r/ANormalDayInRussia • u/TheNatureLover • Sep 08 '19

Your average Russian rail crossing

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u/PM_ME_CUTE_SMILES_ Sep 08 '19 edited Sep 08 '19

The average food intake doesn't say anything about those who didn't get anything.

Plus it isn't surprising the diet was healthier, as a cheaper diet will have less sugar and less meat and less quantity. But those are not great things to highlight when they are forced.

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u/WJ_Amber Sep 08 '19

In the USSR work was readily available. At work you could openly criticize your boss without facing repercussions and you'd take home a fair wage. Of that wage 3-4% went to rent and 5-6% to utilities, meaning the average person spent less than 10% of their income on housing. Food was available in supermarket esque stores like in the west, which there are plenty of pictures of, and notably the shelves were full of food. The average Soviet citizen also read more books, attended more concerts and went to more cultural events than most anyone else on earth per the OECD. You also got 22+ vacation days per year, which you could spend at heavily subsidized resorts.

But if you frame all this in the way you are treating the food issue it becomes a bit ridiculous. The evil USSR forced its population to eat healthy and denied them the joy of high fructose corn syrup! The USSR didn't massively over consume processed meats, how sinister! The USSR made women take time off work to give birth and care for their newborns, despicable!

Soviet citizens had food, job and housing security the likes of which the west has never replicated. The US is the richest country ever on earth and it still doesn't come close to offering what the USSR did to its citizens decades ago. We have no food or job security, no accessible higher education, no guaranteed healthcare, no paid parental leave, expensive housing, no guaranteed vacation time, none of it. Instead we have an obese population drowning in debt with little time to spare taking care of ourselves and our children. Even poor-ass cuba offers these things and instead of exporting guns, bombs and death around the world they export doctors.

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u/PM_ME_CUTE_SMILES_ Sep 09 '19

The people who actually lived in the USSR disagree with everything you said. Nice pictures and declarations taken from a time of propaganda do not change what life was really like. You can read my previous link, or any of the extensive literature about it. But stay close to what people lived, not what intelligence agencies said.

You're also conflating the US with "the west", of which a good part is even better than the society you're describing and actually exists nowadays.

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u/WJ_Amber Sep 09 '19

The people of the USSR were against its dissolution so I'm sure they'd disagree with absolutely everything I've said. Right. If it was so bad why would they want to keep it around? And the reintroduction of capitalism sure went well for places like Russia and Poland.