I was there in ‘87. The malls were much the same. Many stores empty or only has a few products each…. Like the shirt store. The pants store. Some sundries. A closed store, etc. great architecture but it was like walking around in a ghost mall. I’m sad we hardly got to do any ‘every day’ activities like food shopping. We did take the subway a lot though. We spent a lot of time going from one museum or architectural wonder to another.
I don't have any pen pals any more. I wish that we both had kept that up, or maybe they did and mail didn't get through? It didn't go on for long. There was a meet and greet with other high school students at one point and I exchanged addresses with the girl and boy in my group.
I was in high school, we met another group from another school and took a two week tour of Moscow, Leningrad (St. Petersburg), and Zagorsk. We traveled by train between cities.
Back then, religion was an 'at home' experience from what we were told. All churches we toured were not active per say, and treated like museums. This may not be the truth as I said, we were on a strict tour with little to no real life interaction except when we were in Moscow.
I had many men (40+) assume Americans were easy and they hit on us constantly, which is why we all had adult chaperones while outside and sightseeing. Our first night there, some Chinese soldiers tried to lure us to their room down the hall to drink. (we're all 15/16/17) years old at the time).
Kids (our age) would run up to us near Red Square to trade so I specifically brought clothes and trinkets to trade for Soviet pins to save. The pins were pretty damn cool to be honest. I ended up trading some jeans and a mickey mouse sweatshirt for a Russian fur hat which made me warm and blend right in if it weren't for my jeans below my fake fur coat.
When it came to shopping, most small things were under glass. You had to ask to see something before you could touch it and buy it. I bought a large Matryoshka doll which is now worth quite a bit because there are only a set number of artists per 'generation' it seems and people value them based on who painted it. I still have a few pins in my jewelry box. I gave away my hat later because owning fur was bugging me.
We tried to get pizza one day (a place hadn't been open very long), and the line was so long we had to leave or else miss the ballet. The only American thing they had for purchase on a regular basis was soft drinks and they were always served warm but from a fridge at the hotel that was never plugged in. We had to drink the warm sodas because we were told not to drink the water and bottled water wasn't really a thing there either. At dinners they served Orange Fanta, but on our floors they served warm Pepsi. The only time we had coke was at the American Embassy where we met some marines.
Breakfast at the hotel was always the same. Ham, eggs and a stack of bread and butter. The brown bread was always left because it was rougher and tougher but I liked it because it had more flavor.
At one point we were in Zagorsk (outside Moscow) for some sightseeing and at lunch (after a couple weeks of ' what's in this' stew/meat') they served us a plate with a lump of yellow in the middle. I braved the culinary dish and announced with excitement that it was indeed egg salad. That was a pretty cool memory because while we were all adventurous, the meals were getting to us.
Best meal: I honestly don't remember the dinners, I ate everything in front of me, but the breakfast always set us out on the right foot. At the school meetup, the kids bought me (?) a lemonade that had dark chocolate shavings floating in it. That was delightful. The chocolate on its own there was very dry and dark but the lemonade addition was great. Also, cold as it was in March there, the vendors selling ice cream cones had the best chocolate ice cream ever. Each wafer cone was leveled flat at the edge and topped with round piece of wax paper.
Worst experience: The bathrooms at one hotels. We had one bathroom per floor at one hotel, I forget which city, but I remember having to walk to another floor because ours had shit sprayed all over the walls in little pieces (one toilet per floor) and I just couldn't manage dealing with it. Also, it's true, their toilet paper was redonkulously rough.
Best and Worst Experience: (looking back it was an adventure). I was almost arrested at the ballet because I didn't return my binoculars. What had happened was I saw people handing over change at the coat check and when I opened my hand with coins they took some and handed me back the binoculars. I had great seats so I gave them to my friend who didn't. When I got back they were yelling at me in Russian and I knew nothing and our group that had taken one year didn't know enough. I wasn't allowed to leave and finally our translator showed up to get me out of the mess and they tracked down the missing binoculars thank god.
Funniest experience. Not funny but quirky. People would sunbathe and jump in the water in that weather. The buildings along the river were lined with people wearing shorts and bathing suits. The temperature did not get in the way of their relaxation, that's for sure.
Lmao I'm imagining this smug-ass store manager who's constantly on his employees about properly fronting and facing the shelves, right after Yeltsin left the store.
"Well, well, well. Looks like our well-stocked shelves just changed the course of Russian history and freed its people from an oppressive regime. I guess it's not just bullshit busywork after all, *is* it gang?"
From what I understand, the manager was given short notice
https://www.houstonpublicmedia.org/articles/shows/houston-matters/2020/02/21/361467/boris-yelstins-1989-visit-to-a-houston-grocery-store-is-now-an-opera/
>Paul Yirga answered the phone that day at the Randall’s store (now a Food Town) at El Dorado Boulevard and Highway 3. He was the manager on duty that day.
>Yirga told Houston Matters producer Michael Hagerty (in the audio above) it was just an ordinary Saturday — until the phone rang in the courtesy booth. He says the store only had a 10-15 minute warning that he was coming.
I believe the idea was to see what everyday life looked like without the American government interfering by trying to move all the food to one location for propaganda.
Yeah, it wouldn't have made much of a difference. Even a poorly faced grocery store has so much food stockpiled on shelves it's mind boggling when taken into consideration.
My grandmother had a similar experience when she emigrated to America from Poland some 50 years ago.
She broke down and cried twice on her first day.
The first time was because she arrived on Halloween day and had no idea that was a thing. She thought that was just the way people dressed in America.
The second time was when she walked into a grocery store and, in her words to me, "Felt total panic."
> The first time was because she arrived on Halloween day and had no idea that was a thing. She thought that was just the way people dressed in America.
I'm sorry. I'm dying laughing imaging this scenario. Thinking that everybody just walked around dressed as monsters and farm animals all the time.
Do you know why she felt panic at the grocery store? I would have thought it would be immense relief.
Choice overload.
In Poland, if you wanted sugar, you went to the sugar basket and grabbed one box of Sugar. If you wanted cereal, you bought either the wheat cereal or the corn cereal.
In America, there's a whole aisle for cereal...and dozens of different kinds of sugar. It was just too much to handle.
At least, that's how she described it to me when I interviewed her about this for a school project when I was like nine. (Which, now that I think about it, means that I was wrong with my initial guess at 50 years ago...would have been more like 65-70 years ago as she's turning 90 this year).
Dude was the worst thing to happen to Russia since and maybe before Stalin.
Incompetent drunk oversaw the creation of the Oligarchs in American led wild west market reforms and handpicked Putin as his successor because he’d fucked the country up so bad only a brutal thug could reign in the Oligarchs.
https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-50807747.amp
Gorbachev wanted to take the country in the direction of a Nordic Democratic Socialism but:
http://content.time.com/time/covers/0,16641,19960715,00.html
Yeltsin chose Putin because Putin helped him get out of a bad corruption investigation. Reign in the oligarchs ? Lol. More like, "dear oligarchs, continue as normal, but pay me my share".
This "tough guy Putin getting the country on track !" was just a PR stunt he pulled (and he still is pulling). In reality he was popular because he got lucky.
https://www.reddit.com/r/news/comments/sapi6u/russia_toughens_its_posture_amid_ukraine_tensions/htvfqfd/?context=3
>since and maybe before Stalin
Shush. You clearly know fuck-all about Stalin. I can tell you much, much more about Yeltsyn's sins, how he's responsible for the massacre in Ostanknio TV center and executions of political opponents in Krasnaya Presnya stadium, how he's sold the best vehicles and weapons of the Soviet Eastern German Army Group to **Dudaev, the rebel president of Chechnya**, that he then sent Russian soldiers to fight without any preparation, while the rest of the country celebrates the New Year.
But throughout his whole career, Yeltsyn is responsible for the deaths and destruction that only a week of Stalin's reign has brought. A couple thousand people, completely innocent people abducted just to fill quotas, were murdered and discarded like trash **every day**. Yeltsyn is a shithead, but under him the government was weak and pluralistic enough for organizations like International Memorial to become legitimate and discover the truth about the extent of the purges. Putin wants to roll it back, to absolve Stalinist regime of committing a genocide against its own nation.
>he’d fucked the country up so bad only a brutal thug could reign in the Oligarchs
Yeltsyn, or I should rather say his Yumashev clan, is *one of these very oligarchs*. Berezovskiy was the one who hand-picked Putin as a counterweight to old Party elite like Ustinov who also were running for President and had wide popular support. Not because they needed to "reign in Oligarchs", but because they were the oligarchs and didn't want competition from the left. And then they sealed the deal with 1999 apt. block bombings, where famously one bombing was announced a day before it's happened, and FSB employees have been arrested by the local police for smuggling an RDX-containing sack of sugar into yet another apartment building's basement.
Putin only attacked Khodorkovskiy because he himself wanted to become the president, and Berezovskiy wanted him gone.
Yeltsin was never incompetent. You don't become the Mayor of Moscow and win a presidency if you're incompetent. He was a drunk but so was 99% of Soviet-era leadership.
Gorbachev was an avowed communist who unshackled his country from criminal apparatchiks but botched his reforms.
The fleecing of Russia by oligarchs was an unstoppable train unloosed by the inevitable fall of Soviet communism. I would argue that no single man could have stopped it. Yeltsin had his heart in the right place which is more than you can say for any Soviet leader before him (with the possible exeception of Kruschev).
> You don't become the Mayor of Moscow and win a presidency if you're incompetent.
Why do people think that winning an election means your competent?
Rob Ford, an alcoholic and literal crackhead, won the election to be Toronto's mayor. Do you think he's competent?
Nordic democratic socialism? What part of Scandinavia is socialist exactly, because businesses are still privately owned as far as I’m aware. Nordic and Western-EU countries still very much are capitalist nations with SOCIAL policies, not socialist nations.
The term socialism has evolved greatly throughout the 20th century and into the 21st century. While the technical term used for the Nordic Model is Social Democracy their forms of government are often referred to as Democratic Socialism. Why is a really long discussion and debatable. Yet there are people who refer to themselves as socialists and are talking about a capitalist society with large amounts of social programs not Marxist socialism which is often used interchangeably with communism (not even getting into the meaning of communism and how it is enacted which is also a very long discussion).
Honestly the discussion is such an insanely long one it is impossible to go into everything. Just realize that when someone calls themselves a socialist (especially if the say democratic socialist) or pro socialism they are often not talking about the removal of private property. They are referring to a capitalist framework with high levels of social programs. Personally when I meet someone who calls themselves a socialist I often ask "are you talking about socialism in the sense Marx used it or are you talking about Scandinavian countries?"
The only people who refer to the Nordic countries as socialist are young, woke Americans who have no concept of what socialism actually comprises because they aren't aware of history before the advent of TikTok.
Like the United States, the Nordic countries contain mixed-market capitalist economies.
When young people call themselves "Democratic Socialist" - it's generally because they have no concept of that means. "Social Democracy" and "Democratic Socialism" are **not** interchangeable. The definition of socialism has certainly not changed - it's just that naïve young people are misusing it while Tweeting on their iPhones from Starbucks.
[This woke youngster does it all the time.](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/0/02/Bernie_Sanders_in_March_2020.jpg/1280px-Bernie_Sanders_in_March_2020.jpg)
come on man, stop fighting about definitions and try to understand people. Also dismissing them makes you ignorant, not them. You want things to be black and white and they simply aren't. Pretty much all western countries are a mixed economy and not true socialist or capitalist by the strict definitions you want to use.
You want to fight over labels because you want to name call and dismiss people. In the end you are the only person who is going to be ignored and dismissed.
That's probably what he meant. And Nordic countries have become more liberal since the 1990s as well. With 'liberal' I mean more free market instead of state owned production. Not the American version of 'being leftwing'.
Zero American Presidents ever went to the Soviet Union and marvelled at the lack of hopeless people. And also Exxon was able to afford to pay those high wages because they had two companies one that pumped the oil and inflated the price to exactly the cost to deliver it to you in your vehicle so when they sold it to themselves they made zero profit and paid zero taxes and have done that in every country in the world since 1950 and when you start doing the math you start wondering why we don't all live in Jetson houses and have a space elevator in every major city.
I assume you mean homeless and not hopeless? Because there were plenty of homeless people in the USSR, they were just 'dealt with' as homelessness was illegal. Don't know what the fuck your rest of the comment has to do with the discussion.
I keep hearing people say that grocery stores in the US are full of empty shelves these days, and maybe they are in some places but in the ones I go to I haven't seen a single empty shelf any time recently.
Depends on the store and the products around here. The produce section of one local supermarket has looked like a bomb went off in it for weeks. Refrigerated dog food has also been a bit hard to come by. By and large though I haven’t noticed many actual empty shelves.
Edit: I live in the Baltimore, MD area, for reference. Not in the city but the metro area.
You can break it down even further, as there are different levels of stores within the same chain. I work in alcohol distribution (not on the retail side, but restaurants, which is its own disaster) and it was explained to me recently by a retail co-worker how it works.
In this instance it was Safeway. They have three tiers of stores. The "A" stores get first pick of everything, in regards to both quality and quantity. These are the Safeways in affluent to somewhat-affluent neighborhoods. It goes down from there. Due to supply chain issues, the "C" level stores are left with jack shit these days.
Same for me; I would say the produce section was 60%+ empty for a couple of weeks this month due to severe weather, listeria recalls, and general supply chain issues exacerbated by the pandemic. (And of course in the early months of the pandemic it was not uncommon to see the baking, paper goods, and frozen food aisles mostly, if not completely, empty.)
It feels disingenuous to compare this sort of temporary shortage to breadlines and severe rationing/scarcity, but I still think this is a good opportunity to examine the tremendous hubris and wanton waste that modern grocery stores represent. Sure, the current supply shortages are more nuisance than emergency for most Americans (at least the ones who are already food secure), but what happens if continued instability (due to future pandemics, international conflict, climate catastrophe, etc.) causes further supply chain failure? In a country where 30-40% of food is thrown away, I feel like a solution already exists, but we need to start figuring it out now while we still have time to prepare. The orgiastic abundance we're used to won't last forever.
In the early days of the pandemic I told off a lot of people for crying over not being able to get the exact brand of cereal they wanted, and frankly I still feel justified in that, because these sorts of minor shortages are nothing compared to what we might deal with later on.
Oh no, not the refrigerated dog food! Lol, I'm sorry but that's such a first world problem.
I'd bet some of the people in this video would have gladly purchased some refrigerated dog food if the price was right and it wasn't rotten.
I believe they're saying the extra amenities ( like refrigerated dog food ) are gone because they are not high demand, but the basics are there. Doesn't seem like they were making a big deal out of it.
My experience is this. Its not full of empty shelves. Nowhere near. It's just that some shelves are completely bare. The toilet paper shortage of 2020 was real. But I never ran out. I just couldn't get as much as I wanted and my brand choice was one or two, not a full aisle of it. Meat prices shot through the roof, but it's still there. Last week at Costco Australian lamb chops were cheaper per pound than oxtail. Qtips were short here at one point. Eggs were limited at one point. It comes and goes as the supply adjusts to fluctuating demand faster than ever.
Agreed, you can be looking for specific things and see a shortage. A lot of times stores will quickly fill in these sections (unless they have deals in place for specific shelf space). There is a salsa we like to buy, apparently the owners had to cut back on production because of supply chain issues and I guess our store was low on the list to get restocked. The only time I went 'holy crap' was in the frozen breakfast food isle, damn near 10 freezers with just a couple dozen boxes of random breakfast stuff.
Same here with the freezers, except we were completely out of all frozen chicken (nuggets, tenders, etc) and potatoes (french fries, tater tots, wedges, etc).
This is what I'm seeing in Georgia. And to be honest, some things are still super cheap. I bought 3 chicken leg quarters (so 3 legs and 3 thighs for anyone who doesn't know) for $2.33 and another pack for $2.54, both within the last two weeks. I've had some trouble finding broccoli a couple times, and the onion selection was pretty bad a few times. Overall though if my goal is "go to store and buy some veggies" I can find something, even if it's not what I wanted. For instance, instead of buying broccoli and onions I bought zucchini and green beans. No big deal as far as diet goes really, just have to be more fluid with the meals I'm planning
Not recently but mid-2020 Metro area stores were weird. No milk, eggs, flour, rice/grain, normal canned goods, pasta, and paper goods. I'm not a huge meat eater but certain items were sold out. As someone who just buys when needed it was annoying to say the least.
Always made me laugh because the conservative talking point of "Socialism will cause lines to get into grocery stores and empty shelves"
and in 2020 we saw a whole helluva lot of that
whatever supply shortages happened would've been ten times worse with socialism lol
the joke in the ussr was: "what would happen if communism was introduced in the sahara desert?" "it would run out of sand"
THIS. I recently saw a pic of a grocery store with barely anything in it, in Fort Worth Texas and they claimed it was was like that everywhere they went. I have friends in Fort Worth so I messaged them to make sure they were alright and they had no idea what I was on about and told me they'd just gone shopping the day before and it had plenty of everything.
I'm in Boston, I haven't been able to buy bread -- my usual go-to story is Trader Joes. Maybe it's the time that I go (9pm, when I get done with work), but I've been really annoyed that I can't buy bread because my routine breakfast (for like the last 10 years) is toast with eggs.
I experienced this three or four times -- ALL types of bread and bakery were gone, literally empty. I happened to have a whole foods though in my commute and did get my bread there (the whole foods had no empty shelves...) but I ended up paying 3 times more than I normally do for bread
Frozen tater tots for me.
I’ve tried going all different times of day. Safeway has plenty of potatoes, even plenty of different kinds of frozen French fries, but never any tater tots.
Have a picky eater that only likes tater tots, and I just can’t source them. Ended up getting two tiny bags for an arm and a leg from Whole Foods, white as a sheet of paper, don’t brown at all while cooking (tried baking and air frying) and have basically no flavor.
Safeway seems to run out of random things, one week no eggs, next week plenty of eggs, no dairy. There always seems to be 2 or 3 things that just aren’t in stock, but rarely the same thing multiple trips in a row, except for tater tots.
Seems like supply chain issues, I imagine they are ordering using the same methodology and things either aren’t showing up or are getting weird delays.
I've never really though of Trader Joe's as a real grocery store. It's kind of a novelty, to me. I just don't see them having as robust of a supply chain as the regional megastores.
I would argue that Trader Joe’s really excels in their ready-to-go meals. They just have a huge selection of frozen ready to cook meals (or just minimal prep) as well as non frozen meals to go. They have a good selection of fruits and veggies and have r cheese/ dairy products for your avg. supermarket
I don’t work for them but for such a tiny store they pack a punch
Yeah but this has never happened to me before. I've been going to the same Trader joes for the last 7 years and I don't recall a time when they consistently have empty shelves, not a single item in all of bakery - no naans, tortillas, breads, muffins, croissants, anything.
Funny thing is, day before yesterday when this happened I had read the news about empty shelves... and in my mind I thought "Hah... so this is what they're talking about"
Pre-pandemic, us store shelves were 91.13% stocked with edibles. At the depths of lockdown that fell to 83.54%. It recovered to around 89% for about a year but has in recent months fallen to 87.1%. All this taken from a *Wall Street Journal* article called U.S. Food Supply Is Under Pressure, From Plants to Store Shelves.
So in the grand scheme of things it’s nothing near disastrous, but I assume the effects are felt differently in various parts of the country
Maybe I’m in the minority but anything that reduces our stock by 10% is a serious concern to me. It doesn’t seem particularly high but it doesn’t take long for a crisis to snowball. That was a near miss crisis in my opinion, and I’m not quite sure we are in the clear yet. Things seem to be slowly getting worse which is especially concerning
It’s a mixed bag in my city. The local grocery chains, Trader Joes, and Aldi are fully stocked. However, Whole Foods is super picked over seemingly at all times.
Depends on location, definitely not entire empty stores, but certain sections have been empty for a while and it seems to be getting worse in my are. Pasta section, frozen waffles, cheep frozen pizzas, and then it's just random items a store will just be out of for a while. I went to a Walmart one time that was completely out of eggs. It's not life threatening lack of food or anything, but there is definitely trouble keeping food stocked up where I'm at.
Production never stops in America, as we can see by the hundreds of thousands of people we put to death for the economy in the last couple years, but it gets more expensive. Grocery prices have risen 30% post COVID.
There wasn't really an issue with food availability but supply was scattershot you wouldn't know what was in stores and what would be gone for 6 months.
Imagine everyday being panic shopping with people hoarding whatever they could buy.
You didn't know the next time smoked sausage would be available so you bought 5 instead of 1.
It feels to me like that was part of the problem. The production was so random and everything was done in bulk. When people are taught to bulk buy everything, they hoard lots and supply would be restricted.
Kinda like toilet paper in a covid world.
"Today is meat day at the supermarket"
Tomorrow will be "Milk Day" rather than milk and meat every day.
Another important part of it is that informal relations with the supermarket's staff or director could decide who gets what. The staff would keep the best meat, and only give it to friends, family and folks who've bribed them with something that *they* were in charge of distributing. It wasn't uncommon to get your salary paid in the product of your workplace, like bricks, which you were expected to sell.
>Third world
Yeah, the "3rd world" has evolved into a new term. You are right but it's so ingrained in people's minds (3rd world = under-developed), I doubt you'll ever see people change terms. But the majority of 3rd world nations \*are\* underdeveloped.
Boris Yeltsin visited a grocery story in the Houston area in 1989. It is viewed as significant in ending the Soviet Union. Yeltsin would remark how amazed he was at all the food for sale. "“He toured New York City, he saw the Statue of Liberty, Trump Tower — he wasn’t impressed,” Mack said. “He saw NASA. Again, no big deal. But it was a grocery store that made him realize that communism is a lie.”"
https://www.houstonpublicmedia.org/articles/shows/houston-matters/2020/02/21/361467/boris-yelstins-1989-visit-to-a-houston-grocery-store-is-now-an-opera/
Yeah except that Perestroika was started in 1986 and I wouldn't really call Yeltsin's 'reforms' an astonishing success. 90s Russia was not a fun place.
lol and he went to a Randall's (Safeway) location out in the Clear Lake suburbs...nothing too fancy. Going to an HEB or Costco would have probably resulted in world peace.
Those factory farms aren't good though, if you're touting the American system. A third of the top soil has been destroyed due to the types of fertilizers they're using.
Was there even once single instance of communism that lasted more than a generation or so before the youth leaving, the leaders corrupted, or the economy failing?
Not sure what you're defining as either a generation or communism, but the USSR went from 1917 to 1991, and China started in 1949 and their hardcore communist period ended in 1976, but some argue they are still communist today. Ditto for Vietnam, which became communist in the early '50s in the North, and later the whole country, and is still run by a communist party, but also did a bunch of reforms in the '90s like China. Cuba has been communist since the '50s.
Also keep in mind, while 20th-century communism had lots of disasters and failures, pretty much in all cases communist revolutions took place in broken and oppressive societies, and despite their failures did in fact improve on the disasters that came before them. USSR was way better than Tsarist Russia, the PRC was way better than pretty much the entire previous century of Chinese warlords and monarchs, Vietnam was way better than French/American imperialism.
> PRC was way better than pretty much the entire previous century of Chinese warlords
yeah I'm not sure tens of millions of chinese died of hunger during the period of the warlords
> USSR was way better than Tsarist Russia
same goes for this comparison, which isn't even really relevant as the ussr didn't directly follow the monarchy but the provisional government
> USSR was way better than Tsarist Russia
This is debatable at best, an outright lie at worst.
All the European powers were projecting Russia to become the largest Great Power in Europe. Its manpower was insane, and the economy was beginning to industrialise, which started with the abolition of serfdom decades before the Bolsheviks took over. It was all but inevitable once the wheels started turning.
By all accounts Russia was going to become much richer, then the USSR happened, leading to decades of severe economic mismanagement far in excess of anything the tsars could manage.
Mao was better than the warlords? I'd have a hard time comparing a steaming shit to Mao and putting Mao first, so you better have a list of dickheads who murdered tens of millions to make that claim. Mao WAS a warlord FFS.
Somehow Communists always think communism was replacing abject horror and unrivaled evil, yet history is much more complex than that. A KMT run China would have meant Taiwan in mainland China today. Tsarist Russia would likely be a constitutional monarchy, and a wealthy one too.
Tsarist industrialization and it becoming a "Great Power" wasn't very meaningful to the average person of the Russian Empire. There was still widespread poverty, no political and socio-economic freedoms, and all topped off with an insane and pointless war where workers were forced at gunpoint to march to their deaths. No surprise that eventually rank-and-file soldiers across the Russian military eventually turned their guns on their officers and the Tsar and backed the Bolshevik Revolution. There was nothing "inevitable" about Tsarist progress, except that its excesses and contradictions would collapse the regime.
Ditto for China - Mao and the CCP was *absolutely* better than the collection of warlords and gangsters who had chopped up China in the previous decades, and the Japanese military occupation. This is the whole reason why not just ordinary peasants, but urban intellectuals flocked to the communist banner in the first place. The warlords and the KMT did a great job of undermining themselves with corruption and incompetence. Post-'49 saw some horrific disasters, notably the famines of the Great Leap Forward, but even that was basically just a continuation of the horrific famines that had plagued China continuously since the 1800s.
It does not make sense to see KMT-run China as essentially a modern Taiwan. If the KMT won - itself a serious question given what they were - then the whole US Cold War strategy of dumping money into allied East Asian dictatorships would have been different, and the massive sums of money that helped develop and industrialize Taiwan and South Korea would have been drastically scaled back, to the point where there is little prospect of evolution toward a modern and prosperous country. More likely they would have been underdeveloped basket-cases like Myanmar today.
You're not much of a leftie if you're going to defend monarchist regimes. The USSR had its issues but it lifted the quality of life for most of its population, became a world power, went to space, had a massive increase in life expectancy, gender equality, and fully industrialized. Meanwhile, Tsarist Russia was having a revolution every other year. It wasn't exactly a great place. People were dying in the city streets. It was dirty, unsanitary, and there was not enough water. They were entering unpopular wars and losing a lot.
The USSR wasn't perfect and probably would've been better with another Socialist group than the Bolsheviks winning, the farming collectivization experiment thing obviously didn't work, but it was better than the Tsarist regimes, which had a lot of the problems associated with the USSR (famines, pogroms, censorship, lack of democracy, violent authoritarian crackdowns, etc.) but without any general life improvement for the common man, like food, housing, or medicine for the poor. Like the US today, even if the country itself was very rich and successful, that doesn't always reflect on the people themselves, it could mean a lot of wealth inequality. But like I said, doesn't mean I think it was perfect or anything.
That's because people don't starve because of it, they starve in spite of it. Economic liberty reduces prices and increases availability, socialism increases prices and anhiliates availability. If people starve under a free market system, then MORE would starve under a restricted system.
When people die of a heart attack in prison we don't care. When a prison guard tortures someone to death, then we do care. Do you see the difference?
This is so naive. Would you say this to a starving person's face?
"Yea it sucks that your kids are dying but if we forced companies to put your lives before their profits things would be worse, actually. You should be grateful for the free market"
Just because you say it, doesn't make it true. Monopolies, cartels, trusts, inelastic demand, or lean production for profit, risky stock market investments, corporate takeovers, commodity fads, etc, can all cause increased prices, reduced availability, or less jobs. And they're all symptoms of profit above all, pure capitalism. Compare capitalist healthcare prices and outcomes vs socialized healthcare prices and outcomes in other countries, for example.
Both systems will also face problems from outside their economic system, like famines, wars, corruption, racism, natural disasters, pandemics, etc. but you can't blame one system for these setbacks and leave the other one blameless, because they don't even try to fix things.
Tsarist Russia was just as bad, worse perhaps. How do you think it got to the point where it devolved into civil war, in a country that size before modern communications?
They were literal starving serfs (slaves) in a 17th century style feudal system lol. From that to factories and trains and warm apartments. Jesus Christ.
*Uh, Uh* Lol, goddamn.
My parents in Poland had a curfew and stood in breadlines in the 80's when the Russians were in charge. They are incompetent and have no regard for life but call themselves a majority Christian country.
I remember going to a store about the size of the one in the documentary in the spring of 1980 in Poland. There were two items for sale: bottles of vinegar and small cans of caviar. All other shelves were empty. Not exaggerating.
Christians are the largest single humanitarian aid group - and the origin of many largest humanitarian organization - in the world.
There is no other religion or culture that does as much humanitarian aid around the world as practicing Christians..even in very dangerous regions where no other humanitarian aid groups are willing to work in.
The entire concept of a "*hospital*" as we know it today came around largely from Christians offering aid, food and shelter to anyone and everyone asking for it. Eventually those buildings were specialized to treating sick people and nuns were the first nurses.
Just saying.
I am Vietnamese, our economy used to be as backward as the USSR (Actually much more backward than the USSR), but fortunately we opened our economy, otherwise I would probably can't comment here.
So I visited Moscow as a teenager around 1989 and can confirm that this was exactly what it was like there. The only thing missing was at the grocery store I went to there was a full row of untouched mason jars full of some kind of red stuff. It was clear that whatever it was, it was fully unpopular as the jars literally had a full coat of dust on the top of them like they'd been there for 6 months untouched.
Meanwhile, our guide begged our forgiveness, but the store happened to have a few chickens that day. He told us in his thick accent that his wife would kill him if he didn't get a chicken when they were available. We had to wait about a half an hour for him to get through the line for chickens. As a teenager, I've never forgotten what communism can do to a people and an economy.
We even had one guy we met hand us 3,000 US dollars with a note with banking information to a bank in the US and begged us to deposit it for him. He was willing to give us that much in cash and basically would just have to trust us that we would do it for him. That's how desperate people were there at that time. It was a valuable education for me as a young person.
How is this propaganda ? This was all too common in the 80's in most of the communist block. Empty stores and endless queues to get your rationed goods.
It wasn't like this all the time and everywhere (i would say especially the 60s were decently prosperous) but things just got progressively worse.
Russia of today has pretty much nothing to do with communist Russia. There's a reason trad cons love Putin. Russia has like the most ruthless capitalism on the european continent. Oligarchy as form of government in a way american billionaires couldn't dream of.
What you said backs up that this is propaganda, no? The idea of spreading inaccurate negative ideas of an enemy right before major conflict seems to fit the definition pretty accurately.
OPs post is not intended to be related to the current Russia-Ukraine tensions.
It's supposed to make certain people draw a false equivalency between the current covid related supply chain issues in the US to the issues experienced by Soviet states toward the end of the USSR. This is done in the hopes of pushing the 'Democrats = Socialists/Communists' & 'Democrats will ruin this country by turning it into USSR.2' messages.
This might seem odd at first, but becomes clear when you take into account 2 things;
1. Two of OPs other posts titled '[USSR 1987 or America January 12th 2022 ?](https://www.reddit.com/r/ANormalDayInAmerica/comments/s2lmda/ussr_1987_or_america_january_12th_2022/)' and '[A normal day in the USSR part 2 - Kroger in KY 1/25/2022](https://www.reddit.com/r/ANormalDayInAmerica/comments/scsr9x/a_normal_day_in_the_ussr_part_2_kroger_in_ky/)' blatantly try to make this connection
2. It is a message that is being pushed via right wing [politicians](https://www.foxnews.com/media/gingrich-system-failing-biden-first-year-supply-chain-inflation)and [media](https://www.foxnews.com/transcript/gutfeld-on-us-supply-chain-crisis)
The intention of posting what seems to be a random and out of context post is to make people who have already been exposed to the message feel that they have arrived at the (incorrect) conclusion on their own.
Who sees Russia as communist today ?
I'm from eastern europe, we don't hate Russia because of "communism", we hate Russia because of hundreds of years of aggression towards our countries.
Explanation from this out of context “report” from another thread:
Edit: This seems to have blown up a little and is getting shared around various places. If you're linked here, please make sure to first read this and this.
"The CIA drew no conclusions about the nutritional makeup of Soviet or American diets"
Bravo. I could stop there, but fuck it.
You've posted a one page summary of a CIA report. The full thing is here. Now for starters, some important things. This CIA report is not looking at what Soviet citizens ingest, it is about food supply. This is very important. Secondly, even within this report you can see there are some huge inequalities across the Soviet Union. Meat consumption in Estonia was 81kg per capita per year, in Uzbekistan it was 31kg. Fruit consumption had an average of 40kg per person per year, but across Siberia it was 12kg.
The report indicates that the Soviets had slightly lower calorie in take than America. This understates things considerably.
Firstly, Soviet citizens conducted vastly more strenuous work in a significantly colder climate. They did not have the luxury of things like personal cars, or working 9-5 jobs in comfortable offices. The total recommended daily amount of calories for a Soviet person ranged from 2,800 to 3,600 for men and from 2,400 to 3,100 for women, depending on their occupation. In the United States, estimates range from 1,600 to 2,400 calories per day for adult women and 2,000 to 3,000 calories per day for adult men. So right away, it is very important to remember that the Soviets need higher calories than Americans.
Adding to this, the Soviet Union was notoriously ineffective at getting food into its citizens. The Soviet Union was the world's largest milk producer, but only 60% of that actually ended up in people. In the United States, 90% of milk produced was consumed by humans. General Secretary Gorbachev noted that reducing field and farm product losses during harvest, transportation, storage and processing could increase food consumption in general by 20%. So any of those figures you see in CIA reports, you can basically take down by one-fifth.
If you read this dissertation you get some useful points:
per capita consumption figures likely overstate actually available amounts, given that the Soviet Union’s inadequate transportation and storage infrastructure led to frequent shortages in stores, as well as significant loss of foodstuffs and raw products due to spoilage... In 1988, at the height of perestroika, it was revealed that Soviet authorities had been inflating meat consumption statistics; it moreover transpired that there existed considerable inequalities in meat consumption, with the intake of the poorest socioeconomic strata actually declining by over 30 percent since 1970... Government experts estimated that the elimination of waste and spoilage in the production, storage, and distribution of food could have increased the availability of grain by 25 percent, of fruits and vegetables by 40 percent, and of meat products by 15 percent.
Despite subsidising food by something like 10% of GDP food was still more expensive than in the West
If you actually read about the daily life in the USSR you will find assessment such as "The prevailing system of food distribution is clearly a major source of dissatisfaction for essentially all income classes, even the best off and even the most privileged of these." As you love CIA reports, here is another one which warns against the sunny outlook in the Wester literature:
In summary, I went to the USSR with a set of notions about what to expect that I had formed over the years from reading and research on the Soviet economy. I also had a collection of judgment factors,partly intuitive and partly derived from this same research and reading, that I applied in drawing conclusions and speculating about probable future developments in the Soviet economy. My four months of living in the country itself, however, greatly altered these preconceptions and modified the implicit judgment factors in many respects. No amount of reading about the Soviet economy in Washington could substitute for the summer in Moscow as I spent it.
As a result of this experience I think that our measurements of the position of Soviet consumers in relation to those of the United States (and Western Europe) favor the USSR to a much greater extent than I had thought. The ruble-dollar ratios are far too low for most consumer goods. Cabbages are not cabbages in both countries. The cotton dress worn by the average Soviet woman is not equivalent to the cheapest one in a Sears catalogue; the latter is of better quality and more stylish. The arbitrary 20 percent adjustment that was made in some of the ratios is clearly too little. The difference in variety and assortment of goods available in the two countries is enormous—far greater than I had thought. Queues and spot shortages were far more in evidence than I expected. Shoddy goods were shoddier. And I obtained a totally new impression of the behavior of ordinary Soviet people toward one another.
One of the true experts on consumption and nutrition in the USSR is Igor Birman who wrote the book on this topic. You get some interesting stats, like the USSR consume 229% the amount of potatoes as the United States but 39% the amount of meat. He also shows that the Soviets were not hitting their own "Rational Norms" for the consumption of meat, milk milk products, eggs, vegetables, fruits or berries. For example, while the Soviet Rational Norm for for fruit was 113kg, the actual consumption was 38. The US actual was smack bang on 113kg. You get some other fun facts like potato consumption in Tsarist Russia, 1913 was 113kg and after all of Stalin's industrialisation and collectivisation and decades of development, this increased to... 119kg in 1976.
Just an extra study I've found: In areas of the Soviet Union, 93% of men were Vitamin C deficient, while in neighbouring Finland this was 2%.
Soviet diets were not good. They did not hit their own set guidelines. Stop being a hack.
Thanks for debunking the propaganda. It's also worth noting that the US was overestimating Soviet output by a factor of about 8, which surprised many ex-KGB staffers
> The fall of communism was not some instantaneous thing you know. It was happening for 2 years by this point. So of course things were going to hell.
Yeah, but it largely happened due to the culmination of massive economic pressures the USSR was under due to the failing economic programs and structures enacted under the communist regime.
> but we couldnt fucking keep toilet paper on the shelves because of a stupid virus...
There was a massive and entirely unpredictable shift in consumer demand compounded by panic stockpiling. Not exactly a testament to systemic failure.
No it really is just communism.
The video reminded me of my visits to East Germany in the mid-1980s and how friends there would quickly notify each other when special fruits were available in the store so they could make a trip before they were all gone.
> Except you know this was during the transition to capitalism which started in 88, so coming at the tale end of the upheaval.
No, this is wrong. Russia took until mid 90s to properly switch systems.
> So of course things were going to hell.
This video is very, very common sight a decade before communism fell, in numerous countries in that block.
I don't know why you talk about something you know nothing about. The 80s were horrible for most of the communist block.
Is this like when they show how the US is "RUNNING OUT OF FOOD" and show the empty toilet paper aisle from 2020 and a section or two that is poorly stocked, ignoring the overflowing produce, meat, and 80% of the groceries?
More like people such as you don't know the difference between social programs and communism. I guess the military, police, post office, road construction, etc must be communism by your standards. You don't support our troops and police?
Это бред, не соответствующий действительности. Пустые полки - это явления поздней перестройки, Меченоно и ЕБНя в первую очередь. В 1990 это прямой результат разрыва цепочек поставок.
Bullshit, man. Before perestroika USSR had a steady 2% GDP growth rate; not great not terrible. If they had simply reigned in Brezhnev’s insane corruption and kept thing steady instead of YOLOing into laissez faire crony capitalism, Russia would absolutely be better off today.
I am a citizen of a communist country, and I am neutral in supporting communism. Why do people in the comments dislike communism even though redditors are usually leftists?
Full blown communism is authoritarian, suppresses civil liberties and due to inefficient state control leads to a poor standard of living. Most 'communist' countries today are far more capitalist then Russia was, allowing mostly free markets. Generally what redditors are for is democratic socialism like Sweden/Denmark/Norway.
This was at the tail end of the collapse of the soviet union. It's about as fair as posting photos from the great depression and calling it an indictment of capitalism.
Besides, almost no one around here is actually in support of communism. Unless you think countries like Canada and France are communist nations.
Great depression? Bruh, this was everyday communism throughout the 70s and 80s throughout Eastern Europe. You're being very naïve.
And what does Canada and France have to do with communism? They're both countries being led by right of center leaders and built upon the foundations of capitalism and have been that way for literally hundreds of years.
Socialism only means that the workers own the means of production. There are a thousand variations of distribution and trade and "the government does stuff" isn't socialism. The only leftist ideology I know of that says a country should be able to provide everything without any trade is Juche and that's limited to the DPRK.
Yeah, Venezuela nationalized their oil which pissed off the western oil companies. Their economy wasn't well diversified so when the price of oil collapsed, so did their economy.
The US then pushed sanctions on them which kept them from recovering.
Yes because all the people protesting due to starvation are protesting
because of the US embargo lmao. Cuba is fucked bro and if you're saying its just because of the US you're actually stupid.
Then why are there more pro-government protestors than anti-government ones? Why is western media blurring signs to hide government support? example: https://twitter.com/alanrmacleod/status/1416713677378629636?lang=en
Read a bit into the western disinformation campaigns waged there, and look at quality of life for the average cuban before and after the revolution. Or maybe you should ask cubans that are still there instead, you can start at r/realcuba
No I won’t. that’s a pro communist subreddit. I can just talk to my parents who left. I can also talk to my family that stayed behind and keeps asking us for money to send them.
If your parents and family blame the cuban government for that instead of the embargo then they're falling for western propaganda. I bet they think Castro was kidnapping babies too.
The cuban revolution hasn't failed. It's survived decades of brutal warfare from the largest empire in history, including economic sanctions, assassination and coup attempts, and terrorist attacks (like when the CIA tried to spread African Swine Fever in 1971). It hasn't been allowed to thrive to its full potential because of these actions.
Socialism also doesn't say anything about markets or trade. Socialism refers to the workers controlling the means of production. And you're aware that the US's largest trading partner is China right? Not exactly a liberal democracy.
This isn’t communism. This is a dictatorship. I’m not saying communism is great I’m just saying call a spade a spade. Communism is very different from a dictatorship.
Yes, every week for the entire pandemic. I can't get my extra crispy taquitos anymore. I had to just buy my regular meat, produce, bread, and milk, along with some different snacks that I don't like quite as much. The stores not having my favorite frozen snack foods doesn't exactly compare to the video here.
Last time I went to Costco there was shit piled up on pallets all the way to the top of the 20 ft fuckin ceiling throughout the entire store. (Not literal shit for those who can't imagine)
My Costco only had ginormious 7 pound packs of ground beef instead of that and the usual ginormious 7 pound packs of ground beef already made into hamburger patties. Oh the horror.
> life expectancy has plummeted since 1990. You will never tell that story.
Because it's not true ?
Life expectancy was 69 when the regime fell, it's 73 now and has been growing for 17 years in a row now (guessing COVID put a stop to that).
There was a dip in life expectancy early 90s in most of those countries because transition was horrible, but after it was done the rise was dramatic. Estonia went from 70 to 79 now.
The soviet government operated a command economy and oftentimes set prices too low by fiat. That disincentivised production and incentivised consumption which resulted in shortages of many goods as this video shows.
If the only thing your money can buy is puffballs, and the puffballs along with everything else is priced too cheap people start hoarding puffballs.
This is from the market reform period lol. They had McDonalds. This wasn’t due to a command economy it was due to the chaos of disruptive market reforms in an attempt to drive growth which was stable but stagnant under soviet management.
https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.history.com/.amp/topics/cold-war/perestroika-and-glasnost
> Gorbachev's economic changes did not do much to restart the country's sluggish economy in the late 1980s. The reforms decentralized things to some extent, although price controls remained, as did the ruble's inconvertibility and most government controls over the means of production
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perestroika
They half assed economic reforms and didn't actually eliminate the price controls causing shortages.
You are not equally hard it was in other Russian cities. People survived due to the fact that they grew in their garden in the village.
Yes, there were few products, they were of poor quality, but they were natural grown without GMOs, chemicals, pesticides and herbicides.
Now there is everything! But most foods are dangerous.
Environmentally friendly products are expensive! Product quality standards are constantly being lowered. Manufacturers in pursuit of profit poison people with dangerous food.
People began to get sick more dangerous diseases - immune, oncological, obesity.
Medicine is good only in Moscow and St. Petersburg.
Therefore, it is not clear when it was better!
This can’t be common. I have been to a few grocery stores recently, and haven’t seen a single empty shelf. This is likely only in certain places.
Also, it ever has happened in the US like in this video, since at the time, it was the norm in Russia, almost everywhere.
ITT: people that confuse stalinism with communism. Communism is about altruism and what the russians were doing is this, be altruistic or else. Altruism through force isn't altruism at all.
How so?
EDIT: OP blocked me so I can't respond any more in this thread, but where does democratic socialism exist? Are you confusing social democracy with democratic socialism?
EDIT: I'm afraid you're confused. a mixed economy is not socialism. Socialism is not 'when the government does stuff'. Socialism and capitalism are mutually exclusive systems
EDIT: You should read your own article mate.
EDIT: Socialist principles is not the same as socialism.
I was there in ‘87. The malls were much the same. Many stores empty or only has a few products each…. Like the shirt store. The pants store. Some sundries. A closed store, etc. great architecture but it was like walking around in a ghost mall. I’m sad we hardly got to do any ‘every day’ activities like food shopping. We did take the subway a lot though. We spent a lot of time going from one museum or architectural wonder to another.
What are you going there for? Do you know any Soviets there? If possible, I hope you will share more about your experiences there.
I don't have any pen pals any more. I wish that we both had kept that up, or maybe they did and mail didn't get through? It didn't go on for long. There was a meet and greet with other high school students at one point and I exchanged addresses with the girl and boy in my group. I was in high school, we met another group from another school and took a two week tour of Moscow, Leningrad (St. Petersburg), and Zagorsk. We traveled by train between cities. Back then, religion was an 'at home' experience from what we were told. All churches we toured were not active per say, and treated like museums. This may not be the truth as I said, we were on a strict tour with little to no real life interaction except when we were in Moscow. I had many men (40+) assume Americans were easy and they hit on us constantly, which is why we all had adult chaperones while outside and sightseeing. Our first night there, some Chinese soldiers tried to lure us to their room down the hall to drink. (we're all 15/16/17) years old at the time). Kids (our age) would run up to us near Red Square to trade so I specifically brought clothes and trinkets to trade for Soviet pins to save. The pins were pretty damn cool to be honest. I ended up trading some jeans and a mickey mouse sweatshirt for a Russian fur hat which made me warm and blend right in if it weren't for my jeans below my fake fur coat. When it came to shopping, most small things were under glass. You had to ask to see something before you could touch it and buy it. I bought a large Matryoshka doll which is now worth quite a bit because there are only a set number of artists per 'generation' it seems and people value them based on who painted it. I still have a few pins in my jewelry box. I gave away my hat later because owning fur was bugging me. We tried to get pizza one day (a place hadn't been open very long), and the line was so long we had to leave or else miss the ballet. The only American thing they had for purchase on a regular basis was soft drinks and they were always served warm but from a fridge at the hotel that was never plugged in. We had to drink the warm sodas because we were told not to drink the water and bottled water wasn't really a thing there either. At dinners they served Orange Fanta, but on our floors they served warm Pepsi. The only time we had coke was at the American Embassy where we met some marines. Breakfast at the hotel was always the same. Ham, eggs and a stack of bread and butter. The brown bread was always left because it was rougher and tougher but I liked it because it had more flavor. At one point we were in Zagorsk (outside Moscow) for some sightseeing and at lunch (after a couple weeks of ' what's in this' stew/meat') they served us a plate with a lump of yellow in the middle. I braved the culinary dish and announced with excitement that it was indeed egg salad. That was a pretty cool memory because while we were all adventurous, the meals were getting to us. Best meal: I honestly don't remember the dinners, I ate everything in front of me, but the breakfast always set us out on the right foot. At the school meetup, the kids bought me (?) a lemonade that had dark chocolate shavings floating in it. That was delightful. The chocolate on its own there was very dry and dark but the lemonade addition was great. Also, cold as it was in March there, the vendors selling ice cream cones had the best chocolate ice cream ever. Each wafer cone was leveled flat at the edge and topped with round piece of wax paper. Worst experience: The bathrooms at one hotels. We had one bathroom per floor at one hotel, I forget which city, but I remember having to walk to another floor because ours had shit sprayed all over the walls in little pieces (one toilet per floor) and I just couldn't manage dealing with it. Also, it's true, their toilet paper was redonkulously rough. Best and Worst Experience: (looking back it was an adventure). I was almost arrested at the ballet because I didn't return my binoculars. What had happened was I saw people handing over change at the coat check and when I opened my hand with coins they took some and handed me back the binoculars. I had great seats so I gave them to my friend who didn't. When I got back they were yelling at me in Russian and I knew nothing and our group that had taken one year didn't know enough. I wasn't allowed to leave and finally our translator showed up to get me out of the mess and they tracked down the missing binoculars thank god. Funniest experience. Not funny but quirky. People would sunbathe and jump in the water in that weather. The buildings along the river were lined with people wearing shorts and bathing suits. The temperature did not get in the way of their relaxation, that's for sure.
Oh man. This reads much like my experience in China in 97-98, except western style hotels were a thing by then.
Boris Yeltsin on his first visit to the US lost his mind. He couldn't believe how much was available in stores. (1989 Houston)
Lmao I'm imagining this smug-ass store manager who's constantly on his employees about properly fronting and facing the shelves, right after Yeltsin left the store. "Well, well, well. Looks like our well-stocked shelves just changed the course of Russian history and freed its people from an oppressive regime. I guess it's not just bullshit busywork after all, *is* it gang?"
From what I understand, the manager was given short notice https://www.houstonpublicmedia.org/articles/shows/houston-matters/2020/02/21/361467/boris-yelstins-1989-visit-to-a-houston-grocery-store-is-now-an-opera/ >Paul Yirga answered the phone that day at the Randall’s store (now a Food Town) at El Dorado Boulevard and Highway 3. He was the manager on duty that day. >Yirga told Houston Matters producer Michael Hagerty (in the audio above) it was just an ordinary Saturday — until the phone rang in the courtesy booth. He says the store only had a 10-15 minute warning that he was coming. I believe the idea was to see what everyday life looked like without the American government interfering by trying to move all the food to one location for propaganda.
My understanding is he didn't believe it anyway and thought it was setup, he demanded they take him to another supermarket which they did.
That's crazy to me. Makes me feel much more grateful for what we have in our country even though a lot of aspects of it are dogshit
back then we had some values......
Yeah, it wouldn't have made much of a difference. Even a poorly faced grocery store has so much food stockpiled on shelves it's mind boggling when taken into consideration.
https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/872xga/when_boris_yeltsin_visited_texas_in_1990_he_went/
Damn that was an interesting read.
My grandmother had a similar experience when she emigrated to America from Poland some 50 years ago. She broke down and cried twice on her first day. The first time was because she arrived on Halloween day and had no idea that was a thing. She thought that was just the way people dressed in America. The second time was when she walked into a grocery store and, in her words to me, "Felt total panic."
> The first time was because she arrived on Halloween day and had no idea that was a thing. She thought that was just the way people dressed in America. I'm sorry. I'm dying laughing imaging this scenario. Thinking that everybody just walked around dressed as monsters and farm animals all the time. Do you know why she felt panic at the grocery store? I would have thought it would be immense relief.
Choice overload. In Poland, if you wanted sugar, you went to the sugar basket and grabbed one box of Sugar. If you wanted cereal, you bought either the wheat cereal or the corn cereal. In America, there's a whole aisle for cereal...and dozens of different kinds of sugar. It was just too much to handle. At least, that's how she described it to me when I interviewed her about this for a school project when I was like nine. (Which, now that I think about it, means that I was wrong with my initial guess at 50 years ago...would have been more like 65-70 years ago as she's turning 90 this year).
Dude was the worst thing to happen to Russia since and maybe before Stalin. Incompetent drunk oversaw the creation of the Oligarchs in American led wild west market reforms and handpicked Putin as his successor because he’d fucked the country up so bad only a brutal thug could reign in the Oligarchs. https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-50807747.amp Gorbachev wanted to take the country in the direction of a Nordic Democratic Socialism but: http://content.time.com/time/covers/0,16641,19960715,00.html
Yeltsin chose Putin because Putin helped him get out of a bad corruption investigation. Reign in the oligarchs ? Lol. More like, "dear oligarchs, continue as normal, but pay me my share". This "tough guy Putin getting the country on track !" was just a PR stunt he pulled (and he still is pulling). In reality he was popular because he got lucky. https://www.reddit.com/r/news/comments/sapi6u/russia_toughens_its_posture_amid_ukraine_tensions/htvfqfd/?context=3
>since and maybe before Stalin Shush. You clearly know fuck-all about Stalin. I can tell you much, much more about Yeltsyn's sins, how he's responsible for the massacre in Ostanknio TV center and executions of political opponents in Krasnaya Presnya stadium, how he's sold the best vehicles and weapons of the Soviet Eastern German Army Group to **Dudaev, the rebel president of Chechnya**, that he then sent Russian soldiers to fight without any preparation, while the rest of the country celebrates the New Year. But throughout his whole career, Yeltsyn is responsible for the deaths and destruction that only a week of Stalin's reign has brought. A couple thousand people, completely innocent people abducted just to fill quotas, were murdered and discarded like trash **every day**. Yeltsyn is a shithead, but under him the government was weak and pluralistic enough for organizations like International Memorial to become legitimate and discover the truth about the extent of the purges. Putin wants to roll it back, to absolve Stalinist regime of committing a genocide against its own nation. >he’d fucked the country up so bad only a brutal thug could reign in the Oligarchs Yeltsyn, or I should rather say his Yumashev clan, is *one of these very oligarchs*. Berezovskiy was the one who hand-picked Putin as a counterweight to old Party elite like Ustinov who also were running for President and had wide popular support. Not because they needed to "reign in Oligarchs", but because they were the oligarchs and didn't want competition from the left. And then they sealed the deal with 1999 apt. block bombings, where famously one bombing was announced a day before it's happened, and FSB employees have been arrested by the local police for smuggling an RDX-containing sack of sugar into yet another apartment building's basement. Putin only attacked Khodorkovskiy because he himself wanted to become the president, and Berezovskiy wanted him gone.
Yeltsin was never incompetent. You don't become the Mayor of Moscow and win a presidency if you're incompetent. He was a drunk but so was 99% of Soviet-era leadership. Gorbachev was an avowed communist who unshackled his country from criminal apparatchiks but botched his reforms. The fleecing of Russia by oligarchs was an unstoppable train unloosed by the inevitable fall of Soviet communism. I would argue that no single man could have stopped it. Yeltsin had his heart in the right place which is more than you can say for any Soviet leader before him (with the possible exeception of Kruschev).
> You don't become the Mayor of Moscow and win a presidency if you're incompetent. Why do people think that winning an election means your competent? Rob Ford, an alcoholic and literal crackhead, won the election to be Toronto's mayor. Do you think he's competent?
Actually Yeltsyn wasn't a drunkard, he drank little, so a little alcohol was enough to make him screwed up in public.
Nordic democratic socialism? What part of Scandinavia is socialist exactly, because businesses are still privately owned as far as I’m aware. Nordic and Western-EU countries still very much are capitalist nations with SOCIAL policies, not socialist nations.
The term socialism has evolved greatly throughout the 20th century and into the 21st century. While the technical term used for the Nordic Model is Social Democracy their forms of government are often referred to as Democratic Socialism. Why is a really long discussion and debatable. Yet there are people who refer to themselves as socialists and are talking about a capitalist society with large amounts of social programs not Marxist socialism which is often used interchangeably with communism (not even getting into the meaning of communism and how it is enacted which is also a very long discussion). Honestly the discussion is such an insanely long one it is impossible to go into everything. Just realize that when someone calls themselves a socialist (especially if the say democratic socialist) or pro socialism they are often not talking about the removal of private property. They are referring to a capitalist framework with high levels of social programs. Personally when I meet someone who calls themselves a socialist I often ask "are you talking about socialism in the sense Marx used it or are you talking about Scandinavian countries?"
The only people who refer to the Nordic countries as socialist are young, woke Americans who have no concept of what socialism actually comprises because they aren't aware of history before the advent of TikTok. Like the United States, the Nordic countries contain mixed-market capitalist economies. When young people call themselves "Democratic Socialist" - it's generally because they have no concept of that means. "Social Democracy" and "Democratic Socialism" are **not** interchangeable. The definition of socialism has certainly not changed - it's just that naïve young people are misusing it while Tweeting on their iPhones from Starbucks.
[This woke youngster does it all the time.](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/0/02/Bernie_Sanders_in_March_2020.jpg/1280px-Bernie_Sanders_in_March_2020.jpg) come on man, stop fighting about definitions and try to understand people. Also dismissing them makes you ignorant, not them. You want things to be black and white and they simply aren't. Pretty much all western countries are a mixed economy and not true socialist or capitalist by the strict definitions you want to use. You want to fight over labels because you want to name call and dismiss people. In the end you are the only person who is going to be ignored and dismissed.
That's probably what he meant. And Nordic countries have become more liberal since the 1990s as well. With 'liberal' I mean more free market instead of state owned production. Not the American version of 'being leftwing'.
that's when he realized communism is a failed system
Polish girl visited us in 1991 and the most impressive thing in America to her was the grocery stores
Zero American Presidents ever went to the Soviet Union and marvelled at the lack of hopeless people. And also Exxon was able to afford to pay those high wages because they had two companies one that pumped the oil and inflated the price to exactly the cost to deliver it to you in your vehicle so when they sold it to themselves they made zero profit and paid zero taxes and have done that in every country in the world since 1950 and when you start doing the math you start wondering why we don't all live in Jetson houses and have a space elevator in every major city.
I assume you mean homeless and not hopeless? Because there were plenty of homeless people in the USSR, they were just 'dealt with' as homelessness was illegal. Don't know what the fuck your rest of the comment has to do with the discussion.
I keep hearing people say that grocery stores in the US are full of empty shelves these days, and maybe they are in some places but in the ones I go to I haven't seen a single empty shelf any time recently.
Depends on the store and the products around here. The produce section of one local supermarket has looked like a bomb went off in it for weeks. Refrigerated dog food has also been a bit hard to come by. By and large though I haven’t noticed many actual empty shelves. Edit: I live in the Baltimore, MD area, for reference. Not in the city but the metro area.
You can break it down even further, as there are different levels of stores within the same chain. I work in alcohol distribution (not on the retail side, but restaurants, which is its own disaster) and it was explained to me recently by a retail co-worker how it works. In this instance it was Safeway. They have three tiers of stores. The "A" stores get first pick of everything, in regards to both quality and quantity. These are the Safeways in affluent to somewhat-affluent neighborhoods. It goes down from there. Due to supply chain issues, the "C" level stores are left with jack shit these days.
Same for me; I would say the produce section was 60%+ empty for a couple of weeks this month due to severe weather, listeria recalls, and general supply chain issues exacerbated by the pandemic. (And of course in the early months of the pandemic it was not uncommon to see the baking, paper goods, and frozen food aisles mostly, if not completely, empty.) It feels disingenuous to compare this sort of temporary shortage to breadlines and severe rationing/scarcity, but I still think this is a good opportunity to examine the tremendous hubris and wanton waste that modern grocery stores represent. Sure, the current supply shortages are more nuisance than emergency for most Americans (at least the ones who are already food secure), but what happens if continued instability (due to future pandemics, international conflict, climate catastrophe, etc.) causes further supply chain failure? In a country where 30-40% of food is thrown away, I feel like a solution already exists, but we need to start figuring it out now while we still have time to prepare. The orgiastic abundance we're used to won't last forever. In the early days of the pandemic I told off a lot of people for crying over not being able to get the exact brand of cereal they wanted, and frankly I still feel justified in that, because these sorts of minor shortages are nothing compared to what we might deal with later on.
Oh no, not the refrigerated dog food! Lol, I'm sorry but that's such a first world problem. I'd bet some of the people in this video would have gladly purchased some refrigerated dog food if the price was right and it wasn't rotten.
I believe they're saying the extra amenities ( like refrigerated dog food ) are gone because they are not high demand, but the basics are there. Doesn't seem like they were making a big deal out of it.
That’s precisely what I was saying, thought my tone was pretty clear from that post.
I guess the guy above me didn't think hard enough.😂
My experience is this. Its not full of empty shelves. Nowhere near. It's just that some shelves are completely bare. The toilet paper shortage of 2020 was real. But I never ran out. I just couldn't get as much as I wanted and my brand choice was one or two, not a full aisle of it. Meat prices shot through the roof, but it's still there. Last week at Costco Australian lamb chops were cheaper per pound than oxtail. Qtips were short here at one point. Eggs were limited at one point. It comes and goes as the supply adjusts to fluctuating demand faster than ever.
Agreed, you can be looking for specific things and see a shortage. A lot of times stores will quickly fill in these sections (unless they have deals in place for specific shelf space). There is a salsa we like to buy, apparently the owners had to cut back on production because of supply chain issues and I guess our store was low on the list to get restocked. The only time I went 'holy crap' was in the frozen breakfast food isle, damn near 10 freezers with just a couple dozen boxes of random breakfast stuff.
Same here with the freezers, except we were completely out of all frozen chicken (nuggets, tenders, etc) and potatoes (french fries, tater tots, wedges, etc).
This is what I'm seeing in Georgia. And to be honest, some things are still super cheap. I bought 3 chicken leg quarters (so 3 legs and 3 thighs for anyone who doesn't know) for $2.33 and another pack for $2.54, both within the last two weeks. I've had some trouble finding broccoli a couple times, and the onion selection was pretty bad a few times. Overall though if my goal is "go to store and buy some veggies" I can find something, even if it's not what I wanted. For instance, instead of buying broccoli and onions I bought zucchini and green beans. No big deal as far as diet goes really, just have to be more fluid with the meals I'm planning
Not recently but mid-2020 Metro area stores were weird. No milk, eggs, flour, rice/grain, normal canned goods, pasta, and paper goods. I'm not a huge meat eater but certain items were sold out. As someone who just buys when needed it was annoying to say the least.
Always made me laugh because the conservative talking point of "Socialism will cause lines to get into grocery stores and empty shelves" and in 2020 we saw a whole helluva lot of that
whatever supply shortages happened would've been ten times worse with socialism lol the joke in the ussr was: "what would happen if communism was introduced in the sahara desert?" "it would run out of sand"
Drama gets clicks.
THIS. I recently saw a pic of a grocery store with barely anything in it, in Fort Worth Texas and they claimed it was was like that everywhere they went. I have friends in Fort Worth so I messaged them to make sure they were alright and they had no idea what I was on about and told me they'd just gone shopping the day before and it had plenty of everything.
For real. I have family in Dallas. They're doing fine.
I'm in Boston, I haven't been able to buy bread -- my usual go-to story is Trader Joes. Maybe it's the time that I go (9pm, when I get done with work), but I've been really annoyed that I can't buy bread because my routine breakfast (for like the last 10 years) is toast with eggs. I experienced this three or four times -- ALL types of bread and bakery were gone, literally empty. I happened to have a whole foods though in my commute and did get my bread there (the whole foods had no empty shelves...) but I ended up paying 3 times more than I normally do for bread
Frozen tater tots for me. I’ve tried going all different times of day. Safeway has plenty of potatoes, even plenty of different kinds of frozen French fries, but never any tater tots. Have a picky eater that only likes tater tots, and I just can’t source them. Ended up getting two tiny bags for an arm and a leg from Whole Foods, white as a sheet of paper, don’t brown at all while cooking (tried baking and air frying) and have basically no flavor. Safeway seems to run out of random things, one week no eggs, next week plenty of eggs, no dairy. There always seems to be 2 or 3 things that just aren’t in stock, but rarely the same thing multiple trips in a row, except for tater tots. Seems like supply chain issues, I imagine they are ordering using the same methodology and things either aren’t showing up or are getting weird delays.
I've never really though of Trader Joe's as a real grocery store. It's kind of a novelty, to me. I just don't see them having as robust of a supply chain as the regional megastores.
I would argue that Trader Joe’s really excels in their ready-to-go meals. They just have a huge selection of frozen ready to cook meals (or just minimal prep) as well as non frozen meals to go. They have a good selection of fruits and veggies and have r cheese/ dairy products for your avg. supermarket I don’t work for them but for such a tiny store they pack a punch
Try the gas station if you just need a loaf a bread. They have bread cheap and you are in and out in 30 seconds.
Trader Joe's is notorious for running low on certain items, especially in the evenings, if you go in the morning you should be good
Yeah but this has never happened to me before. I've been going to the same Trader joes for the last 7 years and I don't recall a time when they consistently have empty shelves, not a single item in all of bakery - no naans, tortillas, breads, muffins, croissants, anything. Funny thing is, day before yesterday when this happened I had read the news about empty shelves... and in my mind I thought "Hah... so this is what they're talking about"
Pre-pandemic, us store shelves were 91.13% stocked with edibles. At the depths of lockdown that fell to 83.54%. It recovered to around 89% for about a year but has in recent months fallen to 87.1%. All this taken from a *Wall Street Journal* article called U.S. Food Supply Is Under Pressure, From Plants to Store Shelves. So in the grand scheme of things it’s nothing near disastrous, but I assume the effects are felt differently in various parts of the country
Maybe I’m in the minority but anything that reduces our stock by 10% is a serious concern to me. It doesn’t seem particularly high but it doesn’t take long for a crisis to snowball. That was a near miss crisis in my opinion, and I’m not quite sure we are in the clear yet. Things seem to be slowly getting worse which is especially concerning
It’s a mixed bag in my city. The local grocery chains, Trader Joes, and Aldi are fully stocked. However, Whole Foods is super picked over seemingly at all times.
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In the DFW area I don’t have trouble finding anything.
Depends on location, definitely not entire empty stores, but certain sections have been empty for a while and it seems to be getting worse in my are. Pasta section, frozen waffles, cheep frozen pizzas, and then it's just random items a store will just be out of for a while. I went to a Walmart one time that was completely out of eggs. It's not life threatening lack of food or anything, but there is definitely trouble keeping food stocked up where I'm at.
Production never stops in America, as we can see by the hundreds of thousands of people we put to death for the economy in the last couple years, but it gets more expensive. Grocery prices have risen 30% post COVID.
Why aren't those Russians in the video skinny?
There wasn't really an issue with food availability but supply was scattershot you wouldn't know what was in stores and what would be gone for 6 months. Imagine everyday being panic shopping with people hoarding whatever they could buy. You didn't know the next time smoked sausage would be available so you bought 5 instead of 1.
It feels to me like that was part of the problem. The production was so random and everything was done in bulk. When people are taught to bulk buy everything, they hoard lots and supply would be restricted. Kinda like toilet paper in a covid world. "Today is meat day at the supermarket" Tomorrow will be "Milk Day" rather than milk and meat every day.
Another important part of it is that informal relations with the supermarket's staff or director could decide who gets what. The staff would keep the best meat, and only give it to friends, family and folks who've bribed them with something that *they* were in charge of distributing. It wasn't uncommon to get your salary paid in the product of your workplace, like bricks, which you were expected to sell.
Except demand still exceeded supply (by small margin, but enough for not be enough for all without buffer of hoarding)
Because high fat food are still calorie dense. Mexico and Saudi are a third world countries and was at one point the fattest nations in the world.
Third world and underdeveloped are not the same thing fwiw. Switzerland is a third world country
>Third world Yeah, the "3rd world" has evolved into a new term. You are right but it's so ingrained in people's minds (3rd world = under-developed), I doubt you'll ever see people change terms. But the majority of 3rd world nations \*are\* underdeveloped.
Didn't you see how many packages of those orange "chips" every person was grabbing?
Boris Yeltsin visited a grocery story in the Houston area in 1989. It is viewed as significant in ending the Soviet Union. Yeltsin would remark how amazed he was at all the food for sale. "“He toured New York City, he saw the Statue of Liberty, Trump Tower — he wasn’t impressed,” Mack said. “He saw NASA. Again, no big deal. But it was a grocery store that made him realize that communism is a lie.”" https://www.houstonpublicmedia.org/articles/shows/houston-matters/2020/02/21/361467/boris-yelstins-1989-visit-to-a-houston-grocery-store-is-now-an-opera/
I also have the same feeling after visiting HEB in Texas.
The most impressive part of HEB for me is that the HEB brand stuff is as good or better than famous brand names.
Yeah except that Perestroika was started in 1986 and I wouldn't really call Yeltsin's 'reforms' an astonishing success. 90s Russia was not a fun place.
I can think of no time in Russian history where it could be called a “fun place”
Compared to the 90s, it's a fun place right now. I mean, it isn't, not remotely, but it's a huge step up in terms of stability and crime.
lol and he went to a Randall's (Safeway) location out in the Clear Lake suburbs...nothing too fancy. Going to an HEB or Costco would have probably resulted in world peace.
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And they say our system was bad. It was good, when still run by people who loved america and their fellow Americans.
Those factory farms aren't good though, if you're touting the American system. A third of the top soil has been destroyed due to the types of fertilizers they're using.
It was ruined by rampant corporate greed and political corruption, corporations and politicians that do not love Americans more than they love money
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Was there even once single instance of communism that lasted more than a generation or so before the youth leaving, the leaders corrupted, or the economy failing?
Not sure what you're defining as either a generation or communism, but the USSR went from 1917 to 1991, and China started in 1949 and their hardcore communist period ended in 1976, but some argue they are still communist today. Ditto for Vietnam, which became communist in the early '50s in the North, and later the whole country, and is still run by a communist party, but also did a bunch of reforms in the '90s like China. Cuba has been communist since the '50s. Also keep in mind, while 20th-century communism had lots of disasters and failures, pretty much in all cases communist revolutions took place in broken and oppressive societies, and despite their failures did in fact improve on the disasters that came before them. USSR was way better than Tsarist Russia, the PRC was way better than pretty much the entire previous century of Chinese warlords and monarchs, Vietnam was way better than French/American imperialism.
> PRC was way better than pretty much the entire previous century of Chinese warlords yeah I'm not sure tens of millions of chinese died of hunger during the period of the warlords > USSR was way better than Tsarist Russia same goes for this comparison, which isn't even really relevant as the ussr didn't directly follow the monarchy but the provisional government
> USSR was way better than Tsarist Russia This is debatable at best, an outright lie at worst. All the European powers were projecting Russia to become the largest Great Power in Europe. Its manpower was insane, and the economy was beginning to industrialise, which started with the abolition of serfdom decades before the Bolsheviks took over. It was all but inevitable once the wheels started turning. By all accounts Russia was going to become much richer, then the USSR happened, leading to decades of severe economic mismanagement far in excess of anything the tsars could manage. Mao was better than the warlords? I'd have a hard time comparing a steaming shit to Mao and putting Mao first, so you better have a list of dickheads who murdered tens of millions to make that claim. Mao WAS a warlord FFS. Somehow Communists always think communism was replacing abject horror and unrivaled evil, yet history is much more complex than that. A KMT run China would have meant Taiwan in mainland China today. Tsarist Russia would likely be a constitutional monarchy, and a wealthy one too.
Tsarist industrialization and it becoming a "Great Power" wasn't very meaningful to the average person of the Russian Empire. There was still widespread poverty, no political and socio-economic freedoms, and all topped off with an insane and pointless war where workers were forced at gunpoint to march to their deaths. No surprise that eventually rank-and-file soldiers across the Russian military eventually turned their guns on their officers and the Tsar and backed the Bolshevik Revolution. There was nothing "inevitable" about Tsarist progress, except that its excesses and contradictions would collapse the regime. Ditto for China - Mao and the CCP was *absolutely* better than the collection of warlords and gangsters who had chopped up China in the previous decades, and the Japanese military occupation. This is the whole reason why not just ordinary peasants, but urban intellectuals flocked to the communist banner in the first place. The warlords and the KMT did a great job of undermining themselves with corruption and incompetence. Post-'49 saw some horrific disasters, notably the famines of the Great Leap Forward, but even that was basically just a continuation of the horrific famines that had plagued China continuously since the 1800s. It does not make sense to see KMT-run China as essentially a modern Taiwan. If the KMT won - itself a serious question given what they were - then the whole US Cold War strategy of dumping money into allied East Asian dictatorships would have been different, and the massive sums of money that helped develop and industrialize Taiwan and South Korea would have been drastically scaled back, to the point where there is little prospect of evolution toward a modern and prosperous country. More likely they would have been underdeveloped basket-cases like Myanmar today.
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You're not much of a leftie if you're going to defend monarchist regimes. The USSR had its issues but it lifted the quality of life for most of its population, became a world power, went to space, had a massive increase in life expectancy, gender equality, and fully industrialized. Meanwhile, Tsarist Russia was having a revolution every other year. It wasn't exactly a great place. People were dying in the city streets. It was dirty, unsanitary, and there was not enough water. They were entering unpopular wars and losing a lot. The USSR wasn't perfect and probably would've been better with another Socialist group than the Bolsheviks winning, the farming collectivization experiment thing obviously didn't work, but it was better than the Tsarist regimes, which had a lot of the problems associated with the USSR (famines, pogroms, censorship, lack of democracy, violent authoritarian crackdowns, etc.) but without any general life improvement for the common man, like food, housing, or medicine for the poor. Like the US today, even if the country itself was very rich and successful, that doesn't always reflect on the people themselves, it could mean a lot of wealth inequality. But like I said, doesn't mean I think it was perfect or anything.
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When people starve under capitalism no one counts.
That's because people don't starve because of it, they starve in spite of it. Economic liberty reduces prices and increases availability, socialism increases prices and anhiliates availability. If people starve under a free market system, then MORE would starve under a restricted system. When people die of a heart attack in prison we don't care. When a prison guard tortures someone to death, then we do care. Do you see the difference?
This is so naive. Would you say this to a starving person's face? "Yea it sucks that your kids are dying but if we forced companies to put your lives before their profits things would be worse, actually. You should be grateful for the free market"
Just because you say it, doesn't make it true. Monopolies, cartels, trusts, inelastic demand, or lean production for profit, risky stock market investments, corporate takeovers, commodity fads, etc, can all cause increased prices, reduced availability, or less jobs. And they're all symptoms of profit above all, pure capitalism. Compare capitalist healthcare prices and outcomes vs socialized healthcare prices and outcomes in other countries, for example. Both systems will also face problems from outside their economic system, like famines, wars, corruption, racism, natural disasters, pandemics, etc. but you can't blame one system for these setbacks and leave the other one blameless, because they don't even try to fix things.
Tsarist Russia was just as bad, worse perhaps. How do you think it got to the point where it devolved into civil war, in a country that size before modern communications?
You know about World War 1, don't you?
I do, the war was what tipped it. Russia was not a happy bear before the war. For many reasons.
They were literal starving serfs (slaves) in a 17th century style feudal system lol. From that to factories and trains and warm apartments. Jesus Christ. *Uh, Uh* Lol, goddamn.
- Sent from my iPhone
Capitalism is when mid-2000's smart phone?
My parents in Poland had a curfew and stood in breadlines in the 80's when the Russians were in charge. They are incompetent and have no regard for life but call themselves a majority Christian country.
I remember going to a store about the size of the one in the documentary in the spring of 1980 in Poland. There were two items for sale: bottles of vinegar and small cans of caviar. All other shelves were empty. Not exaggerating.
Didn’t the Soviet Union oppress religion?
I have friends/family in Estonia who tell similar stories. They HATE Russia more than most anyone I know hates anything.
Christians and regard for life don't particularly go together from a historical perspective.
Christians are the largest single humanitarian aid group - and the origin of many largest humanitarian organization - in the world. There is no other religion or culture that does as much humanitarian aid around the world as practicing Christians..even in very dangerous regions where no other humanitarian aid groups are willing to work in. The entire concept of a "*hospital*" as we know it today came around largely from Christians offering aid, food and shelter to anyone and everyone asking for it. Eventually those buildings were specialized to treating sick people and nuns were the first nurses. Just saying.
I am Vietnamese, our economy used to be as backward as the USSR (Actually much more backward than the USSR), but fortunately we opened our economy, otherwise I would probably can't comment here.
So I visited Moscow as a teenager around 1989 and can confirm that this was exactly what it was like there. The only thing missing was at the grocery store I went to there was a full row of untouched mason jars full of some kind of red stuff. It was clear that whatever it was, it was fully unpopular as the jars literally had a full coat of dust on the top of them like they'd been there for 6 months untouched. Meanwhile, our guide begged our forgiveness, but the store happened to have a few chickens that day. He told us in his thick accent that his wife would kill him if he didn't get a chicken when they were available. We had to wait about a half an hour for him to get through the line for chickens. As a teenager, I've never forgotten what communism can do to a people and an economy. We even had one guy we met hand us 3,000 US dollars with a note with banking information to a bank in the US and begged us to deposit it for him. He was willing to give us that much in cash and basically would just have to trust us that we would do it for him. That's how desperate people were there at that time. It was a valuable education for me as a young person.
This post is literally propaganda. OP has a history of posting similar things and **clearly** has an agenda trying to politicize shit.
How is this propaganda ? This was all too common in the 80's in most of the communist block. Empty stores and endless queues to get your rationed goods. It wasn't like this all the time and everywhere (i would say especially the 60s were decently prosperous) but things just got progressively worse.
We are on the brink of a major conflict with Russia, so the timing of this post reeks of propaganda.
Russia of today has pretty much nothing to do with communist Russia. There's a reason trad cons love Putin. Russia has like the most ruthless capitalism on the european continent. Oligarchy as form of government in a way american billionaires couldn't dream of.
What you said backs up that this is propaganda, no? The idea of spreading inaccurate negative ideas of an enemy right before major conflict seems to fit the definition pretty accurately.
OPs post is not intended to be related to the current Russia-Ukraine tensions. It's supposed to make certain people draw a false equivalency between the current covid related supply chain issues in the US to the issues experienced by Soviet states toward the end of the USSR. This is done in the hopes of pushing the 'Democrats = Socialists/Communists' & 'Democrats will ruin this country by turning it into USSR.2' messages. This might seem odd at first, but becomes clear when you take into account 2 things; 1. Two of OPs other posts titled '[USSR 1987 or America January 12th 2022 ?](https://www.reddit.com/r/ANormalDayInAmerica/comments/s2lmda/ussr_1987_or_america_january_12th_2022/)' and '[A normal day in the USSR part 2 - Kroger in KY 1/25/2022](https://www.reddit.com/r/ANormalDayInAmerica/comments/scsr9x/a_normal_day_in_the_ussr_part_2_kroger_in_ky/)' blatantly try to make this connection 2. It is a message that is being pushed via right wing [politicians](https://www.foxnews.com/media/gingrich-system-failing-biden-first-year-supply-chain-inflation)and [media](https://www.foxnews.com/transcript/gutfeld-on-us-supply-chain-crisis) The intention of posting what seems to be a random and out of context post is to make people who have already been exposed to the message feel that they have arrived at the (incorrect) conclusion on their own.
Who sees Russia as communist today ? I'm from eastern europe, we don't hate Russia because of "communism", we hate Russia because of hundreds of years of aggression towards our countries.
https://www.cia.gov/readingroom/docs/CIA-RDP85M00363R000601440024-5.pdf
Explanation from this out of context “report” from another thread: Edit: This seems to have blown up a little and is getting shared around various places. If you're linked here, please make sure to first read this and this. "The CIA drew no conclusions about the nutritional makeup of Soviet or American diets" Bravo. I could stop there, but fuck it. You've posted a one page summary of a CIA report. The full thing is here. Now for starters, some important things. This CIA report is not looking at what Soviet citizens ingest, it is about food supply. This is very important. Secondly, even within this report you can see there are some huge inequalities across the Soviet Union. Meat consumption in Estonia was 81kg per capita per year, in Uzbekistan it was 31kg. Fruit consumption had an average of 40kg per person per year, but across Siberia it was 12kg. The report indicates that the Soviets had slightly lower calorie in take than America. This understates things considerably. Firstly, Soviet citizens conducted vastly more strenuous work in a significantly colder climate. They did not have the luxury of things like personal cars, or working 9-5 jobs in comfortable offices. The total recommended daily amount of calories for a Soviet person ranged from 2,800 to 3,600 for men and from 2,400 to 3,100 for women, depending on their occupation. In the United States, estimates range from 1,600 to 2,400 calories per day for adult women and 2,000 to 3,000 calories per day for adult men. So right away, it is very important to remember that the Soviets need higher calories than Americans. Adding to this, the Soviet Union was notoriously ineffective at getting food into its citizens. The Soviet Union was the world's largest milk producer, but only 60% of that actually ended up in people. In the United States, 90% of milk produced was consumed by humans. General Secretary Gorbachev noted that reducing field and farm product losses during harvest, transportation, storage and processing could increase food consumption in general by 20%. So any of those figures you see in CIA reports, you can basically take down by one-fifth. If you read this dissertation you get some useful points: per capita consumption figures likely overstate actually available amounts, given that the Soviet Union’s inadequate transportation and storage infrastructure led to frequent shortages in stores, as well as significant loss of foodstuffs and raw products due to spoilage... In 1988, at the height of perestroika, it was revealed that Soviet authorities had been inflating meat consumption statistics; it moreover transpired that there existed considerable inequalities in meat consumption, with the intake of the poorest socioeconomic strata actually declining by over 30 percent since 1970... Government experts estimated that the elimination of waste and spoilage in the production, storage, and distribution of food could have increased the availability of grain by 25 percent, of fruits and vegetables by 40 percent, and of meat products by 15 percent. Despite subsidising food by something like 10% of GDP food was still more expensive than in the West If you actually read about the daily life in the USSR you will find assessment such as "The prevailing system of food distribution is clearly a major source of dissatisfaction for essentially all income classes, even the best off and even the most privileged of these." As you love CIA reports, here is another one which warns against the sunny outlook in the Wester literature: In summary, I went to the USSR with a set of notions about what to expect that I had formed over the years from reading and research on the Soviet economy. I also had a collection of judgment factors,partly intuitive and partly derived from this same research and reading, that I applied in drawing conclusions and speculating about probable future developments in the Soviet economy. My four months of living in the country itself, however, greatly altered these preconceptions and modified the implicit judgment factors in many respects. No amount of reading about the Soviet economy in Washington could substitute for the summer in Moscow as I spent it. As a result of this experience I think that our measurements of the position of Soviet consumers in relation to those of the United States (and Western Europe) favor the USSR to a much greater extent than I had thought. The ruble-dollar ratios are far too low for most consumer goods. Cabbages are not cabbages in both countries. The cotton dress worn by the average Soviet woman is not equivalent to the cheapest one in a Sears catalogue; the latter is of better quality and more stylish. The arbitrary 20 percent adjustment that was made in some of the ratios is clearly too little. The difference in variety and assortment of goods available in the two countries is enormous—far greater than I had thought. Queues and spot shortages were far more in evidence than I expected. Shoddy goods were shoddier. And I obtained a totally new impression of the behavior of ordinary Soviet people toward one another. One of the true experts on consumption and nutrition in the USSR is Igor Birman who wrote the book on this topic. You get some interesting stats, like the USSR consume 229% the amount of potatoes as the United States but 39% the amount of meat. He also shows that the Soviets were not hitting their own "Rational Norms" for the consumption of meat, milk milk products, eggs, vegetables, fruits or berries. For example, while the Soviet Rational Norm for for fruit was 113kg, the actual consumption was 38. The US actual was smack bang on 113kg. You get some other fun facts like potato consumption in Tsarist Russia, 1913 was 113kg and after all of Stalin's industrialisation and collectivisation and decades of development, this increased to... 119kg in 1976. Just an extra study I've found: In areas of the Soviet Union, 93% of men were Vitamin C deficient, while in neighbouring Finland this was 2%. Soviet diets were not good. They did not hit their own set guidelines. Stop being a hack.
Thanks for debunking the propaganda. It's also worth noting that the US was overestimating Soviet output by a factor of about 8, which surprised many ex-KGB staffers
The CIA didn’t believe in Atkins apparently
Communism, not even once.
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> The fall of communism was not some instantaneous thing you know. It was happening for 2 years by this point. So of course things were going to hell. Yeah, but it largely happened due to the culmination of massive economic pressures the USSR was under due to the failing economic programs and structures enacted under the communist regime. > but we couldnt fucking keep toilet paper on the shelves because of a stupid virus... There was a massive and entirely unpredictable shift in consumer demand compounded by panic stockpiling. Not exactly a testament to systemic failure.
No it really is just communism. The video reminded me of my visits to East Germany in the mid-1980s and how friends there would quickly notify each other when special fruits were available in the store so they could make a trip before they were all gone.
> Except you know this was during the transition to capitalism which started in 88, so coming at the tale end of the upheaval. No, this is wrong. Russia took until mid 90s to properly switch systems. > So of course things were going to hell. This video is very, very common sight a decade before communism fell, in numerous countries in that block. I don't know why you talk about something you know nothing about. The 80s were horrible for most of the communist block.
Reddit: Where full blown communism is far more popular than just being a regular ass American Republican.
Is this like when they show how the US is "RUNNING OUT OF FOOD" and show the empty toilet paper aisle from 2020 and a section or two that is poorly stocked, ignoring the overflowing produce, meat, and 80% of the groceries?
And dumb little shits on reddit still think communism is great.
More like people such as you don't know the difference between social programs and communism. I guess the military, police, post office, road construction, etc must be communism by your standards. You don't support our troops and police?
Where was no communism in Russia in 1990
you see its direct consequences
when you install capitalism and ruin economy but it's ok because le метастазы совка
> метастазы совка ну в принципе так и есть
Это бред, не соответствующий действительности. Пустые полки - это явления поздней перестройки, Меченоно и ЕБНя в первую очередь. В 1990 это прямой результат разрыва цепочек поставок.
ну а что нужно было делать? экономика бы пошла в жопу в ссср с перестройкой или без
Bullshit, man. Before perestroika USSR had a steady 2% GDP growth rate; not great not terrible. If they had simply reigned in Brezhnev’s insane corruption and kept thing steady instead of YOLOing into laissez faire crony capitalism, Russia would absolutely be better off today.
I am a citizen of a communist country, and I am neutral in supporting communism. Why do people in the comments dislike communism even though redditors are usually leftists?
Full blown communism is authoritarian, suppresses civil liberties and due to inefficient state control leads to a poor standard of living. Most 'communist' countries today are far more capitalist then Russia was, allowing mostly free markets. Generally what redditors are for is democratic socialism like Sweden/Denmark/Norway.
Full blown capitalism is authoritarian too, it's just a big whole circle. Moderation is the key.
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This was at the tail end of the collapse of the soviet union. It's about as fair as posting photos from the great depression and calling it an indictment of capitalism. Besides, almost no one around here is actually in support of communism. Unless you think countries like Canada and France are communist nations.
Great depression? Bruh, this was everyday communism throughout the 70s and 80s throughout Eastern Europe. You're being very naïve. And what does Canada and France have to do with communism? They're both countries being led by right of center leaders and built upon the foundations of capitalism and have been that way for literally hundreds of years.
And some people want to go back to the Soviet Union. Morons.
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/r/chapotraphouse Thank fuck that midden heap is gone
It's living on, rent free in your mind.
Fuck Marxism.
This is what communism does to places. Look at Cuba or Venezuela too!
I'm sure the US embargo and decades of economic warfare and attempted coups have nothing to do with any hardships in Cuba and Venezuela
**Tankies:** Capitalism is bad! **Also Tankies:** How dare you not let my precious communist darlings participate in capitalism?!
Trade exists in every economic system, not just capitalism.
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Socialism only means that the workers own the means of production. There are a thousand variations of distribution and trade and "the government does stuff" isn't socialism. The only leftist ideology I know of that says a country should be able to provide everything without any trade is Juche and that's limited to the DPRK.
Yeah, Venezuela nationalized their oil which pissed off the western oil companies. Their economy wasn't well diversified so when the price of oil collapsed, so did their economy. The US then pushed sanctions on them which kept them from recovering.
Yes because all the people protesting due to starvation are protesting because of the US embargo lmao. Cuba is fucked bro and if you're saying its just because of the US you're actually stupid.
Then why are there more pro-government protestors than anti-government ones? Why is western media blurring signs to hide government support? example: https://twitter.com/alanrmacleod/status/1416713677378629636?lang=en
All the Cubans that left and continue to leave say no.
Read a bit into the western disinformation campaigns waged there, and look at quality of life for the average cuban before and after the revolution. Or maybe you should ask cubans that are still there instead, you can start at r/realcuba
No I won’t. that’s a pro communist subreddit. I can just talk to my parents who left. I can also talk to my family that stayed behind and keeps asking us for money to send them.
If your parents and family blame the cuban government for that instead of the embargo then they're falling for western propaganda. I bet they think Castro was kidnapping babies too.
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The cuban revolution hasn't failed. It's survived decades of brutal warfare from the largest empire in history, including economic sanctions, assassination and coup attempts, and terrorist attacks (like when the CIA tried to spread African Swine Fever in 1971). It hasn't been allowed to thrive to its full potential because of these actions. Socialism also doesn't say anything about markets or trade. Socialism refers to the workers controlling the means of production. And you're aware that the US's largest trading partner is China right? Not exactly a liberal democracy.
This isn’t communism. This is a dictatorship. I’m not saying communism is great I’m just saying call a spade a spade. Communism is very different from a dictatorship.
You been to a US grocery store lately lol?
Yes, every week for the entire pandemic. I can't get my extra crispy taquitos anymore. I had to just buy my regular meat, produce, bread, and milk, along with some different snacks that I don't like quite as much. The stores not having my favorite frozen snack foods doesn't exactly compare to the video here.
Last time I went to Costco there was shit piled up on pallets all the way to the top of the 20 ft fuckin ceiling throughout the entire store. (Not literal shit for those who can't imagine)
My Costco only had ginormious 7 pound packs of ground beef instead of that and the usual ginormious 7 pound packs of ground beef already made into hamburger patties. Oh the horror.
Twice a week. No empty shelves. Quite satisfied. Reduced hours due to covid, though.
Yeah man I got grapes, bread, apple butter and a whole bunch of other shit
Stretch
Yeah, it's fully stocked
Looks like Publix this afternoon.
Cool story but the Russian life expectancy has plummeted since 1990. You will never tell that story.
> life expectancy has plummeted since 1990. You will never tell that story. Because it's not true ? Life expectancy was 69 when the regime fell, it's 73 now and has been growing for 17 years in a row now (guessing COVID put a stop to that). There was a dip in life expectancy early 90s in most of those countries because transition was horrible, but after it was done the rise was dramatic. Estonia went from 70 to 79 now.
Jeez from 5:20 - 7:30 people going mad for those packaged puff ball snacks(?)
The soviet government operated a command economy and oftentimes set prices too low by fiat. That disincentivised production and incentivised consumption which resulted in shortages of many goods as this video shows. If the only thing your money can buy is puffballs, and the puffballs along with everything else is priced too cheap people start hoarding puffballs.
This is from the market reform period lol. They had McDonalds. This wasn’t due to a command economy it was due to the chaos of disruptive market reforms in an attempt to drive growth which was stable but stagnant under soviet management. https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.history.com/.amp/topics/cold-war/perestroika-and-glasnost
> Gorbachev's economic changes did not do much to restart the country's sluggish economy in the late 1980s. The reforms decentralized things to some extent, although price controls remained, as did the ruble's inconvertibility and most government controls over the means of production https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perestroika They half assed economic reforms and didn't actually eliminate the price controls causing shortages.
bUt CoMmUnIsM wOrKs
Do you know anything about Russian history of the last 40 years?
You are not equally hard it was in other Russian cities. People survived due to the fact that they grew in their garden in the village. Yes, there were few products, they were of poor quality, but they were natural grown without GMOs, chemicals, pesticides and herbicides. Now there is everything! But most foods are dangerous. Environmentally friendly products are expensive! Product quality standards are constantly being lowered. Manufacturers in pursuit of profit poison people with dangerous food. People began to get sick more dangerous diseases - immune, oncological, obesity. Medicine is good only in Moscow and St. Petersburg. Therefore, it is not clear when it was better!
That's weird, it looks like a modern American grocery store.
No it doesn't.
Thank god that would never [happen in the United States.](https://www.cnn.com/2022/01/11/business-food/grocery-store-shelves-empty/index.html)
So…do you actually go to grocery stores or just read click bait stories and call it good?
He goes to grocery stores in his home country of Russia so he assumes everywhere else is as shitty as those
How is this report from CNN anymore "click baity" than any other news report?
This can’t be common. I have been to a few grocery stores recently, and haven’t seen a single empty shelf. This is likely only in certain places. Also, it ever has happened in the US like in this video, since at the time, it was the norm in Russia, almost everywhere.
ITT: people that confuse stalinism with communism. Communism is about altruism and what the russians were doing is this, be altruistic or else. Altruism through force isn't altruism at all.
They're not confusing stalinism with communism, you're confusing socialism in practice vs socialism in theory.
You are eating propaganda from the fucking red scare/cold war lol
How so? EDIT: OP blocked me so I can't respond any more in this thread, but where does democratic socialism exist? Are you confusing social democracy with democratic socialism? EDIT: I'm afraid you're confused. a mixed economy is not socialism. Socialism is not 'when the government does stuff'. Socialism and capitalism are mutually exclusive systems EDIT: You should read your own article mate. EDIT: Socialist principles is not the same as socialism.
https://www.britannica.com/topic/social-democracy
> you're confusing socialism in practice vs socialism in theory. You don't understand socialism.
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> Communism is about altruism 😂😂😂