Color Photos of Stalin-Era Soviet Union Taken by a US diplomat
rarehistoricalphotos.com
rarehistoricalphotos.com
I didn’t think they illustrated what it felt like to have secret police looking over your shoulder. If you weren’t in trouble with the state or an upper class westerner I don’t think there was a huge difference in lifestyle between East and West Europe for most people until the late 60’s / early 70’s
Remember state housing was common in Britain as well. E.g 80% of the population of Glasgow lived in state owned housing until the 1980’s.
[O] E.g. look at 1960’s London in the film ‘The Ipcress File’.
Look at that film in general. It's brilliant.
It's not too late to go back to this utopia!
Being able to buy all the food you want is nice, but not when you're not making enough to pay for food and rent, or cannot find a job that does. I've not been to UK but I can see people complaining about poor job prospects outside London regularly.
People in USSR would be ecstatic to be able to Moscow to get a job. The problem was, they were not allowed to — which is actually worse.
For people in the first quintile (ambition wise), it was definitely a problem. For the third? Soviet Union offered job stability like no place else with no need to pack their things and chase the job market. I'm not saying fourth or fifth because that's where vodka will probably get you.
Overall, both systems are widely recognized to be badly broken.
Through history sometimes you'd find the extremely well-off people in London, other times they'd not be caught near the place, it seems.
You don't have to go back to the 50's. You can see buildings like that in any european capital today. Moscow from the 50's looks very in line with most european capitals by the way.
>I didn’t think they illustrated what it felt like to have secret police looking over your shoulder. If you weren’t in trouble with the state or an upper class westerner I don’t think there was a huge difference in lifestyle between East and West Europe for most people until the late 60’s / early 70’s
Sometimes I have the impression that Hollywood movies gave people a permanent wrong perception about what it really means to live in a dictatorship with a secret police. For the urban middle/upper class it didn't mean much except if you were involved in politics. That was the case in Latin America at least.
I guess the biggest losers in the Soviet Union were the poor farmers and the industry workers who were forced to work, but you will barely hear about their drama because people don't really identify with them. It's much easier to sell police states from the past as low tech minority report scenarios for an urban middle class even if that was not really the case.
18 million people were sent to gulags. 1.6 million died.
I doubt they were all "involved in politics" beyond expressing an opinion Stalin didn't allow.
The educated middle/high class in Moscow was probably quite critic of Stalin's policies and nothing would happen to them as long as they were not loud enough with their criticism.
Even before Stalin, under Lenin (who was not nearly so bad as Stalin) about 100,000 people were executed for being "counter-revolutionaries" during the Red Terror.
It’s pretty clear that in at least a couple periods of Stalinist history, extreme paranoia led him to imprison or otherwise dispose of enemies in great numbers, e.g. 1937 and again with the Doctor’s Plot toward the end of his life. The late 30’s intensification is, after all, know as the Great Purge and not the great worker shortage.
Anne Applebaum’s scholarly account of the gulag is a great read on the subject. I think she would probably agree that the it wasn’t an either/or issue. Labour demands for industrialization were a driver as were Stalin’s own delusions.
It's as bad as privatized incarceration and worse.
Please, be aware that Solzhenitsin admitted that he lied about millions sent to Gulag on purpose. Documents from archives do not support that numbers.
> Russia's Gulag History Museum says a researcher has discovered a secret Moscow directive in 2014 ordering the destruction of some of the last remaining documents on Soviet-era prisoners -- a move it described as "catastrophic" for historians.
https://www.rferl.org/a/gilag-history-museum-says-moscow-ord...
Every source I've seen says about 18 million, including that one:
> As many as 17 million people were sent to the Gulag, the notorious Soviet prison camp system, in the 1930s and 1940s, and at least 5 million of them were convicted on false testimony.
It is a propaganda machine, not an objective history research institution.
These 18 (and up, sometimes up to 40) millions of people in GULAG (notice all caps) numbers are taken from Solzhenitsin's works, if you go through the chain of sources long enough. And Solzhenitsiin's works are not based on any facts or documents.
I also wonder where does this "at least 5 millions of them were convicted on false testimony" come from? How this interesting and significant number was obtained? Did the resource you cite analyzed every and all records of these 17 (18, sometiimes up to 40) million people?
yes, people have a very strange image of the soviet union somehow. the 90s have been the worse period by far in the ex-soviet union. before the system was in crisis, but sort of worked for most. and in the 50s, 60s was working fairly well. 70s decline, 80s crisis.
[1]: https://www.cia.gov/readingroom/docs/CIA-RDP85M00363R0006014...
In some select border regions that could pick up foreign TV channels (Karelia and Estonia), authorities told that the grocery stores shown in commercials were a CIA psyop. Soviet citizens up to to the highest levels of party elite were deeply shaken when they could finally travel and experience them in person: https://www.chron.com/neighborhood/bayarea/news/article/When...
Imagine coming from that pathetic ice cream and suddenly seeing huge shelves full of everything you can imagine, and not only ice cream, but all other categories too. That was a tremendous cultural shock to anyone who had grown up in the USSR, beyond wildest imagination.
The idea that US and USSR were equals or even anything near it is totally absurd. You can see the same tradition continue in how Russia's potential in Ukraine was ridiculously overestimated, and how mundane things like toilet bowls and washing machines are deemed by Russian soldiers and officers as worthy of looting.
The special part for me is that it's basic, vanilla how it's called in the US, but even without vanilla. However it's hard to explain to someone who grew with all the ice cream having some sort of added flavour.
> The idea that US and USSR were equals or even anything near it is totally absurd
That's not what I said. I said the material conditions of the population improved markedly more in the USSR than here in Latin America following WW2
It's beyond imagination to westerners I've spoken to that people used to queue for hours on the rare occasions when bananas were available, and that most people lived to their 30s and 40s without ever tasting a banana (despite wanting to).
Statistics glance over this "human experience" side of things when making comparisons.
Whereas previously I saw people in much more accessible places (albeit, warmer on average) content with having outhouse over a hole.
I hope your parents do at least have a wooden outhouse over that hole.
What I can say about the hole is that it is more conducive to getting out faster whatever needs to go out, it seems like a more natural position.
Pretty much every time someone pipes up who lived through the SU era themselves, they set the record straight that people weren't really having a great time.
So there is no wonder that "Material conditions in the USSR improved dramatically after WW2".
However, after 1960 the flow of stolen valuables from the occupied countries has progressively dried and eventually the internal corruption made impossible to maintain the previous material conditions of USSR, much less improve them.
They kept making cars with the BMW logo until BMW sued them, so they renamed it "Eisenacher Motorenwerk".
I know that Soviet Union has took e.g. Opel manufacturing line as reparations to form Moskvitch plant, but that's a different story.
Only if you ignore the gulag period.
Which, of course, encompasses the majority of Soviet history. (Speaking of which, Anne Applebaum’s “Gulag: A History” is an excellent introduction to a camp system and culture whose scale and cruelty is little appreciated in the West.)
It is very unlikely that any of those cars was owned by an individual.
Most likely all cars were state-owned and they were used by various important-enough officials. During that time in USSR, many of those who made efforts to ascend through the hierarchy of the Communist Party hoped to reach a position high enough to be provided with a Pobeda car. Even if the cars were claimed to be "property of all the people of the USSR" those who received them as an official car frequently did not hesitate to use them for their personal interests. It was one of the main perks of such positions.
Only a couple of decades later, after a few more car factories for cheap cars, like "Lada", started production, cars owned by individuals became common in the USSR.
The farmers did not. They worked incredible hours, for little pay[1], and had very few options for leaving for a better life in the city.
Access to non-staple consumer goods was, of course, very uneven. The party gets first crack at it, and if anything's left, there's a dograce to pick up the scraps.
[1] Gosh, that part sounds just like being a farmhand today. Weird how farming is universally a shitty job.
This was not the case in the Soviet Union, certainly not under Stalin. The secret police was not only a means of subjugation but a means of extraction - if you had a house, a job, an apartment, or even a wife, that someone in the system wanted, you would be accused, tried, and repressed.
For what it's worth, the difference was huge.
At the consumer, daily-grind kind of level the whole country was basically living just above the poverty level. Very few struggled, but the quality of things was shit as was their availability. Those who lived well and had access to the luxuries were still barely on par with the middle Western class. The only way up the ladder was through the party line, which required faking belief in the bright communist future in order to advance. It also restricted what you could and couldn't say, even if the truth was blatantly obvious. Everyone knew that everyone was faking it and that left a profound imprint on generations of people. It wasn't 1984 exactly, but it wasn't that far off either.
Professor of Economic History, Robert C. Allen, concludes in his study without the 1917 revolution is directly responsible for rapid growth.
* https://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.50...
Study demonstrating the steady increase in quality of life during the Soviet period (including under Stalin). Includes the fact that Soviet life expectancy grew faster than any other nation recorded at the time:
* https://www.jstor.org/stable/2672986?seq=1
A large study using world bank data analyzing the quality of life in Capitalist vs Socialist countries and finds overwhelmingly at similar levels of development with socialism bringing better quality of life:
* https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1646771/pdf/amj...
This study compared capitalist and socialist countries in measures of the physical quality of life (PQL), taking into account the level of economic development.
If this study really has that result then it collides pretty hard with the experience of people who actually lived there (like me having grown up in Eastern Germany).
TBF, East Germany did have a pretty good health care system, which in turn may lead to a life expectancy similar to other countries at the time, but at the same time the level of environmental pollution was (literally) breathtaking.
And for 'real-socialist' standards, East Germany was still pretty well off, but at best comparable with poor capitalist European countries like Portugal or Greece.
Also, you simply cannot trust any public data about socialist countries from that time, because those numbers are almost certainly sugarcoated and had little to do with reality (that might at least partly explain how those studies above come to those 'unbelievable' results).
I don't think there were any care packages sent the other way around from USSR to US..
Although my father did a brisk trade trading Soviet records for Western records via western penpals - eventually bartering enough Western records for the highly prized Lada car. - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VAZ-2101
* A remarkable 72% of Hungarians say that most people in their country are actually worse off today economically than they were under communism. Only 8% say most people in Hungary are better off, and 16% say things are about the same. In no other Central or Eastern European country surveyed did so many believe that economic life is worse now than during the communist era. This is the result of almost universal displeasure with the economy. Fully 94% describe the country's economy as bad, the highest level of economic discontent in the hard hit region of Central and Eastern Europe. Just 46% of Hungarians approve of their country's switch from a state-controlled economy to a market economy; 42% disapprove of the move away from communism. The public is even more negative toward Hungary's integration into Europe; 71% say their country has been weakened by the process.
https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2010/04/28/hungary-bet...
* The most incredible result was registered in a July 2010 IRES (Romanian Institute for Evaluation and Strategy) poll, according to which 41% of the respondents would have voted for Ceausescu, had he run for the position of president. And 63% of the survey participants said their life was better during communism, while only 23% attested that their life was worse then. Some 68% declared that communism was a good idea, just one that had been poorly applied.
https://web.archive.org/web/20210825152314/http://www.balkan...
* Glorification of the German Democratic Republic is on the rise two decades after the Berlin Wall fell. Young people and the better off are among those rebuffing criticism of East Germany as an "illegitimate state." In a new poll, more than half of former eastern Germans defend the GDR.
https://www.spiegel.de/international/germany/homesick-for-a-...
* A poll shows that as many as 81 per cent of Serbians believe they lived best in the former Yugoslavia -"during the time of socialism". The survey focused on the respondents' views on the transition "from socialism to capitalism", and a clear majority said they trusted social institutions the most during the rule of Yugoslav communist president Josip Broz Tito. The standard of living during Tito's rule from the Second World War to the 1980s was also assessed as best, whereas the Milosevic decade of the 1990s, and the subsequent decade since the fall of his regime are seen as "more or less the same". 45 percent said they trusted social institutions most under communism with 23 percent choosing the 2001-2003 period when Zoran Djinđic was prime minister. Only 19 per cent selected present-day institutions.
https://balkaninsight.com/2010/12/24/for-simon-poll-serbians...
* 75% of Russians have expressed increasingly positive opinions about the Soviet Union over the years. Only a small portion of those surveyed said they had negative associations with the Soviet Union. The economic deficit, long lines and coupons were named by 4% of respondents each, while the Iron Curtain, economic stagnation and political repressions were named by 1% each, the Levada Center said.
https://www.themoscowtimes.com/2020/03/24/75-of-russians-say...
Oh boy oh boy, I don't even know where to start... of course the past is glorified, because people tend to selectively remember only the good things and they are always afraid about the present and an uncertain future
And of course I too have plenty of good memories of my childhood, until my mid teens when the great disillusionment set in about having to live the rest of my life locked up in this petrified country. I don't owe those good childhood memories to East Germany or socialism, but to my family alone.
Of course pre-teen kids don't grasp the reality around them, because they are shielded from it by their families.
And of course there are still die hard communists who led a comfy and safe life in East Germany who then suddenly found themselves without power and purpose in unified Germany (and it's the loss of power which really gnaws on them, not the money, because even the unemployed in West Germany were much better off than a highly qualified factory worker in East Germany).
In the 60's and 70's you would also find enough Germans both in East and West who still said in private that their time in the "Hitler Jugend" or "Bund Deutscher Maedels" was the best of their life. My grandmother was one of them.
If life in East Germany was so great, why do you think people went to the streets in '89 to finally overcome this miserable and bleak existance despite the real risk of being gunned down and rolled over by tanks like in 1953? Not even the police and army loved this state enough to defend it from those so called "counter-revolutionaries".
East Germany suffered less during the recent pandemic because of residual investment in social services and infrastructure. Socialism built a more human-centric society.
>why do you think people went to the streets in '89
Propaganda is a hell of a drug.
Technology changed everything, and people felt like they were missing out on the future. That was the power of television broadcast, like TikTok today, or the Facebook and Twitter of yesteryear.
My family was involved in getting the portable news camcorders designed, the broadcast satellites up, and the reporters into the field of the US's largest national news network by 1980. Suddenly, the entire world could see itself in stunning detail and color.
America made the market and sold the world on the consumption of "newness". We've got it, and you don't! (Topple your government for some fruit!)
I don't think either world was truer than the other, but one was certainly better at making people feel unhappy with what they had.
You should consider finding different news sources. 4 of the 6 states on the territory of the former GDR are at the top of the 'COVID-related deaths per capita' statistics, in Saxony and Thuringia twice as high as the German average, and Mecklenburg-Vorpommern was only saved by its low population density:
https://de.statista.com/statistik/daten/studie/1116058/umfra...
> ...investment in social services and infrastructure
This investment mainly happened after the reunification in the 90's, and dwarfs anything the GDR invested in 4 decades of its existence.
> Socialism built a more human-centric society.
Even if that were remotely true it wouldn't have any effect today. The Eastern part of Germany is still poorer than the Western part (even though it caught up quite a bit compared to the difference right after the reunification), which leads to more political extremism (both left and right) and less immunity towards anti-democratic propaganda, like the anti-vaxx bullshit.
Also, back in the 80's East Germans didn't need "US propaganda" to see what's up. Many had relatives in West Germany, and could see the difference of quality of life, and much more important, of personal freedom, with their own eyes.
Think about what kind of spiritual dammage you are doing upon yourself with the lies you are trying to convince yourself and others of. That damage can be irrevocable.
* https://wid.world/document/soviets-oligarchs-inequality-prop...
* https://wid.world/document/appendix-soviets-oligarchs-inequa...
USSR provided free education to all citizens resulting in literacy rising from 33% to 99.9%:
* http://www.revolutionarydemocracy.org/archive/PubEdUSSR.htm
* http://www.revolutionarydemocracy.org/archive/anglosov.htm
* http://unesdoc.unesco.org/images/0000/000013/001300eo.pdf
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Likbez
USSR doubled life expectancy in just 20 years. A newborn child in 1926-27 had a life expectancy of 44.4 years, up from 32.3 years thirty years before. In 1958-59 the life expectancy for newborns went up to 68.6 years. the Semashko system of the USSR increased lifespan by 50% in 20 years. By the 1960's, lifespans in the USSR were comparable to those in the USA:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_the_Soviet_Uni...
* https://www.rand.org/pubs/research_briefs/RB5054/index1.html
Quality of nutrition improved after the Soviet revolution, and the last time USSR had a famine was in 1940s. CIA data suggests they ate just as much as Americans after WW2 peroid while having better nutrition:
* https://www.scribd.com/document/430076844/CIA-RDP84B00274R00...
* https://artir.files.wordpress.com/2016/05/compar1.png?w=640
USSR moved from 58.5-hour work weeks to 41.6 hour work weeks (-0.36 h/yr) between 1913 and 1960:
* https://books.google.com/books?id=x8JYjwEACAAJ
* https://b-ok.cc/book/2669908/77497f
USSR averaged 22 days of paid leave in 1986 while USA averaged 7.6 in 1996:
* https://www.ilo.org/public/libdoc/ilo/1994/94B09_66_englp2.p...
Which makes me think that, amusingly, the HN moderator dang is an open communist.
It's pride time of the year, after all, so whom am I to judge.
I replied to that commenter here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36207435. We're equal-opportunity moderators, but I agree with you that dang being a secret communist (let alone an open one) is pretty amusing.
Lol, no, it's not "completely false".
There are academic papers and there are realities of life under the Soviet rule. Life was substantially shittier than on the West and you didn't need a slide ruler and statistical analysis to see that.
It doesn't mean that it wasn't improving, but the focus of the state was, as others already said, on the industrial development rather than on consumer goods and services, leading to various curious facts such as the lack of mass-produced toilet paper until late 1960s. PQL that.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K7CWajaOx4E
> Everyone knew that everyone was faking it
I think that's what ultimately did them in - the fundamental dishonesty in the system as everyone told lies about their productivity. And this happened all the way up the reporting line, so any amount that was claimed above the plan got magnified. By the time the numbers arrived at Gosplan, Soviet farmers were the most productive in the world (despite widespread hunger).
Repeat that for other western countries.
I had a chance to visit oil and gas production town in Siberia slightly north of Northern Polar circle not long ago after USSR collapse. I have to say the work and life conditions there were quite good, I spare you of long anecdote comparing Yugorsk with then contemporary Moscow.
Can I disagree? Having moved to a small town in south France after living in Marseille I can't say I miss the big city that much, on the contrary. Of course, there are some aspects like museums etc. but it's not like I was visiting them every day. The quality of my current apartment is superior to the one I had in the city. Sure, there will be exceptions, but overall I don't think your example holds for Western towns and cities.
You are disagreeing from the place with warm completely-non-continental-climate of southern France, which is exceptionally warm and mild even for France.
Can I see your disagreement as an exception that supports general rule?
Maybe it's not the big city you don't miss, it's just Marseille, because it's a shithole. There are also nicer big cities.
This can mean exceptional efficiency of the system to deliver and distribute.
There were no such things happening in 1950-s, etc, up till late 1980-s.
Yet, the situation was much like "empty shelves, full fridges" all through the USSR time I remember.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guest_from_the_Future
Some products like sourcream and milk were sold into buyers' containers. Which reduced amount of thrash significantly, compared to the "predictable availability" of today's world.
Moscow after the USSR was just a city anyone could go, even the poor. During the USSR you couldn't travel freely, much less go to Moscow and look for a job. Getting a job in Moscow was a serious promotion.
The inertia of lifestyle is such a massive thing, you cannot overturn it overnight, you cannot change it completely even in ten years.
During the USSR era you were able to travel freely. Even more freeer than today - you didn't even needed any passport to travel to huge distances, to Moscow or from it. You need one now.
Most of my childhood friends were children of Moscow newcomers. Their parents went to Moscow, got a job and then got an apartment to live there.
NO! This is a HUGE fallacy (if not a lie). A "kolkhoz people" (kolkhoz stands for "collective farm") had no passports at all till 1974 and they had NO right to leave their living territories without identity documents. Sort of a slavery. As of 1970 the "kolkhoz people" were ≈20% (or ≈50 millions) of the population.
> Most of my childhood friends were children of Moscow newcomers.
This explains. Moscow always was a sort of "another world" than the rest of USSR.
That's not how a math working in a communist country: it doesn't mean that the rest 80% were able to do so freely.
If you think that you was able to move freely from one city to another "because I wish to try luck at a new place", then think about: how can you move to another city if you can't sell/buy apartments as they almost all owned by the state? You only can move if you got a job at a new place. Given that by the law you can't be unemployed (you could even face a criminal case if not), so you can't just go to "somewhere".
If you are usual worker that somehow managed out to get a new job in another city, then you highly likely (not always) will get an apartment from a factory/state for free, but… What was a chance for you to get a something good by being from another city? Provided apartments almost always were tiny, usually no amenities, and overall living conditions were terrible. Often people were getting just rooms in communes. To get a normal apartment you had to "get into a queue" and wait for 10-20 years. Thus in every city was a huge amount of people waiting for their apartment. When in the city a lot of people are waiting their apartments for years, why someone will give something decent to a newcomer? Yeah, highly skilled/experienced managers or scientists were a bit more privileged, so they could expect of getting something good without queueing.
Some people were trying to swap apartments with those who wanted to move into their city. Needless to say about chances of getting something in this way.
International tourism. It was available mainly to party management and leaders. From time to time a best "workers of socialistic labor" were able to visit other "friendly" (from socialistic block) countries as a "reward", but only after party's approval and only in groups. Never individually. Also such tourism had a strict rules for travelers (what you can bring back with you or what you can visit there). Thus more than 90% of people never were abroad.
The only 100% freedom to move was an inner tourism. You was able to visit almost 100% of territory inside the country as a tourist. You also can't travel across the country for a year like modern bloggers because (as I said above) you can't be unemployed.
Is that a freedom as you know it?
The need for passport to travel was introduced well into 90-s because of speculants who bought out tickets of whole trains/planes of popular destinations. I travel by myself from 1988 or so, and did not need any passport until mid '90s.
[1] https://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D0%A1%D0%BF%D0%B8%D1%81%D0%BE... (Russian)
How do they come to such heights if applying to the study in large cities was restricted, is a complete mistery to me.
I'm from Spain, and nobody here would say that Spain society in the 50's is remotely comparable with Spain in the 80's. Lifestyle turned upside down in the late 70's just swapping peacefully from a dictatorship to a democracy and opening to outside information. Our borders were never too tight: we were 100% free to change residence and to go abroad, and we receive a lot of tourism from Europe and the world. I can't start to imagine the change of an USSR that suddenly opened to a world that most of the people never saw.
The most simple search would give you info about the USSR inner passport (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Passport_system_in_the_Soviet_...). You can read that from 1933 to 1991 "According to the 1926 Soviet Census 82% of the population in the Soviet Union lived in rural areas. Kolkhozniks and individual peasants did not have passports and could not move into towns without permission". Also "On 21 October 1953 [...] rural residents could not leave their place of residence for more than thirty days, and even for this leave a permit from a selsoviet (rural council or soviet) was require". You can read also about https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Propiska_in_the_Soviet_Union, "Propiska was both a residency permit and a migration-recording tool, used [...] in the Soviet Union from the 1930s. [...] A propiska was certified via local police (Militsiya) registers and stamped in this internal passports. Undocumented residence anywhere for longer than a few weeks was prohibited." The current inner passports used in Russia are inherited from those years.
Most Russian regions excluding the region around Moscow is above 0.800 but below 0.850 at the macro level (microlevel Caucasian Oblasts and Far Eastern Oblasts are around 0.750-0.800 but not too bad).
By most standards, at a developmental level Russia is definetly developed, but then again it is roughly comparable to Turkiye or Thailand developmentally, so it is by most standards 15-20 years behind living standards in Western Europe, but none of this is too surprising tbh.
If we're being honest, it is a country in the Middle Income Trap. It almost became a developed country (the gains before the Ukraine War began in 2014 were amazing and broke into the Developed category), but a decade of economic development was lost after the post-Crimea sanctions and the subsequent war from 2014-Present.
Then again, a country like Russia has significantly narrowed the gap from a quality of life standpoint, but conversely, this also makes countries like Russia much more susceptible to a brain drain a la Poland or Czechia.
https://www.reddogplumbing.com.au/plumbing-non-existent-russ...
And they still choose to spend all of their money and prestige on a war of aggression against Ukraine.
Sounds like nonsense and also does not seem to relate to the rest of the article.
Whatever real problems Russia might have, toilet access is not one of them.
https://euroweeklynews.com/2022/12/06/russian-soldiers-looti...
Meanwhile Russian army: not looting much and certainly not toilets.
Just think how long it took to recover from the 2008 crisis and then multiply that by 10.
So if you focus for example on the color red you find it is used extensively in political signaling context (not totally surprising given the location and era :-), to differentiate gender clothing and, in one instance, a religious building.
Usage of bright color is culturally dependent, and also geographically dependent when it comes to sourcing dye.
For example west African counties have always used bright colors in fabric due to culture.
The argument is that marketing has made cities more intensely colored. Its not a value judgement (maybe calm natural colors are better for the soul).
It is also not a universal rule, there are places here and there that have a tradition of painting, e.g., house exteriors in intense colors (these days they are invariably tourist attractions - precisely because they are exceptions).
> For example west African counties have always used bright colors in fabric due to culture
Red appears in these photos in clothing context so not sure what this (dis)proves. Sourcing dyes for clothing has been a global trade mainstay from the earliest days of human civilization.
How about the clothing choices. I see a lot of grey. Do you think that’s an unconscious choice due to lack of marketing for bright clothes?
The red in clothing does stand out, but as other posters and the article say: red was closely associated with the communist party so using it is a political statement of solidarity, not a free fashion choice.
Marketing may have an effect on making western cities more catching than they otherwise would be, but communist era Russia isn’t a good example of what that would look like. Due to other constraints (e.g. government control of factories and design industry) people were not really given free expression. This is an economic factor forcing an aesthetic. Similarly, if you live next to a quarry, you’ll have a lot of polished marble buildings in your town. This isn’t because you love white marble, but because it’s far cheaper than trees to you.
People generally like color in some measure and it obviously serves as sending a more intense signal. But in various contexts other factors may prevail (e.g maximizing the market for eventual sale)
The interesting question is when does color get used more extensively (above average) and why.
I think it’s more that Victorian fashions (and later) favoured those drab colours. Compare to eg medieval dress which was colourful (though limited by dyes) or the way old (catholic) churches were decorated.
You can see the brightly coloured roofs from Red square for example. It was just taken on an overcast day with a 70+ year old camera. I think part of the drabness is limited by the technology, in the same way that Turner’s paintings are less colourful than those by Van Gogh.
Another thing is the soot in the cities making everything generally dirty and perhaps also causing people to prefer darker outer layers.
If anything it's the communists that turned everyone into a gray mass, mostly because you had a very limited number of items of clothing that the state manufactured and you could buy, and the state decided on the color, and second because standing out in any way was at best frowned upon, and at worst dangerous, especially during stalin's times.
Soviet Russia totally did have a propaganda sector. And they sure used bright color, though limited by what colors were available.
https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-86xo22o6jeE/WN5Rye49UvI/AAAAAAACn...
https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-cc6ZoLe139M/WN5RzS1AhCI/AAAAAAACn...
Woman doing such manual labor would have been highly unusual in Western countries at the time (and still are). They probably were assigned these jobs by the system.
Also curious: Selling ice cream in winter?
https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-JgJPVcAaAwo/WN5R7tuIlLI/AAAAAAACo...
I live in a tropical country, and it's quite common to drink hot tea in the heat of summer, to help one cool down.
Perhaps the opposite effect works in the cold regions of the world.
I can vouch for the veracity of that claim. Some members of my family drink hot coffee to cool down. (I drink frosted diet coke)
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/a-hot-drink-on...
"Science and Life" reprinted some article on a comparison between a sandwich and an ice cream for the useful energy output in a cold environment. Guess you missed it. *grin*
In the 2000s saw very similar sights in Bulgaria - gender roles seem far less fixed than you might imagine if you only watch TV or films.
In the 90s, Portugal's HDI was comparable to Poland and a number of other Eastern European states and still is to this day.
Salazar's dictatorship did a severe number on Portugal's development.
And ime, housewife type experiences definetly skew towards those who can afford a household on a single income - especially looking at countries c. 2010-2023 with similar developmental indicators as Portugal and Eastern Europe in the 90s.
It's only in a few countries where there's a large gender difference for outside labourers, ironically it seems to be inversely proportional to how much it's talked about in a given society.
AWLA (Australian Women’s Land Army) was formerly disbanded 31 December 1945 but women stayed on as farm workers in some number for a good few years following.
https://www.awm.gov.au/articles/encyclopedia/homefront/land_...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soviet_famine_of_1930%E2%80%93...
That said, certainly in Thailand commercial driving is still very, very male dominated, and job ads will explicitly insist on men; I’d estimate less than 1/100 motorsai drivers I’ve seen were female, and 90% of those were “Tom”[0].
0: Kinda like F2M trans but also it’s own thing: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gender_identities_in_Thailan...
Female motosai (motorbike taxis) more than 1%. Really only a thing in Bangkok, where organized gangs run the motosai according to territory. Definitely mostly men doing that, and food/parcel delivery. I would guess that results from Thai women finishing school and attending university at a higher rate than Thai men, which leads to better jobs. Motosai sit close to the bottom of Thai jobs in prestige, pay, and education requirements.
It's a complex issue though, and the reasons for and current state of play varies _so_ much between countries that it's not even really worth comparing tbh.
> Strange ideas about gender roles are coloring your perception of what is normal.
It's rather that your perception is off. See for example
https://external-preview.redd.it/RqUXzaQhvPVuJ3Qw6-7hHfsCinn...
Edit: Of course it could have been very common in the Sowjet Union at the time.
https://careersmart.org.uk/occupations/equality/which-jobs-d... and plenty of other sources if you search for it. Which is kind of interesting because most searches result in the "gender pay gap" stuff, yet they kind of answer their own question with the stats.
I think there are a couple of outlying issues even these days: 1: "boys clubs" some men trying to get women to not work in certain industries (although sometimes just men working together is perceived as a boys club, in the tech industry I've seen male friendship/camaraderie killed because it's seen as "boys club-y" even though anyone's free to join) 2: women may or may not choose to work in certain industries, even if it's 100% possible for them to do so 3: societal pressure (from both men and women) on women (and men) to fill certain roles/be perceived certain ways in society.
In Italy ice cream is sold in winter too in all Gelateria.
The good thing about winter ice cream is that it is better, it doesn't melt that fast and artisans tend to do it with more care and quality while in summer there's an offset for quantity.
Today a pile of trash is 50% plastic and will linger around for centuries
Today, we separate them, but in the not so distant past (our family's house in West Virginia, not excepted, didn't get telephone or electricity until the 1970s), you just dug a new outhouse when it got full.
When I asked if that meant the rare bottles he dealt in had been fished out of former toilets, the antique dealer just gave me an amused smile.
Plastic degrades to microplastics and goes into the water cycle and the air, where we breathe it in and drink it. There is suspicion that microplastics could contribute to cancer, autism, obesity, and gender dysphoria. Partly directly, partly because some of the chemicals in plastics resemble hormones, changing prenatal hormone levels, affecting the development of kids as they grow up.
This stuff is hard to study academically, as microplastics is everywhere nowadays. Particularly in household dust due to textiles made out of synthetic fibers.
https://diafilmy.su/3646-nyu-york.html
https://diafilmy.su/3665-nyu-york-2.html
(amusingly enough, I'm pretty sure the first picture of the first part is on the other side of the north american continent from New York, but I didn't notice any other obvious howlers)
Surely it should say his "espionage was detected" if he's a spy as per the title?
Although the article does not suggest he is a spy. Perhaps the title should be changed his deportation might have been a sore spot and it seems unfair to label him definitively a spy if it's not so certain.
> Spy Or Artist? / Part Four / The timing and location of Martin Manhoff's work suggest spy. The artistic images he left behind suggest something else. ...
> There is no direct evidence that Manhoff was a spy during his time in the U.S.S.R. His military records contain no indication that espionage was a formal part of his duties. After the Soviet newspaper Trud alleged that the Americans had been taking note of various infrastructure while traveling the Trans-Siberian Railway, U.S. authorities declined to comment. And to this day U.S. intelligence agencies refuse to discuss the issue.
Article: dry, empty, trite, derivative. Was it written by an AI? I suspect it was.
https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-OPV-iBDM_es/WN5R0JXjX1I/AAAAAAACn...
Workers of the Soviet Union! Let us unite even more closely around the Communist Party and the Soviet government, mobilizing our forces and creative energy for the great task of building a communist society in our country. Long live the unbreakable unity of the party, the government, and the people!
"Workers of the Soviet Union! Let us consolidate ourselves even more around the Communist Party and the Soviet Government, mobilize our forces and our creative energy for the great work of building a Communist society in our country! Long live the unbreakable union between Party, Government, and People!"
Manhoff archive: https://manhoffarchive.org/
This juxtaposition of BBC reporting on DPRK overlaid on the british queen funeral procession[0] brilliantly demonstrates the kind of bias I'm talking about, and how it's more often than not a form of projection of one own issues on others.
A few examples of the bias I'm talking about and how it can as easily be applied to "liberal" societies:
One notable event chronicled in Manhoff’s diary is his participation in the May Day parade of 1953. He vividly describes the grandiosity of the event, with its elaborate displays of military might and the orchestrated enthusiasm of the Soviet people.
It becomes evident that the parade was a carefully choreographed spectacle, designed to showcase the Soviet Union’s ideology and power to the world.
Literally any parade involves a "choreographed spectacle" as it's always about showcasing power to the world.
Despite the pervasive atmosphere of control and suspicion, Manhoff’s diary also reveals moments of genuine connection and warmth between him and the Soviet citizens.
This pervasive atmosphere is nowhere to be seen in the pictures, but of course they had to remind you that these are the ebil commies. The pictures alone look too human otherwise.
The secret police played a crucial role in maintaining the conformity necessary for the survival of the socialist regime.
Easily reversed: The NSA and FBI played a crucial role in maintaining the conformity necessary for the survival of the capitalist regime.
Understanding life in the Soviet Union during this era requires delving into the intricacies of the state-controlled society, the hardships faced by ordinary citizens, and the pervasive ideology that permeated every aspect of life.
Easily reversed: Understanding life in the USA during this era requires delving into the intricacies of the capital-controlled society, the hardships faced by ordinary citizens, and the pervasive ideology that permeated every aspect of life.
Look what a "carefully choreographed spectacle" that is.
.0: https://stream24.ilsole24ore.com/video/italia/2-giugno-migli...
You could have just asked any survivor of these times.
As yourself: would you write a similar comment about Nazi Germany? May be you would consider it insensitive to the millions of its victims? Well, your comment about USSR is insensitive exactly for the same reasons.
I was born in that country, many members of my family have had to survive through it, and many didn't — just as many others have been killed by the Nazis. And westerners who, out of mistrust to their government, begin to whitewash Soviet union make my blood boil. You're as bad as holocaust deniers.
This is spot on, if anything, the 'grandiose' May-parade photos remind me of 1930's Nazi Germany (and back then - before Germany invaded Poland - there was a similar fascination in some corners of western society with this sort of aesthetics).
Yet capitalists will consistenly pick fascism, when given the choice. Pretty weird, considering it's exactly the same thing.
You are conflating fascism and communism with authoritarianism. A more in depth and unbiased study might give you the ability to grasp such subtle differences.
No, capitalists choose laissez-faire. What you are referring to are state capitalists, and they are essentially the same everywhere: whether it’s Mikoyan in the USSR, Gustav Krupp in Nazi Germany, or Dick Cheney in the United States. They all utilize the state’s monopoly on violence to maintain their economic control.
You are right though that authoritarianism seems to be a pre-condition both for communist and fascist regimes.
China has done what needed to be done to realize what is an unprecedented economic miracle, especially considering it's a socialist country surrounded by a hostile capitalist world. They chose to be pragmatic and it worked incredibly well.
While China certainly has capitalists and bilionaires, they are kept in check. China also set a 2050 target to fully transition to socialism.
You are right though that authoritarianism seems to be a pre-condition both for communist and fascist regimes.
Every society has a ruling class. In fascist societies it's the military together with the capital, in liberal societies it's the bourgeoisie, in socialist societies it's the working class. Authoritarian societies use force to maintain order, liberal societies use the illusion of choice. When that doesn't work, they promptly revert to force as everyone else.
Lol, that sounds strangely familiar: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Real_socialism
> in socialist societies it's the working class
Do you really believe this? All socialist countries so far ended up very quickly (or more likely: started with) being ruled by a very small elite comprised of the top of a single political party.
Ah but of course I know - those weren't actually socialist societies but authoritarian regimes in diguise, but next time it will work you'll see!
Jesus Christ...
He’s just a tank.
Did you even read before insulting me? Since you couldn't possibly have read those 100 pages since I shared the book with you, I must conclude you simply CTRL+F for "full socialism", which is the funniest thing I've witnessed in a long time.
Also I'm really curious to know what is your definition of "full socialism". Can you provide one without resorting to Wikipedia?
How does it manifest itself? Did the Eastern Bloc working class have the best access to education, medicine and goods? Was there no party elite with dedicated hospitals and exclusive stores open only to them? Did the working class have any say who and how ran the countries? Could a working man even plant their version of a "Biden blows" sign in front yard without imprisonment?
I have a question for you, what is USA planning to achieve by 2050? Corporate feudalism? What is Europe planning to achieve by 2050?
.0: https://library.oapen.org/bitstream/handle/20.500.12657/4609...
Not the most elegant way to show me you're out of arguments
My mother was an avid polish communist born and raised in communist Poland and there isn't a communist country that she didn't travel from east Germany to Uzbekistan and Yugoslavia.
Yes, as you point out, people living in the Soviet Union were just normal people with their everyday problems: the boss, the colleagues, groceries, buying some new tech (e.g. radio), family, health, etc.
I think it is very false to depict secret police as having such a huge role in everyday's Russia life. What was slightly different in Soviet Russia compared to other countries members of the Warsaw Pact is that there was more control on movement.
She and my father too recollect how going to some village 80 miles from Moscow had them stopped and controlled for documents and purpose of their trip like 4 times.
That tended to fade the further you went and increase around major cities like Moscow.
I wouldn't really say secret police had such a huge role in day by day, but the "police state" of control did. Other things that were quite heavily controlled were phone calls. People had all kinds of secret codes when communicating with people abroad because everyone assumed someone was listening and recording.
But I really cannot stress how average Ivan didn't really care or felt all of that control nor cared unless he did something heavily (politically) risky.
I often ask my family that lived in the Warsaw Pact countries, either in Russia, mostly Poland and Ukraine if they didn't feel there was a lack of freedom, etc, and they all said they didn't care nor think about it at all. They were thinking where to go to vacation, what to prepare for lunch or sporting activities, etc.
It should also be noted that all of those countries never experienced a much "different" state of affairs. My grandmother was born in Nazi Germany, her mother under the Haubsburg's Austrian empire, her husband was born in Prussia. And they all were born in a 30 miles radius. There was always a ruler, repression and control.
If anything, for those people, communist regimes brought the most freedom and best standard of lives they ever even dreamed of. It only got in the late 70s and early 80s that the system started tracking, people weren't blind and could see that people in western countries had it much better and kept growing while communist countries capped in their economic and social evolution. New generations didn't even remember the Tsarist or Prussian times, they looked at America, at West Germany at France and thought the situation was bad.
This looks normal. What typical American spin.
You don't say?
I visited St. Patrick's day parade in SF and it was definitely choreographed. It's not like people just walked as they see fit. If it isn't it's not a parade.
such as?
(interestingly "Agitpunkt" sounds like a German loanword)
Edit: Forgot Engels, another German.
[1] https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/agitpunkt
[2] https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%D0%BF%D1%83%D0%BD%D0%BA%D1%8...
The "parade in front of the former U.S. Embassy building on Manezhnaya ploshchad, Moscow" would be from the old embassy, but could still be after Stalin's death.
There's also "18 Novinsky bulvar under construction in Moscow" and http://wikimapia.org/12359967/Novinsky-bulvar-18 says it was constructed in 1953.
FWIW, Manhoff was in Russia when Stalin died. "From a balcony with a view to the Kremlin, Major Manhoff shot the only known independent footage of Stalin’s funeral." "U.S. Army Major Martin Manhoff had been in Moscow for more than a year when on March 5, 1953, after several days of ominous reports in the Communist Party mouthpiece Pravda, Josef Stalin died." - https://www.rferl.org/a/manhoff-archive-part-one-stalins-fun...
Many of the Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty images are the same as those on Rare Historical Photos. That's because at the bottom of the Rare Historical Photos page you'll read "Photo credit: Courtesy of Douglas Smith, via Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty / Martin Manhoff’s Archive / Bored Panda / Pinterest".
So if you want more old pictures of Moscow, and video, see the RFE/RL link too. Then go to part 3 and see places outside of Moscow - after Stalin's death, travel was easier.