Care to elaborate for people who are not familiar with it?
I would say Westerners are quite intrigued about what life was in Soviet Union in good and in bad as that world feels so different from us and the information has been limited and more propaganda than anything else. Been talking about it with my Estonian and Hungarian colleagues and wouldn't mind understanding more about it.
I would recommend reading Second-hand Time by Svetlana Alexievich, the recollections she collected helps to understand the emotions of the time. The problem is that a lot of literature on the subject has not been translated to English yet.
Sorry? A photographic documentary of Russia in the late 1940s is nauseating?
[EDIT: I didn't mean to start a comparative discussion of the horrors of various totalitarian regimes. I just thought this particular photo essay was rather innocuous.]
Would you consider an article titled "Everyday Nazi Nostalgia" nauseating? I would, and so would many people. In terms of oppression, brutality, and body count, the Soviet Union especially under Stalin is at least the equivalent of Nazi Germany. In addition, there is a history of whitewashing Soviet atrocities (https://mobile.nytimes.com/2003/10/23/us/times-should-lose-p...).
>In terms of oppression, brutality, and body count, the Soviet Union especially under Stalin is at least the equivalent of Nazi Germany.
Not all brutality is made the same. For Nazi Germany it was because Germans were "superior race" and others the scum of the earth, including Jews and such who were seen as subhuman. Death and destruction was part of their agenda starting from the Main Kampf.
For USSR, the persecutions were the result of defensive paranoia and over-reaching (e.g. in the early days) and power plays, but those that were sent to the Gulags or executed were merely seen as traitors, as often happens in revolutions (e.g. 300.000 people executed in the French one) and civil wars.
Sure, most of it were ploys from the party elite to keep their power, but that doesn't mean the regular people didn't share a dream of changing the world for the better. In fact so much so, that they inspired people all around the world.
Heck, European colonial powers resulted in the deaths hundreds of millions (from Latin American natives, to Aboriginals and to all the proxy wars and land grabs they participated in thousands of miles from their borders were they had no place to be) and enslaved 2/3 of the world (including ALL black Americans before the 20th century), and they are painted as A-OK (because they won and they got to write the history from their perspective). And that was pure greed and cynicism -- not some over-encompassing vision for some free humanity.
Atrocities committed in Soviet Russia/Soviet satellites are different from atrocities committed by the Nazis because one set of atrocities was motivated by racism and the other was motivated by various other stuff?
I suppose you can argue that they're different. But I'm not sure how important the differences are. As long as people are being subjugated and murdered to "make the world better," it's all pretty much the same to me.
I also don't know why you think that what the European colonial powers did is "painted as A-OK." Maybe some people think that, but as an American I was taught that what was done to native Americans was definitely not "A-OK."
Soviet Union was 2 different countries during the Stalin's time and after him. United States was a way more brutal country (Mai Lai for example) from 1960's all the way towards 1991.
>Atrocities committed in Soviet Russia/Soviet satellites are different from atrocities committed by the Nazis because one set of atrocities was motivated by racism and the other was motivated by various other stuff?
Yes. Basic human morality 101. Even courts understand this, and have since time immemorial. It's another thing to do something out of pure hate/greed/etc and another to do something believing you did something good, or that you did it in self-defense, etc.
>As long as people are being subjugated and murdered to "make the world better," it's all pretty much the same to me.
Well, then fighting Nazis is the same thing as being a Nazi, after all both kill. Or killing people in the Civil War to abolish slavery is as bad as any civilian murder. But in reality people understand circumstances where killing is considered justified, even if bad.
It's just that some only apply those things to the kind of causes and people they care about.
>I also don't know why you think that what the European colonial powers did is "painted as A-OK." Maybe some people think that, but as an American I was taught that what was done to native Americans was definitely not "A-OK."
>I also don't know why you think that what the European colonial powers did is "painted as A-OK."
Because they got out of it with a slap on the wrist (if not on top), because they pull the same shit even today, and because they feel pretty damn good about having done it, when they're not totally ignorant about it.
>Maybe some people think that, but as an American I was taught that what was done to native Americans was definitely not "A-OK."
And yet everything done still today to native Americans and/or blacks points that few care -- and of course nobody is giving any land back, are they?
My opinion is that killing and subjugating people is wrong, regardless of your motivation for doing so, unless your motivation is to stop people from killing and subjugating other people.
In general, I'm not comfortable speculating about various groups' motivation for mass killing and subjugation and then ranking those instances of mass murder based on the purity of their supposed motivation. That entire exercise seems incredibly silly to me.
I think it's easier to talk about motivation when we're discussing crimes committed by individuals, but even then, I think it's something courts should do less of.
>My opinion is that killing and subjugating people is wrong, regardless of your motivation for doing so, unless your motivation is to stop people from killing and subjugating other people.
Well, the motivation of communists was to stop people from "killing and subjugating other people" in the form of imperialism, wage slavery, and so on.
So?
>That entire exercise seems incredibly silly to me.
Excellent response. I would also add that we got to see what the USSR did with the populations it captured in WWII. Had Nazi Germany won the European war what do you think the populations of Europe would look like today?
For Nazi Germany it was because Germans were "superior race".
For Soviet Russia it was because the proletariat was the superior class. Every other class was to be destroyed.
Lenin's Hanging Order is a nice example of that:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lenin%27s_Hanging_Order
In principle, I don't see why a look at the life of average Germans under Nazi rule would be a bad thing per se, nor do I think it out of the question that certain groups had a better quality of life under Nazi rule (of course founded on the back of atrocities). I certainly didn't take the linked article as suggesting that the Soviet Union was a net positive (and it goes without saying that Nazism most definitely wasn't), just showing another facet of it.
Oddly the only time I've encountered particularly strong nostalgia for the Soviet era is precisely from people from ex-Warsaw-Pact countries who are old enough to remember living under it, though it's much more common in some countries than others. Especially older East Germans and Bulgarians seem quite nostalgic, sometimes to an extent that was pretty surprising to me, and embarrassing to their kids/grandkids who are my age. Much less common among Americans, or among people from those countries too young to remember the pre-1990 era. Many of the older people seem to feel (whether rightly or wrongly) that their standard of living used to be higher under state-socialism than it is now. Older Bulgarians also feel that post-1990 the government has been taken over by gangsters/mafia, and so some have developed nostalgia for the old inefficient bureaucratic government in comparison.
Agreed. The narrative does not align with how people actually feel. Those legitimately interested should try to explain this discrepancy.
"Broken down demographically, nostalgia towards the Soviet Union is most likely to be expressed by older respondents. Only 20 percent of people in the 18-24 age group said they expressed regret about the breakup of the USSR, while 42 percent said they didn’t. In the 25-34 age group, there was parity, while groups aged 35-54 and 55 or older had the highest number of respondents who said they felt regret." https://themoscowtimes.com/news/majority-of-russians-regret-...
Ordinary Russians have suffered in the communist regime at least as hard as those occupied by Soviets, and probably more. And these photos are photos of ordinary people, doing ordinary things, as people tend to do under any regime, whether it is USSR or North Korea or wherever... people just try to live their lives, and not every aspect of life back then was bad, so of course there's also a lot of nostalgia involved now, when it's all in the past...
And those who have actually been through "Soviet occupation and its aftermath" don't all consider it bad -- in fact there's a good percentage of the population in ex-socialist countries that thinks lots of things were better back then -- from Ostalgie phenomenon, to surveys that say so (and relic socialist parties getting some chunk of the vote).
"On June 2009, a survey conducted in Germany showed that 57% of eastern Germans defend the German Democratic Republic (GDR). Of those polled, 49% said “The GDR had more good sides than bad sides. There were some problems, but life was good there.” The poll was reported on Spiegel Online (which, however, tried to vilify GDR with anti-communist lies) and consists a proof that, according to historian Stefan Wolle, “a new form of Ostalgie has taken shape”."
Yeah, so great that the borders patrols killed people trying to escape every day and the state prisons were full of the ones caught.
Please do us (the ones who lived the horror) the courtesy of refraining to comment on things you don't understand or simply move to Venezuela or N. Korea where the blessings of communism continue even this day.
Did YOU personally live in GDR or in the Eastern Block? None of the countries over there resembled North Korea. Soviet Union actually distantiated itself from the radikals like Khmer Rouge.
I did. I have a lot of stories. But let me tell you about my last gift from USSR - when Chernobyl blew and our authorities didn't tell us. And we had parades in the rain and etc. This gift will last for life.
Well, we have the blessings of "western freedom" where I am, including support for several dictatorships imposed on us, and allies getting in bed with ex-Nazi West Germany immediately after the war. So, spare me the hypocrisy.
>Yeah, so great that the borders patrols killed people trying to escape every day and the state prisons were full of the ones caught.
Well, if we're comparing prison populations, what one could say for the world's champion of internment, with 25% of the global prison population when they have a mere 4% of its total population?
Yes, they are brainwashed and/or deluded. My grandparents who lost everything in their posession and nearly also their life to communists, or my parents who couldn't study or do what they wanted, they don't think like that.
True, countless people have one fate, the other group of countless people have another. Poor people of Chicago have one fate, rich people of Chicago have another. For the first group live in Chicago is terrible, for the other it was awesome. Both are right.
While for people who died in the Holodomor (etc) life wasn't at all, because the communist regime killed them by the millions. Do you see the difference? Or are you trying to derail the conversation by using whataboutism, a proven Soviet propaganda tactic?
No, I am not trying to derail anything. Holodomor happened during the Stalin's time indeed, but USSR had sharply changed its politics after his death. Late Soviet Union did not have any holodmors and such, and for many people life in USSR was better that it is now. I can say for sure, economically, Central Asia, Moldova and even Ukraine were better off in USSR than they are today.
As someone who lived a half of his life in that very "late soviet union", I'd like to ask you to try telling your fairy tales elsewhere.
Even a simple googling for images of "late ussr shops" or "late ussr queues" would give anyone a very good idea of how "economically better" it was.
You can't post like that to HN, both because it's personally uncivil and because national/ideological flamewar is not welcome here.
The world is big. People have vastly different perspectives. One person's experience doesn't contradict another's. Commenters here must remain respectful, and it costs nothing except a bit of effort to do so.
According to the CIA, GDP per capita of the USSR in 1990 was 1/2 of the GDP of the US. GDP of Tajikistan today is 1/50th of the US's, and after adjustment for purchasing power 1/20th of American. Same true for Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan, Moldova and to lesser extent Armenia, Georgia and Ukraine.
Would you please stop using Hacker News for ideological flamewar? It's emphatically not what this site is for.
You've also crossed into personal attack, insinuating that someone else might be an enemy spy. That's a bannable offense on HN. Please just keep all such stuff far away from here.
What's been pointed out to me by ex-Soviets is that the fall of communism was hard on many and hardest on the older people, who had decades of experience under communism. Suddenly, there was no bread line, and they had to figure out what to do and how to make do on their own.
Life was good there because ignorance is bliss. East Germans didn't know what a BMW or Munich shopping street looked like.
There's one secret ingredient to socialism: it requires a well run capitalist economy to afford it long term. Something the DDR never cracked. By the 1970s every BRD worker owned a car and television. And the rest is history.
The article feels very much agenda filled. The past was not all so terrible. And remembering the past is just history. It’s good to know history, whatever it is. I know it’s hard for the west to understand that where history has been rewritten numerous times to fit the narrative.
Having lived pieces of that and seen survivors, I’d say it was pretty bad and quite a bit worse than the article describes. Unless you belonged to the nomenclatura and were ok with being at the mercy of the Aparat.
It was not all so terrible indeed. It was much worse. A couple of American journalists in 1940s USSR? They would see as much of real Soviet life as modern tourists would of North Korea.
USSR even had a special programme targeting famous artists/writers etc. They'd invite them to Moscow or Leningrad and give them a majestic tour about how nice Soviet life is.
We had an interesting situation in Lithuania. A lot of local inteligentsia took the tour in 1930s and initially supported Soviet occupation. Quite a few of them quickly backpedaled when they saw how real day-to-day soviet life looks like.
That programme is one of the reasons why a lot of famous people in the West supported USSR during cold war. Old the bad things must be bourgeois propaganda anyway..
I live in ex-USSR, in Central Asia precisely. The life before the fall of USSR was in many ways much, much better than it is now, and before the Soviet rule it was a medieval swamp. There is still respect towards Russians here, a plenty of Russian schools, despite the fact that the Russians are a small minority here.
Well what keeps your country from uplifting itself?
My own country is one of the safest, wealthiest and politically stable on the planet but just a hundred years ago there were slums with child prostitution and cholera. As recent as the 1950s there were people LITERALLY living in holes under the ground.
Why on Earth are you saying this? What the OP says is that their country was very poor and now it's now thriving. I was just about to ask what advice he could give to the grandparent when I read your comment and it made me speechless. What do you mean by "nationalistic"? I really, completely have no clue whatsoever what you mean. Maybe you wanted to use a different word?
What keeps your country from doing admirable X so that it can be more like mine is a loaded, patronizing question. It's also ahistorical and therefore unsubstantive, as if one simply chooses to make things better and then they are. That argument is disrespectful to make about another person, let alone a whole country. Also, to my ear, prefixing the whole comment with "well" is a trivializing gesture, as if to say: "well, what's the matter with you? Pull yourself together and you could be more like me."
I realize the comment didn't land with you that way, but I can guarantee you that it would with others, and that is how we get nationalistic flamewars. Moreover, the account has a pattern of making ideological comments. Such accounts are by far the most prone to flamewarring, so when we see signs of that we err on the side of replying.
Oh I see. I just saw it as a honest question, encouraging discussion. If someone asks me "what keeps you from doing X?", when X is something I want to do, sometimes it's an a-ha moment for me, something actually very useful.
It might be true for this part of the world. I certainly believe you.
But the picture was different for the western part, that was taken back by 50 years under the occupation. Modern societies were destroyed by murder and deportations.
There certainly exists some level of nostalgia but the life for an average person is much better if you honestly think about it.
You can actually buy yourself a living place, you can actually buy a car. You actually have an access to proper food and convenience goods (like something elementary like dish washing clots for example). Pair of jeans is not a luxury.
I think that there were certain aspects that provided more securities for the future (if you managed to align yourself with the system) but we know now that it was in fact not sustainable and the security only was an illusion.
The only problem is that the life in the west is still in many aspects so much better.
Central Asia? Oh my, yes...I'm sure that they people who replaced the ones collectivize, deported or simply exterminated by the Soviets think things were just swell. Nostalgia is a powerful drug.
This is an argument on the level of "Mussolini made the trains run on time". Why not blame your local corrupt dictator for making life even worse than it was under Soviet rule instead?
I hate USSR, communism and socialism but I'm very nostalgic to late years of USSR (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perestroika) and early 1990s. It was time full of hope for new capitalist Russia (inspired by Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher). Unfortunately, all these hopes fell short when Russia fell under control of clans which later transformed to Putin's Russia.
It's interesting to see the binary view of the world even here, in HN comments. It should be clear that there is no one prevailing, unanimously accepted perception of the Soviet past. There are people who long for it, and there are those who hate it; some people don't have any strong feelings about it. They all have their valid reasons to do so, whether being young and associating pleasant memories with the past epoch or losing a family member in repressions etc. It makes no sense to impose one's views on others and trying to explain it to them why they should perceive the past in a different way than they already do.
But the reason why people are discussing the subject, and for that article to be published now in 2018, is not the past. The reason is Russians have recreated much of that past. KGB rule, human rights issues, military aggression towards neighbor countries, cold war rhetorics and propaganda, state sponsored terrorism, it’s all right now in the present.
And it looks like the world either doesn’t care, or doesn’t know what to do about that. Both options are kinda scary.
On the flip side: in 1935–36, two famous Soviet humorists, Ilf and Petrov, did a road trip around the US and chronicled their experiences in "Odnoetazhnaya Amerika", or "Little Golden America" in translation. Vignettes from the book include encounters with Henry Ford, Upton Sinclair, Ernest Hemingway, and even FDR; amused descriptions of a rodeo, wrestling match, and football game; several captivating conversations with hitchhikers on topics ranging from health care to racism to religion; a visit to the Hoover Dam and a chat with one of the little-known and undecorated head engineers; awe-inspiring looks at the Grand Canyon and the Petrified Forest; and a ferry ride between the still under-construction Golden Gate and the Bay bridges. (More in my Goodreads review[1].) It's a fascinating, fantastic book, and especially stunning in how so much of the authors' bemused commentary on American culture remains completely relevant to this day — though I feel much of the charm and humor is lost in Charles Malamuth's translation.
However the USSR might have been good in some ways, it doesn't really matter. That's because its economy was fundamentally dysfunctional and so it was bound to crash at some point.
One significant error: "2017: Circus performances are now held in Moscow’s Dubrovka Theatre, where Chechen militants took theatergoers hostage in 2002, killing 130."
The majority of those deaths were actually due to Russian special forces, who controversially decided to flood the theater with an unnamed chemical agent...
67 comments
[ 2.7 ms ] story [ 128 ms ] threadI would say Westerners are quite intrigued about what life was in Soviet Union in good and in bad as that world feels so different from us and the information has been limited and more propaganda than anything else. Been talking about it with my Estonian and Hungarian colleagues and wouldn't mind understanding more about it.
[EDIT: I didn't mean to start a comparative discussion of the horrors of various totalitarian regimes. I just thought this particular photo essay was rather innocuous.]
See also Holdomor https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holodomor
Not all brutality is made the same. For Nazi Germany it was because Germans were "superior race" and others the scum of the earth, including Jews and such who were seen as subhuman. Death and destruction was part of their agenda starting from the Main Kampf.
For USSR, the persecutions were the result of defensive paranoia and over-reaching (e.g. in the early days) and power plays, but those that were sent to the Gulags or executed were merely seen as traitors, as often happens in revolutions (e.g. 300.000 people executed in the French one) and civil wars.
Sure, most of it were ploys from the party elite to keep their power, but that doesn't mean the regular people didn't share a dream of changing the world for the better. In fact so much so, that they inspired people all around the world.
Heck, European colonial powers resulted in the deaths hundreds of millions (from Latin American natives, to Aboriginals and to all the proxy wars and land grabs they participated in thousands of miles from their borders were they had no place to be) and enslaved 2/3 of the world (including ALL black Americans before the 20th century), and they are painted as A-OK (because they won and they got to write the history from their perspective). And that was pure greed and cynicism -- not some over-encompassing vision for some free humanity.
Atrocities committed in Soviet Russia/Soviet satellites are different from atrocities committed by the Nazis because one set of atrocities was motivated by racism and the other was motivated by various other stuff?
I suppose you can argue that they're different. But I'm not sure how important the differences are. As long as people are being subjugated and murdered to "make the world better," it's all pretty much the same to me.
I also don't know why you think that what the European colonial powers did is "painted as A-OK." Maybe some people think that, but as an American I was taught that what was done to native Americans was definitely not "A-OK."
Yes. Basic human morality 101. Even courts understand this, and have since time immemorial. It's another thing to do something out of pure hate/greed/etc and another to do something believing you did something good, or that you did it in self-defense, etc.
>As long as people are being subjugated and murdered to "make the world better," it's all pretty much the same to me.
Well, then fighting Nazis is the same thing as being a Nazi, after all both kill. Or killing people in the Civil War to abolish slavery is as bad as any civilian murder. But in reality people understand circumstances where killing is considered justified, even if bad.
It's just that some only apply those things to the kind of causes and people they care about.
>I also don't know why you think that what the European colonial powers did is "painted as A-OK." Maybe some people think that, but as an American I was taught that what was done to native Americans was definitely not "A-OK."
>I also don't know why you think that what the European colonial powers did is "painted as A-OK."
Because they got out of it with a slap on the wrist (if not on top), because they pull the same shit even today, and because they feel pretty damn good about having done it, when they're not totally ignorant about it.
>Maybe some people think that, but as an American I was taught that what was done to native Americans was definitely not "A-OK."
And yet everything done still today to native Americans and/or blacks points that few care -- and of course nobody is giving any land back, are they?
In general, I'm not comfortable speculating about various groups' motivation for mass killing and subjugation and then ranking those instances of mass murder based on the purity of their supposed motivation. That entire exercise seems incredibly silly to me.
I think it's easier to talk about motivation when we're discussing crimes committed by individuals, but even then, I think it's something courts should do less of.
Well, the motivation of communists was to stop people from "killing and subjugating other people" in the form of imperialism, wage slavery, and so on.
So?
>That entire exercise seems incredibly silly to me.
Well, that's history to you.
That is precisely what the Nazis did. They defended themselves from the subversions of the Jewish people, and united the German-speaking peoples.
"Broken down demographically, nostalgia towards the Soviet Union is most likely to be expressed by older respondents. Only 20 percent of people in the 18-24 age group said they expressed regret about the breakup of the USSR, while 42 percent said they didn’t. In the 25-34 age group, there was parity, while groups aged 35-54 and 55 or older had the highest number of respondents who said they felt regret." https://themoscowtimes.com/news/majority-of-russians-regret-...
"On June 2009, a survey conducted in Germany showed that 57% of eastern Germans defend the German Democratic Republic (GDR). Of those polled, 49% said “The GDR had more good sides than bad sides. There were some problems, but life was good there.” The poll was reported on Spiegel Online (which, however, tried to vilify GDR with anti-communist lies) and consists a proof that, according to historian Stefan Wolle, “a new form of Ostalgie has taken shape”."
http://www.spiegel.de/international/germany/homesick-for-a-d...
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-communism-nostalgia/speci...
http://www.politicsforum.org/forum/viewtopic.php?t=145614
Please do us (the ones who lived the horror) the courtesy of refraining to comment on things you don't understand or simply move to Venezuela or N. Korea where the blessings of communism continue even this day.
>Yeah, so great that the borders patrols killed people trying to escape every day and the state prisons were full of the ones caught.
Well, if we're comparing prison populations, what one could say for the world's champion of internment, with 25% of the global prison population when they have a mere 4% of its total population?
You can't post like that to HN, both because it's personally uncivil and because national/ideological flamewar is not welcome here.
The world is big. People have vastly different perspectives. One person's experience doesn't contradict another's. Commenters here must remain respectful, and it costs nothing except a bit of effort to do so.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
You've also crossed into personal attack, insinuating that someone else might be an enemy spy. That's a bannable offense on HN. Please just keep all such stuff far away from here.
There's one secret ingredient to socialism: it requires a well run capitalist economy to afford it long term. Something the DDR never cracked. By the 1970s every BRD worker owned a car and television. And the rest is history.
Or the East. Or any civilization.
We had an interesting situation in Lithuania. A lot of local inteligentsia took the tour in 1930s and initially supported Soviet occupation. Quite a few of them quickly backpedaled when they saw how real day-to-day soviet life looks like.
That programme is one of the reasons why a lot of famous people in the West supported USSR during cold war. Old the bad things must be bourgeois propaganda anyway..
My own country is one of the safest, wealthiest and politically stable on the planet but just a hundred years ago there were slums with child prostitution and cholera. As recent as the 1950s there were people LITERALLY living in holes under the ground.
I realize the comment didn't land with you that way, but I can guarantee you that it would with others, and that is how we get nationalistic flamewars. Moreover, the account has a pattern of making ideological comments. Such accounts are by far the most prone to flamewarring, so when we see signs of that we err on the side of replying.
Can you back this statement up, please?
But the picture was different for the western part, that was taken back by 50 years under the occupation. Modern societies were destroyed by murder and deportations.
There certainly exists some level of nostalgia but the life for an average person is much better if you honestly think about it.
You can actually buy yourself a living place, you can actually buy a car. You actually have an access to proper food and convenience goods (like something elementary like dish washing clots for example). Pair of jeans is not a luxury.
I think that there were certain aspects that provided more securities for the future (if you managed to align yourself with the system) but we know now that it was in fact not sustainable and the security only was an illusion.
The only problem is that the life in the west is still in many aspects so much better.
Anyway, here is my 2 cents of nostalgia:
https://www.shrimptoncouture.com/blogs/curated/80026817-reds...
(I got this while listening new Retro Wave music :) )
But the reason why people are discussing the subject, and for that article to be published now in 2018, is not the past. The reason is Russians have recreated much of that past. KGB rule, human rights issues, military aggression towards neighbor countries, cold war rhetorics and propaganda, state sponsored terrorism, it’s all right now in the present.
And it looks like the world either doesn’t care, or doesn’t know what to do about that. Both options are kinda scary.
Once we solve that, we might turn to Russia, or perhaps we find a solution for both at the same time.
[1]: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/2114423486
The majority of those deaths were actually due to Russian special forces, who controversially decided to flood the theater with an unnamed chemical agent...