5 ms·
no photos of KGB prisons or gulags? Not surprising..
by Eriks 2mo ago
no photos of KGB prisons or gulags? Not surprising..
- nailer 2mo agoThere’s a few breadlines
- f6v 2mo agoPeople, on average, were much less unhappy than others believe.
- ekianjo 2mo agosurvivorship bias
- Eriks 2mo agoUnder occupation people hide their real emotions
- lnsru 2mo agoThis topic is very interesting. People from former Soviet states learned what and when to say. Sometimes in brutal inhumane way. Saying that dad brought some sausage or construction material from work was a thing kids learned not to say in public very early. There were many things no to say. Like Xmas or Easter celebrations were topic for family members only. Burial with a priest was tabu. Grandfather fighting Soviet occupation was a big secret kids never knew about. Knowing that having and reading some books were a way to have big troubles. You needed to get mature quickly to live normal life under Soviet occupation. It was really shocking when I arrived in West Germany that guys in their 30s were behaving like Soviet teens.
- mnky9800n 2mo agoIt’s not so bad to keep your mouth shut. Americans blab about everything constantly.
- Sabinus 2mo agoIt actually is a bad experience to live under a totalitarian regime in fear of disappearing forever if you said the wrong thing to the wrong person. And it's kinda weird you're minimising that.
- f6v 2mo agoI mean, opinions are split. I met some older Estonians who couldn't stop blabbering in broken Russian how they liked it in the USSR (was a freaking awkward bus ride listening about NATO provoking Putin). I'm sure there were political prisoners whose life was absolutely miserable. But life isn't a Hollywood movie where everyone was in Gulag. I can only speak for Estonia. And people built their lives and careers, went to sport competitions, completed their PhDs, etc.
- IAmBroom 2mo agoMy Ukrainian (US-raised) coworker was shocked to discover his mother spoke Ukrainian. He was too young when they were in Soviet-controlled Ukraine to trust with the mother tongue of his people. The State might discover they were secretly preserving the language. Fun times.
- readthenotes1 2mo agoI like the picture showing off the full shelf of bread. Which Russian leader came over here and thought he was seeing a potemken village of grocery stores
- dugmartin 2mo agoI think you are thinking g of Boris Yeltsin - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1989_visit_by_Boris_Yeltsin_to_the_United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1989_visit_by_Boris_Yeltsin_to...
- hagbard_c 2mo agoThat picture is the USSR equivalent of the pictures of clean streets without homeless encampments made in San Francisco when Gavin Newsom cleaned up the place before the leader of the Chinese Communist Party visited the city [1]. Come to think of it that's quite the telling statement. [1] https://www.scnr.com/article/thats-true-because-its-true-newsom-confirms-san-francisco-was-cleaned-in-preparation-for-xi-jinping_7a2daf28824e11ee92b58693ecc696b7 https://www.scnr.com/article/thats-true-because-its-true-new...
- TiredOfLife 2mo agoWell yes. Those that were unhappy were killed or sent to siberia like some of my relatives
- well_ackshually 2mo agoAmericans prisons have been historically so much better than USSR prisons, sure <3
- ekianjo 2mo agoyou dont have massive death rates in american prisons
- victorbjorklund 2mo agoI would take an American prison over a slave Labour camp in Stalins Soviet camp with massive death rates. Few American prisoners freeze to death, starve to death or are beaten to death by the guards. Stop comparing American prisions to Stalin gulags or Hitlers concentration camps. They are not the same.
- Arodex 2mo agoYou know that American prisons are slave labor camps too, right? I am not exaggerating things: the 13th amendment calls it "slavery". https://daily.jstor.org/slavery-and-the-modern-day-prison-plantation/ https://daily.jstor.org/slavery-and-the-modern-day-prison-pl... https://www.pbs.org/newshour/nation/inmates-at-louisianas-angola-prison-sue-to-end-working-farm-lines-in-brutal-heat https://www.pbs.org/newshour/nation/inmates-at-louisianas-an...
- TiredOfLife 2mo agoAmerican prisoners are forced to gather weeds to get some form of food?
- Arodex 2mo agoIf that is your baseline, so yeah, mostly everything is fine compared to it. It "just" black guys picking cotton while watched by armed guys on horses. I am sure American slaves were better treated than Soviet goulag prisoners. After all, slave owners didn't want to "break" too much their property.
- keiferski 2mo agoThese kinds of articles are only popular in places that had no direct experience of life in the USSR. No one in Latvia, Poland, Czech Republic, etc. looks back on the time with fondness.
- epolanski 2mo agoI'm Polish and your statement is absolutely false. Things were simply different. My family had an absolutely happy life for all the generations that followed WW2.
- keiferski 2mo agoI've lived in Poland for the last decade. I'd say 95% of the population looks back on the USSR era with negative views. Poland probably has the best situation it's been in for hundreds of years. The opinions of 20 year olds that weren't alive during the USSR era do not count.
- epolanski 2mo agoOf course, why would I, a Pole from as many generations as I can go back in time, know about it better that an expat? 1. Living in Poland does not mean knowing how Poles think about it 2. > I'd say 95% of the population looks back on the USSR era with negative views This is wrong, opinions about PRL have always been mixed and highly influenced by demographics. [1] And they shifted in time. 2014 was the first time more Poles had a negative opinion on PRL than a positive one, similar polls in 2009 and 2000 had much more people seeing the PRL positively (and better than democratic Poland). [2] 3. The opinions of 20 year olds that weren't alive during the USSR era do not count. True, very true! And ironically this is probably where your wrong ideas come from: talking to your millennial coworkers likely in some tech hub or getting randoms opinions over the internet. Stats show that people that were at least 15 by 1989 have warm or mixed memories about PRL. It's actually younger generations that learn it by history rather than experience to hold negative ones. And this shift is even harsher after 2014 and 2016 as there's less people who lived those times polled and more youth that didn't, let alone the Russo-Ukrainian war pushed more people into harsher stances. Let me tell you how things are: life in Communist Poland was ok, people had jobs, had roofs on their heads, had hobbies, did sports, made friends, love, went on vacations. Lives were normal. Are things better now? They are. But to imagine communist countries as some bleak grey dystopia ala papers please or Orwell's 1984 where people were unhappy is nonsense. Believe it or not people had normal lives, with jobs, roofs on their heads, making friends, love, going on vacations, playing sports, cultivating hobbies, etc. I see this every time the topic of communism in Eastern Europe comes up on socials/internet: people that didn't live the era, nor the country, nor the system, speaking about how the people that lived it feel or think. [1] https://dzieje.pl/aktualnosci/cbos-44-proc-polakow-pozytywnie-46-proc-negatywnie-o-okresie-prl-u https://dzieje.pl/aktualnosci/cbos-44-proc-polakow-pozytywni... [2] https://cbos.pl/SPISKOM.POL/2009/K_093_09.PDF https://cbos.pl/SPISKOM.POL/2009/K_093_09.PDF
- Tade0 2mo agoAfter Stalin's death in 1953 the higher ups became more preoccupied with fighting amongst each other and maintaining the soviet union's status on the global scene than holding a tight grip on society like their former leader. Most of the photos appear to be from the Brezhnev Era, when the soviet union already transitioned away from Stalinism. Also I imagine anyone taking a photo of any of that would find themselves a resident shortly after.