26 ms·

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

by willyt 3y ago

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’.

marginalia_nu 3y ago
> E.g. look at 1960’s London in the film ‘The Ipcress File’. Look at that film in general. It's brilliant.
mahathu 3y ago
> E.g 80% of the population of Glasgow lived in state owned housing until the 1980’s. It's not too late to go back to this utopia!
- bradleyjg 3y ago
  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?
golergka 3y ago
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.
- thriftwy 3y ago
  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.
  - golergka 3y ago
    Did people across England come to London to buy food?
    - thriftwy 3y ago
      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.
      - golergka 3y ago
        > People definitely come to London to get a job, whereas in USSR this was never an issue and in fact discouraged. People in USSR would be ecstatic to be able to Moscow to get a job. The problem was, they were not allowed to — which is actually worse.
        thriftwy 3y ago
        I would say it depends on who you are. 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.
- fennecfoxy 3y ago
  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.
lp4vn 3y ago
>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.
- leereeves 3y ago
  > 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.
  - lp4vn 3y ago
    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.
yostrovs 3y ago
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.
huhtenberg 3y ago
> 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.
- yogthos 3y ago
  That's just completely false. Here's some actual research comparing quality of life between USSR and the west. Professor of Economic History, Robert C. Allen, concludes in his study without the 1917 revolution is directly responsible for rapid growth. * https://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.507.8966&rep=rep1&type=pdf https://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.50... 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: * https://www.jstor.org/stable/2672986?seq=1 https://www.jstor.org/stable/2672986?seq=1 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: * https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1646771/pdf/amjph00269-0055.pdf https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1646771/pdf/amj... This study compared capitalist and socialist countries in measures of the physical quality of life (PQL), taking into account the level of economic development. * https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/2430906/ https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/2430906/
  - flohofwoe 3y ago
    > 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).
bjourne 3y ago
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.
- ChuckNorris89 3y ago
  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.
  - thesz 3y ago
    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.
    - hdjjhhvvhga 3y ago
      > Repeat that for other western countries. 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.
      - kubb 3y ago
        true, in western europe small towns are often really nice
      - thesz 3y ago
tomohawk 3y ago
Even today, Russia has the largest percentage of their population without access to indoor plumbing of any industrialized country. https://www.reddogplumbing.com.au/plumbing-non-existent-russian-homes/ https://www.reddogplumbing.com.au/plumbing-non-existent-russ... And they still choose to spend all of their money and prestige on a war of aggression against Ukraine.
- thriftwy 3y ago
  "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.
  - tomohawk 3y ago
    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. https://euroweeklynews.com/2022/12/06/russian-soldiers-looting-ukraine/ https://euroweeklynews.com/2022/12/06/russian-soldiers-looti...
    - thriftwy 3y ago
      The Ukrainian psy ops are infamous for claiming toilet looting, because they though it would be hilarious. Meanwhile Russian army: not looting much and certainly not toilets.
moltar 3y ago
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.

by willyt 3y ago

marginalia_nu 3y ago

> E.g. look at 1960’s London in the film ‘The Ipcress File’. Look at that film in general. It's brilliant.

mahathu 3y ago

> E.g 80% of the population of Glasgow lived in state owned housing until the 1980’s. It's not too late to go back to this utopia!

bradleyjg 3y ago
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?

golergka 3y ago

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.

thriftwy 3y ago
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.
- golergka 3y ago
  Did people across England come to London to buy food?
  - thriftwy 3y ago
    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.
    - golergka 3y ago
      > People definitely come to London to get a job, whereas in USSR this was never an issue and in fact discouraged. People in USSR would be ecstatic to be able to Moscow to get a job. The problem was, they were not allowed to — which is actually worse.
      - thriftwy 3y ago
        I would say it depends on who you are. 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.
fennecfoxy 3y ago
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.

lp4vn 3y ago

>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.

leereeves 3y ago
> 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.
- lp4vn 3y ago
  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.

yostrovs 3y ago

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.

huhtenberg 3y ago

> 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.

yogthos 3y ago
That's just completely false. Here's some actual research comparing quality of life between USSR and the west. Professor of Economic History, Robert C. Allen, concludes in his study without the 1917 revolution is directly responsible for rapid growth. * https://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.507.8966&rep=rep1&type=pdf https://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.50... 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: * https://www.jstor.org/stable/2672986?seq=1 https://www.jstor.org/stable/2672986?seq=1 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: * https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1646771/pdf/amjph00269-0055.pdf https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1646771/pdf/amj... This study compared capitalist and socialist countries in measures of the physical quality of life (PQL), taking into account the level of economic development. * https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/2430906/ https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/2430906/
- flohofwoe 3y ago
  > 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).

bjourne 3y ago

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.

ChuckNorris89 3y ago
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.
- thesz 3y ago
  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.
  - hdjjhhvvhga 3y ago
    > Repeat that for other western countries. 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.
    - kubb 3y ago
      true, in western europe small towns are often really nice
    - thesz 3y ago

tomohawk 3y ago

Even today, Russia has the largest percentage of their population without access to indoor plumbing of any industrialized country. https://www.reddogplumbing.com.au/plumbing-non-existent-russian-homes/ https://www.reddogplumbing.com.au/plumbing-non-existent-russ... And they still choose to spend all of their money and prestige on a war of aggression against Ukraine.

thriftwy 3y ago
"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.
- tomohawk 3y ago
  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. https://euroweeklynews.com/2022/12/06/russian-soldiers-looting-ukraine/ https://euroweeklynews.com/2022/12/06/russian-soldiers-looti...
  - thriftwy 3y ago
    The Ukrainian psy ops are infamous for claiming toilet looting, because they though it would be hilarious. Meanwhile Russian army: not looting much and certainly not toilets.

moltar 3y ago

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.