Soviet Union better than Yeltsin

[Chris Doss]

Just out of curiosity, how old are these co-workers? In Russia, most people
over 40 either approve of the old system or are nostalgic for it to some
extent. This is much less likely if you're in your 20's. (It's also much
less likely if you're not from Moscow; wages in Moscow are something like 6
times the national average. Moscow is practically a Western city.) I
remember overhearing two middle-aged Russian tourists in Boston saying "They
should have let us come over here, so we would know how good we had it."

I was speaking about this to a friend (this is neither here nor there, but
he's a rather well-known artist who recently had an exhibition in England
and just got back from Panama, where he was working for Russian TV). He's
about 45. His view is "WEll, what do you prefer? Do you want a lot of
choices in goods, or do you want cheap stuff and lots of leisure time? It's
all a matter of viewpoint." His stuff was all shown in the USSR in secret
underground exhibitions probably secretly observed by the KGB, but says that
it is worse being an artist now, "because you have to be a whore."

I was never there, but I get the impression that the post-Stalin
pre-glasnost USSR was considerably less repressive than it was depicted in
the West. For instance, while technically jazz and rock music were banned,
nobody actually enforced those laws. You used to have guys walking through
music stores selling people Beatles and Black Sabbath records out of bags. A
friend of mine used to go to university dances around 1980, and they would
play disco and Yaz.

On another note, anybody who talks about "ugly Stalinist architecture" has
obviously never seen any. They're probably thinking of Brezhnev or
Khruschev-era buildings, which are crap. In Moscow, anyway, the Stalin-era
stuff is amazing. The metro is like a friggin' cathedral -- candelbrae,
mosaics, stained glass everywhere, paintings, sculpture. The Seven Towers
that dominate the Moscow skyline are all Stalin-era and they are impressive
to say the least, big hammer and sickles notwithstanding. The House of
Socialism, which to this day houses the descendents of old Bolsheviks, is
modeled after Le Corbusier. Stalin did not fuck around when it came to
building stuff.

Chris Doss
The Russia Journal
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Date: Thu, 10 Jan 2002 11:59:27 -0800 (PST)
From: Thomas Seay <entheogens at yahoo.com>
Subject: Soviet Union Better Than Yeltsin WAS Lenin

It is not hard for me to believe that the Soviet Union
was preferable to Yeltsinite Russia.

However, I have spoken to too many Russian coworkers
who have described the SU in dismal terms to believe
that the SU was a wonderful place to live.

So, I take it that the SU was just the lesser of two
evils; not that the SU is something that
revolutionaries would hope to return to.

For that matter, I can remember progressive Iranian
students telling me that they were better off under
the Shah than under Khomeini.  At least, they could
have some semblance of a life under the Shah.  Yet,
that does not mean Iranians should fight for the
return of the Shah.  It just means that the Shah was
the lesser of two evils, as it turned out.

Thomas