Some of the buildings look quite decrepit but if you look at photos of Britain or France or Germany from the 50’s you will see many similar buildings that need painted and cleaned.[0] People don’t look like they are dressed in rags. If anything I was surprised by the number of cars in some of the photos.
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’.
Moscow isn't representative for Russia and wasn't representative for the Soviet Union. The quality of living of a farmer in Ukraine or an oil-field worker in Turkmenistan would have been significantly lower.
This is still true today... eg. an average n-th generation parisian vs someone who lives in a small village in the south of france... their lifestyles, fashion choices, house design and access to "stuff" (culture,...) differ a lot. "The internet" is a great equalizer, where you don't have to travel half a day to paris to buy something not available elsewhere, but you can order it online, but otherwise a lot of other differences remain.
Even the poorest NUTS1 zones in continental France trend above 0.850 (ie. "Developed"/"First world").
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.
This needs to be repeated 100 times. People in Moscow and Sankt Petersburg to an extent were the elite and had much better living standards than those from smaller cities. Better loving, better education, better healthcare, less shortages, more access to goods.
Compare New York or Washington and some random small town of USA. Repeat 100 times.
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.
If it was after USSR collapse, we are talking about different countries. Like comparing the Mao China, with millions starving, and the 90's China.
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 countries are mostly the same due to inertia and, frankly, there were no million excess deaths per year in USSR as there were throughout 90-s in Russia.
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.
> 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.
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.
You did not needed a passport to travel anywhere. Really. You go to bus/train station, you buy yourself a ticket and then you can go.
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.
And yes, let us first go after "applying to the study was restricted" lie, then we go after a "applying for a job was restricted" and then we go after that "without passport" condition.
A non-negligible percentage of corresponding members of Academy of Sciences of the USSR were born in rural areas [1] (look at these who were appointed at around 1970-1980, they most probably born in USSR).
You could travel for vacations, see family and such. But it wasn’t as simple as get up and move to a new city. You needed a job. The place you lived was often allocated based on your workplace.
> Almost 80% of the population enjoying freedom of movement, minus expenses, still seems reasonable.
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.
During the USSR era you were able to travel freely. <- that’s not true. The newcomers in moscow got job and then went to moscow. And got an apartment from the institution that offered the job. Going to moscow without a job would make you бомж (lowest caste of homeless) there.
If I'm reading the article correctly, the pics are taken around 1950, probably around april 1953. None of them after 1954, when the author was kicked from the USSR. And you compared USSR post-collapse (a minimum of 35 years after the pictures) with USSR still run by Stalin, or at least not still de-stalinized by Krushev.
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.
I don't think the average small town in USA really ever suffered grocery stores with empty shelves which was extremely common throughout the former Soviet Union. If they even had a grocery store at all. The quality of living was significantly different.
The premise of cult classic USSR movie Guest From Future [1] is that a boy walks for a kefir with the bottles for exchange and then gets into time travel adventure.
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.
Yeah, I heard about it, people waiting in queues overnight to get whatever they could put their hands on, needed or not, then stuffed into their fridges/freezers.
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?
>Some of the buildings look quite decrepit but if you look at photos of Britain or France or Germany from the 50’s you will see many similar buildings that need painted and cleaned.[0] People don’t look like they are dressed in rags. If anything I was surprised by the number of cars in some of the photos.
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.
The big losers were the farmers - industrial workers (in the later years) had reasonably good pay for the work they were doing.
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.
> Sometimes I have the impression that Hollywood movies gave people a permanent wrong perception
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.
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.)
On the scale that the CIA said the average citizen of the USSR ate better than their counterpart in the US[1], while still having a lot of science and engineering going on. Material conditions in the USSR improved dramatically after WW2. A lot more than, say, here in Brazil, where we never had a communist regime though we did have a US-backed dictatorship
CIA notoriously overestimated the USSR by assuming competence within (what seemed to them) reasonable bounds. Bananas were luxury items and this sad thing was the most popular ice cream, fondly remembered to this day, because there was nothing better: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/2/25/Plombir_...
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 choice of bananas as a benchmark seems really bad given that the US invaded and supported coups throughout Latin America specifically to keep the price of bananas low.
> 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
Bananas have a symbol status, given how mundane they are in countries that are open to international trade and how infamously difficult they were to get back then (among many other similarly mundane products). In mid-1950s, USSR imported 2000 tons, and by mid-1980s, peaked at around 80 000 tons. Present-day Russia has half the population, but imports 1 500 000 tons.
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.
In the defense of the "plombir" ice cream, I still think that there is no better ice cream. Plombir is still made in that region and whenever I go back there, I eat it in industrial quantities. I could not find anything close to Plombir in the western world.
“Sweet Cream” is the closest to plombir, fyi, if you can find it locally made. Otherwise look for an Eastern European grocery - most carry a few varieties of plombir, though not the best brands.
The “sad thing” was so good it made its way to other countries outside of the USSR and is to this day served in many places. I can confirm from the first hand experience that it has no equals in the western world.
Stockholm syndrome. My father swears by rock hard toffee candy, because that's how they were by the time they reached his local store. Modern iteration that stays soft as intended and melts in mouth is blasphemy according to him.
No,in this case it's different, the ice cream is still made in the ex-URSS countries and you can still try it and you can still not find anything like this outside.
Every Lidl has it in Europe I guess. Here in random Lidl on Adria shore it’s being sold by Monolith group (some Eastern Europe company shell) and made in some far far away ex-soviet country. Nothing special, but nostalgia. On other hand other products in the same freezer were not better.
It's a basic ice cream without any artificially added flavors, even without the vanilla flavor. It's dense and soft.
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.
Sorry, but plombir isn’t USSR’s achievement at all. The “plombir” in USSR first appeared in 1937 produced by using US equipment after Stalin has visited USA and tasted the ice cream there. No ice cream was there prior to that. Next, the plombir’s name and recipe were “borrowed” (as many things in USSR) from French dessert “glace plombières”.
Yeah, idk why everyone's trying to say the SU was so great when the dissolution of the SU happened after Boris Yeltsin went into an American supermarket in Houston and "Yeltsin admitted the visit made a profound impression on him. It cemented his growing view that the Soviet state-run economic system had left the Russian people far behind Americans, forcing them into a much lower standard of living."
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.
My parents’ house has two NATO air bases in a 100-kms radius (one of them very often mentioned on US news because it’s very close to Ukraine and it has US soldiers stationed there), and yet said house doesn’t have indoor plumbing and I do my stuff while visiting them in a hole dug up at the back of the garden. What’s nice is that while I’m doing it I have a splendid view over a Danube branch and over the Dobruja hills, beats navigating social media on my phone.
My grandpa worked as an engineer at one of the freezer-warehouses where they also produced ice-cream. It was end of 80s - mid 90s in USSR. He brought a lot of it home, and my fridge was always filled with 1-3 sorts of it. Sweet childhood time :)
During the years after WW2, the USSR has stolen huge amounts from East Germany and from the other East European countries, in various forms, from factories moved tool by tool from Germany to Russia, to huge bogus war reparations paid by other countries, to mixed companies owned by USSR and the local states, supposedly for cooperation in agricultural production, mining operations or forest exploitation, where the Soviets contributed nothing, except some general manager to oversee the local workers, but they took most or all of the production, exactly like it was done in the past in the colonies of the "imperialists" that the Soviets loved to criticize.
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.
Do you claim that Soviets has actually moved that factory someplace else; or are you blaming that factory for continuing to be where it was built, producing stuff it was built to produce, likely paying wages to the same people who worked there from the start?
I know that Soviet Union has took e.g. Opel manufacturing line as reparations to form Moskvitch plant, but that's a different story.
I just replied to you at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36207426 but need to add that attacks like this are completely not ok on HN and if you continue to do it we are going to have to ban you again. I don't want to ban you, so if you would please fix this and stick to the rules from now on, we'd appreciate it.
HN offers no long-term benefits for having old accounts - the only signs of distinction an existing account can get is being throttled or shadow banned.
So practically it is better for you to warn me and hope that I compel, than ban me and have me getting a new all-good account promptly with no prior convictions.
I can see how I could worded both of these better, though.
I appreciate the last sentence in your reply, so thanks for that.
Old accounts have lots of benefits. One is that age confers credibility in the community and thus enhances your presence here. Account age, in fact, is one of the few sources of status on the internet that can't be faked. Another is that new accounts are subject to extra restrictions, and new accounts that break the rules get banned more quickly.
> I was surprised by the number of cars in some of the photos.
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.
> For the urban middle/upper class it didn't mean much except if you were involved in politics.
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.
> 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.
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.
> 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.
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.
RFERL, I guess, is a Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty.
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?
Do you really think that 18 million people were sent to gulags for being antagonists of Stalin? Don't you think that it's much more plausible a scenario where the regime needed a lot of cheap work and because of that kept sending people to gulags for lower crimes like petty theft or even customary crimes like not holding a job?
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.
> Don't you think that it's much more plausible a scenario where the regime needed a lot of cheap work…
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.
I've been reading up on Soviet Rocket history and both Kurolev and Glushko were sent to Gulags for suspicion of organizing against the government. On the other hand they did do dome engineering work while there, so I suppose there were facilities that didn't conform to today's image of a Gulag
Yes I really do think that the Soviets sent people to gulags for "being antagonists of Stalin".
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.
Analyzing the look of external things near the center of the capital of a country obsessed with centralizing power, leads to the wrong conclusions.
At the time of the taking of these pictures, somewhere else in the Soviet Union my mother, who was still a child, developed a number of health conditions due to malnutrition. She is still psychologically scarred from that and has, like many of her generation, a strange relationship with food.
Her parents, both educated, lived at the poverty level we usually associate with poor places in Africa. That's how the country lived outside even the possibility of western cameras taking a picture.
Maybe talk to someone that lived in Glasgow in the 80s before deciding it was a utopia rather than starting with an ideology and choosing your facts to match?
"According to Water Aid, less than a quarter of Russian households have a centralised sewage system (where their toilets empty into a publicly owned treatment system). Of these households, less than 17% are connected to pit toilets (equivalent to Aussie outdoor dunnies), whilst the remainder aren’t connected to any type of sewage system at all."
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.
The Russian army is infamous for looting toilets. Why toilets? Most likely because the referenced graph is correct. They want them and the government is more interested in war than providing basic things like water.
As far as I can tell, all of these photos are taken in Moscow's center. It was (and still is) the wealthiest and most privileged place of all the nation. And Russia is a much more centralized country than US/UK, with bigger wealth disparity which is very correlated with geography, so even if I told you to compare to Manhattan or London of the same time, it would still be apples to oranges.
Even then it's hard to compare because different places go through different culture shifts. Since moving to London I've learnt that several time through history that "living in London" has shifted from unpopular to unpopular and vice-versa many times.
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.
USSR was more centralized than US but definitely less than UK. For starters, it had Leningrad, Kiev and Baku, which were large cosmopolitain cities with their own culture, whereas UK has its second city slot vacant.
People definitely come to London to get a job, whereas in USSR this was never an issue and in fact discouraged.
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.
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.
> 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
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.
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).
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:
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:
This study compared capitalist and socialist countries in measures of the physical quality of life (PQL), taking into account the level of economic development.
> levels of development with socialism bringing better quality of life
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).
Those studies would have to explain why for 40 some years care packages (clothing, food items, small household goods, etc) sent from emigrees in the West to relatives left behind in Soviet sphere were highly prized in the black market.
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
I grew up in USSR and it doesn't collide with my experience in the slightest. Nor does it collide with experience people report in polling after getting to live under both communism and capitalism.
* 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.
* 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.
* 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.
* 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.
* 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.
> Glorification of the German Democratic Republic is on the rise two decades after the Berlin Wall fell.
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".
>people tend to selectively remember only the good things
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.
> East Germany suffered less during the recent pandemic because of residual investment in social services and infrastructure.
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:
> ...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.
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.
Stalins reign was one of the largest genocides in human history. Torture, starvation, slave labour, execution, was the fate for millions upon millions of innocent people. The horrors of Stalins regime is beyond any imagination and you can easily look it up if you wish.
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.
Meanwhile in the real world, Russia went from a backwards agrarian society where people travelled by horse and carriage to being the first in space in the span of 40 years. Russia showed incredible growth after the revolution that surpassed the rest of the world:
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:
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:
And if they had instead chosen free market capitalism instead of communism they would have had all that and much more without the enormous human sacrifice. Do you know of anyone who would try to run from the west to the eastern block countries behind the iron curtain? What you are saying is basically the same argument used to argue Nazism was great because it brought the 'autobahn' and the 'Volkswagen' to the common people.
You've been posting tons of ideological, political, and nationalistic flamewar comments, as well as attacking other users egregiously. If you keep this up, we're going to have to ban you.
Also, you're way over one important line at which we ban accounts, which is when they're using HN primarily for political or ideological (or nationalistic) battle. Accounts using HN primarily for this are abusive accounts that destroy what HN is supposed to be for.
I don't want to ban you because you've been around a long time and haven't always been abusing the site, but please seriously fix this if you want to continue posting here.
> backwards agrarian society where people travelled by horse and carriage
This is socialist religious bullshit, Russian Empire had a dense network of rail tracks, not to mention Transsib. Large Russian cities had aerodromes by 1917.
I can see how you have flagged three people who opposed to it with reasonable comments, but you did not flag the original page-long Communist copypasta.
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.
Attacking another user will get you banned here, regardless of how wrong they are or you feel they are. You've unfortunately been doing this more than once (e.g. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36143537). Please don't do it again.
I think it is my duty to speak out against the terror and genocide of the Soviet Union, lest it becomes forgotten. Millions were executed or sent to concentration camps for speaking out, so I guess getting silenced on HN is a cheap price to pay. My own people were genocided in Stalins Soviet Union, how could I be silent?
At another level, I completely appreciate how the atrocities and tragedies of the past are still affecting people today and thus I understand and appreciate how you feel.
At the same time, that doesn't make generic ideological battle (which "speaking out against the terror and genocide of the Soviet Union, lest it becomes forgotten" is definitely an example of) on topic for HN. We want curious conversation here. The state you're describing, of battling for people who were genocided in the past, is entirely justified but it is not a state of curiosity. It's therefore off topic for this site.
To say that something is off topic for this site is not a criticism or judgment. Many legitimate, valuable things are off topic for this site. That's because we're trying to have a very specific kind of forum here. It's not a place where "anything goes" - it's a place for a specific kind of interaction.
Keep in mind that these photos are from just a bit less than a decade after the WW2 ended. It took a lot out of the region in both the capital and human terms.
Just think how long it took to recover from the 2008 crisis and then multiply that by 10.
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’.