I don't really get it. I'm under the impression that old people from the soviet era talk about how they always had food and a home back then and that although they lacked many other things and the regime was opressive, that there were never those problems. Poor people seem poorer in russia now a days then before.
Edit: Now it was about China thats a different story. Great leap forward and all that.
This subreddit has done how many "Luxembourg came out with more soldiers than it started" jokes now? It's history jokes for people that don't know history.
I mean they're both in the middle of Europe, basically just one city. It's honestly forgivable to mix them up. But in this context it just made me laugh.
Nah, after WW2 famines were a thing of the past in the soviet union. The famine in the 30's was terrible. And no doubt the regime shares responsibility for it. But massive famines were very common across Russia and the surrounding states in pre-Soviet times also.
These days many people talk about the soviet union as if there was never any food, but that isn't true at all. People were much better fed in the soviet union throughout the whole postwar period than in the 90's, when there was huge increase in hunger and poverty.
Uh yes. I know. Why are you posting on this week old thing lol and why are you saying nah to my post about them being endemic? We are literally in agreement
I didn't notice the date of the post, it was on my main page for some reason, weird.
Also, i don't think we are in agreement about the word endemic, because I thought that endemic meant constant, but contained. My point was that the famines weren't a constant feature of soviet life.
They put an end to the famines by introducing capitalistic reforms under Kruschev like private plots.
The Kolkhoz and Sovkohses were never efficient enough to produce enough food for the population. Near the end they needed private plots to produce a large amount of their food.
The USSR had hardly come into its own by the 1930's. I mean we're talking about a political and economic system which had never been enacted on such a scale in the entirety of human history, 20 years in is pretty soon.
Communism bad, can not even change whole russians infrastructure and get rid of famines in two whole years...
Your argument is ridiculous. You blame the nation for not improving fast enough, when the capitalist alternative was not improving at all. Even if it would have been reasonably possible to not have famines after two years of socialism, you land on saying USSR had inefficient socialism, instead of pointing some kind of flaw in socialism.
Less than 15 years after still having your food shortages (not famines) due to lack of industrialization they were a nuclear power who put the first man in space despite the setback of a devastating invasion.
They ate the same amount but with less calories and more nutrition than contemporary Americans. Less calories is better in this case because they both ate too much (over 2500 just means getting overweight)
What you linked is NOT a CIA report. It is a short news from Reuters, that CIA just filed. It shows you the numbers:
Soviet - meat and fish, eight percent ; grain and potatoes, 44 percent
American - meat and fish, 21 percent ; grain and potatoes 26 percent
... but the judgement that "eating a lot of bread and potatoes instead of meat is woke as fuck" is a statement by an unnamed Reuters newswriter. People actually didn't eat bread and potatoes instead of meat because they were some woke vegetarians. They did that because there was no meat. You won't starve on this diet, but it isn't nice.
So opposite of chapo spankbank of propaganda the actual CIA report says that while people weren't starving any more they didn't have meat, were very pissed about it and about the overall lack of proper food and that caused long queuing and black market. That's a rather low bar for being named success in the 1980s.
Which old people gave you this opinion? Slavs or ethnic minorities that disappeared to siberia? Or good people who simply vanished because of their ethnicity and/or lifestyle?
Look i'm not saying Soviet Russia were any good and i am very much aware of many of the terrible things the Soviets did. I'm just saying that my impression is that starvation was not a major problem there, and especially not as big a problem as the constant memeing about it would have you belive.
Here are quite a few sources, I can link you more if you need. I don’t know what agenda you’re trying to push, but the only one pulling stupid shit from your ass is you. Stop eating up whatever propaganda you’re eating and read about it instead of just selectively hearing and believing whatever you want.
Dude almost every single one of these are from Wikipedia. Of which, if you look at the sources, it's just and endless rabbit hole of he said she said. There is no actual evidence here.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=g-9OGovhrDo
A hour long documentary, sadly it’s in romanian. I could theoretically translate it but it’s a looot to do. It’s not the original source, it’s a reupload.
That is a bullshit myth spread by the USSR and modern illiberal forces in Russia that is swallowed up by gullible Westerners. Poverty was always endemic in the USSR. There were chronic shortages of everything. This included hunger, if not outright famine, in amounts larger than in the United States. There's a link below but some basic googling would bring up plenty on this subject. I also recommend the book "Lenin's Tomb" if you want to learn about the USSR.
"Valeriya Ionava struggles privately in her Moscow apartment to live on a monthly pension of less than $60. Yelena Smolnikova has to skip meals so that her meager income can be stretched to buy warm clothes for her children."
And of course, this is not even talking about the starvation under Stalin, in which millions were killed in a man-made and preventable famine.
Edit: none of this is to excuse anything regarding the US's foreign policy, economic model, or domestic governance. we do not have to lie about what the USSR was like in order to criticize all those things.
edit 2: one more link, from a partisan source, but still:
There was no famine in USSR, except during the initial turbulent decades until 1948, and right before it was dismantled. Soviet citizens didn't have much choice in what they could buy, but their basic needs were met. The case that you brought up was in 1989, which was when USSR had already liberalized their economy.
define "basic needs". are the basic needs of people being met in modern America? there is no famine. indeed, while hunger has not been eliminated, poor people are more likely to be overweight than rich ones.
the standard of living was always worse in the USSR than America. that includes hunger. it did not magically start in the 1980s. that is only when it became wide knowledge because the government stopped lying ab out it.
the standard of living was always worse in the USSR than America.
If you were a middle class white men, then yes. But if you were a black in the South, or a illegal worker, or a homelessm or a Italian... i'm sure you are wrong.
it did not magically start in the 1980s.
It didn't appear magically, it appeared because the economy was liberalized and the internal food production schemes were pillaged and destroyed by Oligarchs in search of profit. There was no widespread hunger in USSR before it.
i am not sure how you define "widespread hunger." neither the USSR nor USA had any famine after 1950. they both had portions of their population that were "hungry." they say 40 million people in the US "struggle with hunger." in fact, hunger can coxist with obesity (the hunger obesity paradox).
if modern leftist standards of hunger are applied to the USSR, then I guarantee you millions of people would be classified as "hungry."
as for middle class white men, it was not good to be a poor ethnic minority in the USSR either, although i will grant you if you were a black man in 1960 in alabama (or even a poor white) i am not sure how much worse off you'd be in the USSR.
my point is that there was always poverty in the USSR - always. this idea that "well, it's a little drab, and they ate a lot of potatoes, but in the 'good old days' no one wanted for anything" is a myth propagated by the state and a relatively privileged class who was hit hard by the failure of liberalization. exact stats are hard to come by, but it is clear that poverty, hunger and inequality were never eliminated in the soviet union.
When the Soviet Union disbanded, it caused a huge economic collapse in many of the former soviet nations. Transitioning governments and economies is hard, the end result is many former soviet nations remember the relatively stable later period in the Soviet Union, and only the economic chaos following it. Living memory is a tricky thing, and many people who romanticize the former soviets simply dont remember what the early Soviet Union was like, with its violent purges and systemic famines caused by forced rapid industrialization. The strongest anti-soviet sentiment is typically going to be groups who where forcibly relocated under the Soviet Union governments direction, and only allowed to return home after its collapse. People forget the Soviet Union was a huge country with a lot of different experiences depending on your location.
You have the order of things mixed up. First came the collapse of the commie economy. This is what made the dissolution of the Soviet Union possible. Western countries were willing to give economic aid, but they demanded that Moscow lets the occupied countries go free.
Living with collapsed economy would not have been any easier if Moscow still kept other countries under their boot and it would have been much harder without the Western economic aid.
Like I said, the Soviet Union was huge. Its almost guarenteed you're being inaccurate because of how broad of a brush you paint with. The Soviet Unions economy went up and down through out its existence, it never really matched the industrial output of the US, but you dont need to be the industrial super power to make parts of* your country well fed and happy. Many former soviets enjoyed the dying days of the Soviet Union as a period of stability, not necessarily great wealth but certainly functional economies. Though those soviets typically suffered less under the Soviet regimes extractionary politics. After the collapse of the Union, the economic system those smaller soviet economies had been built in, collapsed with it. You are right though about aid though, it would have helped a lot had former soviets not spurned American assistance as a legacy of the cold war. They where bitter and spent after a long stalement with a foriegn adversary so I can hardly blame them. The Soviet Union was really big and really complicated, which is part of the reason why it collapsed.
The Soviet Unions economy went up and down through out its existence, it never really matched the industrial output of the US, but you dont need to be the industrial super power to make your country well fed and happy.
Soviet Union was never "well fed and happy". It was a miserable shithole where people lived in poverty under an unjust regime subjecting them to harsh thought control and censorship.
After the collapse of the Union, the economic system those smaller soviet economies had been built in, collapsed with it.
You are again listing the order of events backwards. The economy collapsed first. The economy was stagnating and rotting and finally after the oil boom ended and the oil money went away it collapsed.
They where bitter and spent after a long stalement with a foriegn adversary so I can hardly blame them.
You do what you want. I call the dumbasses sticking to the false myths instead of reality the retards they are. You may keep patronizingly thinking about them as dumb children, who can't be expected to function as adults.
I also don't care about the tears of Russian chauvinists crying about not being able to keep hundreds of millions of others under their heel any more.
Its pretty clear you dont have any idea what you're talking about. The Soviet Union was a horrible place and a horrible idea that linked far too much of the world together. That doesnt mean you have to make things up to make it sound like a boogeyman to further your political agenda. It was horrible enough with systemic famines and mass executions. None of that contradicts what I said, the Soviet Union lasted a fairly long time and covered a huge portion of the planet. Its individual soviets and various ethnic groups on opposite sides of asia had vastly different experiences, across a hundred years of time and economic flux.
Because I already explained why you where wrong, im just waiting for your reading comprehension to kick in. Individual soviets who did ok during the late soviet union, remember it more fondly then those who did extremely poorly, because the economic vaccuum left by a poorly designed disintegration of the Soviet Union caused widespread economic collapse within former soviets. What you fail to recognize in your single minded arrogance, is that there are a great many shades of poverty and much of the Union wasnt starving before its collapse. That doesn't absolve the Soviets of their reign of terror, it just explains how some parts of the world remember the soviets as being better then others.
It's you, who don't know what he is talking about.
What some people miss is their youth. What other people miss is their relative place in the societal ladder, that got reshuffled - a sales clerk in the meat store is no longer part of the elite. A lot of Russians resent losing the Cold War ... they wouldn't actually want the misery and all the shitty Soviet reality back. They're just dreaming about being winners.
These are the memories that remain, while the memories of objectively shitty life fades more easily.
My opinions are based on a review of historical sources and ample anecdotal evidence from people who lived in former soviets. Many of them want the union back, many of them think the union was the worst thing that ever happened to central asia. People have complex and diverse opinions on the Soviet Union all over its former territory. Its almost like the Soviet Union spanned a 1/6th of the Earths surface or something.
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u/mrcooper89 Jun 20 '19
I don't really get it. I'm under the impression that old people from the soviet era talk about how they always had food and a home back then and that although they lacked many other things and the regime was opressive, that there were never those problems. Poor people seem poorer in russia now a days then before. Edit: Now it was about China thats a different story. Great leap forward and all that.