Waiting in line all day for a loaf of bread.
Special stores for the Party elite that no Soviet citizen could access.
If you say anything bad against the Party, you might get a midnight visit from the KGB and never be heard from again.
Mass genocide of entire people groups.
Knowing that no matter how hard you worked, you’d never get ahead.
And, on our side...waiting to see if the madmen in power over there might one day decide to mass-launch several hundred nuclear warheads in our direction, all in the name of world domination.
Yeah, sure...I’d LOVE to go back to that.
You can’t talk about Russia without recalling the Soviet Union.
The nostalgia is less about Communism than reminiscing about the glory days of Soviet science, culture and life.
You can’t bring back the past however. It isn’t possible for any of us.
Those 66% were not among the 25 million or so to be brutally murdered under the system. For those given ration cards and told where to live and work for whatever the government chose to pay them, life was simple and secure. As long as you didn’t complain about the working conditions, or God forbid go on strike, you knew you’d have your daily loaf of bread and ration of vodka.
Bump
"Socialist Christians seek to punish, not change, those whom they believe are not willing enough. In seeking power in the guise of spiritual change, they violate not only a separation of church and state but place their own political goals over their spiritual calling."In Fyodor Dostoevsky’s 'The Brothers Karamazov,' Ivan relates a fictional story to his brother. It posits that Christ refused the Devil’s temptation to create bread from stone so humanity could remain free, and that by doing so Jesus made freedom the ultimate gift from God because man would happily enslave himself for free bread.
“So, in the end, they will lay their freedom at our feet and say to us: ‘Enslave us, but feed us!’ And they will finally understand that freedom and the assurance of daily bread for everyone are two incompatible notions that could never co-exist!”
"Christ may have been able to turn stone into bread or feed 5,000 with three loaves and two fish, but the state is no miracle worker. Any time the state embarks on a miraculous quest, it is always an act of power, not faith or charity." - Peter Marshall
Soviet ice cream really was good. When I visited Russia in the 90s, a friend who lived there told me that the ice cream recipe was from Carnation, dating from about the early 1920s. It was vanilla only, and it never changed for decades, so there were no artificial ingredients or preservatives, or whatever.
I had some. It was pretty good, for plain vanilla.
Things in Russia will only settle down after the Romanov dynasty is restored.
One good thing about the Soviet Union:
Nu, Pogodi (You Just Wait)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zTG6g-ffjco
You need to start a mercenary army and get over to the Ukraine, Georgia, or Crimea. Remember if you get your legs “blown off”, prosthetics have never been better.
Face it, personal freedom and self reliance is tough. It’s not for everyone. I think a lot of Ruskies want to be taken care of cradle to grave even by a brutal dictator.
Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar.
And sometimes people are nostalgic just because they have good personal memories about the past.
I was a kid in the 70’s. A decade that absolutely sucked for this country. Losing a war, runaway inflation, energy shortages, Iran flipping us the bird, Jimmy Carter, etc.
Yet I have good personal memories from that time because of things in my personal life, music and TV that I enjoyed, etc. Perhaps we need not read more into it than that.