great.)
Those tend to get overlooked by people longing for the old days.
can parents support their child that is an artist with their income? or the state knows everything about the artist (her age, fit to work so on) and will compulsorily draft them to work?
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parasitism_(social_offense)
Could you provide evidence for this?
I know my uncle was supposed to go to one company but then that didn't work our for some reason and he had to look for a job himself, which was supposed to be rare. That would be early 1980s.
There were also a plenty of 'underground' artists, who had a day job of being a book illustrator, and did some stuff on the side, which they only would show to the close circle.
Your description of artists' life is pretty simplistic and one-sided. There were some people who did propaganda posters, but there were many things that existed outside the political domain, from book illustrations, to paintings with less ideological overtones, to working in theater. There was also Soviet cinema and animation, which would hardly be seen as only a propaganda vehicle, there was a lot of very nuanced works, which raised important questions. A lot of good stuff was shelved, or circulated underground of course.
It is an interesting film in general, and in context of your comment from the politics of art perspective -- it starts with a Nazi lecture on the "degenerate art" of 20s-30s, to art class lectures in Communist times, and ends with the equally ideological forces dictating "what's art" in West Germany (where are hero finally achieves fame and fortune.) It's East German variety of old regime/new regime but likely will resonate at some level.
The Russian Novel That Foresaw — but Underestimated — Totalitarianism
https://www.newyorker.com/books/second-read/the-russian-nove...
We all have family or friends who were artists before 89. The state arranged structures for artists to have jobs and even subsidised it strongly, so working people could afford to experience culture.
But somehow my little part of lithuania (very north east) feels like an empty shell these days, compared to what it was 20-30-40 years ago.. No people, no economic activity, just empty. I know this is not how it feels in Vilnius - the place gets better by the day, but deeper Lithuania feels deserted.
Is this happiness?
What I am saying is that for people like my parents, grandparents and myself it's really hard to compare life in Lithuania these days and the older times as there's nothing left to compare, really. 27 of 30 of my classmates are spread throughout Europe, including myself. I have more lithuanian friends in uk than I do back in Lt.
Good for them, I suppose, not so good for places I care about. And this is how many ppl from remote Lt places feel like.
It has been happening for decades, all over the world.
I think in the Baltic states this is magnified by population decrease and internal EU migration.
Population:
https://www.worldometers.info/world-population/lithuania-pop...
I think the population decrease numbers can be multiplied by 2 if you take EU emigration into account.
I see it as the biggest long-term problem Lithuania is facing. The country is not that big and crowded to begin with, and in 20-30 years it's projected to be even smaller.
And the society is just not ready for the obvious solution - immigrants.
The kids were different, they began to have access to cartoons and other cultural experiences from the West and began to question why they had to make do with so little (during Brezhnev's time, GDP went into guns and away from butter).
In any event, why should people feel happy about living under an oppressive system -a system which stunted their potential? Their "police" were soviet milicija, so in a way they lived under occupation to booot.
The peak of shortages happened not during Brezhnev but in the 80's during Gorby's rule.
> a system which stunted their potential
Did launch man in space somehow. Plenty of people realized their potential.
And so you stunt the growth not only of Russians but many other non-Russian nationalities so that a few scientists might have a summer dacha and a car and plane trips back to the city for wives to and fro the science town in nowheresville --while they are under threat to have their families sent to gulags if milestones aren't met... nice!
It was true during Stalin. Not sure about Kruschev era laws. After that nobody would be sent to gulag for not meeting milestones so cut the bullshit. It is like segregation in the US. It was true until it was not. Or that women in Canada could be jailed in specialized jails (they were called differently) for being of wrong moral character. Not true anymore either.
Where do you get it from? Of course it depended on time and place, but you can buy a lot of stuff in Kyiv (for example) in 70's and 80's. Some things were 'deficit', but they were more of a luxury items. Also the quality was rather good, due to not having cost cutting.
>> a few scientists might have a summer dacha Dachas were not exactly a sign of the elite. Cars, on the other hand...
>> science town in nowheresville These things existed for some sort of top-secret military research, there were plenty of R&D labs in big cities for a more mundane subjects.
You just have an axe to bury with communism, don't you?
They can be happy to live in the US and have police kneeling on their neck until they're dead.
In the US a callous cop gets tried and gets sent to prison.
In the USSR you got taken around the back, shot in the head and dumped in a hole on the ground, or if slightly luckier you got a chance to freeze to death after the commander of the gulag had you tamp down the three foot snow for his truck to drive in in your ragged boots and in your escape attempt you get lost and starve and freeze to death a couple of miles away but the commander doesn’t bother with a search party knowing what your fate is.
The Gulag system began to be dismantled immediately upon Stalin's death and was fully dismantled by 1960.
Stories about KGB are popular for a reason, you know.
By the way, the police and the KGB often didn't get along. There was a famous case where a couple of cops who were very drunk robbed a high-ranking KGB official (he was carrying food from one of those "special" stores). When their senior found out, he decided that it'd be better to cover it up, and had the KGB guy killed and dumped the body in the woods. The KGB eventually unraveled the case - and many other similar ones, of cops partaking in robberies and beatings.
(https://www.tellerreport.com/news/2020-12-26-%0A---war-of-th...)
So on the whole, I suspect you'd be far more likely to be brutalized by the Soviet cops than by KGB.
https://www.themoscowtimes.com/2021/11/10/new-russian-prison... https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/nov/08/i-was-always-s...
You're forgetting to include the fact that the cop was lucky enough to be recorded by a member of the population, that person had the courage to post the video, and this whole process required riots in all major cities to occur before it became serious enough to for the courts to properly prosecute.
How many other offenses have gone unprosecuted? For example this same officer had a prior complaint from 2017 for hitting a 14-year-old black boy in the head with a flashlight so hard he required stitches and then afterwards holding him down with his knee for almost 17 minutes, ignoring the boy's complaints that he could not breathe.
Thats just this officer, in a country this size there are likely tons of horror stories.
Sure. Whole 2 times when they were caught on video and caused mass movements.
Because its the only system they know, and they've been told forever its the best system there is.
For example; There exists a system where basic health issues can bankrupt you, where the police are above the law, where citizens can, and do, buy machine guns, where the courts are setup to protect the rich and powerful, where politicians can lie without consequence, that separates immigrant children (babies) from parents (and then has no way to reunite them), that has jailed over 1% of its population. Where people get no paid sick or holiday leave.
Why would people feel happy about living under this oppressive system?
Now you probably had some strong reactions to the question. And therein lies your answer. People everywhere, regardless of the system, believe what they are taught to belive, and they are taught that their existing way is the best.
Sounds kinda awesome to be honest.
I'm sure it sounded less awesome to the people he hurt, but hey, it's all relative to where you stand, what you personally value, and how concerned about externalities.
It's rare for people to get shot and killed at a, say, a political protest in a society without such norms. It's rarer yet for the killer to be found to have been in the right.
You don't see teenagers in Canada think that it's a swell idea to drive across the country so that they could LARP Call of Duty at a protest with an AR-15. The two cultures' outlook on guns is different, and one very actively discourages that kind of behaviour... While the other one seems to encourage it.
And what does owning machine guns have to do with public carry? I asked about machine gun ownership.
And what does a teenager driving over state lines have to do with machine gun ownership?
You're really stretching to answer my question.
'I don't like a society where people can and do buy machine guns' is a pretty obvious shorthand for 'I don't like American gun culture'.
And a lot of people feel very strongly, in both directions, about the consequences of American gun culture.
This is a cultural consequence of achieving independence from an oppressor. People who desire control of others will always organize, oppress and build militaries. They invade, so peace is not an option with this personality type. Hence why seemingly normal people can buy machine guns. - There are predators around.
I recall reading there has never been a crime committed with a legally owned machine gun in the US”. I think that changed a while ago when some criminal murdered someone, but do you believe banning everyone from owning something that had been used in a crime once?
That seems very paternalistic. Which is a fine stance. It’s just not the one the US adheres too.
You realize people legally own machine guns in Canada, right? Sure, you can’t get a permit now, but former owners are grandfathered in.
What do you think of Canada’s fun (edit: gun) culture?
As to the "political protest", they were burning buildings and attacking people. (Curiously, many of these businesses were black-owned.)
There's a reason you don't see protests and hockey riots turning into gunfights north of the 49th. People don't bring guns to them, because they know that if they use them, they are going to get an absolute world of shit dumped on their heads by the courts.
Even if we assume that they actually thought that, they attacked someone who they had no reason to believe was involved in said "active shooter situation." The most favorable interpretation is that they were vigilantes who attacked with deadly force.
If Rittenhouse had chased down someone you agreed with politically, claiming "an active shooter situation", you'd want his head.
Because you read too much media.
Quite an unrealistic percentage and I speak as someone who did move to that place.
USSR: first satellite, first animal in space, first animal returning from space, first human in space, first woman in space, first object orbiting the Sun, first hard lunar landing, first pictures of the dark side of the moon, first space station, first spacewalk, first soft landing on he moon, first probe to another planet, first landing on another planet, first satellite on another planet.
USA: first communications satellite, first weather satellite, first man of the moon (and conveniently the space race ends here).
My comment was more in line to contradict the statement of "this country invented everything!" when obviously the Soviets had a strong know how that certainly didn't come from the US [0].
The man on the moon is what it is: an incredibly impressive feat with an objectively terrible risk/benefit ratio, but pulling it off makes it great for propaganda purposes. Once the US did that, the crewed moon landing programs in the USSR, which already had problems, were instantaneously de-funded, as the value of being the first was gone.
It's not casual that since the space race ended, rational thinking kicked in and 100% of surface exploration and analysis has been done with unmanned rovers and sample return missions. And in my opinion, unmanned missions are more impressive from a technical standpoint, but that's another topic.
This is an article on the subject that covers well the main reason why the USSR failed at what they seemed to be winning. [1]
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TjDEsGZLbio
[1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/startswithabang/2019/07/11/this...
USSR did have less resources to dedicate to space. USA spent massively more on the Moon race - and while the technology was somewhat conservative in places, they reached the goal. The close call of Apollo-13 could illustrate both how stretched the resources were and how sufficient level of redundancy was. USA won the Moon landing, even though USSR claimed many secondary prizes - Zond flights, automatic orbiting, landing, Lunokhods and probe returns. Even though Luna-24 clearly brought important materials, still the scientific return from - massively more expensive - Apollo flights could be considered higher. Yet USSR spent maybe 1/5 of what USA spent on the Moon race.
Space stations are also somewhat hard to compare. While USSR had much more, and with better capabilities, the Skylab's heritage is still important - even today. Same goes to Shuttle/Buran - while Buran flew just one, rather symbolic flight, and Shuttle run a massive scientific (and others) program, still Energiya-Buran project produced Zenit launcher, family of engines leading to e.g. RD-180, not to mention the development of underlying technologies - e.g. Al-Li alloys and (I believe) friction welding were worked on in the scope of the project. Shuttle can be accused in killing two crews and in being excessively expensive. Buran can be accused in helping to bankrupt the USSR.
USSR had quite good automatic probes at the time of breaking, too. VEGA program was a resounding success, while Phobos was much less so - even though quite ambitious. Only pieces of those capabilities survived - post-Soviet Russia managed to participate well in commercial launch market and practically created space tourism industry, but seems like it works well only initially, and serious investments are hard to come by. Yet coming back to USSR it's hard to disagree that the space program - till the end of the country - was quite robust, despite the loss of the Moon race.
We can still consider the manned Moon flights as the biggest achievement in the manned space. But going back to USSR/USA comparison - we aren't even sure if USA is able to repeat them easily (USA can, but with lots of efforts, which modern programs demonstrate), which shows importance of political will. So it looks like there were different "kinds of sport" and participants showed different results in them, and if we assume that only Moon landings matter, then USA is the clear winner. The reality is probably more complex.
USA had a tremendous success with space probes - starting with Hubble. Actually, Voyager - still chugging along - and even Vikings - started massive Mars science - but I'd consider the wave of many space projects - Pathfinder, Galileo, Cassini, many space telescopes etc. - started roughly with Hubble launch.
In manned space USA was arguably tied with Shuttle, which eventually stopped flying in 2011, and had to send astronauts with Soyuzes; only when SpaceX completed the Crew Dragon, USA resumed sending people to orbit again; but these are better known recent events. Similarly USA recently got much stronger in commercial space sectors, including regarding manned space - launches, suborbital space; here modern Russia so far offers the same tourist flights as 20 years ago, while having troubles in modernizing, or even maintaining, the launcher fleet. But that's Russia, not USSR.
So if we stop the clock at the moment USSR dissolves, the relative space capabilities are different than now. In space USSR had - up until the end - enough of achievements to be considered world class.
People in the late Soviet Union were quite aware they were not living under the best system there is and most of them did not particularly believe being told things to that effect repeatedly any more than people in western societies believe ads.
It becomes harder to convince people of your position while they are starving. So yeah people stopped believing.
But there's a Long time from 1917 to 1990. And for the bulk of that time people believed enough for the status quo to be maintained.
And plenty of people in Western societies belive adds, and the evidence for this is that companies and parties keep making them...
They were not utterly oblivious to the outside world and accepting of the government and party line from 1917 to 1990. The last one already sounds completely implausible it should give you pause - that would make generations of Soviet people utter naifs. They weren't.
Firstly, the soviet Union was made up of a number of separate countries (as the original article notes things were quite different in Russia, Lithuania and East Germany. While all lead by communist parties, all operated in fear of Russian occupation (as happened in Hungary in 1956 and czechoslovakia in 1968).
Soviet block countries were dependent on Russia for aid, and military support. In the late 80's Russia was unwilling, and unable, to spend the necessary money to cover all the needs, so states prioritised food (on the basis that starving people are seldom compliment). Necessary maintaince of (for example) the border fence between Hungary and Austria is not paid for (by Russia) leading to the first domino falling and a route being opened to the west.
In Poland and Berlin popular movements progress quickly, and in both cases Gorbachev refuses to use the Russian military to prop up those govts.
These are but the broadest strokes though - obviously there are a lot of moving parts, and a lot of different populations in play. But money is at the root of it all, and Warsaw pact countries needed money to import food from the west.
Your newer stuff isn't much better (Hungary didn't let East Germans into Austria because the fence was under-maintained) but that's probably past the point at which should wrap this up.
[1] https://www.bruegel.org/2015/09/eu-immigration-to-the-us-whe...
Why, instead, don’t these million plus seek a life in China or Cuba, if that system is, apparently better than the North American system?
In addition, Americans are actually free to leave but very few do, especially those affected by your examples of suffering from the system. We know people of very few means can emigrate, so given poor Americans have more purchasing power than poor who move here from elsewhere, if it were repressive we’d see an exodus of Americans to greener freer pastures.
There are 200 odd countries in the world, but you belive your country is the best, well, because some number from over there want to come here.
You want to belive your country is the best, your whole life you've been told by your authorities that it is the best, that everyone wants to come live here, and you've heard this as so often you've come to believe it.
This is fine - you are not alone, most people in most countries are perfectly happy with their system. Most people don't want to immigrate - whatever they have, wherever they are, is the home they know.
Unfortunately believing we are the best prevents us from being better. We cannot fix it unless we admit it is broken (whatever It is) and if we start from a position of "we are the best" then it's hard to admit some stuff is broken.
Is there any empirical evidence supporting this? There were many improvements in the life typical citizen in the 1964-1982 era, a lot of better housing(which means more people were able to leave villages for cities, which had infinitely better infrastructure), in my city countless facilities were built in that era.
>> The kids were different, they began to have access to cartoons and other cultural experiences from the West
The cartoons mentioned in the article are Soviet cartoons. Access to Western 'cultural experiences' was more or less present from roughly death of Stalin to start of Perestroika. French films were frequently shown. I think after 1988 or so Western entertainment production flooded the Soviet Union.
>> and began to question why they had to make do with so little That's an interesting take. For example, 'kids' in SU had access to free healthcare and higher education, and a better quality high schools, which the West didn't provide to it's citizens. And the WW2 devastated USSR and there was no Marshall plan. And, for example, Imperial Russia had GDP far below US at 1913 (So these countries were much poorer then the West to begin with)
In any event, why should people feel happy about living under an oppressive system -a system which stunted their potential? I don't think 'oppressive' system is something that has a clear meaning. There were restrictions on travel, on starting and owning the businesses, and political life was structured differently from representative democracy. For some people it was fine, for some it wasn't. As is the current marriage between capitalism and representative democracy.
>> Their "police" were soviet milicija, so in a way they lived under occupation to booot.
Baltic countries were indeed under occupation. They were integrated into Soviet union by military force, compared to other republics, which 'joined' the SU as a result of civil war. That explains that fervent Baltic anti-communism, because socialism was always something brought from abroad, from Russia, something basically not needed.
"milicija" is just a term for police, so that has no relation to occupation.
An example of one of the tragedies of unification? Her brother had become an entrepreneur and then had to work on Saturdays.
In the second part of the 1980s (or maybe since the early 1980s? I can't remember exactly, I was just a kid) Ceausescu's regime imposed work on Saturdays, and for some domains even once every two Sundays (like it happened to my dad, who worked in constructions).
One of the first decisions taken in 1990 by the new democratic regime once Ceausescu fell was to eliminate working Saturdays, i.e. to give a full weekend to working people. It's funny cause the newly formed opposition to that new regime (the forerunners of today's centre-right political, liberal forces) were pretty critical of that decision, saying things like "as bad as the Romania's economy left to us by Ceausescu is we need to work more, not less!".
Read Branko Milanovic take about Yugoslavia: "How I lost my past" https://glineq.blogspot.com/2017/09/how-i-lost-my-past.html
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29680492
(Great essay.)
Of course. It was a propaganda regime after all, so there are tons of books where the heroic simple workers or even children fight along red soldieres or party members against corruption and the various evils of capitalism.
I have some lying around and they are interesting, to get a feel of the time, but are not really the greatest literature ever written. Because to get success as a writer, it was encouraged to write like this. In the sense, that you would loose permission to write and publish, or worse, if the official thought you work was not helping the progressive spirit.
Actually, French and German authorities feared the ideas these sailors might put into the heads of their working class and tried to stifle them. Pictures like Battleship Potemkin were banned for similar reasons.
This started changing in the 1950s. China declared during the Sino-soviet split that the USSR had played itself out and the Chinese communist party was now at the vanguard of fast-moving change, and that seems to have been correct.