USSR Like it or not?

Do you Like the USSR?

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Cheezy the Wiz said:
In addition, the social benefits were supreme; guaranteed pension, health care, education, and affordable housing for everyone, and Western workers simply cannot imagine what it's like to work in a democratically run business where the boss by law must hold meetings if the workers call it, and he must answer their grievances or face legal action by the State.
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Can you imagine having to visit five grocery stores and stand five hour-long queues each day, simply to get stale bread, milk, potatoes of mild blue color, two weeks old minced meat and sugar, so that you can cook something for dinner? And I ain't speaking about famines. Simple everyday life, pleasures of plan economy.
Or can you imagine needing personal connections so you can get your hands on deficit goods like, for instance, toilet paper?
Or can you imagine simple jeans being the highest symbol of status within society?

Sure, what you said sounds awesome. But 99.9% of people who actually have been able to personally compare life is USSR and in random First World country ,will tell you that the downside you had to face simply was not worth all these things.
 
Russian Soviet said:
The USSR was A Massive Nation, Mostly Indutrial

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/a/a1/Soviet_Union_Administrative_Divisions_1989.jpg
The Aministrative Divisions of The USSR

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/4/49/USSR_Ethnic_Groups_1974.jpg
Ethnic Groups

Some Facts

Population
- 1991 est. 293,047,571
Density 13.1 /km² (33.9 /sq mi)
Area
- 1991 22,402,200 km² (8,649,538 sq mi)

Currency Ruble (SUR)

Government: Communist Socialist


I Personaly Like it as a Communist
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How does the USSR represent your Communist ideals, corrupted as it was.
 
Yeekim said:
Can you imagine having to visit five grocery stores and stand five hour-long queues each day, simply to get stale bread, milk, potatoes of mild blue color, two weeks old minced meat and sugar, so that you can cook something for dinner? And I ain't speaking about famines. Simple everyday life, pleasures of plan economy.
Or can you imagine needing personal connections so you can get your hands on deficit goods like, for instance, toilet paper?
Or can you imagine simple jeans being the highest symbol of status within society?

Sure, what you said sounds awesome. But 99.9% of people who actually have been able to personally compare life is USSR and in random First World country ,will tell you that the downside you had to face simply was not worth all these things.
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Yeah. It's very easy to look back, you know how hindsight is better than normal sight? It's also very easy to sit back nicely in a beautifully developed country like the USA or Western Europe and brag about the moral highground of communist/socialist/people's republic societies. I've gone used to that though.
 
Sure, what you said sounds awesome. But 99.9% of people who actually have been able to personally compare life is USSR and in random First World country ,will tell you that the downside you had to face simply was not worth all these things.
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Well thats not the general opinion among Russians so your figure is a gigantic exaggeration
 
Anyone with any ambition would not want to live in the USSR rather than the western world. I think overall the USSR was not a good thing for the world, the best thing to come out of it was to completely discredit the idea of a fully planned economy.
 
RedRalphWiggum said:
Well thats not the general opinion among Russians so your figure is a gigantic exaggeration
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Really? You say that when transported back into, say, 1960-s or 1980-s, our Russian forumers would (possible diehard patriotism aside) rather live in USSR than in Western Europe? Which one of them has claimed this?

Actually, use common sense to find the truth. How many western tourists decided to "jump over" into USSR and vice versa?

Also, don't get confused: I do not argue that in many areas of former USSR, standard of living degenerated even further after its fall, so e.g. 1983 in USSR may have been preferable to 1993 in Russia - creating some soviet nostalgia among those who found it difficult to adapt and never had a valid comparison in the first place. But that was because of general economic crash and difficulties with transition from one economic system into another.
 
Yeekim said:
Really? You say that when transported back into, say, 1960-s or 1980-s, our Russian forumers would (possible diehard patriotism aside) rather live in USSR than in Western Europe? Which one of them has claimed this?

Actually, use common sense to find the truth. How many western tourists decided to "jump over" into USSR and vice versa?

Also, don't get confused: I do not argue that in many areas of former USSR, standard of living degenerated even further after its fall, so e.g. 1983 in USSR may have been preferable to 1993 in Russia - creating some soviet nostalgia among those who found it difficult to adapt and never had a valid comparison in the first place. But that was because of general economic crash and difficulties with transition from one economic system into another.
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I remember seeing a survey (one of many) a few years back that said c. 65% of Russians said life was better in the USSR than in capitalist Russia.
 
Moggy said:
According to Top Gear last night, Communist cars are the worst ever made.

And for that reason the USSR sucked.
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Keep in mind that most vehicles ever produced in USSR were intended for military use one way or another.
Most tractor-producing factories were actually rather armor-producing factories with some modifications etc.
The vehicles were not designed to be comfortable or kickass, they were designed to be cheap, durable, reliable to work in crappy conditions and field-repairable.
Then again, that was little comfort for the end-user.

USSR was probably also the only country in the world, where used cars were much more expensive than new ones. :lol:

RedRalphWiggum said:
I remember seeing a survey (one of many) a few years back that said c. 65% of Russians said life was better in the USSR than in capitalist Russia.
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What I said.
 
Yeekim said:
Keep in mind that most vehicles ever produced in USSR were intended for military use one way or another.
Most tractor-producing factories were actually rather armor-producing factories with some modifications etc.
The vehicles were not designed to be comfortable or kickass, they were designed to be cheap, durable, reliable to work in crappy conditions and field-repairable.
Then again, that was little comfort for the end-user.
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Agreed. With regard to everything in general, the Soviets had a different design philosophy: don't make it nice, make it work, and work forever. This actually bled over into Third World car manufacturing; my mother, who was raised in Zambia, recalls that people preferred Indian Tatas (as well as the occasional Eastern Bloc cars that came by) to far superior Western models because the Tatas and Eastern Bloc cars were much easier to repair, and lasted forever before they broke down (more than you could say about a Chevy or even a Citroen or Volkswagen). The Fiats were an exception: Egyptians in particular loved these, because they made a special model that was particularly idiot-proof.
 
RedRalphWiggum said:
I remember seeing a survey (one of many) a few years back that said c. 65% of Russians said life was better in the USSR than in capitalist Russia.
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Russia is not comparable to Western Europe or the US. It is neither free nor wealthy. Nuclear weapons do not a first world nation make.
 
The USSR wasn't completely bad. For one Communist/Soviet jokes are on par with Hitler/Nazi jokes in hilarity. Secondly, the cold war influenced a lot of great science fiction and you can't have a cold war without the Soviet Union.
 
I wouldn't say the USSR was completely good or completely bad. Like all political states, it was various shades of gray during its existence. I disagree with the political structure and I think the original intention was "well intended"...to help the masses achieve a more equal status...but the execution was poorly done, in my opinion. I think Stalin probably ruined the whole system for everybody and it went downhill from there.

That being said, no economic/political system is perfect....unless you have a nation of 1.
 
The Soviet Union was a massive pile of mistakes and disasters, from the first betrayal of liberalism and accountable government in October 1917 to the theft of the Russian economy and welfare system at the hands of Yeltsin's men.
 
~Corsair#01~ said:
The Soviet Union was a massive pile of mistakes and disasters, from the first betrayal of liberalism and accountable government in October 1917 to the theft of the Russian economy and welfare system at the hands of Yeltsin's men.
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you can hardly blame the last bit on the USSR seeing as that was it being dismantled
 
USSR times are bad, but the life with democracy after 1991 is even worser.. :( agriculture and all the factories are abandoned and ruined, all we do is loaning the money.
 
Brainiac18 said:
USSR times are bad, but the life with democracy after 1991 is even worser.. :( agriculture and all the factories are abandoned and ruined, all we do is loaning the money.
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Im pretty sure that Soviet Russia of the 80s wasnt close to imploding.

Ill prefer an autocratic dictorial monarch over an autocractic dictorial Dictator.
You see monarchs are cooler, and dont kill as much people.

As for being an industrial power, I doubt "communism" was the only ideology that could have industrialised the nation
 
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