@@JamesO512 Лол. Какой коммунизм, если коммунизма никогда не было? Теоретически коммунизма можно достичь только как минимум в масштабах континента, а не одной отдельно взятой страны.
Not all of them. Watch the last instalment of the 1420 channel and you will see a Russian babushka about half way through telling it exactly as it was, buying a house in the country, fleeing Moscow toward the fall, because food was becoming impossible to fine. She then grew her own. There are others going back through the months, but most have this pie in the sky nostalgic version that is a fantasy, and I expect for a VERY few, it was quite good, as well, the ultra elite.govt. Just look at the inside of the Kremlin and those palaces. They literally lived like kings, still do, which Russia resides just about exactly midway down the list of countries by per Capita income, meaning they are a developing nation, not a developed one, even now.
We got a group of visitors from Estonia to Finland in the late 80’s. They had a KGB officer who was guarding them and making sure nobody escapes. But one did escape the group and ended up in Sweden. That’s how wonderful and free the ussr was. And now we are in the EU and we can move anywhere in the EU freely.
Nah, almost nobody wanted to escape, just ask the guy about 20 comments up. :-) If that was true, it was amazing how the Baryshnikov's, etc ALL had handlers, wasn't it? My wife lived in Sweden for a few years as a kid when her dad was working at the embassy. She remembers those as very fond times. Isn't it amazing how many countries have to build walls to keep people out, and countries like the USSR have (had in that case) to build them to keep people in. Kind of says it right there. Reagan, "Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this (Berlin) wall".
I was a teenager growing up in Canada when Gorbachev was promoting the ideas of "glasnost" and "perestroika". I do not know what Russians think of that, but in North America, we were really hoping that Russia would embrace democracy and join North America and Europe as equal trading partners. We all had great hope for Russia as a friend. The perception from our side of the pond is that it was the corruption of the Russian oligarchs that siphoned wealth from the Russian nation and its people. It is sad to see that Mikhail Gorbachev is thought of as the scapegoat when it seems obvious to us that Russian oligarchs and the ruling class are more likely to blame.
The irony is that all those corrupted oligarchs are from Russian Jewish and Ukrainian diaspora. People like Khodorkovsky who helped to defraud the country and fool a lot of citizens before he ran to the the West and he isn’t the only one like that now preaching there moral values.
Pretty hilarious. Russian oppression of the neighbouring states was just one big happy motherland. Waiting years for an apartment or a car was prosperity. The gulags & KGB are forgotten. The collapsed economy isn't proof central control doesn't work. It's that traitor, Gorbachev (+ America hates us).
What does collapse of the USSR has to do with corruption? Both Ukraine and Russia are still quite corrupt countries, even after the fall of the USSR. According to corruption perception index, Ukraine is 116 of 180, Russia is 137 of 180, Kazakhstan is 101 of 180 etc. No great improvements been made after the USSR. Moreover, oligarchs appeared. These are basically businessmen who bought state owned property for mere pennies and made a fortune.
Do you know who are "oligarchs"? The USSR owned ~120,000 enterprises (factories, mines, farms etc.). During the transition from communism to capitalism all of it been sold for mere pennies, way below its market value. 120 thousand factories sold for $16,9 billion dollars total. Or about ~$140,000 per a factory. This way, people who bought oil refineries, aluminum smelters, metal processing factories etc. became so called "oligarchs". This phenomenon exists everywhere in post-Soviet countries, including Ukraine. Maybe except for Baltic countries, simply because there are no resources there.
@@helloworld-ti5zs maybe you should take a deeper glance at former republics of ussr sometimes, i'm sure you will be surprised how independent and wealthy they are today.
@@user-ok8uv3gc7k Less well off than maybe a western European and certainly an American, but moving up fast and when they get up in the morning, they don't have to worry about what they say and they see differing opinions on the TV and don't have to be worried about being conscripted into an army and being thrown like "meat" (Russian soldiers name for themselves) into the grinder of Ukraine. AND, they know their children will be better off than they are and their children even better...
@@Redfour5Если бы СССР не распался не этой ситуацией с Украиной не многих других войн не было, И да в большинстве постсоветских стран диктатура и не о каком развитие речи не идëт
As a russian citizen I can say that most of the people who are nostalgic for the Soviet Union in fact are nostalgic about their youth. They simply forgot about many features of life in the USSR.
I am from Finland and I visited Leningrad on 1984 if i remember right, i was about 15years old back then, it was nice city to visit but people wanted to buy my clothes on street as they were western style, so nice place to visit but maybe there was clear reasons why it collapsed.
Not just their youth as in being youthful, but their youth as in even more do than now being completely oblivious and masters of digging heads in the sand. Even now they push away anything and everything negative. They did then as well. ' Oh we are bombing our civilian brethren and NOT freeing them from nazis? Uhh.. i choose to not acknowledge that and go happily forward with my vodka.' If they can pretend nothing bad is happening now, imagine the things they chose to 'forget' during their whole lifes. I assume you were born in Russia and not USSR?
That's true about anyone. I am sure the poor kids living in the slums of Haiti, Brazil or Nigeria will also tell you of fond memories as kids. Your argument is stale.
I did not live in the USSR but in a satellite state. The apartments were relatively cheap, but you had to wait for years for the so-called bribe allocation and connections within the party made the process easier and we are not talking about ownership of the property, but long-term use. Traveling abroad, you had to get permission from the authorities, including the political police, you didn't have your passport at home, you had to return it every time, the long and complicated process was helped by the same thing as before. A refrigerator, TV, washing machine, etc. were luxury goods that you often had to wait for years for. The economic situation is characterized by periods of crisis interspersed with smaller crises - which usually ended with workers' protests, which the authorities bloodily suppressed by shooting workers, using tanks, militia, etc. Virtually all the protests were related to the increase in food prices - which were set centrally. The card system operated practically throughout the so-called socialism, to buy anything you had to wait in queues, often for many hours, you bought what was on sale and not what you needed - hence many older people have the habit of accumulating various things. Fruits such as oranges were a delicacy that cost a lot and usually appeared before Christmas. But the shortage concerned practically everything - clothes, building materials, etc. - the system was not economically efficient. Censorship was an official state office, and they decided what could be printed, shown on the radio, theater, and TV. Everything for public consumption, all culture and art, books, films, song lyrics and everything else had to be approved by the state. I could go on for a long time, but it wasn't the best system to live in, the state controlled absolutely everything.
Great points. In a centrally controlled economy, all success, and all failure, is divided equally among the people. If the state tells too many farmers to grow potatoes, the potatoes rot, the workers get paid. If a capitalist farmer grows potatoes in a bad year, the farmer takes the hit, not the country. In a good year, the farmer makes out like a bandit. So what do farmers do? They try not to make big mistakes!
You have listed the difficulties that the USSR experienced, apartments were given with a long break, not because there was someone's malicious intent, but because they did not have time to build them, but in this case there was an alternative, cooperative apartments were built (when you invested your funds for construction) or were built independently for a plot allocated for you. You write that it was not enough , but be objective , the USSR suffered the largest war in the history of mankind , as a result of which it lost 40% of industry , 2,000 cities were in ruins , 60,000 villages were burned , and comparing the USSR with the USA . Even before the war, the United States surpassed the USSR in many respects, and after the war, the United States doubled its GDP. The shortage of goods in the USSR is in no way connected with the construction of socialism in the USSR (for example , China ) , in this case there are many reasons from the arms race to Khrushchev 's short - sighted and flawed policy . You write about the Iron Curtain , but the USSR did not introduce it and did not seek to withdraw from the global economy , the curtain was lowered by the capitalist countries after the famous speech of Churchell in 1947 , in Fulton .
@@user-qj5dj5hk1y Досить вже брехати і все списувати на другу світову війну. Хочеш повернення в срср? Збирай однодумців і прошу до колгоспу. Але ви любителі срср тільки язиками здатні плескати. It is enough to lie and write everything off to the Second World War. Do you want to return to the USSR? Gather like-minded people and ask to the collective farm. But you fans of the USSR can only clap with your tongues.
Here in Berlin I ride my bike to work every day. My path leads from the former American sector via the former Soviet sector to the former American sector. I cross the former death strip at the Wall four times every day. In 1989 I would have been shot immediately on this route. I am grateful to the revolutionaries from the GDR and also to Gorbachev for allowing the unjust state of the GDR to collapse and for allowing me to move freely today.
It the took the sacrifice and deaths of millions of allied solders to free Germany from its elected Government and then a huge amount of resources and treasure and sacrifice to ensure its security for the next 45 years and then the political support and international institutions that we set up to make Germany a successful modern democracy. We are asking that Germany provide a tiny amount of that support to Eastern Europe in their defense against Russia.@@puraLusa
@MrNevl: None of what you said shows Germany being responsible, in any way, for the problems of your country. Quit blaming others, put your country on YOUR back, and make your own country a great one. It already has great people in it, so let them shine.
@@MrNevl 1. allies went when they felt themselves atacked, not to liberate any german 2. Rebuilt of germany was of usa interest as to showcase capitalism vs comunism - soviets wanted to do the same, were just incompetent + allies went for the usage of showcase - not out heart but out of pure interest of proving comunism wrong path in a visible manner for the other side (no internet then) - cold war tactics, cold war investment. 3. Germans were smart enough to use the sistem to their advantage and use the rebuild to rebuild the economy as they already had the brains: nazi friendly companies didn't go away, just reinvent themselves. In conclusion, allies liberated cause there was a war not having a care of what would be of germany in the future to the point it was very accepted to sever a capital in half. Germany was used not helped - they just outsmarted their users.
My wife grew up in the Soviet Union. She has nothing good to say about it. Citizens waited half their life in lines just to get basic essentials. If one went to buy shoes, they grabbed whatever was available even if it was not the right size. Then one would trade with someone else for a pair of shoes that fit. And the thing that really shocked me is that basic feminine products like tampons and sanitary pads did not exist. The Soviet Government didn’t think products for women were important enough for their 5 year economic plan. Soviet Union was a joke.
Yes, the Soviet Union was a joke. Workers had to wait 10 years to buy a car. But if you had connections with officals, you could buy it in 1 day. Because of that, a successful car owner would sell his car at the same price he purchased 10 years ago, and with that money he would buy a new one. 😊
I didn't have tampons or pads either in 1990s as a teenage girl, but I was really happy in Russia😊, because I had my family and friends. That is all. And yes, we were poor, but I still was happy)))
The Russian military did not issue socks until 2012. And I think they went back to not issuing socks. I went to high school in the 80's with some people who came from behind the Iron Curtain. They Lithuanian twins had no sense of humor. The Russian, who did grow up here, was fun to hang around with. And none of their families would have gone back.
"It was one huge motherland where people lived in peace and kindness." Tell that to every former Soviet colony in Eastern Europe who managed to crawl out from under the rock of Russian political oppression and economic servitude, and escape to democracy and an economic rebirth as EU members.
The moment the Iron Curtain came down, Poland, Hungary, and Czechoslovakia got together and petitioned NATO for membership. The second they could, they ran to the arms of the "enemy" to be safe from Russia.
Nostalgia for an ideology that was never more than a pretext for authoritarianism, from people who've spent their whole lives deliberately not noticing anything political or thinking about anything uncomfortable.
"Nostalgia for an ideology that was never more than a pretext for authoritarianism" So you're denying that many people believed in socialism? What a stupid, ignorant thing to say.
@@billyconnelly3568 You can be both socialist and authoritarian. You absolutely can give free healthcare, free education or free whatever , while forcing people to agree with you, send to gulags those who don't and keep the power for yourself for decades.
@@broncotiny8191Well you can have both Capitalism and Authoritarianism and Plutocracy like in the USA. You can be controlled by the government, being shot in schools and still have to pay obscene amounts for education and medical.
@@broncotiny8191 I don't consider the soviet system socialist, and (not but) I accept that a system can at once provide a suite of benefits and still be authoritarian. However, the original poster said the Russians speaking in this clip are expressing nostalgia for an ideology that was never more than a *pretext* for authoritarianism. That's what I'm contesting. The vast majority of socialists want--and have historically wanted--to create a world in which the masses are able to be self-actualized. I've never met a socialist who wanted socialism simply as a cat's paw for authoritarianism.
The right question is not if Russia wants Soviet Union back, but if the former Soviet States want to be part of it again ! You know the obvious answer ...
Asking an old Russian if he wants the USSR back is like asking an old Englishman if he wants the Empire back. That sentiment brought us Brexit, ... so obvious, indeed.
Here are two different qiestions. To they want to be independent. Offcourse. And here is the other more complicated question: do they want todays political system and capitalism, or they want socialism, or maybe something in between. Here you wouldn't get all the same answears.
@@andrekoster9708 it's quite obvious to me that many Russians want the USSR back just because it was a world superpower, not really because of communism. The experiment so-strongly wanted by Vladimir Lenin turned out to be a monument to far-right ultranationalism.
@@andrekoster9708not quite. There's quite a scaled difference between reliving an empire and leaving the European Union. That being said, no one in the UK wants the commonwealth empire back except for maybe a tiny minority. As opposed to the split difference to pro EU and anti EU views which is a different scale.
‘…of course things were better in the Soviet Union, we weren’t allowed to travel anywhere, bicycles were made of cement, no one had a car, you lined up all day for one rubber boot, or a single cabbage, and you had to put your name on a waiting list for ten years to buy a small black and white television….it was paradise…’
Benefits (reduces overall stress for ordinary person): 1) No need to worry about being unemployed 2) No need to worry about being homeless (employed = employer must provide at least a dorm at the start and then a house/apartment) 3) No need to worry about basic food 4) No need to worry about education 5) No need to worry about basic healthcare 6) Other small things that remove pressure (stress) that existed and exists in other countries So 'less worries' is a fact (on a basic level: you'll have a job, you'll have a roof, you'll be fed, you'll get education, you'll be treated in a hospital). Traveling abroad isn't a basic thing that a person needs (most people never travel abroad in their lives [although my parents and mother's relatives traveled to warsaw pact countries because it was relatively cheap to travel between warsaw pact countries]). Closer you get to the 90th worse things become (carts with rotten chicken, grains and stuff [could've been made on purpose to show rapid collapse and ignite active people. rate of decline didn't match with what was happening]). So apart from that basic list most things were very bad or not good enough (people mentioned some things in comments). Some places were better in some aspects but worse in others. But basic list sets a level that you can get with minimal effort. To get more - have to work smart/pick better paying jobs (just like under capitalism but with limitations). Most people want to put minimal effort and then complain that system is bad when other people also put minimal effort and produce shit. In late USSR proper top-down quality control existed only in military production (afaik in civilian area Khrushchev gave it away to producers, making it useless [it's like big pharma regulating itself, retarded]).
No Gorbachev didn’t start Afghanistan….he ended it. Some of these crazies blame the west, blame Gorbachev ect….always finger pointing and looking for scapegoats. How about spending insane amounts on weapons and wars that couldn’t be sustained under a communist economy…..Chernobyl?? These disgruntled folk looking outwards instead of inwards for the root cause. Everything has a beginning and an end. Nothing lasts forever. Learn from your own mistakes and failures so you learn from them and don’t repeat them.
That’s one thing from these videos that’s so consistent, blaming others and never taking accountability for anything. It’s usually blame America and the West.
They old ones don't even see the irony of being in a shopping district that is 100X wealthier and better stocked than the empty Russian stores of their youth while saying how great the USSR was. The US makes a great bogeyman for everybody to avoid confronting their own issues. Runaway inflation in Brazil? The US. Regional war in Africa? US conspiracy. All the IMF money that was supposed to develop roads and infrastructure gone? US/colonialism. I do appreciate the damage done historically by Western policies, but half these issues would be solved if countries confronted their own corruption and built something other than a dictator's palace.
Горбачева сделали козлом отпущения конечно! Он не святой и не самый умный правитель, но вот даже он выглядит умнее на фоне людей, которые считают, что один человек способен развалить целую страну за небольшой срок своего правления
Yeah, believing a single cause or a person is silly. So many causes. In fact, Gorbachev tried hard to keep USSR together. He even went in with military in several countries.
Развал СССР начался не с Горбачёва , а с хрущёвской не дальновидной политики . Горбачёв умышлено или не умышлено , но поставил точку в развале страны . Он устроил череду перемен чем выбил "клинья " которые обеспечивали устойчивость страны.
@@bring_back_dislikesИ , что ? В любой стране есть и разведка и исправительные учреждения и цензура . На счёт "клиньев " в моём комментарии я имел совсем другое.
No. They miss their motherland. You are wrong. I remember the Soviet Union and miss it too. I got tired to pay much money for medicine, for sports sections of my kids . In the USSR my parents paid only for my musical school and for my summer camp. The prices were cheap though. For a month I rested in a camp almost for free. As for the musical school my mom said that piano lessons were expensive. I learned to play dombra. It was cheap. 15 rubles a year. My dad's salary was 400 rubles a month.
It's easy. Millions of people like me unscrewed one screw every day. And one day this entire structure called the USSR collapsed. You can blame Gorbachev, Reagan, the evil west, but the truth is that ordinary people did not want to live in the eternal Matrix of Soviet socialism. No empire lasts forever.
The political structure and economic structure are interconnected. The economic processes is a tool of the political structure. They reinforce each other.
Alishker Sultanovich with his PhD says the USSR "was one huge motherland where people lived in peace and kindness." What kind of pathetic PhD could this man possibly have?
I believe the PhD claim is just bs. I checked his name in google scholar, both in latin and cyrillic letters, and there is no evidence of any scholar by that name, let alone any PhD dissertations.
beacause it is true. Compare to now. Bunch of nationalists preaching hate from TV and internet in all of Eastern Europe. Soviet Union kept region stable and prosperous while it existed and stumped down reactonary degeneracy.
Ah yes, the imperialists waxing nostalgic about how great their empire was and it was only the traitors and jealous foreign powers that were against it.
That's not the point of people opinion on USSR in this video lol, mostly it based on childhood memories and comparison of their life before destructive hell of what 90s was
@@verar2247 The destructive hell was because of Russians and no one else. They also tried to keep under control those countries that shared the destructive hell. After 2005 my country (that was under Moscow influence) escaped Russia and reconstruction started.
The soviet union was more or less bankrupt in the 1980s..Gorbachov tried to revert this,but it was too much effort too late,and people didnt want to live under the Soviet system any longer...they wanted freedom !
But "freedom" (however we define it) does not me the splitting of a country into pieces. That's one of the reasons why many anticommunist Russian (such as myself) still lament the 1991. Nobody cares about the Soviet system (may it never return), but everyone cares about Russian territories split among the newly "independent" states most of which never existed before 1991.
During the Soviet Union many families lived in "kommunalkas" - large apartments stolen from the aristocrats, shared by many families: one room per family, shared kitchen, and often one single bathroom for 15-20 persons.. .A nightmare.. . No possibility to go abroad, empty shelves in stores, alcoholism was massive. Paradise indeed!
Before the communists came to power, people lived in the basements of these very apartments of aristocrats, and an apartment for an aristocrat’s family occupied the floor. And it was the communists who organized the construction of houses for all citizens and passed them off as work for an enterprise or the state, and not for bank interest.
I'm not a fan of the Soviet Union (I'm glad it fell apart), but Gorbachev was not as good as Westerners think he is. Gorbachev also had his own plans, and he initially only wanted to make a semblance of change (because then the people had a request for change that could not be ignored), only because he began to give freedom, since the people began to put pressure on him. He was the same imperialist and autocrat as Putin, because, for example, he did not want to recognize the independence of the Baltic republics, resisted this in every possible way, and even sent his army there to suppress protest sentiments (for which Gorbachev is deservedly not liked in these countries). But he himself wanted to remain in power just like Brezhniv, and was against the elections, and held out until the last, until other people eliminated him. This is the reason why Gorbachev in Russia is not liked even by those who during perestroika really wanted change and sought to that.
There was a time at the beginning of the Khrushchev era when the Soviets genuinely believed that they had come through all the horrors of the preceding decades and finally they would overtake the West in living standards. They actually had some of the brightest minds in the country, mathematicians, economists etc. working on this project. But by the end of Khrushchev's presidency it was obvious that the social experiment that was started by Lenin had failed. They can blame Gorbachev or the arms race with the West or just wax lyical about their youth, but the simple fact is the system stagnated.
I agree with you. In theory communism - with equal opportunities for everybody, free education, health care and so on - sounds great. But the system didn't work. The Soviet Union collapsed because the economy failed. I may be wrong but I see two main reasons. The whole economy was planned by a central administration. Imagine an office in Moscow that has to decide how many shoes have to be made nationwide, and where the shoes have to be shipped to. That also means planning the production and shipping of raw materials to the different shoe factories. And that goes for everything. The other reason I see is that communism offers no incentives for individual workers to work harder or better.
@@janentomenkafka You're wrong. Your idea of socialism as an ideology having a specific path of development , but socialism is primarily a dialectical system of development and in no way rejects all types of economics . You know that under Stalin there was a market economy more than a planned one . That there were agricultural markets and there were artels (Cooperatives) which worked in a market economy mode , artels produced products from shoes to televisions . At that time , in the 30 - 50s , the share of state - owned enterprises operating in a planned mode accounted for 10,000 types of products , the share of artels operating in a market economy accounted for 30,000 types of products .
You are right that the construction of socialism in the USSR began to lead its way to degradation with the coming to power of Khrushchev with his not far - sighted policy . The illiteracy and inferiority of Khrushchev's transformations and this is the beginning of the collapse of the USSR. Building socialism is an unexplored path to building a more just society , and many mistakes lie in wait on this path . Stalin said (one of the smartest people of his time) "Without a theory, we die," that is, the theory of socialism is not a frozen mass, it is in constant dialectics, in constant development, in finding the right path of human development.But the trouble with the USSR is that such poletic pegmies as Khrushchev and Gorbachev came to the leadership of the country , and then such scum and drunkards as Yeltsin. After Stalin's death, there was no person in power who would give impetus to the theory of the development of socialism.
The USSR was on the path to economic collapsed by 1962. Prior to this time all workers were required to buy bonds equal to one month's annual income. This financed the State. The interest and principal was paid at maturity. In 1956/57 the state's financiers realised that the amount owed to workers in a few years would exceed the amount taken from them. Khrushchev and other others came up with a cunning plan that they would ask the workers to forego repayment voluntarily to express their gratitude to the State and Party. This was pitched to a few groups of workers to gauge the reception. It was hated by the workers. They asserted they must be repaid. Khrushchev was in a bind. They decided to end the bonds (except for a few very well paid groups) and froze repayment of interest and principal until the 1970s (hoping that many people would forget about them and fail to redeem). Bonds were replaced by a lottery. Workers were coerced to buy lottery tickets at their workplaces. Winners had a choice of cash or high-demand goods like cars (that were very over priced). Deficit goods were more popular than cash. And the State's takings didn't need to be repaid.
Quite interestingly they don't remember how much USSR was lacking behind the West what it comes to cars, domestic appliances, clothing, electronics, consumer goods, general quality of production... I visited the country in mid-80's and most of the things appeared like they were 10-30 years ago in the free world. Low quality paper, clumsy dull coloured items, fashion that the Government had determined to fit you. Apparently getting sought after products such as cars took years even if you were a model citizen.
Sometime little desire to have many things or tied to a lot of consumerism make someone feel happier . Today each month you want a new iphone or your children threated to kill themselved
- Comrade, your car will be delivered exactly ten years from now. - in the morning or in the afternoon? - it's ten years... why would it matter? - the blumber will visit in the afternoon.
They don't remember because they were unaware of how far behind the USSR was from the West. They were told on the news that the USSR was the best place to live and that all other nations were in terrible shape. Nothing changed.
@@ultrablond The Klitschko brothers said that their father didn't want to believe them when they told him what it was like in the US. He believed the Americans staged the whole thing specifically for visitors.
I was born in USSR and saw it collapse. There was nothing good for a talented person it it. It benefited only the ruling party and lazy people. Hard working people were seeing a small percentage of their efforts returned in value, while it was distributed to everybody else who did no work at all. Thieves were thriving, cause you kept what you stole only for yourself. Everything was provisioned by government. I remember my mother running to the book shop, cause she heard there was a new book being sold. They would bring 100 books to a city with 130k population. But you could always buy books from Lenin, Marks, etc.
Interesting, I watch a YT channel named 1420. In it, some young Russian adults (who know exactly what is going on in the world) interview Russians on the streets of Moscow, St Petersburg, some rural areas, and a couple of times in Belarus, asking very direct questions about various topics, most often Ukraine and Russian politics. A few of the Russians have got it, some are just misinformed and/or brain washed, and some of them live in this weird fantasy domain. I heard a babushka describing Russia in USSR times, and saying during the end she fled Moscow and bought a small house in the country to grow food, because the stores were rapidly becoming so bare that finding food was becoming very difficult. I guess when they fell, they FELL. And yup, look up the book Xi Thinking, which fills entire racks of bookshops in China, and where NOTHING from the outside world does, unless cleared by the party. They are falling off of that cliff right now. Xi is far more dangerous than even Putin, for many reasons, not the least of which being China's economic might, which Russia has none of. And Xi cares FAR less about the Chinese people than Putin does about the Russian people. Hold up a blank sign in China, and you disappear, permanently, as related by many of those families.
Да, конечно:) именно поэтому мой дед оставшийся сиротой из деревни под Воронежем (талантливый механик, машиностроитель) дорос до замминистра лесной промышленности СССР , а бабушка из деревни под Рязанью до ведущего экономиста на крупном предприятии. И получили несколько квартир, одну из них в центре Москвы. Может быть, ты не так уж и талантлив ? Как там у тебя успехи ?
@@johnnydeppsky3510 quick translation of this troll post: "what about my grandma and grandpa who did career in cccp, blah blah". Noboby, and I mean NOBODY, could make any career in cccp without belonging to comunist party. That meant doing what you're being told, simulating results (cause the goals were impossible - they tried to race USA), reporting to kgb (or even belonging). So his grandparents build a career on someone elses life / freedom. Nothing to brag about...
Not one person mentioned Chernobyl, yet Gorbachev named the economic effects of the disaster as a key reason or last straw that broke the system. I bet the satellite countries, east Germany , Poland, Ukraine, hungrey, etc don’t have nice nostalgic memories
Satellite states fed Moscow and Leningrad. As grand as these kooks remember it they had the luxury of being spoon-fed by the occupied states. Yes there were some benefits, but when everyone lives in poverty a free shit apartment seems like a dream come true.
@@MJ-uk6luHow do you know? Did you live there? At least we didn't have wars. In Soviet times everyone had a job and could afford all basic stuff, we had powerful industry and produced all kinds of things. Now Russia's become a third world country, a colony of the West and Chinese capital. Russian government sents all resources abroad and the majority of people live in poverty. USSR cared about people, it was social. Russian government acts as there's no people in Russia, all they care about is money which they don't even keep here.
@@alexy741228 I was there, what basic stuff? Empty shelves? I had to wait 2 year until I could get a bicycle as I kid (it was not issue of money). What powerful industry? It was all outdated, this is why it did not survive well after country did open to outside. It was not competitive at all.
After communism and the end of the Cold War Gorbachev gave Russia the opportunity to come out of isolation and adversity to join the rest of the World. Unfortunately, there was someone else waiting in the wings that realised isolation and adversity works in his favour. And those people that want the failed USSR back, well it's not the USSR they remember, it's their youth they remember.
After the fall of USSR, USA sent advisers to Russia to create a russian oligarchy and usurp the national resources. Anatoly Chubais was responsible for this "privatization". Its a mystery why he was kept in both Jeltsins and Putins governments. I don't think Russia was ever welcome in one piece in the west whatever they did and however much they wanted it. They have too much resources.
Old USSR is exactly what they want. Freedom is like poison for them. Free speech is acid in their eyes. Economic success of anyone else is a blow in their stomach
After spending two and a half years in Vietnam I promised myself I wouldn’t look back later and remember it as a good time. But almost 60 years later I find that the bad times have been over come in my memory by what now seems like the good times. It’s only the memory of being young that prevails. Such is life, youth is good but not always true.
"This is good, things will change"": That's what I was saying to myself (in Czechoslovakia) when Gorbachev came to power and when I heard one of his speeches. And things changed, the iron curtain fell down. Here's one guy (one of many) who is grateful for their "traitor's" actions
Exactly. People here in Russia act like the Soviet Union was some amazing glorious place when really it was a nation capable of nothing more than genocide and corruption. Speaking as a Latvian.
Foe me Gorbachev is a true heroe of humanity: he decided not to send the tanks to salvage a deeply corrupt and collapsing system! The fact that the Soviet Union was peaceful is a joke: Should we recall Cehoslovakia? Budapest? + Stalin started 2nd World War along Hitler. They invaded Poland too,. And if that was not conclusive: why did Russia have to attack Finland?
The people of Poland, Ukraine etc don't have the same fond memories of the USSR as Russians because they were occupied nations with a gun to their head.
My friend in Helsinki used to go when it was the Soviet Union, he would take a suitcase full of carrier bags that were free in the stores in Helsinki and he would fund his trip by selling them in Russia, they were highly sought after.
I don't see how is it connected. Yes, the USSR been a closed country. Just like Japan was before. If we follow your logic, then Japan should collapse too. I mean, yes, closedness of the Soviet Union is one of the main drawbacks. But why people think the country can't be open without collapsing itself? 🤔
@@user-yj7um6hv1d Japan was a closed country until the 19th century... and it has collapsed since then, and recovered. So this analogy you're making doesn't really stand up
I can believe it. There are photos from 90' and 80's were people have hanged out these plastic bags on a cloth/washing rack in their balconies to dry them. What was considered in other countries as a garbage was worth a washing here is USSR... And no it was not because of being eco friendly.
Уже сам факт того,что они говорят о БАЗОВОЙ возможности человека куда то поехать как о чем то необычном,даёт представление о том,какое же дно это было на самом деле. Пролы
а что сейчас о базовых возможностях известно? почему во многие страны для удовлетворения базовых возможностей требуется виза? Ну и о базовой необходимости иметь свое жилье хотелось бы услышать, почему нужно 20 лет работать для удовлетворения базовой необходимости? Это надо понимать обычное дело. Хочешь свою крышу над головой - работай до пенсии. Так выглядит не дно.
@@DrBurdock Виза нужна если у тебя паспорт РФ. Граждане любой страны ЕС (и не только) ездят по всему миру без каких либо виз, например, гражданин Швеции, Германии или Финляндии может поехать без предварительной визы в любую из 176 стран, где в 133 странах ему даже платить ничего не надо и въезд свободный, а в оставшихся 43 ему поставят визу по прибытию и где-то это можно сделать за бесплатно в рамках турпакета, а где-то за небольшое fees, но возможность посещения гарантирована. Это для граждан РФ есть куча визовых трудностей, где во многие страны надо получать визу заранее иначе не пустят, в некоторые из которых её сейчас получить практически нереально и связано это с привычкой властей РФ нападать ну чужие страны как на Украину например или запускать агентов-отравителей под видом туристов как это было в Солсбери в Великобритании, поэтому другие страны не хотят иметь дел с Россией.
@@bsbdptsd а гражданам Афганистана как? во сколько стран безвизовый въезд открыт? Или они тоже на чужие страны нападали и запускали агентов-отравителей под видом туристов?
Ну да, путешествовать - это же так важно! Сейчас-то точно можно ехать куда угодно, а значит все хорошо. Правда, сначала большинству путешественников нужно будет расплатиться по кредитам за их машины, дома и технику, потом проложить безопасные маршруты в объезд районов с арабами-мигрантами, которые могут ограбить, ну и взять с собой радужные флажки, а то сочтут нетолерантными.
@@DrBurdock Так же как и гражданам Сирии, Ирака, Йемена, Сомали, Ливии и других стран из этой же категории, где в той или иной степени имеют место быть локальные гражданские конфликты, беззаконие, бандитизм, похищения и отсутствует понимание гражданских прав, необязательно гадить чужим странам чтобы иметь плохой визовый статус, достаточно гадить своим же гражданам в своей стране в плане прав и свобод. Для этой метрики есть специальный рейтинг, точнее даже несколько, где можно посмотреть в какую страну и с каким паспортом проще попасть, но все рейтинги сведены к тому, что паспорт Арабских Эмиратов лучший в мире, как и Арабские Эмираты одна из самых посещаемых стран мира. А причина тому что Эмираты не поощряют варварство и бандитизм, и в свете недавних событий стали единственной страной арабского мира, осудившей нападение Хамаса на Израиль и публично поддержавшее Израиль в этом конфликте (это было ещё до того как началась операция в Газе).
We were so friendly with other nations....East Germany, Hungary, Czechoslavakia, Poland.....anymore? You had to invade them to keep them in the fold because they did not want Russians from the 1960's onwards. As for food in the shops, the line ups for anything which came in a dribble. I once was on the East German border and watching an East German factory employing 2000 people. There were 6 Trabants only in the car park while on the other side the West Germans were driving Mercs and BMW's. Thanks to Russian communism. Trying to escape was punishable by death.
Ну вообще-то в Чехословакию вторгся не только СССР, а еще ГДР и еще несколько стран. В Венгрии был фашисткий переворот, людей линчивали и рубили топорами на улицах, это факт, СССР силой оружия остановил бойню. То что СССР вошел в эти страны в 1944-45 годах, это было справедливо, репарации . которые наложил на них СССР были еще очень мягкими, за зверства творимые на оккупированных территориях, Польша вообще получила из рук СССР территории восточной Германии, на которые права не имела.
East German fairly was more about Berlin wall, otherwise, communists were extremely strong there. German republic literally had to use american forces to make force communist surrender there. Still till today communist terrorism exists in Germany like its South america just bcs of that.
@@antonzhdanov9653 это когда приходилось привлекать американцев для подавления коммунистов в Берлине? Да вам немцам хватит жаловаться, с вами не совершали геноцида и уничтожения вашего народа, если бы СССР ответил зеркально и убил бы у вас 17 миллионов гражданских лиц, то от Германии в демографическом плане, практически не чего не осталось бы. Хватит ныть, вы легко отделались.
He should have fought it. Not fighting it was worse. And the shed was and is by far more than it would be. Idk how dumb tou should be to make that statement
@@eXTreemator He didn't give up he fought for the Soviet Union but the old ways fought back. He had finally managed to convince almost everyone to sign the New Union Treaty, then came the KGB coup which destroyed the hopes of it being signed AND gave power away from the Kremlin (and Gorbachev) and into Yeltsin. Yeltsin then decided he wanted more power and made Russia leave the USSR alongside Ukraine. Gorbachev only gave democracy and autonomy to the USSR, which some men took advantage of. If anyone is to blame it's Yeltsin.
What people miss is not the USSR system per se, but Russian territories that were lost. You could change the system without splitting the country, especially along such clearly anti-Russian borders. But here Yeltsin is to blame, not Gorbachev.
"For me, it was one huge motherland, where people lived together in peace and kindness..." and then 15 SSRs couldn't *freakin'* wait to escape from the 'workers paradise'. The ones who were unable to escape, and others that did, had genocide inflicted upon them by 'kind babushkas'... Sheesh!
1:20 Me: wow none if them have tried to blame the US yet that's actually... oh wait there it is. 1) The soviet invasion of Afghanistan 2) Chornobyl disaster 3) absurd military spending 4) spending a fortune on a space program you were barely ready for 5) Communism These are why your opressive empire collapsed, stop blaming others for your own failures and take some damn responsibility for once.
@@user-vu9xl2yz4s true, the west could easily do that to russia again but the world is far more interconnected than it was back then with global trade so doing so now would hurt everyone else just as much so the best option is just to keep the price cap at break even levels so it screws Russia's profit margins but doesn't hurt the global economy at the same time.
I don't see what any of that has to with the collapse of the USSR. 1) You youself invaded into Afghanistan, along with other countries. Vietnam, Iraq, Libya. The US still didn't collapse yet. 2) Chornobyl is Ukrainian city near Kyiv. So what. Nuclear disasters happen in other countries as well - see Fukushima. 3) About 4-7% of the GDP per year. Quite a lot, agree. 4) That's a good thing. Space exploration is a high tech field. I don't see any downsides of investing into it. 5) I don't see how an economic structure "communism" connected with political structure "USSR". It's absolutely achievable to switch to capitalism without collapsing the country into many parts. You can have capitalistic and democratic USSR if you really want to.
@@user-yj7um6hv1d you've completely exposed your ignorance of the USSR's history. 1) I'm not American (shouldn't be so presumptius, English is the world's second language after all... clue is in that its called ENGLISH) and the context you are sorely lacking is that the soviet invasion of Afghanistan is one of the primary factors that led to the collapse of the soviet economy, your mistake is assuming i was approaching that point from a moral perspective when i wasn't... anyone else who knows soviet history would know exactly why i referenced Afghanistan. 2) Again you're missing the point, me mentioning Chornobyl was not a criticism of Soviet negligence/incompetence, that's another issue entirely. It's relevant in the context of the collapse of the soviet union in that the post-crisis recovery costs were staggeringly enormous and came at a time when the USSR was far from it's economic peak and though not as decisively a fatal blow as the invasion of Afghanistan to the Soviet economy... it certainly hurt a lot. 3) I'm glad we agree that it was a huge amount for peace time (yes it was the cold war ofc) but then again trying to compete with the US economy in a military bulid up was a losing proposition from the beginning, plus the enormous cost of buliding and maintaining their huge nuclear arsenal was a massive financial drain too. 4) Again, yes it's a noble endeavour when done for the right reasons but in the case of the Soviets it was just to try and beat the US in the 'space race' which at the time was expensive in a way that's difficult to imagine if you adjust for inflation and it hurt the USSR's economy in the long run. 5) come on man i feel like im just teaching you basic history at this point... * sigh * communism was absolutely relevant as to the collapse of the Union because the rigid low growth, and zero consumer economy couldn't possibly conpete in the long run with the flexible high growth, strong consumer economy of the United states and in the very effort of trying to compete with US Militarily, economically whilst also still reeling from the aforementioned multiple crises... it just pushed an already massively overstretched communist economy to it's breaking point and... it broke, then the bread lines and chaos appeared along with the dissolution of the USSR. As for having a capitalistic USSR? Yeah, sure. If they had transitioned properly to a capitalist economy instead of the chaotic way Gorbachev reformed russia and then yeltsin later selling russia to it's oligarchs... done properly it could have worked you're right. As for having a democratic USSR? Never. The soviet republics were abused hostages of the russians and were genocided, forcibly relocated etc on multiple occasions and in any true democratic USSR they would demand independence referendums and leave just like they did when the Union collapsed, if russia had treated it's republics better maybe some or all would stay in a democratic USSR but even in that scenario it's doubtful due to the rise of nationalism and independent culture's in the republics themselves which would have inevitably led to them seeking their independence and in a truly democratic union they would have been allowed to secede. That's of course not even mentioning the enormous challenge of getting a communist, authoritarian union to flip to a capitalist democracy... i can't even begin to imagine the upheaval that would have caused in the memebers of the union and likely would have just served as a catalyst for most if not all of the republic's independence movements on account of now being much more closely alingned to the west and wanting to integrate to an already thriving capitalist, democratic community. Dude like im sorry for being a bit rude to you there but i highly reccomend you brush up on topics before trying to engage someone in a meaningful debate about them because it saves you looking ignorant and saves my time having to explain things to you whilst also countering your points, just saying.
@@robertjohn6585 there is a logical error in your reasoning. Even if as you say (a) the USSR been in a sad economic state, how is (b) breaking the USSR into independent states suppose to help? All post-Soviet countries switched to capitalism afterwards. What prevents from simply transitioning to the capitalism without breaking the union? I am just saying that the USSR collapse is not carved in stone and was avoidable. In fact, it solved nothing. Most of post-Soviet countries still corrupt. Did not solve corruption problem. Most of post-Soviet countries still ruled by dictators who's in power for 20 years - Lukashenko, Putin, Aliyev, etc. The only successful examples are Baltic countries, but they are microscopic compared to the size of the USSR. Around 2% of its total size.
its crazy how people see collapse of USSR as "their betrayal" but also think that we all was "equal and fair memebers" of USSR 😂 folks dont get the concept that we all have our own countries 😂
They say it was a betrayal and that collapse of Evil Empire was their leaders fault. At the same time none of them personally lift a finger to save their beloved USSR.
the same happened in 1917, Ukraine and the other Eastern Europeans declared independence but the Soviets managed to invade them all and get them back under occupation, they tried the same in 1991, but they only saved Tatarstan, got Chechnya with a brutal war, parts of Moldova and Georgia, and with Ukraine they are still at it
A few facts about life in the USSR outside of Moscow. To fix a fence or make a shed, we used nails that were already in use. We had several homemade anvils for straightening nails. It looks like a metal wedge with transverse grooves for fixing nails. It was possible to make such a thing at the factory at the place of work and secretly take it out for the checkpoint. Why not buy it? Like nails, they were not sold. By the way, there were no shops for the sale of building materials in principle. There were wholesale bases for the supply of construction organizations, but they were not obliged to sell you anything if they had a shortage of materials, and it was always there. By the way, in my father's house all the windows and doors were homemade, and even the chain-link mesh was woven from wire itself using a homemade machine in the form of a wooden frame and a rotor with a handle. To repair his wooden house, my uncle bought a forest on the vine and took it to the sawmill. Everywhere it was necessary to negotiate separately. Yes, freight transport was not sold into private hands, the state had a monopoly on cargo transportation. And there were also administrative issues, for example, mandatory construction contracts. So in the RSFSR you could not build a house where the area suitable for living exceeds 60 square meters. This is very small, so extensions without wall insulation, heating and with a separate entrance were popular. Many of my friends at school lived with the whole family in an apartment of about 30 sq.m and waited for the conditions to improve (yes, free) for years. And it was not the worst variation, some lived in a hostel where the family has only one room, and the bathroom, toilet and kitchen are shared on the floor. There were "barracks" - dormitories built at the beginning of the 20th century in very poor technical condition, where a bathroom is not provided, and a toilet on the street in a separate building. By the way, about the "trips of pensioners to health resorts": most of the villagers have not been anywhere further than the district center, well, except for a trip to Europe during the Second World War. The USSR was a complete suck to be honest.
Горбачев преступник потому что он развалил страну на много кусков. В то время как Китай на своем примере показал что могло перейти к капитализму, не разрушая государство.
мне жаль что СССР развалился на части, хоть я и написал в своем сообщении, что это был "был полный отстой", но от разделения на части людям лучше не стало. Иной вопрос, возможно ли было этого избежать? Наверное возможно, но не во времена Горбачева, все прогнило и разрушилось раньше. Заслуга Горбачева в том, что неизбежный на тот момент распад произошел мирно и почти бескровно. Это не было оценено тогда, что ж сейчас мы видим худший сценарий и это только начало... А Китай так себе пример. Если Вы за социалистические ценности, то Вам бы там не понравилось. Это точно.
Soviet Union was collapsing much before Gorbatchov era. He, Gorbatchov, just heritate it. Some people had good memories because they where young at the time - we all have good memories of our childwood... But the true life was miserable ,compared to the large majority of western countries. Also, there was a big difference between people filiated on the only one politic party, or not. There was a very different treatment. And, at the time, if you wouln`t agree with the line of the government you would be arrest for many years in prison, usually considered a foreign agent working for the enemy ( the eternel enemy ). Amazingly, it sounds exactly like the today`s Russian Federation. For the defenders o f the Soviet Union, one simply question : why millions wanted to emigrate to the west countries for a better life and noone would emigrate to the Soviet Union ? The answer is there, isn`t it ? Unless all that people, emigrating during decades, were suffering of masochism... Please ,defenders of Comunism and the Soviet Union, come to the reality.
Throughout the 20th century there were several massive waves of migration from the West to the USSR. First the Italians and Spaniards, then the Armenians from Greece and Turkey, then American farmers and specialists in the 30s, Jews and so on. Today, the Russian Federation is at the same level as Germany in terms of the number of migrants and is second only to the United States.
@@maestro6458 "...Throughout the 20th century there were several massive waves of migration from the West to the USSR. ..." There were many people who initially found this communist experiment interesting, but after a few years it became clear that it wasn't working. The communists had to close their borders relatively quickly and thus prevent people from emigrating. The fact that one's own citizens are shot at just because they wanted to leave the country is an absurdity that only existed in these communist countries and still exists today. North Korea would immediately be empty if the borders were opened.
What is the difference between those who believed in a communist paradise and those who believed in a capitalist paradise? Because those who left for capitalism found themselves in a trap of mortgages and loans?@@mmitleidt7969
@@maestro6458 It would be great to compare what would happen if borders in USSR were open for people to leave anytime they want. I think we would see completely different "massive waves". Oh and regarding migrants, how much of these migrants are highly skilled workers like doctors, IT, engineers? And how much of them are construction workers, taxi drivers and cleaners from central asia? Don't you think this might be quite important factor?
@@maestro6458 fun fact about "massive waves". Daughter of Stalin migrated to USA and her daughter still lives there. His great-grandson from one of his sons lives in USA. Son of Khruschev - USA, his great-granddaughter from another son - USA. Granddaughter of Andropov - USA. Daughter of Gorbachev - Germany. Now tell me how many kids/grandkids of american presidents immigrated to Russia?
Soviet union mutch like an onion,looks ok from afar if u squint hard enough even seemed to have layers to it but if u come too close it will make u cry
The best joke that ever came out of the USSR during the Cold War: "The government pretends to pay us, and we pretend to work." The per capita GDP was even worse (compared to the rest of the industrialized world) than today. The bulk of GDP went into the arms race. Products were shoddier. Availability of consumer goods was a sad joke. Even availability of food staples was irregular. This idealised nostalgia says a great deal about the Russian mentality. They are fully satisfied to become another North Korea -- and are running headlong in that direction.
I loved it how it began with facts about the USSR and ended with blatant racism against Russians. Although nobody said all (or the majority of) the people on the video were Russian.
Should you call a process of an annihilation of a Russian culture, at the same time killing millions of Russian people and its most intelligent and proficient human resource in a civil war and terror, a Russification?
What foolishness. Who did the try to "Russify"^ Czechs, Slovaks, maybe Hungarians or Romanians? I can't see any traces of these attempts. What I see is all the attempts of the Soviet leadership to keep good relation with those "neighbours", even to the fault of the Soviet population itself. Even within the USSR Russians were considered 2nd class citizens as "former oppressors", and the efforts of so-called "korenization" ("rootification") were made to spread Ukrainian/Byelorussian/Kazakh languages in the areas where people spoke Russian. Even the later spread of the Russian language had nothing to do with "Russification", it was merely an instrument of the cosmopolitan Communist party to strengthen their control over the country.
@@bring_back_dislikes Yes, Russia relaxes and they end up like Libya. Libya gave up their plans to get nukes. A few years later when Moammar Gaddafi was sitting in the suburb on his granddaugthers 6 year birthday. All of a sudden a US warship in the mediterranean hit the house with rockets, possibly tomahawks. Gaddafi survived but the 6 year old child and his son in law did not. Few years later western media wrote "Gaddafi is bombing his own people, we must help them". Then they bombed Libya to the stoneage, took the gold reserve, put ISIS in control and had Gaddafi publicly murdered. Who is getting the Libyan oil and for what price I currently dont know. Russia also has oil which seems to be a very strong motivator for some.
Only a couple got close. The US outspent the USSR massively on strategic weapons and the USSR was a stinking corrupt mess, just like Russia is right now with it's thuggish govt. Do Russians REALLY not understand how you SHOULD be living right now? There is no reason you need to be an undeveloped nation. Very interesting to hear the one babushka's take on what she experienced personally. It actually sounded pretty much like the stories coming out. And it was so obvious that it wasn't great there, contrary to all these pie in the sky remembrances, because people were trying to escape it everywhere. They had physical and legal walls up everywhere to stop it, even when individual athletes, performers, etc were traveling elsewhere to compete, etc. The guys in coats shading the Baryshnikovs, etc were actually a joke here, but apparently that was 100% accurate,and many defectors took very real personal risks to get away. People that didn't live it don't really have any value toward speaking to whether is was better or worse when you think about it, because they don't know.
This is not an argument. 1) "The USSR was a stinking corrupt mess". Well, Ukraine, Kazakhstan, Russia etc. are still a stinking corrupt mess. Nothing much changed, really. 2) "Russia is right now with it's thuggish govt". If the USSR didn't collapse, many wars would not happen in the first place. Including war with Georgia, war with Ukraine, Nagorno-Karabach and so on. 3) "They had physical and legal walls" - well, that's one of the disadvantages of the USSR. But bad laws does not mean the country should collapse.
"There is no reason you need to be an undeveloped nation." Well, already Winston Churchill mentioned how Russia was targeted for "arrested development". The western advisors from the 1990's that created todays russian oligarchs is part of the same package.
@@edonveil9887 what parts grown out, for example? Just don't say "Baltic countries", because they are microscopic and only 2% of the USSR combined. Moldova? Poor. Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan? Poor and ruled by dictators. Belarus? Ha-ha. Kazakhstan? Ukraine?
Blyat, what nonsense the last woman is talking about, about free flats, free education. That was right. She simply does not understand that hundreds of thousands of flats have been given away for free. For what money? Where did the materials for the housing come from? People made bricks, cement, glue... They were paid wages. And everything becomes free housing? And in reality, you had to have lower wages to get something for free. Who paid for all those FREE things ? You see, the economy doesn't work like that.
People who always say that in ussr was perfect life just stupid or thinking about their childhood and student life. This state was the prison of nations, there was no freedom, no medicine, no education(only moscow and some universities in big cities, but there was no oppotunities to get there from small town or village) , no rights, they think it was good cause everything free, but there is no exsist such thing as "free smth" - its always cost money, yours or goverment's it doesnt matter, thats why 90x years gave ppl very poor life because ussr economy collapsed - there was no money to give you "everything free", ofc there is many reasons why ussr died, not just economic problems: wars, riots, first integrations in global world, political crysis are the same important as the economic collapse and it just came at once on the state which is not prepared for this P.s. Sory for bad eng
Big pros about the part that they're thinking about theirs childhood and student life at a time in first place apart of other facts. Also it's true that many of people doesn't even have opportunity to be a student if you are from small town, unless you trying insanely and stupidly hard or simply have connections. Many of people from such small cities or towns doesn't even end the school
That all combined does not justify breaking the country apart. I mean so what. China been communist and had a dictator Mao Zedung. Even if modern China does not provide liberal rights to people, they still don't fall apart 🙄
@@user-yj7um6hv1d Well tough modern China does not provide all of liberal rights to its citizens it's still like 2 different countries in many terms if we compare it with what China was like 50 years ago and what USSR on its 70-90s was. And even back then there is no reason to China for collapse since it was not a union. Yeah, China has a conflict with Taiwan but it's a whole different story
It's funny many Russians don't see any problem with a fact that the Soviet Union was a communist dictatorship ruled by one party. For instance the ordinary Soviet citizens had to have a passport in their own country and they couldn't move freely to other city to live. The KGB made sure that nobody said anything bad about the goverment. Besides so-called planned economy never really worked, and the Soviet leaders always preferred to have more tanks, guns, ships, aeroplanes and trains rather than have enough consumer goods in shops. Since the late 1970s Chinese Communists have been far more clever and they have developed free market economy in China instead of using too much money for weapons. As we can clearly seen even Putin's Russia hasn't really created new economic sectors but it has relied heavily on exporting oil and other raw materials.
Nothing's much changed since the Soviet union collapse. But now Russia is ruled by oligarchs dictatorship instead of communist party. They turned Russia to a poor third world country. Planned economy worked, many cities and factories were built in Soviet times. Now Russian population is shrinking, most of the factories are destroyed, villages and cities get abandoned.
Wait! what was so nice befor the collapse? did they really enjoy not being able to travel to the vest, or stand in line for bread and empty shelfs, or the privilege of waiting 10-20 years to buy a shitty car? what am i missing here?
I guess, the situation in Moscow has never been so tragic like in other countries and regions which belonged to USSR. So, sure, in Moskow locals miss the time when millions of people worked for them
How comes russians think it was a union where people lived in peace and kindness, while every single person i talked about it from their "member countries" are speaking about the complete opposite? 😂 Is it possible that muscovites lived on the back of other's pockets? 🤔 It's impressive that they're crying about other countries not wanting to serve them anymore after 30 years. 😂
Only a deeply traumatised individual can miss a totalitarian regime with zero freedom of speech, widespread poverty, lying 'Pravda' and the Iron Curtain.
yes, Moscovites are crying because they can not loot their colonies any more, this is why they are spending so much money and sending all their poor to die in Ukraine, they desperately want it back, it was their biggest and richest colony
I talked to a lot of former ethnic Koreans, from Uzbekistan. They told me during a friendly chat over coffee that they missed the Soviet Union. How could that be?, I asked. They told me while the USSR wasn't perfect, it kept the racism and ethnic hatred under control. Thought that would be helpful to add here, to get other viewpoints from far outside Moscow and the center of control during that time.
As a western going to the East (USSR ) in that time the country was very poor and years behind the West...I felt sorry for the people...but the arms race broke the USSR it ran out of money.. They had absolutely nothing, shops were empty ...I was in Berlin the day the wall came down and the East Germans came to the West to buy an Orange , and it they had the money some coloured bed sheets..most just walked around in disbelief at the items for sell in shops and cried..I lived through this time a part of History.we thought it was all over and Russia would be friends with the West...and it started to be so until Putin came into power.
I remember the smell of West German supermarkets, especially one HaWeGe in Heringen, Hesse. My uncle lived 300 m from the first fence at the inner German border in Thuringia. In 1990 I was 14 years old.
All true but don't forget that America supported Yeltsin and then Putin. They foolishly allowed him to take the Russian Presidency because they thought they could control him. They were wrong.
Many westerners did not understand what a shortage economy is and how it worked, I guess due to the lack of own experience. They were often mistaken by empty shop shelves. In East Germany nobody had to starve, but not everything was always available 24/7 - not like today when a bakery has to have the full range of products until 5 min before closing and then 50% is trown in the bin. Sure western supermarkets and the variety of goods were overwhelming ... but still until today I don't feel pleasure shopping in an American supermarket were you have in 20 meters 50 variations of the same product.
I worked with a Russian woman who grew up in the Soviet Union. She was very clear life in Russia was way better after the Soviet Union because theybwere more free. In High School I took German and my High School German teacher brought russian friends of her to USA and they came to our class. They were amazed they could go where they want and just go to the Grocery store and get what they want. 7:37 Instead of standing in a line.
My friend's grandfather was a salesman in an electronics store (TVs, boomboxes) in Amsterdam. He recalls groups of Russian tourists who asked whether the things they saw on the shelves and at the exhibition could be bought. And what conditions must be met (special permit, certificate of preferred profession, etc.). When they heard that they just had to pay, they couldn't believe it. They kept asking questions. They asked, among other things, whether they could buy only one cassette tape or if they could buy more. They suspected that the goods on the shelves were some kind of staging (which was the norm in the USSR).
This was not the norm in the USSR, as the government of the last years of its existence distorted the attitude of the very essence of socialist relations to labor, to consumer goods and created conditions for shortages - in order to create distrust in the system, so that during the transition to “market relations” the population would not resist.@@mpingo91
I lived in the Soviet Union and I can compare socialism and capitalism. I prefer to stand in a line for a good , organic food than to buy a chemical food in a beautiful wrapper. Soviet food was better. It had control and excellent Soviet food standards. For example shelf life of milk was 2- 3 days. Drinks ( like lemonade) - 7 days. Beer - 7 days. Soviets never used plastic. Only glass bottles.
"It was great, as long as you didn't get murdered in the purges or sent to the gulags. It was a time when everyone was equal but of course, some were more equal than others...."
Hey Daniil, you should ask ppl what they think about Hamas' delegation visit to Moscow alongside an Iranian one. Considering Russia's history of wars against Islamic extremists it might be interesting to hear what the common folks think about this new "alliance".
I don't see any problem with it. Any organization that does not pose a threat to Russia is welcomed here. Both HAMAS and Hezbolla, unlike the US, Germany, UK etc never stole any Russian assets, never sanctioned Russia, never supplied weapons against Russian people, never blew up any pipelines or bridges in a futile attempt to disrupt logistics. That's why we don't recognize them as terrorists. We cooperate with them because among hostages there are Russian people too. What about anyone else... well, that's an American/European/Israeli problem not ours.
So no economic problems then? And all of the countries storming out of the USSR the milisecond they saw a half-chance although it was a peaceful paradise where everyone live happily ever after?
That's absurd. The idea that to switch from communism to capitalism, you need to break the country apart. I mean, yes, maybe we had economic problems (who doesn't?). By your logic, the US with its debt of $45 trillion dollars should break into pieces because it has economic problems? That's insane!
The end of the Soviet Union On August 19, 1991, it was announced from Moscow that Gorbachev had been deposed as President of the Soviet Union. Nine people had taken over power. The coup plotters said they wanted to stop the collapse of the Soviet Union. However, it turned out that the army supported Gorbachev. In addition, Boris Yeltsin - a former high-ranking party member - a central figure in the resistance to the coup plotters. The coup failed. The coup came to mean the end of the Communist Party and the Soviet Union as a state. It turned out that the coup plotters accelerated the development they tried to prevent. More and more states declared independence despite Gorbachev's refusal to accept the dissolution of the Soviet Union. On December 25, 1991, Gorbachev resigned as President of the Soviet Union. The Soviet Union no longer existed. A new Russia When the Soviet Union fell, the country of Russia arose again as its own independent state. The first president of the new Russia was Boris Yeltsin. As the leader of Russia, Boris Yeltsin tried to change the economic system. State property began to be sold off to private individuals. In the fall of 1993, Yeltsin decided that the land would be privatized. Yeltsin had had problems with it in parliament and in October 1993 some MPs occupied the Russian parliament. Extensive fighting took place inside Moscow before the rebellion was put down. Yeltsin was succeeded on 7 May 2000 by Vladimir Putin as President of Russia. The death of a superpower When Mikhail Gorbachev took over power in the Soviet Union in 1985, the country was counted together with the United States as one of the world's two superpowers. But the Soviet Union had major economic problems. Production had ground to a halt, and the arms race with the United States was costing more than the Soviet Union could afford. Gorbachev started a series of reforms. The United States and the Soviet Union gained friendly relations. At home, Gorbachev wanted to open up society and introduce increased democracy. The Soviet Union consisted of 15 sub-republics; Russia was by far the biggest. The new openness meant that some republics, especially Lithuania, demanded increased independence. More republics followed. Many conservative communists began to fear the collapse of the Soviet Union. In August 1991, conservative communists attempted to overthrow Gorbachev in a coup. A few days later, he was to sign an agreement that gave the republics greater independence, and the coup plotters wanted to stop that. But the coup failed, mainly through the opposition of Russian President Boris Yeltsin. The Baltic states declared themselves independent, and Moscow recognized their independence. In December 1991, Yeltsin, together with the presidents of Belarus (now Belarus) and Ukraine, declared the dissolution of the Soviet Union. Instead there were 15 independent countries. They would cooperate in the organization OSS, the Commonwealth of Independent States. With the stroke of a pen, a superpower was dissolved! Ironically, the coup plotters in 1991 accelerated the development they tried to stop. OSS remained mainly on paper, and by the end of the 1990s the organization was almost forgotten.
It wasn't much of superpower in that decade anyway. You can't claim to be a superpower, when people don't have food and other necessities. It's as much superpower as something like Kenya.
@@MJ-uk6luAnyone with a large strategic nuclear arsenal and the ability to mess around in other countries can be considered a superpower, regardless of how the folks at home live.
@@teresabenson3385 Kazakhstan became a Union Republic of the Soviet Union in 1936. Forced collectivization of livestock farming in the 1930s led to hundreds of thousands of Kazakhs starving to death. Under Soviet leader Josef Stalin, entire ethnic groups were deported to Kazakhstan from other parts of the country. Upon the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991, Kazakhstan became an independent state with Nursultan Nazarbayev as president. He ruled the country with an iron fist until 2019, when his handpicked successor Kasym-Zjomart Tokayev took over.
Gorbachev didn't seem too popular, which seems unjust because he tried to do the right thing. Old ladies saying how great the USSR was, despite the fact they were aware of the arrests, widespread persecution and dissidents being locked in psychiatric hospitals. Not very caring for their fellow man, are they?
I grew up in Soviet Union. We were arm, we got 1,5 kg meat pro week for our Familie. There were no enough rooms for all person in our little flat. The bus never come, I have to wait for it for hours. You could not move somewhere: The women have to work for years together with the Ex-husband in one firm and leaved in the same flat, as it was impossible to change something….
А сейчас у людей проблем нет вообще с жильем. Ипотечное рабство. Напишите иностранцами процент ипотеки . Это не их 5 процентов. У всех членов семьи по комнате.😂 Мясо сейчас и ечть то страшно. И там химия. Моя семья нормально питалась. Если совсем прям надо было , то у деревенских брали. У вас что отец пил что-ли? Так в СССР жили только семьи с пьющим отцом.
The name Alisker Sultanovich, the PhD guy, doesn’t sound Russian to me. And a person like him is telling us that the nationalities had a good life in the USSR 🙄 The coup against Gorbachev was on 1991 August 19. All Soviet Republics declared their independence during August-September, Estonia the very next day, on August 20 😊 This is how well “they lived together in peace and kindness.”
Lithuania broke away before the Soviet Union formally collapsed. We declared the reestablishment of our independence on 11 March 1990. Of course, Soviets didn't like that and sent their brotherly tanks to roll over civilians early in 1991. Gorbachev never managed to even apologise for that, supposedly it wasn't him, it was Politburo. We probably should be grateful for their kindness as they killed 'only' 14 people and injured about 800.
Funny how people who claim they ‘don’t follow politics’ when asked about current subjects, have a deep memory as it relates to the politics of the past…
There is not such thing as a "free apartment" or "free education"... it just means, that all citizens are forced to pay for these things independently of how much use the make of them. Giving in this way very extensive control over investment and spending to the state has always led to decay, every time it has been tried, not only in the Soviet Uniion. Because nobody is responsible, the quality of decisions is not good.. We, in the West, are also slowly sliding in this direction...
@@FloppaTheBased So how does it help then if this is centrally enforced? In actual fact, the supply of these "necessities" was far from equitable... children of the nomenklature had much better standards of living and prospects than ordinary citizens, and the overall level of wealth was low. Apart from the arbitrary power functionaries of the state wielded. To me it looks like willful blindness, not recognzing the many manifest side effects of investing these enormous economic powers in the state. What more evidence is needed than 70 years of murderous Soviet dictorship to prove this idea wrong?
@@dynamicfieldtheory7915 >children of nomenklature had much better standarts of living better job pays better. Nothing wrong with this >overall level of wealth was low House ownership is still over 80% in post-soviet countries even despite landlords slowly decreasing this number. what about the first economy of the world?😉 >murderous dictatorship well...😂ironic to hear this from american citizen. "gulags" and "deportarions" were inherent in the early years of USSR, in the late USSR it was just a history.
We never paid for education in the USSR. My parents lived in a village (they were classmates) and studied at universities for free. If you were an invalid or a person of a village or a person of not numerous nation ( Korean for example ) you could get a quota. So if you get minimum score , you enter the university. Social support. Not for all , for some only. For example Korean diaspora of that region could give only two quotas. After graduating universities Soviet people were distributed to any part of our huge country. We didn't like that. 😂😂😂 You had to work there for three years and only after these three years you could go anywhere of you wanted. My dad was sent to Northern Kazakhstan. It is Southern Siberia. Damn. It was so cold there. But he decided to stay and still lives here as he liked that land. He got a flat after 6 months, his organisation wanted to stay young specialists and tried to all for that. I miss USSR. ❤
Russia only understands cruelty. It has always been am empire of fists, weapons and guns, but not so much of wealth. Basically Mongolia, but more European and with cyrillic letters.
I visited often in Soviet times . These people have selective memories or are younger than depicted . There were nothing in the shops .not even biros . I used to be asked to pack them on my trips for handing out . The only reasonable shops were only open to foreigners and you had to use special certificates to buy the crap on sale . Only a few hotels and again foreigners only . It was dreadful and equally bad in Poland and China . I did one journey with a suitcase of biros to use as “trade” only to discover on arrival in Moscow that the command economy decided that month to pump out millions of ballpoints and my stash was worthless . I was told there was however a huge demand for Bath plugs . I had to plug my hotel room bath tub with copies of Pravda to retain the Luke warm water .
What is more important: sausage and a bathtub plug or free housing from the state?.. Ask this question in the West, and the majority would prefer to plug the bathtub with a newspaper than to pay a mortgage until retirement by overpaying 2-3 times.
@@maestro6458 As a person who lived in Soviet Union for 30+ years and 27 years in the US, I can respond. I'd rather prefer to pay with my own money. It is better than if someone else (the state) pays for my house with money stolen from me. Besides, it is not true that all could get a free apartment in the USSR. My family of five used to live a medium size 1 room, and we were even not eligible to be in a waiting list.
You pay with your "own money" as long as there is no crisis or armed conflict... In the 1930s, these “lovers of paying with their own” threw themselves out of windows or took on any menial job just to feed their children.@@LisaLitvak
Do you know the story of the hotel in Moscow built before the 1980 Olympics specifically for players of foreign sports teams? Among other things, the hotel was equipped with a large number of phones (this had a propaganda dimension for foreign guests). Before the athletes arrived for the Olympics, all the phones were stolen by local police officers!
@@maestro6458 It wasn't just the sausage that was missing. For bread and milk you had to get up very early and stand in line. Sweets, sensible soap, sensible toothpaste, medicines, toys, freezers and many everyday items were in short supply, not available at all or only available with connections. You had to wait many years to get a car. And then it was a piece of crap. And by the way, in the post-war West, even people with low incomes could afford large houses or apartments that were far more luxurious than the free apartments in those concrete blocks of the USSR.
The Soviet Union failed because its military spending trying to keep up with the American military bankrupted it. Russia has never been a producer of goods & services, only raw materials, and this has led to a depressed import-heavy economy that still exists to this day.
"To each their own" doesn't work very well, when some gremlins spread propaganda from Kremlin 24/7/365 and when they attack their neighbours and Russians as well.
@@maestro6458 My dad got a flat in 6 months after graduating his university. He and my mom were so happy. 😊 In the USSR after graduating you were to be distributed to some region and work there for 3 years. Only after that you can change your job. So my dad was sent to Northern Kazakhstan. Education and medicine were also for free. Gas , water and electricity were absolutely cheap. We didn't have water and gas meters. Only electric ones.
@@LisaLitvakDid you live in my country? They were for free!!!! Education and medicine were for free too. I was 7 when I got badly ill. I with my mom were sent to a sanatorium in Zheleznovodsk. My mom paid only for plane tickets. In the USSR kids , whi were less rhan 7 years old flied for free. In that sanatorium we BOTH had complete medical examination. Heart, teeth... all!!!!!! As medicine was for free , it wasn't business and Government was interested to have healthy citizens. It didn't want to pay much for us and preventing medicine was very popular in the Soviet Union.
A couple had it correct, but, omg, those who thought it was so good because everything was free failed to understand that "being free" was a main issue "why" it failed. The economy was horrible, Russia was going backwards not forwards, and the US was actually sending food to the largest food basket in the world, the USSR. Sad to see some in the US wanting to experiment with such a system. A system that has always failed across the world, in every instance it was tried.
In Lithuania many people are still thankful for the USSR. So many Lithuanians would have died at such an early age if Moscow had not saved them from so much butter and bacon!
I think people tend to forget about all the bad things in their Soviet past and remember only the positives. When you ask a 50 year old he or she will say everything was fine. Of course everything is fine when you are 18. I just finished school when the Soviet Union had collapsed. For me, all looked very nice back then but my parents did feel the economic collapse immediately. They were both engineers and we were considered a middle class family by Soviet standards. Our only source of income was my parents salary. We had our own 2-bedroom apartment but we could build it only because my grandparents helped. Yes, some people were getting apartments for free but there was a huge queue where the priority was given to those in need - single mothers with children, veterans, disabled, communist Party leaders etc. So, since we were not from these categories, we could not count on a free apartment in any reasonable time. We could not afford a car, for example. Food availability was much worse than today. Soviet service was a joke. We have some remnants of it even today here and there but thankfully it is fading away. Soviet Union collapsed not because of Gorbachev but because of the socialist paradigm suppressing private business and competition. It caused so many economic issues and disbalances that the failure of the state regime promoting it was only a question of time. Gorbachev and other party bosses were incapable and incompetent, yes, but they were only the symptoms, not the root cause of the failure. They were acting by Lenin books but these books did not give any answer on what to do when the world changed.
Apart from the minority like yourself, most Russians cannot fathom any of those processes and just look directly to the top. USSR collapsed -- therefore it was Gorbachev. Now we have food in the shops (for now), so it's thanks to Putin. Russia has always been a Tsardom, and the serfs still are serfs, even dressed up in western clothes and with "educations."
And here I was thinking the soviet union collapsed under the weight of its own enormous military spending. Also, as a Ukrainian subject of the former USSR, it wasn't actually all that great.
The US spends more tax money on military than the next several biggest countries combined, and they're doing fine. Soviet Union was larger that the US, but the US had almost double the GDP of Soviet Union even back then. I don't believe military spending was the downfall of Soviet Union.
@@edmis90 Ya...there's the difference between capitalism and communism. We could afford it, they couldn't. Also a lesson for another time in soft power vs hard power.
As a person from a country formerly occupied by soviet union I definitely agree with you. Don’t miss economic poverty, corruption and oppression. Also can’t wait until Ukraine is admitted to EU and is rebuilt.
@@cud0s The difference between being a kid in Ukraine under russian boots and a kid in our adopted Canada was like moving to a utopian planet after having an apartment in Hell.
The view of the situation through a Moscow prism doesn't tell the whole story. People complain that products have disappeared from the stores. In Siberia, where my family came from, the stores where already empty 10 years prior to that.
Yeah I was waiting for somebody to say it.. Soviet Moscow was one thing, but Soviet Siberia, Soviet Kalingrad, Soviet Georgia or Soviet Estonia were different stories again.
Not bad. We had good , happy and simple life. No rich, no luxury and no poor , no unemployed. Middle class. You could be put to prison of you don't work in the USSR! 😂 All Soviets were obliged to work except women , who wanted to look after their kids.
Our system has minuses but pluses it had much more. Education and medicine were really for free. And as medicine wasn't business , doctors were really professional and they did all for your health. At present it is business.😢
It’s easy to say that they are all brainwashed nuts, but a lot of us tend to look back on our ‘good old days’ as well. The hard fact is that our quality of life has improved significantly over the past thirty years and this is probably more so in Russia as they were so far behind the western world before Gorbachev took office. Thus my view is that while we can’t simply discard how some of the older generation people of Russia may feel, we need to make sure that history is depicted in a way that perception is relative. At the end of the day, we are all living a better life than any medieval aristocrat. I hope I am making some sense.
It makes sense till you realise that generation also right now simply refuses to acknowledge what russia is doing. We may have warm nostalgic feels that cloud our judgement of the past. All we need to do is to think a bit deeper and we start remembering it all more properly. They however have fabricated a whole alternate reality in which all the bad never even happened, in which they are a superior people that has saved the world countless times and they are happy to continue to ostrich out their lifes. Im not going to defend that as if its anywhere near similar. Many of them are worse than brainwashed nuts. And dont start about 'afghanistan iraq blabla the western civilians let that happen as well'. (We massively protested western atrocities though) These people are choosing to ignore/celebrate a genocide of a people they claimed were their brothers since birth. So what are they? Brainwashed nuts, or evil?
It is indeed. I could relate very much with the people whose reaction was that they would like to go back to their youth. I was 17, and living in a tiny village in India when the Soviet Union collapsed. Most of my high school classmates are in touch with each other, and the only reason seems to be that these other middle-aged people remind them of their youth.
Fascinating how the Russian memories of the USSR are much warmer than those you’ll find in the countries forced to be part of it.
I know people in Slovakia who are nostalgic for the communist era.
They miss their young age. @@JamesO512
@@JamesO512 Лол. Какой коммунизм, если коммунизма никогда не было? Теоретически коммунизма можно достичь только как минимум в масштабах континента, а не одной отдельно взятой страны.
Not all of them. Watch the last instalment of the 1420 channel and you will see a Russian babushka about half way through telling it exactly as it was, buying a house in the country, fleeing Moscow toward the fall, because food was becoming impossible to fine. She then grew her own.
There are others going back through the months, but most have this pie in the sky nostalgic version that is a fantasy, and I expect for a VERY few, it was quite good, as well, the ultra elite.govt. Just look at the inside of the Kremlin and those palaces. They literally lived like kings, still do, which Russia resides just about exactly midway down the list of countries by per Capita income, meaning they are a developing nation, not a developed one, even now.
Might explain why so much in Russia was "free." Easily to give the illusion of a great and prosperous society when you take from others.
We got a group of visitors from Estonia to Finland in the late 80’s. They had a KGB officer who was guarding them and making sure nobody escapes. But one did escape the group and ended up in Sweden. That’s how wonderful and free the ussr was. And now we are in the EU and we can move anywhere in the EU freely.
You can visit outside EU as well, what was hard or almost impossible in soviet times
Nah, almost nobody wanted to escape, just ask the guy about 20 comments up. :-) If that was true, it was amazing how the Baryshnikov's, etc ALL had handlers, wasn't it? My wife lived in Sweden for a few years as a kid when her dad was working at the embassy. She remembers those as very fond times. Isn't it amazing how many countries have to build walls to keep people out, and countries like the USSR have (had in that case) to build them to keep people in. Kind of says it right there. Reagan, "Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this (Berlin) wall".
Soon as Ukraine left I guess that was the finish Ukraine was the backbone of the Soviet Union
@@MenBehavingBadly.why was Ukraine the backbone?
@@flopunkt3665 Ukrainian men and women built stronger then these feeble Russians pretending to be soviet strong men
I was a teenager growing up in Canada when Gorbachev was promoting the ideas of "glasnost" and "perestroika". I do not know what Russians think of that, but in North America, we were really hoping that Russia would embrace democracy and join North America and Europe as equal trading partners. We all had great hope for Russia as a friend. The perception from our side of the pond is that it was the corruption of the Russian oligarchs that siphoned wealth from the Russian nation and its people. It is sad to see that Mikhail Gorbachev is thought of as the scapegoat when it seems obvious to us that Russian oligarchs and the ruling class are more likely to blame.
The irony is that all those corrupted oligarchs are from Russian Jewish and Ukrainian diaspora. People like Khodorkovsky who helped to defraud the country and fool a lot of citizens before he ran to the the West and he isn’t the only one like that now preaching there moral values.
Pretty hilarious. Russian oppression of the neighbouring states was just one big happy motherland. Waiting years for an apartment or a car was prosperity. The gulags & KGB are forgotten. The collapsed economy isn't proof central control doesn't work. It's that traitor, Gorbachev (+ America hates us).
What does collapse of the USSR has to do with corruption? Both Ukraine and Russia are still quite corrupt countries, even after the fall of the USSR. According to corruption perception index, Ukraine is 116 of 180, Russia is 137 of 180, Kazakhstan is 101 of 180 etc. No great improvements been made after the USSR. Moreover, oligarchs appeared. These are basically businessmen who bought state owned property for mere pennies and made a fortune.
Do you know who are "oligarchs"? The USSR owned ~120,000 enterprises (factories, mines, farms etc.). During the transition from communism to capitalism all of it been sold for mere pennies, way below its market value. 120 thousand factories sold for $16,9 billion dollars total. Or about ~$140,000 per a factory. This way, people who bought oil refineries, aluminum smelters, metal processing factories etc. became so called "oligarchs". This phenomenon exists everywhere in post-Soviet countries, including Ukraine. Maybe except for Baltic countries, simply because there are no resources there.
UNDERSTATEMENT.
Coming from an ex soviet union country, I am happy we gained independency and are deciding by ourselves what is our future
И мы много вы там решили? Или ща вас олигархи и буржуи решают? Все бывшие республики СССР нищие.
@@helloworld-ti5zs maybe you should take a deeper glance at former republics of ussr sometimes, i'm sure you will be surprised how independent and wealthy they are today.
@@rakanishu531Ну и насколько они богаты?
@@user-ok8uv3gc7k Less well off than maybe a western European and certainly an American, but moving up fast and when they get up in the morning, they don't have to worry about what they say and they see differing opinions on the TV and don't have to be worried about being conscripted into an army and being thrown like "meat" (Russian soldiers name for themselves) into the grinder of Ukraine. AND, they know their children will be better off than they are and their children even better...
@@Redfour5Если бы СССР не распался не этой ситуацией с Украиной не многих других войн не было, И да в большинстве постсоветских стран диктатура и не о каком развитие речи не идëт
As a russian citizen I can say that most of the people who are nostalgic for the Soviet Union in fact are nostalgic about their youth. They simply forgot about many features of life in the USSR.
I am from Finland and I visited Leningrad on 1984 if i remember right, i was about 15years old back then, it was nice city to visit but people wanted to buy my clothes on street as they were western style, so nice place to visit but maybe there was clear reasons why it collapsed.
Not just their youth as in being youthful, but their youth as in even more do than now being completely oblivious and masters of digging heads in the sand. Even now they push away anything and everything negative. They did then as well. ' Oh we are bombing our civilian brethren and NOT freeing them from nazis? Uhh.. i choose to not acknowledge that and go happily forward with my vodka.' If they can pretend nothing bad is happening now, imagine the things they chose to 'forget' during their whole lifes.
I assume you were born in Russia and not USSR?
People forget fast, and romantisized thé past. It is a survival mechanism
Это единственно верный ответ. Вспоминается знаменитый анекдот про деда и внука о том, что было хорошего при Сталине...
That's true about anyone. I am sure the poor kids living in the slums of Haiti, Brazil or Nigeria will also tell you of fond memories as kids. Your argument is stale.
I did not live in the USSR but in a satellite state. The apartments were relatively cheap, but you had to wait for years for the so-called bribe allocation and connections within the party made the process easier and we are not talking about ownership of the property, but long-term use. Traveling abroad, you had to get permission from the authorities, including the political police, you didn't have your passport at home, you had to return it every time, the long and complicated process was helped by the same thing as before. A refrigerator, TV, washing machine, etc. were luxury goods that you often had to wait for years for. The economic situation is characterized by periods of crisis interspersed with smaller crises - which usually ended with workers' protests, which the authorities bloodily suppressed by shooting workers, using tanks, militia, etc. Virtually all the protests were related to the increase in food prices - which were set centrally. The card system operated practically throughout the so-called socialism, to buy anything you had to wait in queues, often for many hours, you bought what was on sale and not what you needed - hence many older people have the habit of accumulating various things. Fruits such as oranges were a delicacy that cost a lot and usually appeared before Christmas. But the shortage concerned practically everything - clothes, building materials, etc. - the system was not economically efficient. Censorship was an official state office, and they decided what could be printed, shown on the radio, theater, and TV. Everything for public consumption, all culture and art, books, films, song lyrics and everything else had to be approved by the state. I could go on for a long time, but it wasn't the best system to live in, the state controlled absolutely everything.
You described it very well.
Yes it is. Thank you for the life lesson.... Saludos desde Andalucía en España 🇪🇸
Great points. In a centrally controlled economy, all success, and all failure, is divided equally among the people. If the state tells too many farmers to grow potatoes, the potatoes rot, the workers get paid. If a capitalist farmer grows potatoes in a bad year, the farmer takes the hit, not the country. In a good year, the farmer makes out like a bandit. So what do farmers do? They try not to make big mistakes!
You have listed the difficulties that the USSR experienced, apartments were given with a long break, not because there was someone's malicious intent, but because they did not have time to build them, but in this case there was an alternative, cooperative apartments were built (when you invested your funds for construction) or were built independently for a plot allocated for you. You write that it was not enough , but be objective , the USSR suffered the largest war in the history of mankind , as a result of which it lost 40% of industry , 2,000 cities were in ruins , 60,000 villages were burned , and comparing the USSR with the USA . Even before the war, the United States surpassed the USSR in many respects, and after the war, the United States doubled its GDP. The shortage of goods in the USSR is in no way connected with the construction of socialism in the USSR (for example , China ) , in this case there are many reasons from the arms race to Khrushchev 's short - sighted and flawed policy . You write about the Iron Curtain , but the USSR did not introduce it and did not seek to withdraw from the global economy , the curtain was lowered by the capitalist countries after the famous speech of Churchell in 1947 , in Fulton .
@@user-qj5dj5hk1y Досить вже брехати і все списувати на другу світову війну. Хочеш повернення в срср? Збирай однодумців і прошу до колгоспу. Але ви любителі срср тільки язиками здатні плескати. It is enough to lie and write everything off to the Second World War. Do you want to return to the USSR? Gather like-minded people and ask to the collective farm. But you fans of the USSR can only clap with your tongues.
Here in Berlin I ride my bike to work every day. My path leads from the former American sector via the former Soviet sector to the former American sector. I cross the former death strip at the Wall four times every day. In 1989 I would have been shot immediately on this route. I am grateful to the revolutionaries from the GDR and also to Gorbachev for allowing the unjust state of the GDR to collapse and for allowing me to move freely today.
Germany was better off before 1990. The wall came down only to make massimmigration and the rest of the current madness possible.
@@zdf4308explain how germany is responsible for other countries territorial integrity? Are any of that list a german protectorate?
It the took the sacrifice and deaths of millions of allied solders to free Germany from its elected Government and then a huge amount of resources and treasure and sacrifice to ensure its security for the next 45 years and then the political support and international institutions that we set up to make Germany a successful modern democracy. We are asking that Germany provide a tiny amount of that support to Eastern Europe in their defense against Russia.@@puraLusa
@MrNevl: None of what you said shows Germany being responsible, in any way, for the problems of your country. Quit blaming others, put your country on YOUR back, and make your own country a great one. It already has great people in it, so let them shine.
@@MrNevl 1. allies went when they felt themselves atacked, not to liberate any german
2. Rebuilt of germany was of usa interest as to showcase capitalism vs comunism - soviets wanted to do the same, were just incompetent + allies went for the usage of showcase - not out heart but out of pure interest of proving comunism wrong path in a visible manner for the other side (no internet then) - cold war tactics, cold war investment.
3. Germans were smart enough to use the sistem to their advantage and use the rebuild to rebuild the economy as they already had the brains: nazi friendly companies didn't go away, just reinvent themselves.
In conclusion, allies liberated cause there was a war not having a care of what would be of germany in the future to the point it was very accepted to sever a capital in half.
Germany was used not helped - they just outsmarted their users.
"The economy is not yet stable". Boy do I have bad news for you.
My wife grew up in the Soviet Union. She has nothing good to say about it. Citizens waited half their life in lines just to get basic essentials. If one went to buy shoes, they grabbed whatever was available even if it was not the right size. Then one would trade with someone else for a pair of shoes that fit. And the thing that really shocked me is that basic feminine products like tampons and sanitary pads did not exist. The Soviet Government didn’t think products for women were important enough for their 5 year economic plan. Soviet Union was a joke.
Yes, the Soviet Union was a joke. Workers had to wait 10 years to buy a car. But if you had connections with officals, you could buy it in 1 day. Because of that, a successful car owner would sell his car at the same price he purchased 10 years ago, and with that money he would buy a new one. 😊
I didn't have tampons or pads either in 1990s as a teenage girl, but I was really happy in Russia😊, because I had my family and friends. That is all. And yes, we were poor, but I still was happy)))
All are true at the same time
The Russian military did not issue socks until 2012. And I think they went back to not issuing socks.
I went to high school in the 80's with some people who came from behind the Iron Curtain. They Lithuanian twins had no sense of humor. The Russian, who did grow up here, was fun to hang around with. And none of their families would have gone back.
@@annaignatochkina3438 I'm sure that's true because you had friends and family. But as a state, it wasn't the best.
"It was one huge motherland where people lived in peace and kindness." Tell that to every former Soviet colony in Eastern Europe who managed to crawl out from under the rock of Russian political oppression and economic servitude, and escape to democracy and an economic rebirth as EU members.
Why does she think the other states broke off
Couldn't have been that good except for a deluded person who had it nice
The moment the Iron Curtain came down, Poland, Hungary, and Czechoslovakia got together and petitioned NATO for membership. The second they could, they ran to the arms of the "enemy" to be safe from Russia.
EU will collapse too, its just matter of time
Since 1989 Polish economy grew 1000% .
@@recoil53 Wonder why, big bad Russia would never invade would they? 💀
Nostalgia for an ideology that was never more than a pretext for authoritarianism, from people who've spent their whole lives deliberately not noticing anything political or thinking about anything uncomfortable.
Great comment, very succinct.
"Nostalgia for an ideology that was never more than a pretext for authoritarianism"
So you're denying that many people believed in socialism?
What a stupid, ignorant thing to say.
@@billyconnelly3568 You can be both socialist and authoritarian.
You absolutely can give free healthcare, free education or free whatever , while forcing people to agree with you, send to gulags those who don't and keep the power for yourself for decades.
@@broncotiny8191Well you can have both Capitalism and Authoritarianism and Plutocracy like in the USA.
You can be controlled by the government, being shot in schools and still have to pay obscene amounts for education and medical.
@@broncotiny8191
I don't consider the soviet system socialist, and (not but) I accept that a system can at once provide a suite of benefits and still be authoritarian.
However, the original poster said the Russians speaking in this clip are expressing nostalgia for an ideology that was never more than a *pretext* for authoritarianism. That's what I'm contesting. The vast majority of socialists want--and have historically wanted--to create a world in which the masses are able to be self-actualized. I've never met a socialist who wanted socialism simply as a cat's paw for authoritarianism.
The right question is not if Russia wants Soviet Union back, but if the former Soviet States want to be part of it again ! You know the obvious answer ...
Asking an old Russian if he wants the USSR back is like asking an old Englishman if he wants the Empire back. That sentiment brought us Brexit, ... so obvious, indeed.
Here are two different qiestions. To they want to be independent. Offcourse. And here is the other more complicated question: do they want todays political system and capitalism, or they want socialism, or maybe something in between. Here you wouldn't get all the same answears.
@@andrekoster9708 it's quite obvious to me that many Russians want the USSR back just because it was a world superpower, not really because of communism. The experiment so-strongly wanted by Vladimir Lenin turned out to be a monument to far-right ultranationalism.
@@andrekoster9708not quite.
There's quite a scaled difference between reliving an empire and leaving the European Union. That being said, no one in the UK wants the commonwealth empire back except for maybe a tiny minority. As opposed to the split difference to pro EU and anti EU views which is a different scale.
That's called democracy!
@@andrejpriterznik4034
In my opinion, it's good that they don't know that they simply went bankrupt. They don't learn from mistakes.
🤦♂️
Arms race bankrupted them because communism and socialism doesn't work. Ronald Reagan crushed them with the might of capitalism.
Don't worry they wont learn from mistakes.
Forever stupid 🤷
It's not like they went bankrupt, but rather went out of production, which trigerred even worse industrial collapse.
"People lived in peace and kindness" said one of the speakers.
Dear russians other countries don't want your "peace and kindness"
Dear "other countries", we don't care
It seems like you need some good ol' freedom 🦅🦅🦅🦅🦅🦅🦅🦅🦅🦅🦅
‘…of course things were better in the Soviet Union, we weren’t allowed to travel anywhere, bicycles were made of cement, no one had a car, you lined up all day for one rubber boot, or a single cabbage, and you had to put your name on a waiting list for ten years to buy a small black and white television….it was paradise…’
I see a common theme. Many want to go back solely because they were young and had less worries even in reality it may have been far worse
Benefits (reduces overall stress for ordinary person):
1) No need to worry about being unemployed
2) No need to worry about being homeless (employed = employer must provide at least a dorm at the start and then a house/apartment)
3) No need to worry about basic food
4) No need to worry about education
5) No need to worry about basic healthcare
6) Other small things that remove pressure (stress) that existed and exists in other countries
So 'less worries' is a fact (on a basic level: you'll have a job, you'll have a roof, you'll be fed, you'll get education, you'll be treated in a hospital).
Traveling abroad isn't a basic thing that a person needs (most people never travel abroad in their lives [although my parents and mother's relatives traveled to warsaw pact countries because it was relatively cheap to travel between warsaw pact countries]).
Closer you get to the 90th worse things become (carts with rotten chicken, grains and stuff [could've been made on purpose to show rapid collapse and ignite active people. rate of decline didn't match with what was happening]).
So apart from that basic list most things were very bad or not good enough (people mentioned some things in comments).
Some places were better in some aspects but worse in others. But basic list sets a level that you can get with minimal effort.
To get more - have to work smart/pick better paying jobs (just like under capitalism but with limitations). Most people want to put minimal effort and then complain that system is bad when other people also put minimal effort and produce shit.
In late USSR proper top-down quality control existed only in military production (afaik in civilian area Khrushchev gave it away to producers, making it useless [it's like big pharma regulating itself, retarded]).
No Gorbachev didn’t start Afghanistan….he ended it. Some of these crazies blame the west, blame Gorbachev ect….always finger pointing and looking for scapegoats. How about spending insane amounts on weapons and wars that couldn’t be sustained under a communist economy…..Chernobyl?? These disgruntled folk looking outwards instead of inwards for the root cause. Everything has a beginning and an end. Nothing lasts forever. Learn from your own mistakes and failures so you learn from them and don’t repeat them.
100%
Thanks for mentioning Chernobyl also!
Yes, Chernobyl was the hammer that cracked the old soviet system withstand its culture cover up and bury information.
That’s one thing from these videos that’s so consistent, blaming others and never taking accountability for anything. It’s usually blame America and the West.
They old ones don't even see the irony of being in a shopping district that is 100X wealthier and better stocked than the empty Russian stores of their youth while saying how great the USSR was.
The US makes a great bogeyman for everybody to avoid confronting their own issues. Runaway inflation in Brazil? The US. Regional war in Africa? US conspiracy. All the IMF money that was supposed to develop roads and infrastructure gone? US/colonialism.
I do appreciate the damage done historically by Western policies, but half these issues would be solved if countries confronted their own corruption and built something other than a dictator's palace.
Горбачева сделали козлом отпущения конечно! Он не святой и не самый умный правитель, но вот даже он выглядит умнее на фоне людей, которые считают, что один человек способен развалить целую страну за небольшой срок своего правления
Yeah, believing a single cause or a person is silly. So many causes. In fact, Gorbachev tried hard to keep USSR together. He even went in with military in several countries.
Развал СССР начался не с Горбачёва , а с хрущёвской не дальновидной политики . Горбачёв умышлено или не умышлено , но поставил точку в развале страны . Он устроил череду перемен чем выбил "клинья " которые обеспечивали устойчивость страны.
@@user-qj5dj5hk1y совок развалился, потому что все это не работает. Ты винишь хрущева? А то что сралин завалил уйму народа до войны и после? Нет?
@@user-qj5dj5hk1y"клинья": цензура, КГБ, лагеря и т.д.
@@bring_back_dislikesИ , что ? В любой стране есть и разведка и исправительные учреждения и цензура . На счёт "клиньев " в моём комментарии я имел совсем другое.
It seems to me that most of these people took the question, "would you like to bring the USSR back?" as "would you like to be young again?"
No. They miss their motherland. You are wrong.
I remember the Soviet Union and miss it too.
I got tired to pay much money for medicine, for sports sections of my kids . In the USSR my parents paid only for my musical school and for my summer camp. The prices were cheap though. For a month I rested in a camp almost for free.
As for the musical school my mom said that piano lessons were expensive. I learned to play dombra. It was cheap. 15 rubles a year. My dad's salary was 400 rubles a month.
They look upon Stalin more favorably than Gorbachev, that's wild
I think that fully explains the main problem in Russia.
the Russian brain is not like yours
Fantastic observation!
Who in this video stated that?
I've never heard any Russian say a good thing about Gorbachev...but I've heard lots of criticism. Stalin...not so much.
It's easy. Millions of people like me unscrewed one screw every day. And one day this entire structure called the USSR collapsed. You can blame Gorbachev, Reagan, the evil west, but the truth is that ordinary people did not want to live in the eternal Matrix of Soviet socialism.
No empire lasts forever.
I don't see how it's connected. What does socialism (economic structure) has to do with the USSR (political structure)? 🤔
@@user-yj7um6hv1dthe political stracture was built to enable the economic stracture being socialism . Its all in marx's manifest
The political structure and economic structure are interconnected. The economic processes is a tool of the political structure. They reinforce each other.
The Soviet Union collapsed during the Bush administration, not Reagan
@@Rob-metoo527due to the policies of the Reagan/Bush administration
Alishker Sultanovich with his PhD says the USSR "was one huge motherland where people lived in peace and kindness." What kind of pathetic PhD could this man possibly have?
Piled Higher and Deeper.
I believe the PhD claim is just bs. I checked his name in google scholar, both in latin and cyrillic letters, and there is no evidence of any scholar by that name, let alone any PhD dissertations.
You could be Alishker, if you were at his place. Don't believe in your superiority.
beacause it is true. Compare to now. Bunch of nationalists preaching hate from TV and internet in all of Eastern Europe. Soviet Union kept region stable and prosperous while it existed and stumped down reactonary degeneracy.
Ah yes, the imperialists waxing nostalgic about how great their empire was and it was only the traitors and jealous foreign powers that were against it.
That's not the point of people opinion on USSR in this video lol, mostly it based on childhood memories and comparison of their life before destructive hell of what 90s was
Empires usually have relatively wealthy capital and other regions much poorer.
You are the Imperialists Spock! Trying to expand your Universe through logic! Most Earth folk don't understand Spock logic 👊🍺
Well since all Empires collapse I think the West is heading towards it as you speak.
@@verar2247 The destructive hell was because of Russians and no one else. They also tried to keep under control those countries that shared the destructive hell. After 2005 my country (that was under Moscow influence) escaped Russia and reconstruction started.
The soviet union was more or less bankrupt in the 1980s..Gorbachov tried to revert this,but it was too much effort too late,and people didnt want to live under the Soviet system any longer...they wanted freedom !
But "freedom" (however we define it) does not me the splitting of a country into pieces. That's one of the reasons why many anticommunist Russian (such as myself) still lament the 1991. Nobody cares about the Soviet system (may it never return), but everyone cares about Russian territories split among the newly "independent" states most of which never existed before 1991.
During the Soviet Union many families lived in "kommunalkas" - large apartments stolen from the aristocrats, shared by many families: one room per family, shared kitchen, and often one single bathroom for 15-20 persons.. .A nightmare.. . No possibility to go abroad, empty shelves in stores, alcoholism was massive. Paradise indeed!
Before the communists came to power, people lived in the basements of these very apartments of aristocrats, and an apartment for an aristocrat’s family occupied the floor.
And it was the communists who organized the construction of houses for all citizens and passed them off as work for an enterprise or the state, and not for bank interest.
Better for them to be homeless while the aristocrats continue live in luxury I suppose?
@@Sankara561 they were not homeless. And yes, aristocrats could live in luxury or otherwise, they did it on their own money, inherited or earned.
Amazing! They feel bitterness towards the guy that brought more freedom to the people. Untill putler took it away again.(at least freedom of speech).
That's not freedom. What do you call "freedom"? Freedom from whom? From Russia? Well, Russia can't be free from Russia itself.
It is a bit more complicated than that
at least they dont support lgbt
japan is becoming terrible as well
Slavery runs deeply in their genes.
I'm not a fan of the Soviet Union (I'm glad it fell apart), but Gorbachev was not as good as Westerners think he is. Gorbachev also had his own plans, and he initially only wanted to make a semblance of change (because then the people had a request for change that could not be ignored), only because he began to give freedom, since the people began to put pressure on him. He was the same imperialist and autocrat as Putin, because, for example, he did not want to recognize the independence of the Baltic republics, resisted this in every possible way, and even sent his army there to suppress protest sentiments (for which Gorbachev is deservedly not liked in these countries). But he himself wanted to remain in power just like Brezhniv, and was against the elections, and held out until the last, until other people eliminated him. This is the reason why Gorbachev in Russia is not liked even by those who during perestroika really wanted change and sought to that.
There was a time at the beginning of the Khrushchev era when the Soviets genuinely believed that they had come through all the horrors of the preceding decades and finally they would overtake the West in living standards. They actually had some of the brightest minds in the country, mathematicians, economists etc. working on this project. But by the end of Khrushchev's presidency it was obvious that the social experiment that was started by Lenin had failed. They can blame Gorbachev or the arms race with the West or just wax lyical about their youth, but the simple fact is the system stagnated.
well said, but they refuse to believe it.
I agree with you. In theory communism - with equal opportunities for everybody, free education, health care and so on - sounds great. But the system didn't work. The Soviet Union collapsed because the economy failed. I may be wrong but I see two main reasons. The whole economy was planned by a central administration. Imagine an office in Moscow that has to decide how many shoes have to be made nationwide, and where the shoes have to be shipped to. That also means planning the production and shipping of raw materials to the different shoe factories. And that goes for everything. The other reason I see is that communism offers no incentives for individual workers to work harder or better.
@@janentomenkafka You're wrong. Your idea of socialism as an ideology having a specific path of development , but socialism is primarily a dialectical system of development and in no way rejects all types of economics . You know that under Stalin there was a market economy more than a planned one . That there were agricultural markets and there were artels (Cooperatives) which worked in a market economy mode , artels produced products from shoes to televisions . At that time , in the 30 - 50s , the share of state - owned enterprises operating in a planned mode accounted for 10,000 types of products , the share of artels operating in a market economy accounted for 30,000 types of products .
You are right that the construction of socialism in the USSR began to lead its way to degradation with the coming to power of Khrushchev with his not far - sighted policy . The illiteracy and inferiority of Khrushchev's transformations and this is the beginning of the collapse of the USSR. Building socialism is an unexplored path to building a more just society , and many mistakes lie in wait on this path . Stalin said (one of the smartest people of his time) "Without a theory, we die," that is, the theory of socialism is not a frozen mass, it is in constant dialectics, in constant development, in finding the right path of human development.But the trouble with the USSR is that such poletic pegmies as Khrushchev and Gorbachev came to the leadership of the country , and then such scum and drunkards as Yeltsin. After Stalin's death, there was no person in power who would give impetus to the theory of the development of socialism.
The USSR was on the path to economic collapsed by 1962. Prior to this time all workers were required to buy bonds equal to one month's annual income. This financed the State. The interest and principal was paid at maturity. In 1956/57 the state's financiers realised that the amount owed to workers in a few years would exceed the amount taken from them. Khrushchev and other others came up with a cunning plan that they would ask the workers to forego repayment voluntarily to express their gratitude to the State and Party. This was pitched to a few groups of workers to gauge the reception. It was hated by the workers. They asserted they must be repaid. Khrushchev was in a bind. They decided to end the bonds (except for a few very well paid groups) and froze repayment of interest and principal until the 1970s (hoping that many people would forget about them and fail to redeem). Bonds were replaced by a lottery. Workers were coerced to buy lottery tickets at their workplaces. Winners had a choice of cash or high-demand goods like cars (that were very over priced). Deficit goods were more popular than cash. And the State's takings didn't need to be repaid.
Quite interestingly they don't remember how much USSR was lacking behind the West what it comes to cars, domestic appliances, clothing, electronics, consumer goods, general quality of production... I visited the country in mid-80's and most of the things appeared like they were 10-30 years ago in the free world. Low quality paper, clumsy dull coloured items, fashion that the Government had determined to fit you. Apparently getting sought after products such as cars took years even if you were a model citizen.
don't know if you knew - most of people had to use cut-up newspapers as toilet paper!
Sometime little desire to have many things or tied to a lot of consumerism make someone feel happier . Today each month you want a new iphone or your children threated to kill themselved
- Comrade, your car will be delivered exactly ten years from now.
- in the morning or in the afternoon?
- it's ten years... why would it matter?
- the blumber will visit in the afternoon.
They don't remember because they were unaware of how far behind the USSR was from the West. They were told on the news that the USSR was the best place to live and that all other nations were in terrible shape. Nothing changed.
@@ultrablond The Klitschko brothers said that their father didn't want to believe them when they told him what it was like in the US. He believed the Americans staged the whole thing specifically for visitors.
I was born in USSR and saw it collapse. There was nothing good for a talented person it it. It benefited only the ruling party and lazy people. Hard working people were seeing a small percentage of their efforts returned in value, while it was distributed to everybody else who did no work at all. Thieves were thriving, cause you kept what you stole only for yourself. Everything was provisioned by government. I remember my mother running to the book shop, cause she heard there was a new book being sold. They would bring 100 books to a city with 130k population. But you could always buy books from Lenin, Marks, etc.
Interesting, I watch a YT channel named 1420. In it, some young Russian adults (who know exactly what is going on in the world) interview Russians on the streets of Moscow, St Petersburg, some rural areas, and a couple of times in Belarus, asking very direct questions about various topics, most often Ukraine and Russian politics. A few of the Russians have got it, some are just misinformed and/or brain washed, and some of them live in this weird fantasy domain. I heard a babushka describing Russia in USSR times, and saying during the end she fled Moscow and bought a small house in the country to grow food, because the stores were rapidly becoming so bare that finding food was becoming very difficult. I guess when they fell, they FELL.
And yup, look up the book Xi Thinking, which fills entire racks of bookshops in China, and where NOTHING from the outside world does, unless cleared by the party. They are falling off of that cliff right now. Xi is far more dangerous than even Putin, for many reasons, not the least of which being China's economic might, which Russia has none of. And Xi cares FAR less about the Chinese people than Putin does about the Russian people. Hold up a blank sign in China, and you disappear, permanently, as related by many of those families.
@@MrJdsenior Um, this is the "1420" YT channel you're commenting on.
Да, конечно:) именно поэтому мой дед оставшийся сиротой из деревни под Воронежем (талантливый механик, машиностроитель) дорос до замминистра лесной промышленности СССР , а бабушка из деревни под Рязанью до ведущего экономиста на крупном предприятии. И получили несколько квартир, одну из них в центре Москвы. Может быть, ты не так уж и талантлив ? Как там у тебя успехи ?
@@johnnydeppsky3510 quick translation of this troll post: "what about my grandma and grandpa who did career in cccp, blah blah". Noboby, and I mean NOBODY, could make any career in cccp without belonging to comunist party. That meant doing what you're being told, simulating results (cause the goals were impossible - they tried to race USA), reporting to kgb (or even belonging). So his grandparents build a career on someone elses life / freedom. Nothing to brag about...
@@MrJdsenior "Interesting, I watch a YT channel named 1420."
Fascinating! I wonder if anyone else in this comment section has seen it.
Not one person mentioned Chernobyl, yet Gorbachev named the economic effects of the disaster as a key reason or last straw that broke the system. I bet the satellite countries, east Germany , Poland, Ukraine, hungrey, etc don’t have nice nostalgic memories
Satellite states fed Moscow and Leningrad. As grand as these kooks remember it they had the luxury of being spoon-fed by the occupied states. Yes there were some benefits, but when everyone lives in poverty a free shit apartment seems like a dream come true.
My friends from former Soviet countries (like the Czech Republic and Poland for instance) all hated the USSR
Chernobyl is in Ukraine
@@maximilianboost8498second name ussr in our countries is "Jail for nations"
Ofcourse, because if not for exploitation of now ex vasal states communism would have collapsed many years earlier.
LOL Alisker just said that the soviet union was a place of peace and kindness.
It was probably the most cruel country of all time so far.
@@MJ-uk6luHow do you know? Did you live there? At least we didn't have wars. In Soviet times everyone had a job and could afford all basic stuff, we had powerful industry and produced all kinds of things. Now Russia's become a third world country, a colony of the West and Chinese capital. Russian government sents all resources abroad and the majority of people live in poverty. USSR cared about people, it was social. Russian government acts as there's no people in Russia, all they care about is money which they don't even keep here.
@@MJ-uk6lunot really, maybe during ww2,
@@alexy741228 I was there, what basic stuff? Empty shelves? I had to wait 2 year until I could get a bicycle as I kid (it was not issue of money). What powerful industry? It was all outdated, this is why it did not survive well after country did open to outside. It was not competitive at all.
After communism and the end of the Cold War Gorbachev gave Russia the opportunity to come out of isolation and adversity to join the rest of the World. Unfortunately, there was someone else waiting in the wings that realised isolation and adversity works in his favour. And those people that want the failed USSR back, well it's not the USSR they remember, it's their youth they remember.
After communism 🤣🤣🤣
Yes, the God of Youth. And we have only that 1 chance in life to see it.
After the fall of USSR, USA sent advisers to Russia to create a russian oligarchy and usurp the national resources. Anatoly Chubais was responsible for this "privatization". Its a mystery why he was kept in both Jeltsins and Putins governments. I don't think Russia was ever welcome in one piece in the west whatever they did and however much they wanted it. They have too much resources.
Old USSR is exactly what they want. Freedom is like poison for them. Free speech is acid in their eyes. Economic success of anyone else is a blow in their stomach
He gave an opportunity to be enslaved by American corporations
After spending two and a half years in Vietnam I promised myself I wouldn’t look back later and remember it as a good time. But almost 60 years later I find that the bad times have been over come in my memory by what now seems like the good times. It’s only the memory of being young that prevails. Such is life, youth is good but not always true.
"This is good, things will change"": That's what I was saying to myself (in Czechoslovakia) when Gorbachev came to power and when I heard one of his speeches. And things changed, the iron curtain fell down. Here's one guy (one of many) who is grateful for their "traitor's" actions
In Germany as well, he is remembered as one of the most Important People in modern German history, due to him allowing our Country to reunite
Exactly. People here in Russia act like the Soviet Union was some amazing glorious place when really it was a nation capable of nothing more than genocide and corruption. Speaking as a Latvian.
As the Czechs say : Lenin, wake up, they have got mad. They didn't get mad, they have always been like that.
Foe me Gorbachev is a true heroe of humanity: he decided not to send the tanks to salvage a deeply corrupt and collapsing system!
The fact that the Soviet Union was peaceful is a joke:
Should we recall Cehoslovakia? Budapest?
+ Stalin started 2nd World War along Hitler.
They invaded Poland too,.
And if that was not conclusive: why did Russia have to attack Finland?
@@mihaidumitrescu1325 that's because he already took the money.
The people of Poland, Ukraine etc don't have the same fond memories of the USSR as Russians because they were occupied nations with a gun to their head.
My friend in Helsinki used to go when it was the Soviet Union, he would take a suitcase full of carrier bags that were free in the stores in Helsinki and he would fund his trip by selling them in Russia, they were highly sought after.
All true. These plastic bags were sold 3-7 rubles a piece on the black market! Average salory then in USSR was about 80 -110 rubles.
I don't see how is it connected. Yes, the USSR been a closed country. Just like Japan was before. If we follow your logic, then Japan should collapse too. I mean, yes, closedness of the Soviet Union is one of the main drawbacks. But why people think the country can't be open without collapsing itself? 🤔
@@user-yj7um6hv1d Japan was a closed country until the 19th century... and it has collapsed since then, and recovered. So this analogy you're making doesn't really stand up
I can believe it. There are photos from 90' and 80's were people have hanged out these plastic bags on a cloth/washing rack in their balconies to dry them. What was considered in other countries as a garbage was worth a washing here is USSR... And no it was not because of being eco friendly.
Hahah true. My mother told me that too.
Уже сам факт того,что они говорят о БАЗОВОЙ возможности человека куда то поехать как о чем то необычном,даёт представление о том,какое же дно это было на самом деле. Пролы
а что сейчас о базовых возможностях известно? почему во многие страны для удовлетворения базовых возможностей требуется виза? Ну и о базовой необходимости иметь свое жилье хотелось бы услышать, почему нужно 20 лет работать для удовлетворения базовой необходимости? Это надо понимать обычное дело. Хочешь свою крышу над головой - работай до пенсии. Так выглядит не дно.
@@DrBurdock Виза нужна если у тебя паспорт РФ. Граждане любой страны ЕС (и не только) ездят по всему миру без каких либо виз, например, гражданин Швеции, Германии или Финляндии может поехать без предварительной визы в любую из 176 стран, где в 133 странах ему даже платить ничего не надо и въезд свободный, а в оставшихся 43 ему поставят визу по прибытию и где-то это можно сделать за бесплатно в рамках турпакета, а где-то за небольшое fees, но возможность посещения гарантирована. Это для граждан РФ есть куча визовых трудностей, где во многие страны надо получать визу заранее иначе не пустят, в некоторые из которых её сейчас получить практически нереально и связано это с привычкой властей РФ нападать ну чужие страны как на Украину например или запускать агентов-отравителей под видом туристов как это было в Солсбери в Великобритании, поэтому другие страны не хотят иметь дел с Россией.
@@bsbdptsd а гражданам Афганистана как? во сколько стран безвизовый въезд открыт? Или они тоже на чужие страны нападали и запускали агентов-отравителей под видом туристов?
Ну да, путешествовать - это же так важно! Сейчас-то точно можно ехать куда угодно, а значит все хорошо. Правда, сначала большинству путешественников нужно будет расплатиться по кредитам за их машины, дома и технику, потом проложить безопасные маршруты в объезд районов с арабами-мигрантами, которые могут ограбить, ну и взять с собой радужные флажки, а то сочтут нетолерантными.
@@DrBurdock Так же как и гражданам Сирии, Ирака, Йемена, Сомали, Ливии и других стран из этой же категории, где в той или иной степени имеют место быть локальные гражданские конфликты, беззаконие, бандитизм, похищения и отсутствует понимание гражданских прав, необязательно гадить чужим странам чтобы иметь плохой визовый статус, достаточно гадить своим же гражданам в своей стране в плане прав и свобод. Для этой метрики есть специальный рейтинг, точнее даже несколько, где можно посмотреть в какую страну и с каким паспортом проще попасть, но все рейтинги сведены к тому, что паспорт Арабских Эмиратов лучший в мире, как и Арабские Эмираты одна из самых посещаемых стран мира. А причина тому что Эмираты не поощряют варварство и бандитизм, и в свете недавних событий стали единственной страной арабского мира, осудившей нападение Хамаса на Израиль и публично поддержавшее Израиль в этом конфликте (это было ещё до того как началась операция в Газе).
Wow, America must be very powerful to solely “dismantle the Soviet Union”!
Old 80s America without BLM and LGBT is real ideal for modern Russians. Ironic.
America has nothing to do with demising of the Soviet Union.
@@kingdomofgeorgia1751 His statement was irony. I think he would largely agree with you.
@@kingdomofgeorgia1751was sarcasm 😂
Unfortunately many Americans actually believe this.
We were so friendly with other nations....East Germany, Hungary, Czechoslavakia, Poland.....anymore? You had to invade them to keep them in the fold because they did not want Russians from the 1960's onwards. As for food in the shops, the line ups for anything which came in a dribble.
I once was on the East German border and watching an East German factory employing 2000 people. There were 6 Trabants only in the car park while on the other side the West Germans were driving Mercs and BMW's. Thanks to Russian communism. Trying to escape was punishable by death.
Ну вообще-то в Чехословакию вторгся не только СССР, а еще ГДР и еще несколько стран. В Венгрии был фашисткий переворот, людей линчивали и рубили топорами на улицах, это факт, СССР силой оружия остановил бойню. То что СССР вошел в эти страны в 1944-45 годах, это было справедливо, репарации . которые наложил на них СССР были еще очень мягкими, за зверства творимые на оккупированных территориях, Польша вообще получила из рук СССР территории восточной Германии, на которые права не имела.
East German fairly was more about Berlin wall, otherwise, communists were extremely strong there. German republic literally had to use american forces to make force communist surrender there. Still till today communist terrorism exists in Germany like its South america just bcs of that.
@@antonzhdanov9653 это когда приходилось привлекать американцев для подавления коммунистов в Берлине? Да вам немцам хватит жаловаться, с вами не совершали геноцида и уничтожения вашего народа, если бы СССР ответил зеркально и убил бы у вас 17 миллионов гражданских лиц, то от Германии в демографическом плане, практически не чего не осталось бы. Хватит ныть, вы легко отделались.
It was collapsing either way, Gorbachev choose not to fight it and so avoid unnecessary bloodshed.
He should have fought it. Not fighting it was worse. And the shed was and is by far more than it would be. Idk how dumb tou should be to make that statement
@@eXTreemator He didn't give up he fought for the Soviet Union but the old ways fought back. He had finally managed to convince almost everyone to sign the New Union Treaty, then came the KGB coup which destroyed the hopes of it being signed AND gave power away from the Kremlin (and Gorbachev) and into Yeltsin. Yeltsin then decided he wanted more power and made Russia leave the USSR alongside Ukraine. Gorbachev only gave democracy and autonomy to the USSR, which some men took advantage of. If anyone is to blame it's Yeltsin.
What people miss is not the USSR system per se, but Russian territories that were lost. You could change the system without splitting the country, especially along such clearly anti-Russian borders. But here Yeltsin is to blame, not Gorbachev.
"For me, it was one huge motherland, where people lived together in peace and kindness..." and then 15 SSRs couldn't *freakin'* wait to escape from the 'workers paradise'. The ones who were unable to escape, and others that did, had genocide inflicted upon them by 'kind babushkas'... Sheesh!
1:20 Me: wow none if them have tried to blame the US yet that's actually... oh wait there it is.
1) The soviet invasion of Afghanistan
2) Chornobyl disaster
3) absurd military spending
4) spending a fortune on a space program you were barely ready for
5) Communism
These are why your opressive empire collapsed, stop blaming others for your own failures and take some damn responsibility for once.
+ Oil at 20 USD. If Oil go at 20 USD again russia is done again. U never learn something in a vodka bottle.
@@user-vu9xl2yz4s true, the west could easily do that to russia again but the world is far more interconnected than it was back then with global trade so doing so now would hurt everyone else just as much so the best option is just to keep the price cap at break even levels so it screws Russia's profit margins but doesn't hurt the global economy at the same time.
I don't see what any of that has to with the collapse of the USSR.
1) You youself invaded into Afghanistan, along with other countries. Vietnam, Iraq, Libya. The US still didn't collapse yet.
2) Chornobyl is Ukrainian city near Kyiv. So what. Nuclear disasters happen in other countries as well - see Fukushima.
3) About 4-7% of the GDP per year. Quite a lot, agree.
4) That's a good thing. Space exploration is a high tech field. I don't see any downsides of investing into it.
5) I don't see how an economic structure "communism" connected with political structure "USSR". It's absolutely achievable to switch to capitalism without collapsing the country into many parts. You can have capitalistic and democratic USSR if you really want to.
@@user-yj7um6hv1d you've completely exposed your ignorance of the USSR's history.
1) I'm not American (shouldn't be so presumptius, English is the world's second language after all... clue is in that its called ENGLISH) and the context you are sorely lacking is that the soviet invasion of Afghanistan is one of the primary factors that led to the collapse of the soviet economy, your mistake is assuming i was approaching that point from a moral perspective when i wasn't... anyone else who knows soviet history would know exactly why i referenced Afghanistan.
2) Again you're missing the point, me mentioning Chornobyl was not a criticism of Soviet negligence/incompetence, that's another issue entirely. It's relevant in the context of the collapse of the soviet union in that the post-crisis recovery costs were staggeringly enormous and came at a time when the USSR was far from it's economic peak and though not as decisively a fatal blow as the invasion of Afghanistan to the Soviet economy... it certainly hurt a lot.
3) I'm glad we agree that it was a huge amount for peace time (yes it was the cold war ofc) but then again trying to compete with the US economy in a military bulid up was a losing proposition from the beginning, plus the enormous cost of buliding and maintaining their huge nuclear arsenal was a massive financial drain too.
4) Again, yes it's a noble endeavour when done for the right reasons but in the case of the Soviets it was just to try and beat the US in the 'space race' which at the time was expensive in a way that's difficult to imagine if you adjust for inflation and it hurt the USSR's economy in the long run.
5) come on man i feel like im just teaching you basic history at this point... * sigh * communism was absolutely relevant as to the collapse of the Union because the rigid low growth, and zero consumer economy couldn't possibly conpete in the long run with the flexible high growth, strong consumer economy of the United states and in the very effort of trying to compete with US Militarily, economically whilst also still reeling from the aforementioned multiple crises... it just pushed an already massively overstretched communist economy to it's breaking point and... it broke, then the bread lines and chaos appeared along with the dissolution of the USSR.
As for having a capitalistic USSR? Yeah, sure. If they had transitioned properly to a capitalist economy instead of the chaotic way Gorbachev reformed russia and then yeltsin later selling russia to it's oligarchs... done properly it could have worked you're right.
As for having a democratic USSR? Never. The soviet republics were abused hostages of the russians and were genocided, forcibly relocated etc on multiple occasions and in any true democratic USSR they would demand independence referendums and leave just like they did when the Union collapsed, if russia had treated it's republics better maybe some or all would stay in a democratic USSR but even in that scenario it's doubtful due to the rise of nationalism and independent culture's in the republics themselves which would have inevitably led to them seeking their independence and in a truly democratic union they would have been allowed to secede. That's of course not even mentioning the enormous challenge of getting a communist, authoritarian union to flip to a capitalist democracy... i can't even begin to imagine the upheaval that would have caused in the memebers of the union and likely would have just served as a catalyst for most if not all of the republic's independence movements on account of now being much more closely alingned to the west and wanting to integrate to an already thriving capitalist, democratic community.
Dude like im sorry for being a bit rude to you there but i highly reccomend you brush up on topics before trying to engage someone in a meaningful debate about them because it saves you looking ignorant and saves my time having to explain things to you whilst also countering your points, just saying.
@@robertjohn6585 there is a logical error in your reasoning. Even if as you say (a) the USSR been in a sad economic state, how is (b) breaking the USSR into independent states suppose to help? All post-Soviet countries switched to capitalism afterwards. What prevents from simply transitioning to the capitalism without breaking the union?
I am just saying that the USSR collapse is not carved in stone and was avoidable. In fact, it solved nothing. Most of post-Soviet countries still corrupt. Did not solve corruption problem. Most of post-Soviet countries still ruled by dictators who's in power for 20 years - Lukashenko, Putin, Aliyev, etc. The only successful examples are Baltic countries, but they are microscopic compared to the size of the USSR. Around 2% of its total size.
its crazy how people see collapse of USSR as "their betrayal" but also think that we all was "equal and fair memebers" of USSR 😂
folks dont get the concept that we all have our own countries 😂
They say it was a betrayal and that collapse of Evil Empire was their leaders fault. At the same time none of them personally lift a finger to save their beloved USSR.
the same happened in 1917, Ukraine and the other Eastern Europeans declared independence but the Soviets managed to invade them all and get them back under occupation, they tried the same in 1991, but they only saved Tatarstan, got Chechnya with a brutal war, parts of Moldova and Georgia, and with Ukraine they are still at it
> we all was
@@RainerMichellecommunists created Ukraine. Leaders of ukraine independence were communists
@@namesurname-1488 whats wrong with that? or what do you mean? I donr get 😅
A few facts about life in the USSR outside of Moscow. To fix a fence or make a shed, we used nails that were already in use. We had several homemade anvils for straightening nails. It looks like a metal wedge with transverse grooves for fixing nails. It was possible to make such a thing at the factory at the place of work and secretly take it out for the checkpoint. Why not buy it? Like nails, they were not sold. By the way, there were no shops for the sale of building materials in principle. There were wholesale bases for the supply of construction organizations, but they were not obliged to sell you anything if they had a shortage of materials, and it was always there. By the way, in my father's house all the windows and doors were homemade, and even the chain-link mesh was woven from wire itself using a homemade machine in the form of a wooden frame and a rotor with a handle. To repair his wooden house, my uncle bought a forest on the vine and took it to the sawmill. Everywhere it was necessary to negotiate separately. Yes, freight transport was not sold into private hands, the state had a monopoly on cargo transportation. And there were also administrative issues, for example, mandatory construction contracts. So in the RSFSR you could not build a house where the area suitable for living exceeds 60 square meters. This is very small, so extensions without wall insulation, heating and with a separate entrance were popular. Many of my friends at school lived with the whole family in an apartment of about 30 sq.m and waited for the conditions to improve (yes, free) for years. And it was not the worst variation, some lived in a hostel where the family has only one room, and the bathroom, toilet and kitchen are shared on the floor. There were "barracks" - dormitories built at the beginning of the 20th century in very poor technical condition, where a bathroom is not provided, and a toilet on the street in a separate building. By the way, about the "trips of pensioners to health resorts": most of the villagers have not been anywhere further than the district center, well, except for a trip to Europe during the Second World War. The USSR was a complete suck to be honest.
_"To fix a fence or make a shed, we used nails that were already in use"_ * * * Yep, "samodyelka"...
Горбачев преступник потому что он развалил страну на много кусков. В то время как Китай на своем примере показал что могло перейти к капитализму, не разрушая государство.
мне жаль что СССР развалился на части, хоть я и написал в своем сообщении, что это был "был полный отстой", но от разделения на части людям лучше не стало. Иной вопрос, возможно ли было этого избежать? Наверное возможно, но не во времена Горбачева, все прогнило и разрушилось раньше. Заслуга Горбачева в том, что неизбежный на тот момент распад произошел мирно и почти бескровно. Это не было оценено тогда, что ж сейчас мы видим худший сценарий и это только начало... А Китай так себе пример. Если Вы за социалистические ценности, то Вам бы там не понравилось. Это точно.
@@barbiturat1 There's no capitalism in China. There's chinese Potemkin village of capitalism.
@@mpingo91 Что именно вы имеете в виду?
Putin went from making 400 rubles a month in Leningrad, to being a billionaire if not trillionaire while never working a private sector job
Soviet Union was collapsing much before Gorbatchov era. He, Gorbatchov, just heritate it. Some people had good memories because they where young at the time - we all have good memories of our childwood... But the true life was miserable ,compared to the large majority of western countries. Also, there was a big difference between people filiated on the only one politic party, or not. There was a very different treatment. And, at the time, if you wouln`t agree with the line of the government you would be arrest for many years in prison, usually considered a foreign agent working for the enemy ( the eternel enemy ). Amazingly, it sounds exactly like the today`s Russian Federation. For the defenders o f the Soviet Union, one simply question : why millions wanted to emigrate to the west countries for a better life and noone would emigrate to the Soviet Union ? The answer is there, isn`t it ? Unless all that people, emigrating during decades, were suffering of masochism... Please ,defenders of Comunism and the Soviet Union, come to the reality.
Throughout the 20th century there were several massive waves of migration from the West to the USSR. First the Italians and Spaniards, then the Armenians from Greece and Turkey, then American farmers and specialists in the 30s, Jews and so on.
Today, the Russian Federation is at the same level as Germany in terms of the number of migrants and is second only to the United States.
@@maestro6458 "...Throughout the 20th century there were several massive waves of migration from the West to the USSR. ..." There were many people who initially found this communist experiment interesting, but after a few years it became clear that it wasn't working. The communists had to close their borders relatively quickly and thus prevent people from emigrating. The fact that one's own citizens are shot at just because they wanted to leave the country is an absurdity that only existed in these communist countries and still exists today. North Korea would immediately be empty if the borders were opened.
What is the difference between those who believed in a communist paradise and those who believed in a capitalist paradise? Because those who left for capitalism found themselves in a trap of mortgages and loans?@@mmitleidt7969
@@maestro6458 It would be great to compare what would happen if borders in USSR were open for people to leave anytime they want. I think we would see completely different "massive waves".
Oh and regarding migrants, how much of these migrants are highly skilled workers like doctors, IT, engineers? And how much of them are construction workers, taxi drivers and cleaners from central asia? Don't you think this might be quite important factor?
@@maestro6458 fun fact about "massive waves". Daughter of Stalin migrated to USA and her daughter still lives there. His great-grandson from one of his sons lives in USA. Son of Khruschev - USA, his great-granddaughter from another son - USA. Granddaughter of Andropov - USA. Daughter of Gorbachev - Germany. Now tell me how many kids/grandkids of american presidents immigrated to Russia?
“Those who do not learn history are doomed to repeat it.”
And I think that soon they all will be Back In The USSR.
Soviet union mutch like an onion,looks ok from afar if u squint hard enough even seemed to have layers to it but if u come too close it will make u cry
The best joke that ever came out of the USSR during the Cold War: "The government pretends to pay us, and we pretend to work." The per capita GDP was even worse (compared to the rest of the industrialized world) than today. The bulk of GDP went into the arms race. Products were shoddier. Availability of consumer goods was a sad joke. Even availability of food staples was irregular. This idealised nostalgia says a great deal about the Russian mentality. They are fully satisfied to become another North Korea -- and are running headlong in that direction.
I loved it how it began with facts about the USSR and ended with blatant racism against Russians. Although nobody said all (or the majority of) the people on the video were Russian.
This was distressing to watch. The people as so brainwashed, ignorant and subservient to the point of fatalism.
Ну да, лучше слушать тебя, который историю СССР знает из американской пропаганды, чем тех людей, что жили в Советском Союзе.
"Why did our 70-year project to Russify and colonize our neighbors fail? " Hmm...
Nah, where did you see that? Any russian nationalist say that USSR rob russians and send it to "smaller" nations.
Should you call a process of an annihilation of a Russian culture, at the same time killing millions of Russian people and its most intelligent and proficient human resource in a civil war and terror, a Russification?
What foolishness. Who did the try to "Russify"^ Czechs, Slovaks, maybe Hungarians or Romanians? I can't see any traces of these attempts. What I see is all the attempts of the Soviet leadership to keep good relation with those "neighbours", even to the fault of the Soviet population itself. Even within the USSR Russians were considered 2nd class citizens as "former oppressors", and the efforts of so-called "korenization" ("rootification") were made to spread Ukrainian/Byelorussian/Kazakh languages in the areas where people spoke Russian. Even the later spread of the Russian language had nothing to do with "Russification", it was merely an instrument of the cosmopolitan Communist party to strengthen their control over the country.
Russia needs to relax. Peaceful commerce, respect borders, happy world. Simple.
Libya relaxed...
@@rogerolsson7303Care to elaborate on how that comparison makes even the slightest bit of sense?
Russian brain does not understand it 😊
Russia never did and never will. They have no clue what it means.
@@bring_back_dislikes Yes, Russia relaxes and they end up like Libya. Libya gave up their plans to get nukes. A few years later when Moammar Gaddafi was sitting in the suburb on his granddaugthers 6 year birthday. All of a sudden a US warship in the mediterranean hit the house with rockets, possibly tomahawks. Gaddafi survived but the 6 year old child and his son in law did not. Few years later western media wrote "Gaddafi is bombing his own people, we must help them". Then they bombed Libya to the stoneage, took the gold reserve, put ISIS in control and had Gaddafi publicly murdered. Who is getting the Libyan oil and for what price I currently dont know. Russia also has oil which seems to be a very strong motivator for some.
Only a couple got close. The US outspent the USSR massively on strategic weapons and the USSR was a stinking corrupt mess, just like Russia is right now with it's thuggish govt. Do Russians REALLY not understand how you SHOULD be living right now? There is no reason you need to be an undeveloped nation.
Very interesting to hear the one babushka's take on what she experienced personally. It actually sounded pretty much like the stories coming out. And it was so obvious that it wasn't great there, contrary to all these pie in the sky remembrances, because people were trying to escape it everywhere. They had physical and legal walls up everywhere to stop it, even when individual athletes, performers, etc were traveling elsewhere to compete, etc. The guys in coats shading the Baryshnikovs, etc were actually a joke here, but apparently that was 100% accurate,and many defectors took very real personal risks to get away. People that didn't live it don't really have any value toward speaking to whether is was better or worse when you think about it, because they don't know.
This is not an argument. 1) "The USSR was a stinking corrupt mess". Well, Ukraine, Kazakhstan, Russia etc. are still a stinking corrupt mess. Nothing much changed, really. 2) "Russia is right now with it's thuggish govt". If the USSR didn't collapse, many wars would not happen in the first place. Including war with Georgia, war with Ukraine, Nagorno-Karabach and so on. 3) "They had physical and legal walls" - well, that's one of the disadvantages of the USSR. But bad laws does not mean the country should collapse.
the percentage of the people who wanted to 'escape' was very small. Most people wanted to have better lives in their own country.
"There is no reason you need to be an undeveloped nation." Well, already Winston Churchill mentioned how Russia was targeted for "arrested development". The western advisors from the 1990's that created todays russian oligarchs is part of the same package.
@@user-yj7um6hv1dSome parts of the USSR have grown out from the Soviet legacy. Makes you believe the serfdom theory, I guess.
@@edonveil9887 what parts grown out, for example? Just don't say "Baltic countries", because they are microscopic and only 2% of the USSR combined. Moldova? Poor. Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan? Poor and ruled by dictators. Belarus? Ha-ha. Kazakhstan? Ukraine?
Blyat, what nonsense the last woman is talking about, about free flats, free education. That was right. She simply does not understand that hundreds of thousands of flats have been given away for free. For what money? Where did the materials for the housing come from? People made bricks, cement, glue... They were paid wages. And everything becomes free housing? And in reality, you had to have lower wages to get something for free. Who paid for all those FREE things ? You see, the economy doesn't work like that.
People who always say that in ussr was perfect life just stupid or thinking about their childhood and student life. This state was the prison of nations, there was no freedom, no medicine, no education(only moscow and some universities in big cities, but there was no oppotunities to get there from small town or village) , no rights, they think it was good cause everything free, but there is no exsist such thing as "free smth" - its always cost money, yours or goverment's it doesnt matter, thats why 90x years gave ppl very poor life because ussr economy collapsed - there was no money to give you "everything free", ofc there is many reasons why ussr died, not just economic problems: wars, riots, first integrations in global world, political crysis are the same important as the economic collapse and it just came at once on the state which is not prepared for this
P.s. Sory for bad eng
Big pros about the part that they're thinking about theirs childhood and student life at a time in first place apart of other facts. Also it's true that many of people doesn't even have opportunity to be a student if you are from small town, unless you trying insanely and stupidly hard or simply have connections. Many of people from such small cities or towns doesn't even end the school
That all combined does not justify breaking the country apart. I mean so what. China been communist and had a dictator Mao Zedung. Even if modern China does not provide liberal rights to people, they still don't fall apart 🙄
@@user-yj7um6hv1d Well tough modern China does not provide all of liberal rights to its citizens it's still like 2 different countries in many terms if we compare it with what China was like 50 years ago and what USSR on its 70-90s was. And even back then there is no reason to China for collapse since it was not a union. Yeah, China has a conflict with Taiwan but it's a whole different story
@@user-yj7um6hv1d communism in china is a fiction, like the ussr's was a fiction after 20x y, china is a dictatorship with market economy
It's funny many Russians don't see any problem with a fact that the Soviet Union was a communist dictatorship ruled by one party. For instance the ordinary Soviet citizens had to have a passport in their own country and they couldn't move freely to other city to live. The KGB made sure that nobody said anything bad about the goverment. Besides so-called planned economy never really worked, and the Soviet leaders always preferred to have more tanks, guns, ships, aeroplanes and trains rather than have enough consumer goods in shops.
Since the late 1970s Chinese Communists have been far more clever and they have developed free market economy in China instead of using too much money for weapons. As we can clearly seen even Putin's Russia hasn't really created new economic sectors but it has relied heavily on exporting oil and other raw materials.
Its funny that you dont know about USSR 80s
@@thorlight697 I know a lot about the USSR, I lived in the 1980s and I'm a professional historian.
Nothing's much changed since the Soviet union collapse. But now Russia is ruled by oligarchs dictatorship instead of communist party. They turned Russia to a poor third world country. Planned economy worked, many cities and factories were built in Soviet times. Now Russian population is shrinking, most of the factories are destroyed, villages and cities get abandoned.
Wait! what was so nice befor the collapse? did they really enjoy not being able to travel to the vest, or stand in line for bread and empty shelfs, or the privilege of waiting 10-20 years to buy a shitty car? what am i missing here?
I guess, the situation in Moscow has never been so tragic like in other countries and regions which belonged to USSR. So, sure, in Moskow locals miss the time when millions of people worked for them
@@natalianatalia8134true. I travelled once from the far east Russia to Moscow in the 80s and they had a completely different life. Good point.
How comes russians think it was a union where people lived in peace and kindness, while every single person i talked about it from their "member countries" are speaking about the complete opposite? 😂
Is it possible that muscovites lived on the back of other's pockets? 🤔
It's impressive that they're crying about other countries not wanting to serve them anymore after 30 years. 😂
And of course Muscovites don't even realize that CHMO was a swear word and to be Muscovite, it was to be a scum.
Only a deeply traumatised individual can miss a totalitarian regime with zero freedom of speech, widespread poverty, lying 'Pravda' and the Iron Curtain.
check what they had before the Soviet Union and what the Soviet Union left them with.
It's like the British still believe there empire was great and it was just about trade ,not blundering and ethnic cleansing
yes, Moscovites are crying because they can not loot their colonies any more, this is why they are spending so much money and sending all their poor to die in Ukraine, they desperately want it back, it was their biggest and richest colony
I talked to a lot of former ethnic Koreans, from Uzbekistan. They told me during a friendly chat over coffee that they missed the Soviet Union. How could that be?, I asked. They told me while the USSR wasn't perfect, it kept the racism and ethnic hatred under control. Thought that would be helpful to add here, to get other viewpoints from far outside Moscow and the center of control during that time.
Former ethnic Koreans? What ethnicity are they now?
@@abcdesholei would assume assimilated into uzbek culture and that they might have ethnic ties to korea but consider themselves uzbek
Koreans try not to mix and they live pretty comfortably in modern Central Asia, so no need to speculate on one point of view
As a western going to the East (USSR ) in that time the country was very poor and years behind the West...I felt sorry for the people...but the arms race broke the USSR it ran out of money..
They had absolutely nothing, shops were empty ...I was in Berlin the day the wall came down and
the East Germans came to the West to buy an Orange , and it they had the money some coloured bed sheets..most just walked around in disbelief at the items for sell in shops and cried..I lived through this time a part of History.we thought it was all over and Russia would be friends with the West...and it started to be so until Putin came into power.
I remember the smell of West German supermarkets, especially one HaWeGe in Heringen, Hesse. My uncle lived 300 m from the first fence at the inner German border in Thuringia. In 1990 I was 14 years old.
All true but don't forget that America supported Yeltsin and then Putin. They foolishly allowed him to take the Russian Presidency because they thought they could control him. They were wrong.
It is Russia which created Putin, not the opposite. Russia is always the same.
It wasn't the arms race. It was Chernobyl & Afghanistan.
Many westerners did not understand what a shortage economy is and how it worked, I guess due to the lack of own experience. They were often mistaken by empty shop shelves. In East Germany nobody had to starve, but not everything was always available 24/7 - not like today when a bakery has to have the full range of products until 5 min before closing and then 50% is trown in the bin. Sure western supermarkets and the variety of goods were overwhelming ... but still until today I don't feel pleasure shopping in an American supermarket were you have in 20 meters 50 variations of the same product.
I worked with a Russian woman who grew up in the Soviet Union. She was very clear life in Russia was way better after the Soviet Union because theybwere more free.
In High School I took German and my High School German teacher brought russian friends of her to USA and they came to our class. They were amazed they could go where they want and just go to the Grocery store and get what they want. 7:37 Instead of standing in a line.
Freedom ? ))) Russians have never lived worse than in the 90s. Hunger, unemployment, crime on the streets, do you think this is freedom?
My friend's grandfather was a salesman in an electronics store (TVs, boomboxes) in Amsterdam. He recalls groups of Russian tourists who asked whether the things they saw on the shelves and at the exhibition could be bought. And what conditions must be met (special permit, certificate of preferred profession, etc.). When they heard that they just had to pay, they couldn't believe it. They kept asking questions. They asked, among other things, whether they could buy only one cassette tape or if they could buy more. They suspected that the goods on the shelves were some kind of staging (which was the norm in the USSR).
This was not the norm in the USSR, as the government of the last years of its existence distorted the attitude of the very essence of socialist relations to labor, to consumer goods and created conditions for shortages - in order to create distrust in the system, so that during the transition to “market relations” the population would not resist.@@mpingo91
I lived in the Soviet Union and I can compare socialism and capitalism. I prefer to stand in a line for a good , organic food than to buy a chemical food in a beautiful wrapper. Soviet food was better. It had control and excellent Soviet food standards.
For example shelf life of milk was 2- 3 days. Drinks ( like lemonade) - 7 days. Beer - 7 days. Soviets never used plastic. Only glass bottles.
@@helloworld-ti5zs And you can't buy organic food in capitalism, right?
Putin 20 years later still the problem
The same woman in the video who said the govt used to care about the people and now it doesn't, is probably singing Putin's praises also.
That is actually really cool that you’ve put the age and occupancy in the left top corner. It really helps to understand the logic of the people.🤝
It's interesting how Nina says "now we have MORE freedom " instead of "we have Freedom". Pretty sad.
"It was great, as long as you didn't get murdered in the purges or sent to the gulags. It was a time when everyone was equal but of course, some were more equal than others...."
Hey Daniil, you should ask ppl what they think about Hamas' delegation visit to Moscow alongside an Iranian one. Considering Russia's history of wars against Islamic extremists it might be interesting to hear what the common folks think about this new "alliance".
Didn't they declared jihad on soloviov show? Russia is clearly an islamic state.
Yes I want to know their opinion on this too.
Oh yes, please!
Great topic!
I don't see any problem with it. Any organization that does not pose a threat to Russia is welcomed here. Both HAMAS and Hezbolla, unlike the US, Germany, UK etc never stole any Russian assets, never sanctioned Russia, never supplied weapons against Russian people, never blew up any pipelines or bridges in a futile attempt to disrupt logistics. That's why we don't recognize them as terrorists. We cooperate with them because among hostages there are Russian people too. What about anyone else... well, that's an American/European/Israeli problem not ours.
History repeats itself
Gorbachev gave freedom to people who didn't know how to handle it
...and he himself was one of them...
“One huge motherland where people lived in peace and kindness”.
Wowwwwwwwww
This is a very common view of USSR among older Russians
So no economic problems then? And all of the countries storming out of the USSR the milisecond they saw a half-chance although it was a peaceful paradise where everyone live happily ever after?
That's absurd. The idea that to switch from communism to capitalism, you need to break the country apart. I mean, yes, maybe we had economic problems (who doesn't?). By your logic, the US with its debt of $45 trillion dollars should break into pieces because it has economic problems? That's insane!
@@user-yj7um6hv1d It obviously gets a problem if you rule other countries with an iron fist that badly want to get away from you.
Nostalgia is a powerful drug.
The end of the Soviet Union
On August 19, 1991, it was announced from Moscow that Gorbachev had been deposed as President of the Soviet Union. Nine people had taken over power. The coup plotters said they wanted to stop the collapse of the Soviet Union. However, it turned out that the army supported Gorbachev. In addition, Boris Yeltsin - a former high-ranking party member - a central figure in the resistance to the coup plotters. The coup failed.
The coup came to mean the end of the Communist Party and the Soviet Union as a state. It turned out that the coup plotters accelerated the development they tried to prevent. More and more states declared independence despite Gorbachev's refusal to accept the dissolution of the Soviet Union.
On December 25, 1991, Gorbachev resigned as President of the Soviet Union. The Soviet Union no longer existed.
A new Russia
When the Soviet Union fell, the country of Russia arose again as its own independent state. The first president of the new Russia was Boris Yeltsin.
As the leader of Russia, Boris Yeltsin tried to change the economic system. State property began to be sold off to private individuals. In the fall of 1993, Yeltsin decided that the land would be privatized. Yeltsin had had problems with it in parliament and in October 1993 some MPs occupied the Russian parliament. Extensive fighting took place inside Moscow before the rebellion was put down. Yeltsin was succeeded on 7 May 2000 by Vladimir Putin as President of Russia.
The death of a superpower
When Mikhail Gorbachev took over power in the Soviet Union in 1985, the country was counted together with the United States as one of the world's two superpowers. But the Soviet Union had major economic problems. Production had ground to a halt, and the arms race with the United States was costing more than the Soviet Union could afford. Gorbachev started a series of reforms. The United States and the Soviet Union gained friendly relations. At home, Gorbachev wanted to open up society and introduce increased democracy.
The Soviet Union consisted of 15 sub-republics; Russia was by far the biggest. The new openness meant that some republics, especially Lithuania, demanded increased independence. More republics followed. Many conservative communists began to fear the collapse of the Soviet Union. In August 1991, conservative communists attempted to overthrow Gorbachev in a coup. A few days later, he was to sign an agreement that gave the republics greater independence, and the coup plotters wanted to stop that.
But the coup failed, mainly through the opposition of Russian President Boris Yeltsin. The Baltic states declared themselves independent, and Moscow recognized their independence.
In December 1991, Yeltsin, together with the presidents of Belarus (now Belarus) and Ukraine, declared the dissolution of the Soviet Union. Instead there were 15 independent countries. They would cooperate in the organization OSS, the Commonwealth of Independent States.
With the stroke of a pen, a superpower was dissolved! Ironically, the coup plotters in 1991 accelerated the development they tried to stop. OSS remained mainly on paper, and by the end of the 1990s the organization was almost forgotten.
It wasn't much of superpower in that decade anyway. You can't claim to be a superpower, when people don't have food and other necessities. It's as much superpower as something like Kenya.
@@MJ-uk6luAnyone with a large strategic nuclear arsenal and the ability to mess around in other countries can be considered a superpower, regardless of how the folks at home live.
Technically, wasn't Kazakhstan the last remaining Soviet republic?
@@teresabenson3385 Kazakhstan became a Union Republic of the Soviet Union in 1936. Forced collectivization of livestock farming in the 1930s led to hundreds of thousands of Kazakhs starving to death. Under Soviet leader Josef Stalin, entire ethnic groups were deported to Kazakhstan from other parts of the country. Upon the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991, Kazakhstan became an independent state with Nursultan Nazarbayev as president. He ruled the country with an iron fist until 2019, when his handpicked successor Kasym-Zjomart Tokayev took over.
@@teresabenson3385 That's absolutely not true. Unless you also consider North Korea and Pakistan to be superpowers.
Gorbachev didn't seem too popular, which seems unjust because he tried to do the right thing.
Old ladies saying how great the USSR was, despite the fact they were aware of the arrests, widespread persecution and dissidents being locked in psychiatric hospitals.
Not very caring for their fellow man, are they?
I grew up in Soviet Union. We were arm, we got 1,5 kg meat pro week for our Familie. There were no enough rooms for all person in our little flat. The bus never come, I have to wait for it for hours. You could not move somewhere: The women have to work for years together with the Ex-husband in one firm and leaved in the same flat, as it was impossible to change something….
Meat consumption declined after the end of the USSR. Keep your fairytales to yourself
А сейчас у людей проблем нет вообще с жильем. Ипотечное рабство. Напишите иностранцами процент ипотеки . Это не их 5 процентов.
У всех членов семьи по комнате.😂
Мясо сейчас и ечть то страшно. И там химия.
Моя семья нормально питалась. Если совсем прям надо было , то у деревенских брали.
У вас что отец пил что-ли? Так в СССР жили только семьи с пьющим отцом.
The name Alisker Sultanovich, the PhD guy, doesn’t sound Russian to me. And a person like him is telling us that the nationalities had a good life in the USSR 🙄
The coup against Gorbachev was on 1991 August 19.
All Soviet Republics declared their independence during August-September, Estonia the very next day, on August 20 😊
This is how well “they lived together in peace and kindness.”
Lithuania broke away before the Soviet Union formally collapsed. We declared the reestablishment of our independence on 11 March 1990. Of course, Soviets didn't like that and sent their brotherly tanks to roll over civilians early in 1991. Gorbachev never managed to even apologise for that, supposedly it wasn't him, it was Politburo. We probably should be grateful for their kindness as they killed 'only' 14 people and injured about 800.
@@giedrestankeviciene34 Tegyvuoja Lietuva!
@@zootallures6470 Ačiū 🥰
Every Soviet Socialist Republic was very happy about it - except Russia. Rather than blaming Gorbachev - they should be thanking him.
Nina was wrong about not needing assistance. In the 1980's the USA provided USSR with some of their surplus wheat.
Funny how people who claim they ‘don’t follow politics’ when asked about current subjects, have a deep memory as it relates to the politics of the past…
There is not such thing as a "free apartment" or "free education"... it just means, that all citizens are forced to pay for these things independently of how much use the make of them. Giving in this way very extensive control over investment and spending to the state has always led to decay, every time it has been tried, not only in the Soviet Uniion. Because nobody is responsible, the quality of decisions is not good.. We, in the West, are also slowly sliding in this direction...
all people used apartment obviously and all people had the access to education thus they all paid. This is absolutely fair
@@FloppaTheBased So how does it help then if this is centrally enforced? In actual fact, the supply of these "necessities" was far from equitable... children of the nomenklature had much better standards of living and prospects than ordinary citizens, and the overall level of wealth was low. Apart from the arbitrary power functionaries of the state wielded. To me it looks like willful blindness, not recognzing the many manifest side effects of investing these enormous economic powers in the state. What more evidence is needed than 70 years of murderous Soviet dictorship to prove this idea wrong?
@@dynamicfieldtheory7915
>children of nomenklature had much better standarts of living
better job pays better. Nothing wrong with this
>overall level of wealth was low
House ownership is still over 80% in post-soviet countries even despite landlords slowly decreasing this number.
what about the first economy of the world?😉
>murderous dictatorship
well...😂ironic to hear this from american citizen. "gulags" and "deportarions" were inherent in the early years of USSR, in the late USSR it was just a history.
We never paid for education in the USSR. My parents lived in a village (they were classmates) and studied at universities for free. If you were an invalid or a person of a village or a person of not numerous nation ( Korean for example ) you could get a quota. So if you get minimum score , you enter the university. Social support. Not for all , for some only. For example Korean diaspora of that region could give only two quotas.
After graduating universities Soviet people were distributed to any part of our huge country. We didn't like that. 😂😂😂 You had to work there for three years and only after these three years you could go anywhere of you wanted.
My dad was sent to Northern Kazakhstan. It is Southern Siberia. Damn. It was so cold there. But he decided to stay and still lives here as he liked that land. He got a flat after 6 months, his organisation wanted to stay young specialists and tried to all for that.
I miss USSR. ❤
Strange...no Russian knows how the World works...One doctor, one Phd...nobody can explain...
world works on free money.
And you can?
@@mam0lechinookclan607 Of course...Most important...In well fuctioning countries people have agency.
Russia only understands cruelty. It has always been am empire of fists, weapons and guns, but not so much of wealth. Basically Mongolia, but more European and with cyrillic letters.
@@johanswede8200 sure ...
Some people just love to wear those rose colored glasses...
Best education. Oh I see, I see.
прогугли про советские университеты, про советские училища. Загугли про киига (ныне нау)
@@satyr5867 загугли про ДонНТУ, який деградував після захоплення Донецьку рашкою. Загугли ВУЗи розбомбленого Маріуполя тощо.
I visited often in Soviet times . These people have selective memories or are younger than depicted . There were nothing in the shops .not even biros . I used to be asked to pack them on my trips for handing out . The only reasonable shops were only open to foreigners and you had to use special certificates to buy the crap on sale . Only a few hotels and again foreigners only . It was dreadful and equally bad in Poland and China . I did one journey with a suitcase of biros to use as “trade” only to discover on arrival in Moscow that the command economy decided that month to pump out millions of ballpoints and my stash was worthless . I was told there was however a huge demand for Bath plugs . I had to plug my hotel room bath tub with copies of Pravda to retain the Luke warm water .
What is more important: sausage and a bathtub plug or free housing from the state?.. Ask this question in the West, and the majority would prefer to plug the bathtub with a newspaper than to pay a mortgage until retirement by overpaying 2-3 times.
@@maestro6458 As a person who lived in Soviet Union for 30+ years and 27 years in the US, I can respond. I'd rather prefer to pay with my own money. It is better than if someone else (the state) pays for my house with money stolen from me. Besides, it is not true that all could get a free apartment in the USSR. My family of five used to live a medium size 1 room, and we were even not eligible to be in a waiting list.
You pay with your "own money" as long as there is no crisis or armed conflict... In the 1930s, these “lovers of paying with their own” threw themselves out of windows or took on any menial job just to feed their children.@@LisaLitvak
Do you know the story of the hotel in Moscow built before the 1980 Olympics specifically for players of foreign sports teams? Among other things, the hotel was equipped with a large number of phones (this had a propaganda dimension for foreign guests). Before the athletes arrived for the Olympics, all the phones were stolen by local police officers!
@@maestro6458 It wasn't just the sausage that was missing. For bread and milk you had to get up very early and stand in line. Sweets, sensible soap, sensible toothpaste, medicines, toys, freezers and many everyday items were in short supply, not available at all or only available with connections. You had to wait many years to get a car. And then it was a piece of crap.
And by the way, in the post-war West, even people with low incomes could afford large houses or apartments that were far more luxurious than the free apartments in those concrete blocks of the USSR.
The Soviet Union failed because its military spending trying to keep up with the American military bankrupted it. Russia has never been a producer of goods & services, only raw materials, and this has led to a depressed import-heavy economy that still exists to this day.
These people are living in a dream world. Happy? To each their own, I suppose. Thank you 💛 1420 !!!
"To each their own" doesn't work very well, when some gremlins spread propaganda from Kremlin 24/7/365 and when they attack their neighbours and Russians as well.
are the tens of millions of apartments that Soviet people received for free from the state also dreams?
Yes they are. Because it was not for free.
@@maestro6458 My dad got a flat in 6 months after graduating his university. He and my mom were so happy. 😊
In the USSR after graduating you were to be distributed to some region and work there for 3 years. Only after that you can change your job.
So my dad was sent to Northern Kazakhstan.
Education and medicine were also for free. Gas , water and electricity were absolutely cheap. We didn't have water and gas meters. Only electric ones.
@@LisaLitvakDid you live in my country? They were for free!!!!
Education and medicine were for free too. I was 7 when I got badly ill. I with my mom were sent to a sanatorium in Zheleznovodsk. My mom paid only for plane tickets. In the USSR kids , whi were less rhan 7 years old flied for free.
In that sanatorium we BOTH had complete medical examination. Heart, teeth... all!!!!!!
As medicine was for free , it wasn't business and Government was interested to have healthy citizens. It didn't want to pay much for us and preventing medicine was very popular in the Soviet Union.
Lol, it collapsed because they literally couldn't even afford the mold on their bread anymore.
People grew up in prison find it hard to live in a different kind of prison. They need the old prison back :)
A couple had it correct, but, omg, those who thought it was so good because everything was free failed to understand that "being free" was a main issue "why" it failed. The economy was horrible, Russia was going backwards not forwards, and the US was actually sending food to the largest food basket in the world, the USSR. Sad to see some in the US wanting to experiment with such a system. A system that has always failed across the world, in every instance it was tried.
In Lithuania many people are still thankful for the USSR. So many Lithuanians would have died at such an early age if Moscow had not saved them from so much butter and bacon!
😂
Well, the past and the future are always better than the present.
I think people tend to forget about all the bad things in their Soviet past and remember only the positives. When you ask a 50 year old he or she will say everything was fine. Of course everything is fine when you are 18.
I just finished school when the Soviet Union had collapsed. For me, all looked very nice back then but my parents did feel the economic collapse immediately. They were both engineers and we were considered a middle class family by Soviet standards. Our only source of income was my parents salary. We had our own 2-bedroom apartment but we could build it only because my grandparents helped. Yes, some people were getting apartments for free but there was a huge queue where the priority was given to those in need - single mothers with children, veterans, disabled, communist Party leaders etc. So, since we were not from these categories, we could not count on a free apartment in any reasonable time.
We could not afford a car, for example. Food availability was much worse than today. Soviet service was a joke. We have some remnants of it even today here and there but thankfully it is fading away.
Soviet Union collapsed not because of Gorbachev but because of the socialist paradigm suppressing private business and competition. It caused so many economic issues and disbalances that the failure of the state regime promoting it was only a question of time. Gorbachev and other party bosses were incapable and incompetent, yes, but they were only the symptoms, not the root cause of the failure. They were acting by Lenin books but these books did not give any answer on what to do when the world changed.
Apart from the minority like yourself, most Russians cannot fathom any of those processes and just look directly to the top. USSR collapsed -- therefore it was Gorbachev. Now we have food in the shops (for now), so it's thanks to Putin. Russia has always been a Tsardom, and the serfs still are serfs, even dressed up in western clothes and with "educations."
glasnost and perestroika revealed the rot, they werent the cause of it.
And here I was thinking the soviet union collapsed under the weight of its own enormous military spending. Also, as a Ukrainian subject of the former USSR, it wasn't actually all that great.
The US spends more tax money on military than the next several biggest countries combined, and they're doing fine.
Soviet Union was larger that the US, but the US had almost double the GDP of Soviet Union even back then.
I don't believe military spending was the downfall of Soviet Union.
@@edmis90 Ya...there's the difference between capitalism and communism. We could afford it, they couldn't. Also a lesson for another time in soft power vs hard power.
As a person from a country formerly occupied by soviet union I definitely agree with you. Don’t miss economic poverty, corruption and oppression. Also can’t wait until Ukraine is admitted to EU and is rebuilt.
@@edmis90 the you need to learn this! and us gdp was much more then double of the russian gdp!
@@cud0s The difference between being a kid in Ukraine under russian boots and a kid in our adopted Canada was like moving to a utopian planet after having an apartment in Hell.
The view of the situation through a Moscow prism doesn't tell the whole story. People complain that products have disappeared from the stores. In Siberia, where my family came from, the stores where already empty 10 years prior to that.
Yeah I was waiting for somebody to say it.. Soviet Moscow was one thing, but Soviet Siberia, Soviet Kalingrad, Soviet Georgia or Soviet Estonia were different stories again.
"The early years of the Soviet Union was relly, really harsh, but after that it was only just bad."
Not bad. We had good , happy and simple life. No rich, no luxury and no poor , no unemployed. Middle class.
You could be put to prison of you don't work in the USSR! 😂 All Soviets were obliged to work except women , who wanted to look after their kids.
Our system has minuses but pluses it had much more.
Education and medicine were really for free. And as medicine wasn't business , doctors were really professional and they did all for your health.
At present it is business.😢
It’s easy to say that they are all brainwashed nuts, but a lot of us tend to look back on our ‘good old days’ as well. The hard fact is that our quality of life has improved significantly over the past thirty years and this is probably more so in Russia as they were so far behind the western world before Gorbachev took office. Thus my view is that while we can’t simply discard how some of the older generation people of Russia may feel, we need to make sure that history is depicted in a way that perception is relative. At the end of the day, we are all living a better life than any medieval aristocrat. I hope I am making some sense.
It makes sense till you realise that generation also right now simply refuses to acknowledge what russia is doing.
We may have warm nostalgic feels that cloud our judgement of the past. All we need to do is to think a bit deeper and we start remembering it all more properly.
They however have fabricated a whole alternate reality in which all the bad never even happened, in which they are a superior people that has saved the world countless times and they are happy to continue to ostrich out their lifes.
Im not going to defend that as if its anywhere near similar. Many of them are worse than brainwashed nuts. And dont start about 'afghanistan iraq blabla the western civilians let that happen as well'. (We massively protested western atrocities though) These people are choosing to ignore/celebrate a genocide of a people they claimed were their brothers since birth. So what are they? Brainwashed nuts, or evil?
Life in USSR was not good exept if You liked queing for cabbage.
Or you lived in village with pensions and food on table
"The inherent vice of capitalism is the unequal sharing of blessings. The inherent virtue of Socialism is the equal sharing of miseries.”
🤓🫵
😅
I went to Sofia in Bulgaria and seen people rushing to the square, it was because someone was selling butter. The queue was massive.
🎵🎶 when I was seventeen 🎵🎶 it was a very good year..🎵🎶 a very good year..😢😢😢😢😢
It is indeed. I could relate very much with the people whose reaction was that they would like to go back to their youth. I was 17, and living in a tiny village in India when the Soviet Union collapsed. Most of my high school classmates are in touch with each other, and the only reason seems to be that these other middle-aged people remind them of their youth.