In which the Soviet Union was the first. The Soviet Union was a slave state

SOVIET AUTHORITY PLUS... PROHIBITIONS What is communism? This is Soviet power plus... prohibitions, a great many prohibitions, striking in their senselessness and high cost. The propaganda machine, as far as the world stands, branded the “such-and-such” West, where (we

Chapter 1. The “Underground Economy” in the Soviet Union and its impact on the development of the country At the beginning of the chapter, the authors decided to cite three excerpts from different studies on this phenomenon in the life of Soviet society. Thus we would like to draw attention

I was born in the Soviet Union! A wave of dark despair washed over me. Yes, a country born in Belovezhskaya Pushcha, leaves. You can't be deceived. You can no longer hide from reality. The chances for a better fate that opened up in the early 2000s have been flushed down the toilet. 1991 experiment (speech

When Soviet power returned In July 1944, on the initiative of the OUN and UPA, a united Ukrainian Main Liberation Council (UGVR) was created, headed by Kirill Osmak. He did not hold this post for long. Chekists arrested him on September 13, 1944. Died in Vladimirskaya

What happened in the Soviet Union It would seem that the communist government is eliminating the blatant inequality between the Russian center and the national outskirts. After all, the communists wrote thousands of books about the international friendship of peoples. However, words about equality and friendship of peoples -

Here's the standard summary of the history of the Soviet Union: The Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) was a socialist state from 1917 to 1991 and was a great rival of the United States from World War II until the late 1980s. But what was the Soviet Union really like? What was it like to live in the Soviet Union? In that same history lesson, you were probably told that life was difficult and sometimes even terrible.

Daily life in the Soviet Union turns out to be much the same as you may have heard, especially during the times of famine and camps forced labor. But, as in any big modern country quality of life in Soviet Russia has varied greatly over the years, depending on many complex factors.

Beer was not considered alcohol

It sounds strange, but only by 2011 was beer recognized alcoholic drink in Russia. Prior to this, legislation classified it as food product, meaning it could be sold as a soft drink. This meant that it could be sold at street stalls.

During the Soviet era, Mikhail Gorbachev learned the hard way not to get involved with the sale of alcohol: historians believe that his attempt to ban alcohol "accelerated his downfall."

Newspapers did not always report murders, plane crashes, or train crashes

Former engineer Hendrik Vartanyan says that Soviet newspapers did not report anything that was not “in favor of the Soviet Union.” Bad news were hidden because "the belief was that nothing bad happens under communist rule because it is always right."

In a stunning 2006 interview, Vartanian said he had no knowledge of the train or plane crashes before he came to the United States in 1990 to retire. He said this cover-up extends to murders and major robberies. It's hard to believe that anyone could live to retire without knowing that plane crashes even existed, but as Vartanyan says, covering up these events was part of the "Soviet code."

Pepsi appeared in the USSR before McDonald's and Coca-Cola

McDonald's and Coca-Cola are often mentioned as two American companies with the largest global influence and reach, but did you know that Pepsi was the very first to enter the USSR?

It's true: Pepsi was already in the Soviet Union: 21 years before McDonald's and 16 years before Coca-Cola. This is largely due to the appearance of Pepsi at an exhibition in Moscow's Sokolniki Park in 1959, where the soda was distributed free of charge in disposable paper cups. Ten years later, the USSR struck a deal with Pepsi that also included distribution rights for Stolichnaya vodka.

Cars have served their owners almost their entire lives.

According to Russian writer Alexandra Kabakova, From the 1930s to the 1950s, car owners in the Soviet Union took pride in the fact that their cars lasted them a long time - and in some cases, a lifetime. Quality control and the very build quality of the car played a huge role in this. Kabakov says the metal frames were so thick that they were "resistant to corrosion."

Grocery shopping took forever

Many people have heard about the long Soviet lines for bread, but that's not even half the story. Even the most "prosperous" American student, who lived in Moscow in the mid-60s, said that getting any food at all was a huge chore. Even buying staples like cheese and rice took forever because you had to wait in long lines for almost every item. Even after waiting, people did not receive the goods immediately: they received coupons at each “station” and gave them to the cashier to finally receive their products.

Stalin wanted everyone to eat in communal canteens

IN Stalin's time the authorities considered private kitchens and even apartments dangerous for the regime, so the idea arose to force people to eat in communal canteens. The so-called “kitchen policy” proposed building new houses without kitchens at all. It was not just about depriving people of the right to privacy: The idea was also to "free the housewife from daily duties, liberate the country from tsarism and bring happiness to the poor classes."

The idea didn't work, and soon widespread industrialization led to "120 different ethnic groups"served" with products such as canned soup, meat and fish.

Hard rock bands were blacklisted in discos

In 1958, party officials accused rock bands such as Iron Maiden and Black Sabbath of "religious obscurantism, violence, racism and anti-communism."

Many pop and indie singers also made it to this list. Groups such as Talking Heads (“the myth of the Soviet military threat”) and The Village People were named in documents that spoke of strengthening control over the activities of discos.

There were no free canteens for the poor

In 1989, the New York Times talked quite a bit about Soviet attitudes toward the poor and homeless. One Western diplomat was quoted as saying that Soviet officials stopped collecting poverty statistics "because they insisted there were none."

When the Soviet Union was presented with the idea of ​​combating the American cafeteria problem, one Soviet official said, "We are against this system... where the poor get a free lunch. We will not consider that option." In 1989, it took a Soviet worker ten times longer to earn even a pound of meat than the average American.

On a winter day on December 30, 1922, the 1st Congress of Soviets adopted the Declaration and Treaty on the Formation of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. 90 years have passed since then, and we still cannot decide what “the world’s first state of workers and peasants” was. An unprecedented leap to freedom - or an unprecedented experiment on the people, designed to show the whole world how not to develop the national economy?

Power and justice...

Army. The USSR was one of the world's two superpowers, and Soviet army- the most powerful in the world. There were 63.9 thousand tanks in service - more than in all other countries. Nuclear missile shield included 1,200 land-based ballistic missiles and 62 nuclear submarines on the sea. The size of the Armed Forces after the war reached 3.7 million people.

Equality. The level of well-being of the “bottom” and “top” in the country differed, but not tenfold, the Soviet middle class made up the overwhelming majority of the population. A skilled worker could earn even more than the director of the plant where he worked.

Rest. The right to rest was not an empty phrase for Soviet people. By 1988, there were 16,200 sanatoriums and rest homes operating in the country, where citizens partially paid for accommodation and treatment.

...or beggar slavery?

Decline. Praised universal education and medical care at the end of the twentieth century. hopelessly behind the world level.

Leadership in the defense industry turned into a failure in the production of industrial goods for the population: consumer goods were produced on a residual basis and for the most part were of disgusting quality.

Prisons. From 1921 to 1940 alone, approximately 3 million people were sentenced to various terms of imprisonment.

In 1930 - 1931 More than 380 thousand were dispossessed and evicted. peasant families. At the stage of formation of the USSR, entire groups of the population were repressed: entrepreneurs, priests, etc. The Gulag became one of the symbols of the Soviet system.

Deficit. The Soviet people have never lived in abundance in their entire history. Even in the relatively prosperous 70s, there was a shortage of something toilet paper, then tights, then beer, not to mention sausage.

Censorship. Censorship in the USSR covered all areas of life, including the media, literature, music, cinema, theater, ballet and even fashion. Prominent writers and poets - Solzhenitsyn, Voinovich, Dovlatov, Brodsky and others - were forced to leave their homeland.

USSR was multinational country with the proclaimed principle of friendship of peoples. And this friendship was not always just a declaration. It was impossible to do otherwise in a country inhabited by more than 100 different nations and nationalities. The equality of all peoples in the formal absence of a titular nation is the basis for the propaganda myth of “a single historical community - the Soviet people.”
However, all representatives of a single historical community were required to have passports, which contained the notorious “fifth column” to indicate the citizen’s nationality in the document. How was nationality determined in the USSR?

By passport

Certification of the country's population began in the early 30s and ended shortly before the war. Each passport must indicate social status, place of residence (registration) and nationality. Moreover, then, before the war, according to a secret order of the NKVD, nationality was to be determined not by the self-determination of a citizen, but based on the origin of the parents. The police had instructions to check all cases of discrepancy between the surname and the nationality declared by the citizen. Statisticians and ethnographers compiled a list of 200 nationalities, and when receiving a passport, a person received one of the nationalities from this list. It was on the basis of these same passport data that they were carried out in the 30s and later. mass deportations peoples According to the estimates of historians, representatives of 10 nationalities were subjected to total deportation to the USSR: Koreans, Germans, Ingrian Finns, Karachais, Kalmyks, Chechens, Ingush, Balkars, Crimean Tatars and Meskhetian Turks. In addition, there was implicit, but quite obvious anti-Semitism, and the practice of repression against representatives of other peoples, such as Poles, Kurds, Turks, etc. Since 1974, nationality has been indicated in the passport based on the application of the person himself. Then jokes like this appeared: “Dad is Armenian, mom is Jewish, who will be their son? Of course, Russian! However, in most cases, nationality was still indicated by one of the parents.

By mom and dad

In the vast majority of cases, your nationality the citizen determined the father's nationality. In the USSR, patriarchal traditions were quite strong, according to which the father determined both the surname and nationality of the child. However, there were other options. For example, many people, if they had to choose between “Jew” and “Russian,” chose “Russian,” even if their mother was Russian. This was done because the “fifth column” made it possible for officials to discriminate against representatives of certain national minorities, including Jews. However, after Jews were allowed to leave for Israel in 1968, there were sometimes reverse situation. Some Russians looked for some Jew among their relatives and made incredible efforts to change the inscription in the “fifth column.” During this period of free national self-identification, nationalities were determined according to lists of officially recognized peoples living in the USSR. In 1959, there were 126 names on the list, in 1979 – 123, and in 1989 – 128. At the same time, some peoples, for example, Assyrians, were not on these lists, while in the USSR there lived people who defined their nationality in this way .

By the face

There is a sad joke about a Jewish pogrom. They beat up a Jew, and his neighbors say to him: “How can this be, you bought yourself a passport with a “fifth column” where it says Russian!” To which he sadly replies: “Yes, but they beat me not on my passport, but on my face!” Actually, this anecdote quite accurately illustrates the situation in the law enforcement agencies, where they were taught to determine nationality this way: not by the passport, but by the face . And if it is, in general, easy to distinguish a Gypsy from a Yakut, then it will be somewhat more difficult to understand where the Yakut is and where the Buryat are. How can you understand where the Russian is, and where the Latvian or Belarusian is? There were entire tables with ethnic types of persons, which allowed police officers, KGB officers and other structures to accurately distinguish people “not by passport.” Of course, this required a good memory for faces and observation, but who said that understanding the nationality of people in a country where more than 100 nations live would be easy?

At the behest of the heart

The "fifth column" was abolished in 1991. Nowadays, nationality is not indicated in the passport and in other documents or is indicated in special inserts, solely at will. And now there are no lists of nationalities from which a citizen must choose. The removal of restrictions on national self-identification led to an interesting result. During the 2010 census, some citizens indicated their affiliation with such nations as “Cossack”, “Pomor”, “Scythian” and even “elf”.