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  • 6 Comments
Joined 6 years ago
Cake day: May 7th, 2020
  • harc@szmer.infoBanned from communitytoMemes@lemmy.ml•Turned red after finding out thatEnglish
    510·
    9 days ago

    Where did they work, and did they live in Moscow? Some regions or particular stores by key plants were much better supplied, but honestly I’m not sure if you could find one family in USSR that would claim stores were well supplied in the 80s.
    Also I come from one of the satellite state. Food was taken out from the country, while there were protests over look of food in the stores. Kinda hard to claim it did not happen. There were rail carts welded to tracks to by workers trying to stop it…

    And yeah, Russia was an absolutne shitshow both before and after, no question about it. I’m just addressing oversimplified vision of what money meant in state capitalism.

  • harc@szmer.infoBanned from communitytoMemes@lemmy.ml•Turned red after finding out thatEnglish
    2316·
    9 days ago

    Ex soviet block kid here, even got CCCP stamp in an old passport.

    This might be true, but it might be worth considering that by late 70 it would not really matter that much. You could hardly get anything with the money left, basic food products included.

    Buying meat in a store would be a thing of a chance or you got nasty scraps, and there was really little other options beyond popatos and a few other very basic foods. In my country most of 80s people would que for most of the day to buy toilet paper, and one your run around the city based on rumor on where something could be gotten. This created a massive black market, but there prices would make an average pay worthless. And also any western foreign currency would be worth much more than local, as they were key for smugglers, anyone looking to escape to the other side and tightly controlled (if you were even given a passport and were allowed to travel abroad you could buy a very small amount of currency, much below what would be needed to sustain oneself). Anyways stuff like this, institutional inertia and stiffness, plus repression of any attempts at change created a feedback loop of a massive shadow economy and corruption that chocked the system and created a deeply pathological culture that has been an issue in the region since.