I have a feeling that I’m not making myself clear on the subject of the so-called Soviet economy. So let me put it this way:
The lifestyle I, the daughter of a linguist and a school teacher and a grand-daughter of a famous doctor, a corporate lawyer, a school-teacher, and a World War II veteran, enjoyed while growing up in the Soviet Union is the kind of lifestyle that a kid has today in the US if her mother is a drug-addicted prostitute and her father is a convicted criminal who hasn’t seen the outside of a jail in a decade.
My parents only had 2 kids, didn’t drink or smoke, and worked all day and well into the night to the point where we barely saw them. And the result of all that industry was that I saw a piece of cheese maybe once a year if I was lucky, only wore hand-downs, and couldn’t visit my friends’ birthday parties in winter because – other than my school uniform – I had no clothes to wear outside. My cousins (both boys and girls) had to wear my and my sister’s used underwear. Where my underwear came from is also a very interesting question. That’s how we lived. And that’s just a small part of it.
The children of the party apparatchiks, decked in diamonds and furs and lighting cigarettes with a bill that represented my father’s entire monthly salary, lived differently, of course.
But yes, we all had security. We could all be completely secure in the idea that, as long as the USSR persisted, every generation of us, lowly doctors, teachers, academics, lawyers, etc., would live exactly the same abject lifestyle where the greatest achievement you could hope for was to wrestle a piece of butter from the hands of equally desperate and pathetic individuals beating each other up in stores over basic food-stuffs.
Is it a little clearer now why steam starts coming out of my ears whenever anybody says anything even remotely positive about the Soviet Union?
Clarissa's Blog 
Leave a comment