8 ms·

"The decline is associated with increased misery". Apparently life in Russia during the Soviet years was jolly in comparison!

by jaza 3y ago

bawolff 3y ago
Comparitavly it probably was. I can't imagine life is very good there now.
epolanski 3y ago
Life in Warsaw Pact countries was not bad. Nobody lacked a roof or job or something to eat post ww2. Social stability was huge, criminality insanely low, lack of market economy didn't made people obsessed to work themselves to buy useless things one after the other. The situation really got bad by the mid 70s when the gap with western neighbors started increasing and a wind of social and political change hit most of the countries in the pact. But comments like yours make it sound as if people were sleeping in tents or trailers on Moscow's roads.
- ben_w 3y ago
  > But comments like yours make it sound as if people were sleeping in tents or trailers on Moscow's roads. That's not the type of misery I thinks of when the USSR comes up — the gulags, the secret police, the inability to leave, the propaganda, not the housing. (Also the pre-war disasters like the Holomodor, as while you did exclude that by saying post-war and Warsaw Pact, the preceding comment said "Soviet").
  - rsynnott 3y ago
    > the gulags, the secret police, the inability to leave, the propaganda I mean, bear in mind that some of that stuff is coming back; note the very high rate of careless opposition politicians and journalists falling out windows, and so on.
    - jrimbault 3y ago
      As far as I know, the gulags never went away[1]. The secret police's status, by its very nature, is unknown. [1]: https://www.economist.com/europe/2013/10/19/slave-labour-and-criminal-cultures https://www.economist.com/europe/2013/10/19/slave-labour-and...
      - rsynnott 3y ago
        Like neutrinos, secret police can't be directly observed, but their presence can be inferred by their effect on their surroundings, for instance, as mentioned, people being very careless around windows.
  - pjc50 3y ago
    All that was very real and yet, by its very nature, applied only to some people and it was possible - indeed, mandatory - to not think about it in daily life. The overall effect was a sort of adequately comfortable open prison, while a lot of people saw improvements in their material condition over their lives. As in China. It also had a certain structure to the misery, which is now replaced by arbitrary brutality both from the state and organized crime. It is a documented fact that Russian life expectancy dropped immediately after the fall of the USSR. https://link.springer.com/article/10.1057/s41294-021-00169-w https://link.springer.com/article/10.1057/s41294-021-00169-w ; "Male life expectancy at birth in Russia fell by six years between 1991 and 1994, from an already-low 63.4 years to 57.4 years over that period, an almost unprecedented decrease in life expectancy in three years" They have a chart on which you can see how the recovery corresponds roughly to how successfully post-Soviet states managed to "westernize". Estonia did well. Ukraine has only just recovered to Soviet levels. In summary: western life expectancy good, Soviet life expectancy adequate, third state of collapse autocracy/anarchy in the middle very bad.
    - smcl 3y ago
      Right, and most of the footage of Russians being miserable that we are familiar with is from after the introduction of “shock therapy” (ie during the ruthless, sudden introduction of capitalism). This is always a hard topic to discuss with those not exposed to any life in former Warsaw pact countries. Because there’s a chance they’ll ignore what you say about the day-to-day life of your average person there (and how it was largely ok if often a bit poorer than much of the west), and assume you’re trying to say “communism and everything that came with it was perfect”.
      - pjc50 3y ago
        Not that you'd have been allowed to film Russians being miserable beforehand; don't forget the 1932 Pulitzer/Holomodor controversy. There's probably a whole field of study in what went wrong with the airdropping of "capitalism" and "democracy" into both post-Soviet states and Afghanistan. It clearly missed a number of elements which were required for those plans to work, mostly around trust and rule of law but also around class and small-l liberalism. Somehow these were more easily overcome the closer (geographically) the country was to core Europe. Then there's the semi-democratic not-very-liberal outcomes of Poland and Hungary thirty years on.
  - epolanski 3y ago
    > That's not the type of misery I thinks of when the USSR comes up — the gulags, the secret police, the inability to leave, the propaganda, not the housing. Those were absolutely non-issues for anyone but a small minority of people. Movement limitation, which varied in time, is the only thing that applied to a much larger subset of people. It required quite some bureaucracy to travel. Gonna give you an example: people that were members of the communist party enjoyed an easier time from this point of view. Everyone could join the party by the way, but it was generally unpopular. In Poland I think, e.g., despite the advantages of being a party member, at its peak only few millions were part of it.
  - smcl 3y ago
    You do realise you’re saying “when I think of the worst aspects of a country, I am not thinking about the better parts of them” Not trying to “whatabout” you here but you could construct a similarly dystopian view of most countries by only focusing on the grimmer parts of life there. In the USA this would involve school shootings, lack of affordable healthcare and housing, poor/forgotten areas, increased threat of violence from the police and the far right. If you focussed on those without any of the most positive aspects (freedom of speech as a constitutional right, good healthcare/education once you break into middle class, realistic possibility of becoming relatively well off, freedom of movement, gender and racial equality on paper) you’d think the country was pretty miserable too. Again, this is not an attempt at a whataboutist change of subject, rather an invitation to reflect on what you’re saying.
- Aerroon 3y ago
  >But comments like yours make it sound as if people were sleeping in tents or trailers on Moscow's roads. Being unemployed was illegal. And the 70s are only a decade from when the gulags were closed.
- TwoNineA 3y ago
  >> Life in Warsaw Pact countries was not bad. Did you live there? I did. - Electricity rationed: we had maybe 3-4 days per week and mostly evenings and in winter. We lived in a medium sized city. Plenty of villages had no electricity whatsoever. - Food rationed: You could buy meat twice a week. Bread? Once ever two days. We were lucky we lived close to nature so collecting mushrooms and fishing filled the gaps. - Hot water rationed: You can get used to cold showers, I guess. - Ethnic minorities were viewed as vermin (we were one). - More and more school subjects were thought not in your mother's tongue. - Roof? Sure we had. - Lack of market economy? We had "illegal" movies, "illegal" rock music and some "illegal" western tech. There was a thriving black market economy. - Your phone was constantly taped and listened on. - You were afraid who you talked to, were afraid of your friends because they could be informants. - Criminality low? Maybe in one aspect but corruption was through the roof. You wanted something? Bribe someone. - There was also a pandemic of alcoholism and violent men towards their wives. My father and 3 of my 5 uncles were part of this statistic. So were thousands of others. But yeah, life was "not bad".
  - smcl 3y ago
    The point is that rather than looking with curiosity at what life was actually like it is common for, say, a Brit or an American to picture a mental image of the most deprived community in a given Warsaw Pact country and project that over the entire region. Like it’s not helpful to pretend that it was a utopia like some “tankies” insist on doing (they’re brain-broken). But it’s equally unhelpful to construct the fantasy that ČSSR was like a real-life Mordor-like state, yet many (not you) insist on doing so. edit - Downvoted for suggesting we shouldn't just rely on lazy stereotypes. Folks, we love to see it.
    - ddalex 3y ago
      I grew up in a eastern bloc country, and what the GP says is spot-on. This is not stereotyping, this is how it was. I still have nightmares about queueing for cheese alone as a little boy (my grandma was queueing somewhere else for soy-based meat substitute) and getting shoved around by angry people that were desperate to get some produce before it ended - cause the supply was always less then the number of the people in the queue. Imagine waiting hours for the truck to arrive with cheese and it finishes just in front of you.
- namaria 3y ago
  There absolutely were paupers, starvation, misery and crime in the Soviet Union and other eastern block countries throughout the 20th century.
- AlexeyBrin 3y ago
  > Life in Warsaw Pact countries was not bad. Talk to the millions of Romanians that were incarcerated during the 50s in Communist Camps, thousands died in these Camps. Some were political people from the past, militaries, priests, teachers, students, some were just regular people unwilling to give their land to the state.
- pandaman 3y ago
  Maybe in some Warsaw Pact countries, but not in the USSR (where Russia was one of the SSRs).
- t8sr 3y ago
  > The situation really got bad by the mid 70s when the gap with western neighbors started increasing and a wind of social and political change hit most of the countries in the pact. Yeah, but there was an entire generation that grew up post-70s. Post-war Europe was just focused on rebuilding, and the centrally planned economies did an OK job, but after Prague Spring things got progressively worse and worse. You are wrong that people had access to cheap housing and basic goods. While, yes, it was a much better material living standard than third world countries, families with two kids still had to be crammed into tiny one bedroom apartments and considered themselves lucky. Those big grey blocky buildings? You waited 30 years to get an apartment in one of those. You waited 5 years for a car. It wasn't great. People had enough to eat, and heat in the winter and the streets were safe, but not much more than that. And while you didn't "hussle" to get ahead, you had to do a lot of political maneuvering to get ahead, which probably worked out to be about as stressful. I think your revisionist view of history is as dangerous as the people responding to you saying the opposite. We should be clear that this way of running a society is thoroughly discredited. Was it the worst place to live? No. Social progress was even made, as you point out. But it was much, much worse than than you seem to imply.
mananaysiempre 3y ago
When it comes to population policy, surprisingly, yes. Most of the countryside and many large towns subsisted on economically unviable and sometimes outright stupid and useless sources of income, all of which abruptly went bust in the 1990s and were slowly going bust even under Soviet management the decade before. You might argue about what should have happened, but what actually did is enterprising people left for the big cities (leaving the countryside in particular basically lifeless), and the rest went into depression backed by large quantities of alcohol—that is to say, into the ridiculously high male mortality statistics of Russia, Belarus, and others. (It’s more socially acceptable for men to drink, although women are of course not exempted, and while there might be more of them alive they’re also not precisely happy.) Frankly, many of those factories and communal farms deserved to die on economic grounds, barring drastic changes. But I can’t bring myself to say that the population of the communities built around them (and frequently nothing else for a couple dozen kilometers or more) thereby deserved literal death. That’s what it’s been coming to for the last thirty years, though.

"The decline is associated with increased misery". Apparently life in Russia during the Soviet years was jolly in comparison!

by jaza 3y ago

"The decline is associated with increased misery". Apparently life in Russia during the Soviet years was jolly in comparison!

bawolff 3y ago

Comparitavly it probably was. I can't imagine life is very good there now.

epolanski 3y ago

Life in Warsaw Pact countries was not bad. Nobody lacked a roof or job or something to eat post ww2. Social stability was huge, criminality insanely low, lack of market economy didn't made people obsessed to work themselves to buy useless things one after the other. The situation really got bad by the mid 70s when the gap with western neighbors started increasing and a wind of social and political change hit most of the countries in the pact. But comments like yours make it sound as if people were sleeping in tents or trailers on Moscow's roads.

ben_w 3y ago
> But comments like yours make it sound as if people were sleeping in tents or trailers on Moscow's roads. That's not the type of misery I thinks of when the USSR comes up — the gulags, the secret police, the inability to leave, the propaganda, not the housing. (Also the pre-war disasters like the Holomodor, as while you did exclude that by saying post-war and Warsaw Pact, the preceding comment said "Soviet").
- rsynnott 3y ago
  > the gulags, the secret police, the inability to leave, the propaganda I mean, bear in mind that some of that stuff is coming back; note the very high rate of careless opposition politicians and journalists falling out windows, and so on.
  - jrimbault 3y ago
    As far as I know, the gulags never went away[1]. The secret police's status, by its very nature, is unknown. [1]: https://www.economist.com/europe/2013/10/19/slave-labour-and-criminal-cultures https://www.economist.com/europe/2013/10/19/slave-labour-and...
    - rsynnott 3y ago
      Like neutrinos, secret police can't be directly observed, but their presence can be inferred by their effect on their surroundings, for instance, as mentioned, people being very careless around windows.
- pjc50 3y ago
  All that was very real and yet, by its very nature, applied only to some people and it was possible - indeed, mandatory - to not think about it in daily life. The overall effect was a sort of adequately comfortable open prison, while a lot of people saw improvements in their material condition over their lives. As in China. It also had a certain structure to the misery, which is now replaced by arbitrary brutality both from the state and organized crime. It is a documented fact that Russian life expectancy dropped immediately after the fall of the USSR. https://link.springer.com/article/10.1057/s41294-021-00169-w https://link.springer.com/article/10.1057/s41294-021-00169-w ; "Male life expectancy at birth in Russia fell by six years between 1991 and 1994, from an already-low 63.4 years to 57.4 years over that period, an almost unprecedented decrease in life expectancy in three years" They have a chart on which you can see how the recovery corresponds roughly to how successfully post-Soviet states managed to "westernize". Estonia did well. Ukraine has only just recovered to Soviet levels. In summary: western life expectancy good, Soviet life expectancy adequate, third state of collapse autocracy/anarchy in the middle very bad.
  - smcl 3y ago
    Right, and most of the footage of Russians being miserable that we are familiar with is from after the introduction of “shock therapy” (ie during the ruthless, sudden introduction of capitalism). This is always a hard topic to discuss with those not exposed to any life in former Warsaw pact countries. Because there’s a chance they’ll ignore what you say about the day-to-day life of your average person there (and how it was largely ok if often a bit poorer than much of the west), and assume you’re trying to say “communism and everything that came with it was perfect”.
    - pjc50 3y ago
      Not that you'd have been allowed to film Russians being miserable beforehand; don't forget the 1932 Pulitzer/Holomodor controversy. There's probably a whole field of study in what went wrong with the airdropping of "capitalism" and "democracy" into both post-Soviet states and Afghanistan. It clearly missed a number of elements which were required for those plans to work, mostly around trust and rule of law but also around class and small-l liberalism. Somehow these were more easily overcome the closer (geographically) the country was to core Europe. Then there's the semi-democratic not-very-liberal outcomes of Poland and Hungary thirty years on.
- epolanski 3y ago
  > That's not the type of misery I thinks of when the USSR comes up — the gulags, the secret police, the inability to leave, the propaganda, not the housing. Those were absolutely non-issues for anyone but a small minority of people. Movement limitation, which varied in time, is the only thing that applied to a much larger subset of people. It required quite some bureaucracy to travel. Gonna give you an example: people that were members of the communist party enjoyed an easier time from this point of view. Everyone could join the party by the way, but it was generally unpopular. In Poland I think, e.g., despite the advantages of being a party member, at its peak only few millions were part of it.
- smcl 3y ago
  You do realise you’re saying “when I think of the worst aspects of a country, I am not thinking about the better parts of them” Not trying to “whatabout” you here but you could construct a similarly dystopian view of most countries by only focusing on the grimmer parts of life there. In the USA this would involve school shootings, lack of affordable healthcare and housing, poor/forgotten areas, increased threat of violence from the police and the far right. If you focussed on those without any of the most positive aspects (freedom of speech as a constitutional right, good healthcare/education once you break into middle class, realistic possibility of becoming relatively well off, freedom of movement, gender and racial equality on paper) you’d think the country was pretty miserable too. Again, this is not an attempt at a whataboutist change of subject, rather an invitation to reflect on what you’re saying.
Aerroon 3y ago
>But comments like yours make it sound as if people were sleeping in tents or trailers on Moscow's roads. Being unemployed was illegal. And the 70s are only a decade from when the gulags were closed.
TwoNineA 3y ago
>> Life in Warsaw Pact countries was not bad. Did you live there? I did. - Electricity rationed: we had maybe 3-4 days per week and mostly evenings and in winter. We lived in a medium sized city. Plenty of villages had no electricity whatsoever. - Food rationed: You could buy meat twice a week. Bread? Once ever two days. We were lucky we lived close to nature so collecting mushrooms and fishing filled the gaps. - Hot water rationed: You can get used to cold showers, I guess. - Ethnic minorities were viewed as vermin (we were one). - More and more school subjects were thought not in your mother's tongue. - Roof? Sure we had. - Lack of market economy? We had "illegal" movies, "illegal" rock music and some "illegal" western tech. There was a thriving black market economy. - Your phone was constantly taped and listened on. - You were afraid who you talked to, were afraid of your friends because they could be informants. - Criminality low? Maybe in one aspect but corruption was through the roof. You wanted something? Bribe someone. - There was also a pandemic of alcoholism and violent men towards their wives. My father and 3 of my 5 uncles were part of this statistic. So were thousands of others. But yeah, life was "not bad".
- smcl 3y ago
  The point is that rather than looking with curiosity at what life was actually like it is common for, say, a Brit or an American to picture a mental image of the most deprived community in a given Warsaw Pact country and project that over the entire region. Like it’s not helpful to pretend that it was a utopia like some “tankies” insist on doing (they’re brain-broken). But it’s equally unhelpful to construct the fantasy that ČSSR was like a real-life Mordor-like state, yet many (not you) insist on doing so. edit - Downvoted for suggesting we shouldn't just rely on lazy stereotypes. Folks, we love to see it.
  - ddalex 3y ago
    I grew up in a eastern bloc country, and what the GP says is spot-on. This is not stereotyping, this is how it was. I still have nightmares about queueing for cheese alone as a little boy (my grandma was queueing somewhere else for soy-based meat substitute) and getting shoved around by angry people that were desperate to get some produce before it ended - cause the supply was always less then the number of the people in the queue. Imagine waiting hours for the truck to arrive with cheese and it finishes just in front of you.
namaria 3y ago
There absolutely were paupers, starvation, misery and crime in the Soviet Union and other eastern block countries throughout the 20th century.
AlexeyBrin 3y ago
> Life in Warsaw Pact countries was not bad. Talk to the millions of Romanians that were incarcerated during the 50s in Communist Camps, thousands died in these Camps. Some were political people from the past, militaries, priests, teachers, students, some were just regular people unwilling to give their land to the state.
pandaman 3y ago
Maybe in some Warsaw Pact countries, but not in the USSR (where Russia was one of the SSRs).
t8sr 3y ago
> The situation really got bad by the mid 70s when the gap with western neighbors started increasing and a wind of social and political change hit most of the countries in the pact. Yeah, but there was an entire generation that grew up post-70s. Post-war Europe was just focused on rebuilding, and the centrally planned economies did an OK job, but after Prague Spring things got progressively worse and worse. You are wrong that people had access to cheap housing and basic goods. While, yes, it was a much better material living standard than third world countries, families with two kids still had to be crammed into tiny one bedroom apartments and considered themselves lucky. Those big grey blocky buildings? You waited 30 years to get an apartment in one of those. You waited 5 years for a car. It wasn't great. People had enough to eat, and heat in the winter and the streets were safe, but not much more than that. And while you didn't "hussle" to get ahead, you had to do a lot of political maneuvering to get ahead, which probably worked out to be about as stressful. I think your revisionist view of history is as dangerous as the people responding to you saying the opposite. We should be clear that this way of running a society is thoroughly discredited. Was it the worst place to live? No. Social progress was even made, as you point out. But it was much, much worse than than you seem to imply.

mananaysiempre 3y ago

When it comes to population policy, surprisingly, yes. Most of the countryside and many large towns subsisted on economically unviable and sometimes outright stupid and useless sources of income, all of which abruptly went bust in the 1990s and were slowly going bust even under Soviet management the decade before. You might argue about what should have happened, but what actually did is enterprising people left for the big cities (leaving the countryside in particular basically lifeless), and the rest went into depression backed by large quantities of alcohol—that is to say, into the ridiculously high male mortality statistics of Russia, Belarus, and others. (It’s more socially acceptable for men to drink, although women are of course not exempted, and while there might be more of them alive they’re also not precisely happy.) Frankly, many of those factories and communal farms deserved to die on economic grounds, barring drastic changes. But I can’t bring myself to say that the population of the communities built around them (and frequently nothing else for a couple dozen kilometers or more) thereby deserved literal death. That’s what it’s been coming to for the last thirty years, though.