Hacker News Reader

Comment by grishka | Hacker News Reader

Meanwhile, in the USSR itself, if you wanted a car, thanks to the planned economy, you couldn't just go and buy one. There was a queue you had to register in and wait for months, maybe years.

The quality was crap. The cars came out of the factory essentially unfinished — you had to take your new car to a workshop to have an anti-corrosion coating applied for example.

View on HN

Fun fact, there were no commercials in the USSR. No TV advertisements as a genre, so nobody knew how to make these. And one of the first Soviet commercials I saw was already during perestroyka, and it was about Lada. It was 15 minutes long, and it featured a line (sorry, may be misremembering it a bit) "if your brand new car doesn't start, no worries! Just take a 10mm wrench, and tighten the battery bolts. See how easy it is!"

There actually were commercials and they were ridiculous.

"Demand <product> in your local store". If you tried to demand something from the demigods of soviet trades you'd be laughed out of the neighborhood.

> Fun fact, there were no commercials in the USSR.

Actually there were, at least in some parts of USSR. Search youtube for "Harry Egipt" for some fun examples.

Scarcity wasn't the only reason, there was also poverty. A qualified engineer with 10 years of experience would need to save all his salary for a few years. Very few people could afford cars from their official salary.

The USSR was robbing people of the fruits of their labour to make stupid amounts of tanks, incite guerillas all over the world and build useless railroads to nowhere.

Yes, one of the paradoxes of Soviet Union was that used cars were more expensive than new cars, at least in the 80s. That was exactly because of the sales restrictions. You needed a special permit for a new car. These were usually distributed by trade union, in quantities like 1 permit per year per your_workplace. Used cars, however, were sold on "free market".

Reply on news.ycombinator.com