Moscow’s Metro Dogs (2013)
newyorker.com
newyorker.com
Another piece of propaganda from the fantasy-land here to make Moscow look bad. Baby-faced guard = incompetent. White-collars do not use metro in real life.
I was living two stations away from Университе́т on the red line and riding the train daily to / from MGU. And they were well fed enough that they regularly refused part of my late night blinis.
The unrealistic part of this article is a subway guard that doesn't already hate all people.
Yeah, that's a really strange claim about general quality of life in Russia. However, I can believe there was more garbage lying around due to decline in public services.
"after oil money came to Russia, quality of life improved"
Quality of life improved for people who sold oil.
"However, I can believe there was more garbage lying around due to decline in public services."
So quality of life for most of other people has declined, or is "garbage lying around" a sign of good quality (of life) ?
But a big change was that in the 1990s all kinds of desirable consumer goods became available to anyone with money. In the 1980s, money was not enough: goods were simply not available for sale, they were distributed by special people or only in certain places in entirely insufficient quantity, and to get them, you needed special knowledge and personal connections and lots of time wasted. In the 1990s, it was much simpler; as long as you had some legal or not-so-legal way to make money, you could buy whatever you wanted.
Everyone was kinda middle-class, and nobody was overly rich. The malls were full to the tilt, the prices within reach for everybody no matter their occupation (like Walden Two, by Skinner).
Education was free, hospitals were free, people had house, car, etc. The only things you could not freely buy were some of the "designer" goods that belong to the "want" category (not "need"). And I also recall that the USSR propaganda was working full-time to dissuade the common folk to avoid the trappings of the Capitalist societies.
As for consumer goods? bread disappeared (my father went there in 90's and he told me), milk disappeared, long queues for basic goods. Yeah maybe MacDonald's and expensive shopping bags and jeans arrived--but these were not what people need to live a good life. Their own clothes were fashionable and durable enough, the people were voracious bookworms who did not care about lobotomy and a big a*, like they do now on Instagram.
> The malls
Where did you find a mall in the USSR? I do not remember even the concept of such a thing existing in the 1980s. There were only department stores (универмаги).
I suspect you may be misremembering and mean a large department store located in an >1M population city.
> were full to the tilt
Full of goods or of people? Were those people from out of town, taking a day-long train ride because in their small towns/villages there was little for sale besides vegetables and bread?
> the prices within reach for everybody no matter their occupation
For an ordinary engineer, a new color TV set cost something like 6 months of gross income. A set of bookshelves (стенка) was 1.5 years. A new car (Zhiguli) was around 5-6 years - and even if you had the money, you would spend years waiting for your turn to have the right to buy one!
> Education was free, hospitals were free, people had house, car, etc.
Education - sure, that was a true Soviet achievement. Hospitals, while free, were horrific. Housing was heavily subsidized, but there was a terrible shortage of it; it wasn't uncommon for whole families to live in one room of a communal apartment (sharing the apartment's one bathroom with a half dozen other families). As for cars - a car was a luxury (although attainable with some effort) and a status symbol.
> The only things you could not freely buy were some of the "designer" goods that belong to the "want" category (not "need").
Replace "designer" with "not falling apart the day after purchase and not looking 20 years out of fashion".
> And I also recall that the USSR propaganda was working full-time to dissuade the common folk to avoid the trappings of the Capitalist societies.
The propaganda kinda lost its effectiveness after the 1960s or so. Certainly by the 1980s few, if anyone, believed it.
Were salaries taxed? I assumed you'd get a net income only becauae if everyone's already working for the state, what would be the point of an income tax?
Thus in my definition, the word SHOP is included and there were myriads of those, all full of goods (I cant' speak for all regions but it was so in Moscow, Odessa, Tashkent where I lived)--so for proof of elsewhere maybe you can head on to VK.com and see documented proof of pictures taken by common people, of the abundance.
"Gross" income? hehehe. In USSR? I'll let that slide. Wow then according to your economics, they would have been working their a$ses off just to buy a TV--which is not true. Why everybody had a TV then if it was so expensive? If books were mere kopeks, why would TV be so expensive? from a CPI point of view, your logic does not make sense.
An engineer, 6 months of income for a TV? That's a ridiculous price-to-income ratio ANYWHERE in any ANY era. My father was on scholarship subsidies, which is way less than what an engineer earned then, and we even had a TV, a projector, a radio, a cassette player, and what not. So how did WE buy it then??
<<Hospitals, while free, were horrific>> are you sure? How can education be top-notch but hospitals horrific? the two are inter-connected. Better education means better doctors. What was horrific about it? It was free!
<<Replace "designer" with "not falling apart the day after purchase>> are you sure about that? Most of the Russian stuff from early 80's still working, not so much the new-age "designer" things that have planned obsolescence (look it up in the management textbooks).
The quality of textile, toys, electronics, almost everything was better than anywhere in the world (with the exception of cars--but that was only because the Soviets were pragmatists and didn't care about luxury--a Bourgeois concept.) quality was never a problem.
<< The propaganda kinda lost its effectiveness after the 1960s or so. Certainly by the 1980s few, if anyone, believed it. >>
Once again, I wonder how you came to that conclusion. Up until Brezhnev was alive, almost every Soviet Russian believed and followed the doctrines of their government, and were proud to do so. Only after Garbageov did cracks appear probably because of the sell-outs and traitors who were promised the rose gardens of a Capitalist Utopia. Even so, 90% of Russians today regret (see VK.com for proof) that they lost the Soviet era superpower status and high standard of living.