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Comment by obscurette | Hacker News Reader

I lived half of my life in Soviet Union and would say that this article is simplification with sources more from instate propaganda than from reality. The article basically describes russian upper middle class (yes, there were classes within soviet society) after WWII. Most of people couldn't even dream about Sochi. Soviet Union was huge and differences between regions, classes, nationalities etc were very much there. The life of intelligence in Moscow was very different from the life of intelligence in Baltic republics or the life of farmer in Central-Asia republics etc. Even in seventies it was common that people in many regions weren't even allowed to move from their hometown or village.

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While any article will be a simplification this one does match my own anecdotal experience.

To wit: My current mother in the law was a simple accountant in a mid-sized Baltic city. She was able to go to a sanatorium in Crimea (without husband of course) for the yearly vacation due to a slipped disk in her back. Where she apparently had a platonic affair with another vacationer who kept writing her letters afterwards..

Similarly I was able to attend Artek (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artek_(camp) ) in Crimea solely due to my grades. Our village grade school in Latvia had one ticket allocated.

Now this was in February which is not in season. Our komsomol - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Komsomol guide mentioned that only extremely privileged kids with parents high in the party got to go in the summer to meet with https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samantha_Smith and other VIPs.

Note: It might not have been solely due to my grades. I was visiting Kiev on an academic trip in late 2021. The head of institute mentioned that Artek tickets were quite expensive and not everybody with an opportunity actually went. She mentioned price being 200-300 rubles - which was about twice my father's official salary.

Yeah as somebody coming from former Czechoslovakia, it was hard for us to travel too, even in 80s. My parents were forbidden to travel to the sea to former Yugoslavia for example, since it was neutral country that one could use to escape to Austria. Heck, even travel to very much communist Poland nearby was very hard, special approvals from apparatchiks were required and those were only granted to regime-friendly folks. Not unlike current China for example.

But Soviet union from my late grandparents tales was different reality, they used chewing gums and other stuff we considered common as currency much more sought-after by locals than rubles. It makes sense regime didn't want for people tt discover massive discrepancies between various parts of eastern bloc. As whole world saw few years after, mighty soviet union was actually pretty fragile mosaic with pieces desperately wanting freedom from often horrible and incompetent central Russian management.

One of the reason why eastern part of EU is not so happy with uber-centralization in Brussel - we saw what level of inefficiency such approach brings.

> freedom from often horrible and incompetent central Russian management.

Russia does just fine without most of those pieces, whereas the pieces struggle to be viable.

The management was not 'Russian', by the way. It came proportionally from all of the Soviet republics, more or less. When the Union collapsed, they mostly stayed in Moscow.

> Heck, even travel to very much communist Poland nearby was very hard, special approvals from apparatchiks were required and those were only granted to regime-friendly folks. Not unlike current China for example.

You don't need any special approval to leave China nowadays, and haven't for a few decades. Hundreds of millions of Chinese people vacation abroad.

Just a minor comment - the word you're looking for is intelligentsia[0] not intelligence.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intelligentsia

> there were classes within soviet society

Karl Marx's definition of communism was literally "a classless society"

That’s why soviet union had communism written on the facade and caste system inside. Party members had every luxury westerners had. And stupid dissidents silently disappeared to some far far away places behind Arctic circle.

I wouldn't say they had everything, but they surely had more. It's basically like in 1984. If nobody has chocolate and you have a little, you already feel richer.

I am king if I have original Levi’s jeans :-)

Soviet Union never claimed to actually be communist - it was the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, after all. Communism was supposed to be that thing that'll eventually happen after you had socialism for long enough for the "new type" of people to emerge. The Soviet joke about it went, "communism is like the horizon: an imaginary line that is always the same distance away as you walk towards it".

Communism is a process leading to a utopic state. Even Marx makes this clear in his manifesto.

> Most of people couldn't even dream about Sochi.

That's not true. Not to idealize anything, there were people, of course, who were poorer than average for one reason or another, but once in a while an average person could actually afford a vacation in Sochi and other areas around Black Sea. (The quality of accommodation is another question, of course.) Also, union members (i.e. pretty much everyone) were occasionally given an opportunity to spend time in spas ("sanatoriums") there. And if you remember, people took vacations that were usually one month-long!

I'm only in my sixties, so yes, I remember. But that's not true. As I said – if you were in privileged middle class, yes, that was your life. I could never dream about it although my parents were educated people. Both worked in factory with thousands of workers and every year union got 5-7 vacation tickets (путёвка) in spas around Black Sea. Of course only people close to party and upper management got these. This wasn't the case only once – workers (including my parents) demanded that one ticket must be given to worker who had cancer in the last stage. My personal experience in last decade of Soviet Union was basically same although as a young university student I could already travel on my own with my peers. This wasn't in any way easy though.

Your experience may very different if you worked in military important factory etc. Second half of eighties was already a very different story though.

Idk about Soviet Union, but in Communist Poland, the farmers didn't even get basic health care and pension until 1970s (that was still probably around 40-50% of population by then), not to mention luxuries like state-provided vacations.

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