The USSR in 100 Photographs
trinixy.ru
trinixy.ru
was there some particular risk of this?
I suppose that can be said about everywhere, but it wasn't a desolate rusty bullet ridden hellscape, the cities were beautiful and so were the beaches, at least as captured in my memory.
My family had friends from Poland and Hungary and we always envied them, the green kind. So, I always assumed at that age things were nicer beyond the borders, but they weren't so bad locally either. Of course, in the end, it was a house of cards, but the life itself wasn't NK level.
Note that even today hundreds of millions in India and China still don't have access to modern toilets or sewage systems.
Quite the opposite: millions of people got electricity and plumbing in the USSR era, that lacked before.
>The aftermath is still tangible: former satellite states are even after 30 years behind Western Europe economically
And how are the Latin American 20th century right wing countries doing compared to Western Europe?
Funnily forgot how most of the Western European countries had massive colonies funding their earlier development, which the eastern european countries lacked.
Oh wow, a blast from the past. Remember reading and re-reading it a lot when I was very young. Seems it is still printed and updated! You can see the 1988 edition in full here https://samoe-vazhnoe.blogspot.com/2014/03/mir-i-chelovek.ht...
I'm not denying things are better now, but they are also much more complex, people socialize way less, neighborhoods that were filled with life are now filled by cars taking any corner and you barely see anybody sitting outside and just talking.
People are way more anxious and less happy, have no kids at all.
Are we better overall? Sure. If you look at the financial angle we are.
Are we safer or happier? I don't see that at all.
People are way more anxious and less happy, have no kids at all.
This is also the contrast you can see in countries that didn't live under a single-party rule with a secret police that can disappear you at any moment.
What you describe is the disease of modernity, and you wouldn't get a safer happier result if the USSR was back or never disappeared.
I would find it fascinating if an author did a deep dive into the toy knock-offs in the USSR and how they came to be.
It is a bit slow, atmospheric, very long. HyperNormalization or Bitter Lake are probably my go-to starting recommendations for classic Curtis, with a bit more velocity to them. But I'm very thankful for having such a visual history lesson in TraumaZone, for such a found-footage style walk through the years.
Runner up, the inconsolable background pooper (towards the end), what a weird photo to take btw.
https://www.nationalgeographic.com/photo-of-the-day/photo/ul...
Skin cancer from sun exposure wasn't something I think they'd have considered in the USSR.
1. If the children didn't have enough vitamin D, wouldn't a pill be a much cheaper and easier solution?
2. There seem to be other possible reasons for prescribing treatment with ultraviolet light because I seem to recall a case of someone (in England, half a century ago) having that recommended for some kind of skin condition.
Apparently they did that too. [1]
If I were to guess, there was probably a belief that you could be getting some unmeasured health benefits from sunlight that you don't get from a vitamin D supplement.
In the 30s in the US the government mandated that all milk be fortified with vitamin D.
> There seem to be other possible reasons for prescribing treatment with ultraviolet light because I seem to recall a case of someone (in England, half a century ago) having that recommended for some kind of skin condition.
My grandpa was treated with radiation for his eczema as a kid. IIRC, he was blasted with xray radiation. While he lived into his 90s, he had some of the worst skin I've ever seen in my life. That treatment ruined his skin for life. He was actually used in dermatology glossaries for several skin conditions because he basically had them all. I'm sure if you look up various skin conditions you'll probably still see pictures of a patch of my grandpa's skin :).
IDK if the USSR was doing it. Most of the literature I saw was saying it was to combat rickets.
[1] https://doaj.org/article/8ad9233cdeb54973aec8b3b0d84ec88e
I found it absolutely fascinating. After the first episode I didn't think I'd watch anymore of it since it's very odd (how it's presented IMHO) but it kept drawing me back in.
Hypernormalisation is a good place to start: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Gr7T07WfIhM
https://www.ceskatelevize.cz/ivysilani/kategorie/4079-histor...
No subtitles, but it is all on youtube anyway.
A set designer can of course find pieces from the time, but I always find with shows made now it always feels retro rather than authentic, but in this show they managed to find some genuine time capsules.
But life isn't a Hollywood movie where everyone was in Gulag. I can only speak for Estonia. And people built their lives and careers, went to sport competitions, completed their PhDs, etc.
He was too young when they were in Soviet-controlled Ukraine to trust with the mother tongue of his people. The State might discover they were secretly preserving the language.
Fun times.
Which Russian leader came over here and thought he was seeing a potemken village of grocery stores
[1] https://www.scnr.com/article/thats-true-because-its-true-new...
https://daily.jstor.org/slavery-and-the-modern-day-prison-pl...
https://www.pbs.org/newshour/nation/inmates-at-louisianas-an...
I am sure American slaves were better treated than Soviet goulag prisoners. After all, slave owners didn't want to "break" too much their property.
Default uneducated behavior to respond to anything USSR related with "BUT STALIN GULAGS" (when gulags are both from the time of Lenin and heavily ran by Trotskyists, who, if you've heard anything about them, weren't exactly Stalin's best friends.). Bringing in nazis is just the cherry on top.
Shit knowledge and reading of history doesn't make an argument.
I get that there are problems today too, and in the US too, but honestly they don't compare. If that's a problem for your politics then, frankly, maybe your politics are just wrong.
Conditions in gulags were fucking dreadful, the same way conditions post any revolution when it came to repressing those who would put down a revolution would be: american prisons post reovlution weren't better, french prisons post revolution weren't better, etc: every single revolution has pretty much ended with a period of terror, and Lenin's wasn't different.
As it remains, the subject isn't gulags (which are, undeniably, work camps, though not death camps), but regular prisons. which existed. Which were the same damn thing as american prisons, except you would come out of it and probably have a house at least.
"Western observers described Soviet prisons and corrective institutions as involving harsh living conditions, arbitrary treatment, abuse by officials, poor rations and serious human-rights violations"
I'm going to assert that US prisons are far better than these socialist prisons. And that is still the case in contemporary socialist regimes like Cuba (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_rights_in_Cuba where they still purposefully starve prisoners and totally deny medical care)
Your claim of those camps being 'work camps, though not death camps' make me suspect you did not read The GULAG Archipelago since some camps in effect served both roles for political prisoners by setting rations, work schedules and prisoner amenities like clothing to such levels that they were almost assured to lead to death. That last line about Soviet prisoners having it better than American ones since they would 'come out of it and probably have a house at least' is just laughable and shows you're parroting Howard Zinn or some other propagandist. Read a book, read another one, read some real history.
Things were simply different. My family had an absolutely happy life for all the generations that followed WW2.
The opinions of 20 year olds that weren't alive during the USSR era do not count.
1. Living in Poland does not mean knowing how Poles think about it
2. > I'd say 95% of the population looks back on the USSR era with negative views
This is wrong, opinions about PRL have always been mixed and highly influenced by demographics. [1]
And they shifted in time. 2014 was the first time more Poles had a negative opinion on PRL than a positive one, similar polls in 2009 and 2000 had much more people seeing the PRL positively (and better than democratic Poland). [2]
3. The opinions of 20 year olds that weren't alive during the USSR era do not count.
True, very true! And ironically this is probably where your wrong ideas come from: talking to your millennial coworkers likely in some tech hub or getting randoms opinions over the internet.
Stats show that people that were at least 15 by 1989 have warm or mixed memories about PRL. It's actually younger generations that learn it by history rather than experience to hold negative ones.
And this shift is even harsher after 2014 and 2016 as there's less people who lived those times polled and more youth that didn't, let alone the Russo-Ukrainian war pushed more people into harsher stances.
Let me tell you how things are: life in Communist Poland was ok, people had jobs, had roofs on their heads, had hobbies, did sports, made friends, love, went on vacations. Lives were normal.
Are things better now? They are.
But to imagine communist countries as some bleak grey dystopia ala papers please or Orwell's 1984 where people were unhappy is nonsense. Believe it or not people had normal lives, with jobs, roofs on their heads, making friends, love, going on vacations, playing sports, cultivating hobbies, etc.
I see this every time the topic of communism in Eastern Europe comes up on socials/internet: people that didn't live the era, nor the country, nor the system, speaking about how the people that lived it feel or think.
[1] https://dzieje.pl/aktualnosci/cbos-44-proc-polakow-pozytywni...
I don't have "millennial coworkers" nor do I attend a tech hub.
Especially absurd when the ongoing war with Russia. It wouldn't surprise me if Polish opinions of Russia were 99% negative.
2014 was 12 years ago. Poland is an entirely different place now. Perhaps you should update your opinion sometime. No one said it was a warzone dystopia, just that it was a darker time compared to today.
The "nostalgia" for those times is basically just nostalgia for the past; American "I miss X" views of the same time period are basically the same, meaning it has more to do with global culture and technological development than some specific thing about the USSR. And of course anyone with the slightest bit of political opinions doesn't miss that era.
Not having had generations and generations of Polish parents and grandparents and great grandparents to intimately understand their daily lifes over decades and their times removes the entirety of the elements you need to understand the topic. You simply don't have it. The same way you don't have any data (which I posted) to back your first statement.
I stated this already, since you might've skipped it:
> Stats show that people that were at least 15 by 1989 have warm or mixed memories about PRL. It's actually younger generations that learn it by history rather than experience to hold negative ones.
> And this shift is even harsher after 2014 and 2016 as there's less people who lived those times polled, let alone the Russo-Ukrainian war pushed more people into harsher stances.
So not sure, how are you disagreeing with me thre.
But facts are facts this line of yours is BS:
> No one in Latvia, Poland, Czech Republic, etc. looks back on the time with fondness.
That no one is false. Older people that lived those times often do. This is a fact shown by all polls you will be able to find online. And also by my anecdotal recollection of virtually every 60+ people I know.
So stop spreading falsehood about topics you don't know.
And I say it as a child of two Poles that escaped communism, my father hated it and hated the idea he could not be an entrepeneur and buy himself a Mini Morris car.
You americans are obsessed by over simplified white vs black, winners vs losers narratives and speaking in absolutes. History is more nuanced.
Are you certain your parents weren't informants for the SB?
It would be more obvious if someone was talking about their family living a "happy life" during apartheid or in North Korea.
Most likely your family was part of the communist elite. I believe you had a very happy life.
Communist party was very unpopular in Poland, even though registering was free and had benefits no more than 2.5% of poles ever signed to it.
https://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polish_United_Workers%27_P...
People that were at least 15 by 1989 (the last year of communism in Poland) had a warm opinion on it.
It's really younger generations that did not live in PRL that hold overwhelmingly negative opinions on it.
In any case, I'm not sure why am I arguing with you? I'm Polish and my family lived those eras, so did my friends and their families.
Simple fact is: during communism people enjoyed fair lives, there was lots of safety, everybody had a job and a roof on their head and could afford one vacation per year. People made friends, sports, had hobbies and they were younger, so they remember the times as okay.
On the other hand, people that did not live them, base their opinions on vibes and their external idea of how it was to live under PRL.
Look, nobody is saying that life isn't better now, of course it is. But don't believe it was that bad. It was called "second" world and not "third" for a reason. It was okay.
Yet in yanks minds we were living some dystopia were everybody lacked everything and was unhappy and their neighbour was gonna report them for anything.
Most of the photos appear to be from the Brezhnev Era, when the soviet union already transitioned away from Stalinism.
Also I imagine anyone taking a photo of any of that would find themselves a resident shortly after.
Sing to the Motherland, home of the free,
Bulwark of peoples in brotherhood strong.
O Party of Lenin, the strength of the people,
To Communism's triumph lead us on!
Славься, Отечество наше свободное,
Дружбы народов надёжный оплот!
Партия Ленина - сила народная
Нас к торжеству коммунизма ведёт!I guess Deng Xioping said it best - "I don't care if the cat is black, white or purple as long as it catches mice"
The still on-going genocide of non-Han ethnic groups did produce a slight tension.
In the USSR, workers (in Soviets) voted their delegates and the delegates in turn elected the top hierarchy of the communist party.
So yes, the USSR was obviously an authoritarian regime controlled by a single party, but you still had to lobby and depend on getting elected by your party, whose delegates had to be first elected by the workers.
In modern Russia, Belarus, etc?
It's arguably even worse, the elected presidents and prime ministers de facto control the opposition which pretends to be an opposition, and real opposition faces either legal issues or direct threats.
And yet, you can pretend to be a democracy and tell your people its better than it was once, but is it really?
It's been 60 years now till the last parliamentary republic turned authoritarian, Sri Lanka. Every single other country to do so has always been a presidential or semi presidential republic. From the former Eastern Europe, to Asia, to Africa to South America.
We should now know that electing a single person to hold executive power is just non democratic and concentrates too much power in a single individual, but we keep falling in love with winner-takes-all elections and loving the idea of a single individual that doesn't need to win his own parties or PMs support every day can fix things quickly.
It's hard to exaggerate about the historically-documented third-worst murderer in history. But it can technically be done.
> He didn't accumulate any wealth for himself.
Remind me of when he had to wait in a breadline, again?
Winner-takes-all mechanic are flawed, non representative, breed personal cults, and put power in hands of individuals that are hard to remove (both constitutionally and by them being able to claim popular mandate).
All those republics need to break them is the right person in the right moment.
Numbers and facts clearly show that parliamentary republics do not suffer the same threat as any individual has to win the support and votes of its own party, coalition and parliament every single day and its very easy to remove.
So... Like the Soviet system?
Are you seriously claiming that 'workers' in the USSR had any influence on what happened in the Party? If so you fell for the propaganda and need to read up on the real history of Communism - not Howard Zinn, not whatever the Soviet 'history' books say.