Chris Doss appears to be having his leg pulled, when he quotes:
'Yes, we had no possibility to buy many things but not because we were short of money - import was not developed and we were too closed country, you know.'
But isn't that the point? Soviet output was so poor in quality that the domestic consumer goods sector could not meet ordinary people's basic needs. So Chris, you win, workers were rich under Brezhnev, it's just that they did not have anything to spend their money on! ---
Olga is referring I believe to the low variety of goods; e.g. there were only about 2 or 3 brands of vodka (maybe there was only one? I don't remember). No Russian worker I have ever spoken with, for instance Olga's dad, who is an auto mechanic, believes that he or she was poor on the Soviet Union. They must be lying, I guess.
People's basic needs were met. What there was a "lack" of was luxury items. By the way I have a Soviet washing machine that works perfectly well.
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Wojtek:
So the bottom line is that the actual standards of living in EE were relatively decent, even by western standards, but the consumer expectations (teased in part by Western commercial propaganda) and purchasing power exceeded the supply of discretionary goods (mainly semi-luxury items).
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Me: I agree with this completely. As a matter of fact I have found that Russians like to complain about being poor a lot more than they actually ARE poor.
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James again:
I see that Chris knows a lot of intellectuals who think that the working class were overpaid and lazy in the soviet era. I too have met middle class people who thought that workers were overpaid. I've also met people who are nostaglic for the 1940s and 1950s in Britain, and weave fairy stories to themselves about how we were all better off then. No doubt some people have ostalgia for the Stalin era, too. But a wiser person might have taken this with a pinch of salt.
---
James, we are not talking about a few intellectuals. We are talking about the overwhelming majority of the population. No one said anything about Soviet workers being "overpaid." What I find interesting is how, upon reading that workers were paid more than intellectuals, the reader (you) translates that as into "workers were overpaid," as if it is natural that intellectuals earn more than factory workers.
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Heartfield again:
Internal passports recorded the racial origins of the bearer.
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Don't read Western concepts into a Soviet/Russian practice. The concept of "race" developed in the West as a result of the slave trade and colonialism. What conception there is of "race" in Russia is only a few decades old and is imported from the West. Nationalities are not races. Russians, Ukrainians, Avars, Tatars, Belarusians and Uzbeks are no more different "races" than the Germans, Dutch, French and English are. In any case, outside of anti-Semitism, Russia has almost no history of systematically oppressing groups of the people on the basis of ancestry. The majority of the GenSecs were not Russian.
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Tahir:
"D. I hate to break this to you, but the majority of the population was pretty content under the "mockery" of socialism, and most would like to have it back.
What are they doing about that?"
---
Why do you think the Communist Party is in power in Moldova?
This is why people vote for the KPRF, Zhirinovsky and Rodina, actually. But mostly they are doing nothing. People spent the 90s in a bewildered state of shock wondering where their way of life was vanishing to. They are not in a position to become activists.
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Heartfield again:
Listening to Joanna and Chris, anyone would be bound to ask how it was that the market was re-imposed on Eastern Europe; why didn't the people of the 'communist' countries rise up to prevent it?
--- Me: Uh, they did. That's why Yeltsin shelled the White House in 1993, why he stole the election in 1996 from Zyuganov, and why miners were sitting on traintracks in 1998.
The USSR did not have a popular revolution in 1991. It had a coup.
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