Which Russian leader came over here and thought he was seeing a potemken village of grocery stores
https://daily.jstor.org/slavery-and-the-modern-day-prison-pl...
https://www.pbs.org/newshour/nation/inmates-at-louisianas-an...
Things were simply different. My family had an absolutely happy life for all the generations that followed WW2.
The opinions of 20 year olds that weren't alive during the USSR era do not count.
Are you certain your parents weren't informants for the SB?
Most of the photos appear to be from the Brezhnev Era, when the soviet union already transitioned away from Stalinism.
Also I imagine anyone taking a photo of any of that would find themselves a resident shortly after.
Oh wow, a blast from the past. Remember reading and re-reading it a lot when I was very young. Seems it is still printed and updated! You can see the 1988 edition in full here https://samoe-vazhnoe.blogspot.com/2014/03/mir-i-chelovek.ht...
I'm not denying things are better now, but they are also much more complex, people socialize way less, neighborhoods that were filled with life are now filled by cars taking any corner and you barely see anybody sitting outside and just talking.
People are way more anxious and less happy, have no kids at all.
Are we better overall? Sure. If you look at the financial angle we are.
Are we safer or happier? I don't see that at all.
People are way more anxious and less happy, have no kids at all.
This is also the contrast you can see in countries that didn't live under a single-party rule with a secret police that can disappear you at any moment.
What you describe is the disease of modernity, and you wouldn't get a safer happier result if the USSR was back or never disappeared.
In the USSR, workers (in Soviets) voted their delegates and the delegates in turn elected the top hierarchy of the communist party.
So yes, the USSR was obviously an authoritarian regime controlled by a single party, but you still had to lobby and depend on getting elected by your party, whose delegates had to be first elected by the workers.
In modern Russia, Belarus, etc?
It's arguably even worse, the elected presidents and prime ministers de facto control the opposition which pretends to be an opposition, and real opposition faces either legal issues or direct threats.
And yet, you can pretend to be a democracy and tell your people its better than it was once, but is it really?
It's been 60 years now till the last parliamentary republic turned authoritarian, Sri Lanka. Every single other country to do so has always been a presidential or semi presidential republic. From the former Eastern Europe, to Asia, to Africa to South America.
We should now know that electing a single person to hold executive power is just non democratic and concentrates too much power in a single individual, but we keep falling in love with winner-takes-all elections and loving the idea of a single individual that doesn't need to win his own parties or PMs support every day can fix things quickly.
was there some particular risk of this?
https://www.nationalgeographic.com/photo-of-the-day/photo/ul...
Skin cancer from sun exposure wasn't something I think they'd have considered in the USSR.
Runner up, the inconsolable background pooper (towards the end), what a weird photo to take btw.
I guess Deng Xioping said it best - "I don't care if the cat is black, white or purple as long as it catches mice"
I found it absolutely fascinating. After the first episode I didn't think I'd watch anymore of it since it's very odd (how it's presented IMHO) but it kept drawing me back in.
A set designer can of course find pieces from the time, but I always find with shows made now it always feels retro rather than authentic, but in this show they managed to find some genuine time capsules.
Note that even today hundreds of millions in India and China still don't have access to modern toilets or sewage systems.
biscuits1•50m ago
I would find it fascinating if an author did a deep dive into the toy knock-offs in the USSR and how they came to be.