this post was submitted on 22 Jul 2023
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A lot of eastern Europeans actually miss/look back fondly on the USSR days.... I'm not exactly a fan of them or other "communist" regimes, as they were all basically thinly veiled dictatorships, but standard of living was higher for most of the former block countries.
I really don't get all the china dick riding going on. I gotta think it's driven by bots and Chinese netizens. The west is a little unfair on their views of China, but they grab descenters with secret police and quash any form of opposition to their one party system. People who praise them and act like that's a better system are crazy. Really wish we could build some decent highspeed rail network in America though...
I'm from an ex soviet country and I can tell you that the people who miss it are the ones who got free apartments and property from people who were kidnapped and sent to the soviet death camps in siberia. I have not met anyone else who misses that time when you had to live in constant fear being deported and worked to death and when your culture and language was basically criminalised.
That never happened in a lot of ex soviet countries. Not saying that type of communism was good but there were enough positives under that system where normal people benefited in some ways and that is why a lot of older people remember those days fondly even if they were just normal unconnected wokers.
It's possible some ex soviet countries didn't get their dose of ethnic/cultural cleansing and maybe even had a good life under it but by no means were living standards better back then unless their countries have really gone down the toilet now and most countries are doing better now.
I can't say older people mentioned food was higher quality which might be true due to how modern companies minmax the quality of it for profit and housing market today does feel slavelike. It's probably overall better due to more freedoms but not as good as it should be due to corruption and lobbying.
Huh? Food was incredibly one sided in soviet times, that's like the one thing that everyone knows if they know anything about the soviet occupation. Like you had to have connections to get any variety. My parents for example made their own vodka and cooking greese and traded it for more varied food. What the soviets did good was apartment design because before apartments didn't commonly come with a kitchen and bathroom.
Also housing was different then, you usually got an apartment with your job and you kept it while you had that job but most of Eastern Europe still has affordable housing. Like I bought a newly built 3 room apartment in the capital for 100k euros fairly recently.
I have no idea what it was in Soviet Union but other countries have a variety of foods and candy made by local companies and people that ate those in those days and eat current ones say the quality is worse. This is backed up by the companies changing the recipes and ingredients. Though this basically happens everywhere now. 100k is fairly cheap other countries and capitals costs way more than 100k. I doubt you would get something like that even in the cheaper boroughs.
You can check Estonian real estate sites if you don't believe me. You can get a cheaper apartment easily. Like the cheapest 1 room ones are like 40k and outside the capital it's way cheaper still or it was last I checked but that was no more than 5 years ago.
Local candies and food production is definitely a thing here now but according to my parents it was less prominent during the soviet era because you were obligated to give some of your production away to the occupiers. The most famous local candy companies is definitely still running and taste the same according to my mom, they are called Kalev if you wanna look them up.
I looked at Prague prices and it's insane and Nestle bought a ton of candy companies in the EU and cheapened the product which is as expected from Nestle.
Isn't this because half the population left?
??? No idea what this is referencing, as far as I know nothing like that has happened. The soviets gulaged a lot of people and many fled during that occupation but nothing as dramatic like half the population.
I mean post Soviets, haven't all the Baltic nations seen significant depopulation?
Not really. A lot of Russian citizens left or where made to leave when Estonia got it's independence back but outside of that I don't think there has been a major population shift.
https://www.macrotrends.net/countries/EST/estonia/population
You can see here that it's been in decline consistently for the past 20 years.
According to the Estonian census it dropped between 1990 - 2015 (period after we got our independence back) and has been on an uptick since then. Though the massive drop right after 1990 is when soviet citizens left.
No idea why that graph is predicting that the population will halve in 80 years, seems a little ridiculous considering Estonian birth rate is fine and the population has been increasing for like 8 years.
I really don't get China being seen as a communist state. At this point it's a straight up fascist dictatorship.
Yup. There's basically never been a true communist state. Theyve all been dictatorships that attempt to establish communism. Which is a long drawn out process. The dictatorship gets entreched and never really gives up power.
The ruling class/wealthy if a country will never willingly agree to communism. They have too much to lose. So it always happens by revolution, which will always have a strong military leader to succeed. Human nature makes this always play out in a similar fashion regardless of that leaders initial intent.
yeah communism will never work, at least for more then a year.
The political climate in china is a lot more complicated than we in the west generally understand. I've been trying to wrap my head around a lot of the pro-china stuff I see in online left spaces. I don't feel prepared to make any for or against points in regard to China, but when you start asking more precise questions about Chinese government and society it becomes easier to see the bigger picture. Economically, they're very odd, but a lot closer to a socialist economy than the US or Europe is. My biggest criticisms are social issues, the Uyghur concentration camps, LGBT rights, the COVID lockdowns, etc. But to simply call them fascist is incorrect
So what reforms have they enacted the last decades that could be considered socialist. To me the chinese communist party seem closer aligned with the ideals and actions of the NSDAP.
Being from here, I can say that those are are people who either 1. Look back fondly just because they were young back then, and now they're old, or 2. Were connected enough to the party to be privileged.
Grandparents from one side of my family were the latter, and their political views nowadays are strongly pro-Russian these days, while everyone else(whose lives were improved after fall of USSR) is pro-Western. Funny how that works.
From my eastern block friends they are very confused how the USA could have allowed homelessness, they remember the bread lines so it's not all great memories, but they do talk about how everyone at least had a home, a job and some standard of living - where it seems the standard of living is higher in Western countries.
Yeah, looking from the outside, the USA seems like it's in a mess that it needs to fix.
It is easy to look back at worse times in the past with pink glasses of nostalgia... Yes, everyone did have a home, but the standard of living was piss-poor - except for people with connections, who had it much muuuuch better, like my aforementioned grandparents.
I'm from one of the Baltic states, and honestly the standards of living now are much better for the vast majority of people than it was in the USSR, even for minimum wage earners.
There was no veil. They were all dictatorships.