I get quite a few emails from this blog’s readers and followers. The emails that contain the most insightful and curious questions invariably come from Aaron Clarey’s mega-popular blog. (I also want to reiterate my eternal gratitude to Aaron for promoting my blog every chance he gets. Aaron, you are a brilliant guy and a talented writer.)
Here is the most recent question I got:
I have devoured your posts about life in Soviet-era Ukraine. I have been interested in the realitis in Communism since many acquaintances and family members are pronounced Marxists. I live in Colombia, where pro -Marxist sentiments are high among my age -group.
I personally view Communism as an evil broken clock – pure evil except for 1 or 2 miniscule things.
What I wonder is if the standards of living varied in the Soviet Union? What I imagine is that in the strong economic centers (Eastern Germany, Czechoslovakia, Moscow, St. Petersberg etc) a citizen would have more access to basic goods, food, clothing. Would a citizen in these places have more electrical appliances, or even be able to go to a grocery store with a wide selection of goods?
Unlike my correspondent, I don’t see even the 1 or 2 tiny good things in Communism, but the question is one I really want to answer.
In what concerns the Soviet-bloc countries, the greater the distance was separating them from the USSR, the better their standard of living was. I recently discovered that the Poles, the Czechs, the Eastern Germans and the Yugoslavians considered themselves poor and miserable during the Soviet era. Gosh, to us, they were all swimming in riches. Any Soviet person would dream of visiting one of these countries and experiencing, albeit for a few days, the unimaginable variety of goods and services available there. But, of course, almost nobody who wasn’t a performer or a party apparatchik ever got to travel.
In the USSR proper, everything produced in the entire country was shipped to Moscow. As a result, Muscovites enjoyed a much higher standard of living than the rest of the country. My husband (who was born in the greater Moscow area) keeps telling me how they could sometimes buy bananas or cheese, which for us “in the provinces” were the height of luxury. For Muscovites, everything that isn’t Moscow is a province. And the provinces always existed to be plundered.
I will never forget my mother’s shopping trips to Moscow. In the 1970s and 1980s, it was not possible to buy absolutely anything by way of clothes or shoes in Ukraine. Food could only be bought on the black market at exorbitant prices. Stores stood empty. And I mean, completely empty. There was nothing on the shelves. So when we needed shoes, boots or a coat, we’d have to buy a train ticket to Moscow and try to acquire these goods there. In the end, factoring in the travel expenses, a pair of boots would end up costing us my father’s five-month salary.
Electrical appliances could never be bought in stores anywhere, not even in Moscow. Just the idea of a Soviet store filled with refrigerators or TVs makes me laugh because it’s unimaginable. If you wanted a fridge (or a kitchen table, or a sofa), you needed to get on a list, get assigned a number (like, 18,934), and then wait until the 18,933 people before you on the list were allowed to buy their appliances. And the prices, of course, were ridiculously high.
Of course, there was always a shortage of small daily items whose importance you never register until you are deprived of them. Buttons, thread, shoe-laces, toilet paper, cotton wool – everything was of abysmally low quality and rarely available.
I heard a lot of myths when I was growing up that things were better in other Soviet Socialist republics, like Estonia, Latvia, Georgia, or Armenia. I only visited a couple of them and discovered the same kind of poverty that the one we had in Ukraine.
As I said before, the greatest problem isn’t the shortage of food or consumer goods per se. It is, rather, that when acquiring every single basic object turns into a complex, time and energy-consuming affair, your entire life becomes about things. Americans seem to believe that materialism is when you go to a store and buy anything you want. But that isn’t real materialism. If buying some stupid toilet seat or a table-cloth turns into an extremely complicated affair that requires every ounce of networking skills and energy that you possess, that’s when you become completely materialistic.
When life becomes solely about getting stuff, that’s no life at all. That’s walking death. And that is what Soviet reality was.
Clarissa's Blog 
Ha, on your recommendation I visited this guy’s blog. On the economic growth of the US being only 0.1% he had this analysis to offer:
“idiot socialist we have for president”
Well, alright.
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Yes, he is very provocative. And has the opinions that are the polar opposite of mine on every single subject.
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Nothing wrong with being provocative. You’re provocative too but it’s always backed by sound and detailed analysis. His provocation seems to be of the yelling-the-n-word-in-a-black-church’ variety.
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You know how popular he is, though? About 100 times more popular than me. It’s crucial to know what attracts massive followings.
Thank you for the compliment!
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Good god, I had no idea that life was so tough in Ukraine under the USSR. I knew of course that it was tough, but not *that* tough.
I was born in communist Czechoslovakia and spent half of my childhood there. I can attest that we had a much higher standard of living. Appliances were expensive but one could buy them, especially if one had contacts at the stores. My family and all of my relatives had the basic appliances: stove, fridge, electric heaters. Food was available but you had to stand in line for it. At 6 am, the grandmothers would line up to buy food for their families. If you slept in, well, good luck. There might be some stuff left over. Bananas were a source of excitement. I still remember my grandma announcing to me one day when I got home from school that we had bananas! I jumped around in joy cause I loved bananas. All in all, we had what we needed but life was tough by western standards. The extended family had to work together to procure the necessities of life. Much depended on my grandmother. If she had not been available to stand in line for food every morning, I don’t know how we would have coped as my parents had to work.
Our country was productive but our best products were shipped to the west and sold for profit (which profits of course the people never saw) or else sent to Moscow. That is one of many reasons why there was a deep resentment, to put it mildly, of Russia. We were being robbed, of food, of our basic rights, by the Soviet rulers.
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Thank you for sharing, Anonymous!
I remember how somebody in the apartment block where I lived got a stick of American chewing gum from somewhere, and all of the kids on the block chewed it for a month, taking turns and feeling incredibly cool. And then one hapless kid swallowed it and became an instant outcast.
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My own circumstances were not incredibly different. All my clothes were hand downs except for a few purchased just before we left the country and school clothes and we didn’t have a lot apart from the basics in terms of furniture, food and so on. Some of the delicacies we tried toward the end of the regime and the beginning of the new were kapenta.
http://hopechildrenscenter.blogspot.com.au/2010_12_01_archive.html
and something called “samp”. It was dried, broken corn teeth which also had a lot of weevils and weevils faeces in it. You scooped off the dead weavils with a tablespoon when the water began to boil, but they always left a slightly rancid taste in the food.
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I’m American, but I lived in the former East Germany for several years in the early 90s and was married to an East German for over a decade. My knowledge of East Germany is second hand, but I was always very interested in people’s stories about life under communism and had lots of opportunity to hear them.
My sense is that everyday life in East Germany was characterized by monotony rather than the deprivation you describe in the USSR.. You could always get the basics – bread, sausage, potatoes, cabbage, milk, etc. There were sometimes shortages of random basic things – I’ve heard stories about the year without onions and times when there was no mustard for months at a time. Items beyond the basics were in limited supply and people had to expend lots of effort or trade favors to get them. My ex refused to eat apples for years because apples had been the only fruit available in stores for years at a time. I’ve heard many complaints about the lack of variety in clothing, the stores would have one girls sweater for the winter and half the kids at school would show up wearing the same clothes because that was all you could buy. I don’t recall any stories about appliances, but putting your name on the waiting list for a car was a right of passage on your 18th birthday. There were also regional differences, the stores in East Berlin generally had more/better things than stores elsewhere.
There were aspects of life in East Germany that were unique among the communist countries. Most East Germans were able to watch West German television, so they were very aware of products and living standards in the west. It was illegal to watch West German broadcasts, but almost everyone who could watch them did. There are quite a few East German jokes about people from the areas that were too far from West Germany and West Berlin to watch western television. These jokes characterize people from those areas as being naive and clueless because they only had access to East German media.
Many East Germans also received Westpakete, packages from relatives in West Germany that were sent at Christmas, Easter, and birthdays. Westpakete often contained chocolates, candy, and items of clothing, There was considerable social pressure in West Germany to send packages to the poor relatives the east and many people were getting packages from rather distant cousins. People generally felt sorry for those who had no western relatives and didn’t get Westpakete. Having generous western relatives was a great boost for people. Even when the items weren’t exactly right (e.g. clothing in the wrong sizes) they were very desirable items to trade.
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I love how people start coming to this blog to share these fascinating stories. Thank you so much! I always wonder how people in other Soviet bloc countries experienced this era.
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As always, I really appreciate your perspective on life in the Soviet era. Thank you for sharing.
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No surprise here. The stereotypical Russian woman spent half of her non-work life in line for whatever article of ordinary food or clothing was rumored to be on offer. A school friend of mine visited relatives in the Ukraine in the mid 1970s, and brought them their requests from the west: lots of children’s vitamins. That seemed like a highly sensible request, but sad, because it implied that the children didn’t have regular access to a healthy diet. The other Eastern European deprivation story I remember was when I attended an academic conference in a small town without “sufficient” housing capacity for the conference. You either specified a roommate or were assigned a roommate. My assigned roommate was a woman from Bulgaria. All meals at the conference were at the cafeteria, and conference fees included all-you-can-eat at the cafeteria. This woman always had a banana, or two, on her tray, 3 meals a day. I asked her why – she said, if she was lucky, she might be able to get one at Christmastime.
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“The stereotypical Russian woman spent half of her non-work life in line for whatever article of ordinary food or clothing was rumored to be on offer.”
– Exactly. My mother worked 60-65 hours a week (including Saturdays and often Sundays). Every day she’d get out of work and embark on an endless journey all over town, hunting for basic food items.
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I was only a couple in months in Poland in the communist era (and far less in Czechoslovakia and Hungary). And as a (relatively) privileged foreigner was kept far away from the daily grind of locals (something I was aware of that not all the foreigners I came into contact with were).
At the time (a few years before the roundtable that set in motion the collapse of communism) it seemed obvious that no one even pretended to believe in communism anymore and that the system was not viable or sustainable in the long term. People seemed to be walking in place waiting for Something to Happen (which it eventually did).
The situation (even with ration cards) wasn’t as grim as you describe Ukraine, though it was pretty miserable. Food stores were a joke with little but vinegar, bread and pickled vegetables. (I ate a lot of bread and pickled vegetables in that time). Lots more could be found at private outdoor markets though the prices very steep for locals. There were also private stores (again very high prices).
Unusually for a communist country, local people were allowed to shop in Pewex the hard currency stores (like Kashtan in Ukraine?) as a way of making sure the state got its grubby paws on remittances sent by family outside the country.
I immediately noticed the grasping materialism of the local people and a kind of wild west off-the-books capitalism. Lots of people had second or third unofficial gigs and a lot of the unofficial transactions were based on barter rather than cash.
Since essentially no one was invested in trying to replicate the Soviet model things were more liberal and more sprouts of capitalism were allowed exist here and there.
There were weird things like people carrying around years of savings just in case they got lucky and something showed up in the stores (no checks and by the time you went home and got the money whatever it was would be gone or the line would be too long). If people saw a new line (there were long lines everywhere) they might ask “What are they giving out?” Since no one thought of Polish currency as any kind of real money.
Once walking around I saw a couple of people carrying new plastic tubs (of the kind people did laundry in) and I immediately found myself thinking “Where are they? If I go right this minute will the line be too long already?” even though I had no use whatsover for such a thing. I think I was thinking about how they were sure to come in handy for someone I knew.
After I a couple of months I didn’t think anything of waiting over an hour in line (my usual state is to get fidgety after five minutes).
There was also a class of little old ladies with large social networks and a good idea of things like distribution routes and who was related to who. They spent their time shopping for client families. They weren’t paid in money, their customers simply gave them back some of the things they bought for them.
The life expectancy differences between men and women seemed perfectly clear to me. Old men past a certain age were a burden on families while old women were a valuable asset.
Many families seemed to have one member who could be described as a ‘kombinator’ (someone who knew how to get things done off the books if necessary). Interestingly all the kombinators I met (a small sample, admittedly) also seemed to be family scapegoats and I wondered about the direction of causality (if there was one).
Finally, something that doesn’t get enough attention. the Soviet bloc countries had a kind of reverse genius for making things that seemed old, worn out and shabby even when they were new. I don’t know how they did it but they had a knack for making things that seemed to ooze contempt for the person that bought it.
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Cliff, thank you for the great story. This is fascinating.
“The life expectancy differences between men and women seemed perfectly clear to me. Old men past a certain age were a burden on families while old women were a valuable asset.”
– I never thought about it this way, but you are right, there was definitely such a distribution of roles as to make old men quite redundant.
“Finally, something that doesn’t get enough attention. the Soviet bloc countries had a kind of reverse genius for making things that seemed old, worn out and shabby even when they were new. I don’t know how they did it but they had a knack for making things that seemed to ooze contempt for the person that bought it.”
– SO TRUE!!!!! This is how I know when somebody really understands the Soviet bloc!
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