Haunting pictures show desperate struggle to survive in last days of USSR

The Daily Mail ^ | 1 January 2013

[MinorityRepublican]

Hard times: Eighteen-year-old prostitute Katya scours the street for work as a police car drives past in Moscow in 1991 shortly before the collapse of the USSR

These shocking pictures may look like something out of the Great Depression - but in fact they show life in the last years of the Soviet Union, less than three decades ago.

Shop shelves were often bare, it was normal to have to join a long queue if you wanted to buy groceries and many of the people looked ground down after a century of desperate poverty.

The dismal state of the USSR's economy, during a time of rapidly improving living standards in the West, was a result of its dogmatic Communist political system, which stifled free enterprise and stopped the country moving on from its feudal past.

As these images show, by the 1980s that system was close to collapse, as Mikhail Gorbachev's liberalising reforms did little more than open the door to ever louder clamours for change - and on Boxing Day 1991, just a few years after these photos were taken, the Soviet Union was finally dissolved.

[Kartographer]

"I was in St Petersburg in October 1996. I observed a young soldier in a tattered uniform begging on the street; I saw a a woman drop to her knees in supplication for alms on the subway; I saw families selling their linens and silverware at curb sides; I rode the elevator in my hotel with very young, heavily made-up prostitutes on their way to service clients"

Just like a weekend in Detroit, just less lead in the air.

[JRandomFreeper]

By the grace of God, and steadfast adherence to my oath....

NYET!

/johnny

[353FMG]

>The government not so cool.<

.
Seen a “cool” government lately?

[kaehurowing]

We’re certainly more than halfway there. USA 2013.

[Marcella]

“I believe our Great Depression was worse.”

My parents lived in Oklahoma when they were first married. He went to work for Sun Oil Company and was sent to the east Texas oil field. That's where they were in the depression so they never suffered from that - he had a good job with Sun Oil and plenty of food as they had a garden and pigs and chickens and fruit trees and that monthly check from Sun Oil. They could buy what they needed.

If you were in Texas, you could get a job in the booming oil fields. It looks like it is the same now - the state of Texas can't over spend due to their constitution preventing that and there are jobs around everywhere and a new oil field in south Texas and that area is booming.

I think it is the diversity of Texas job “fields” that keeps her going. Texas is so big that different natural resources are spread around the whole state and those resources make jobs in those areas.

God Bless Texas for her natural resources.

[Pilsner]

I remember reading about the contemporary Soviet Army, in the 1980s. Its latest tanks had laser range finders on their main guns. But the crews were issued triangular pieces of cloth to wrap their feet in, because the USSR could not afford to issue socks soldiers who did not have to march...

[GGpaX4DumpedTea]

“The delusion that it will never happen to them is simply narcissism, a quality Marxists possess in spades.”

Hmmm, and the ‘Occupier’ of the White Hut is a narcist...as well as being a Marxist Spade.

[Fledermaus]

I like the fact the fall of Russian communism shined the light of truth on their lies and failures.

Sad pictures will not make me compassionate for their plight. FU Commies!

[Erasmus]

Look on the bright side. We’ll finally get that Mexican wall built.

[Ax]

I was stationed in Buenos Aires in the 80’s. Late wife and I were walking around Calle Lavalle (big shopping district) and were accidentally following some Soviet merchant seamen. Even though Argentina was going through one of their regular economic crises, the shops, high-end boutiques, markets, restaurants, etc, were filled with shoppers and diners. The Soviet sailors were awe stricken. It must’ve been their first time outside the USSR.

[Ax]

I was stationed in Buenos Aires in the 80’s. Late wife and I were walking around Calle Lavalle (big shopping district) and were accidentally following some Soviet merchant seamen. Even though Argentina was going through one of their regular economic crises, the shops, high-end boutiques, markets, restaurants, etc, were filled with shoppers and diners. The Soviet sailors were awe stricken. It must’ve been their first time outside the USSR.

[radiohead]

I never understood the Russian shopping system. Lots of those lines were not for scarce goods (after all, once the ‘scarce’ good was gone, you might as well go home) but because of the involved shopping system. You select the item and get a receipt, you go to another line to pay for it, then back again in line to show your receipt and pick up the item. Insane.

btw - if you want to see real Russian insanity, look at what’s happening with the drug ‘krokodil.’ Heroin addicts can’t afford heroin, so they make a homemade killer drug that eats away the flesh.

Very graphic, not for squeamish:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Yfd_7jrnMk
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cM6v-43-1PU

[Psalm 144]

“Some very good pictures/photographs there. Faces of brave people is what I see. Orderly, too. They’ve lived this way their whole lives. I hope they fared well and are doing better now.”

I was there for part of it. They were brave, they did fare well, and they are doing better. George Herbert Walker Bush tired to prop up Gorbachev at the end, but fortunately his predecessor had mortally wounded the Soviet Union. Russia endures and slowly recovers after the death of the Politburo. Similarly, after the beast on the Potomac rolls over and dies, America will endure, and slowly recover.

I like your tagline. That is the ‘X’ factor the Caesar worshipers keep forgetting.

[Psalm 144]

You will probably be proven right. I just wonder whether I will live to see it, or if it will stagger on for another generation or two.

[meadsjn]

Socialism in the USSR benefitted a small privileged minority, at the expense of a vast majority who suffered shortages of everything for 70+ years. For socialists, socialism is not so bad.

When the USSR fell apart, many of those privileged socialist elites were the ones able to migrate to the wonderful USA, where beginning in Nov 1992, socialism was ramping up to cruising speed.

These former soviet socialists love where we're going. They know how to play this game, and they tap into every source of free money available.

[X Fretensis]

From what I have read, the triangular pieces of cloth foot wraps are traditional in the Soviet Army. Saw a film clip many years ago of an old vet from WWII demonstrating how they were used. Suppose the custom goes back to the days of the tsarist armies when they were mostly peasants.

[bgill]

I was there in the 70s and it was the same. Nothing changes there. The deal with their stores vs. ours is that they sell one or two items in each store. One store might sell sewing machines and cabbage. Another shoes and radios. Nothing else. The items usually had no connection. It made no sense. They always had lines. Even the street vendors had lines. They had the tea dispensers but even in the 70s, it'd give you your own dixie cup - no tin cup on a chain. No coke machines with bottles or cans but sometimes you could get Pepsi at a restaraunt. Also, the government had a list of products that needed to be produced but if something was accidently left off the list, too bad, it wasn't made that year. IIRC, that year it was something like toothpaste. They had toothbrushes but no toothpaste. The women had just discovered hair dye but it was that awful orange/red from the '50s. Just like the weather, everything and everyone looked gray and gloomy.

I'm thinking the culture has a lot to do with the lines. With just a couple items sold in each store, you spend all your time going from one store to the next. They shop daily for food whereas I may go to the grocery store once or twice a month so I'm in only a couple lines a month rather than several lines every day. Your co-worker's mom wasn't freaking over the abundance of food but that it was all in one place.

[AppyPappy]

“She also is chronically ill and can’t work. “

But she can get pregnant. Is she putting the child up for adoption?

[AppyPappy]

Communist government told their citizens that shows like Dallas are all fiction. Their citizens are convinced everyone in the world lives like they live. If the North Koreans ever invade South Korea, the invasion will stop at the first grocery store because they will be convinced it is the only one in South Korea and they will need to loot it before someone else does.

When we hire professors from overseas, they are astonished at the number of large grocery stores in town. And rice in small bags. What’s up with that? They buy rice 50 lbs at a time.

[Osage Orange]

Oklahoma....will NEVER be part of Texas!!