born 1990 in an eastern european SSR, months before the dissolution
not great. my parents were good people, and did their best to care for me, but we were extremely poor. like, we-got-nothing-to-feed-you-so-you-have-to-stay-with-your-uncle-for-the-summer-poor EDIT: i should note, i'm talking after the dissolution. before we were doing very well apparently, but being months old at the time i obviously don't remember it
damn, feel like i should CW the answer for some real sad shit but
spoiler
my dad killed himself when i was around 20, after struggling with depression and alcoholism for most his life
he did manage to get back up on his feet financially after the 90s, at least we weren't living in poverty by the time i was in my late teens, but the fact that we still lived in the flat owned by his wife's mother really did not help, with his ideas of what a man is supposed to be
my mum is doing well. she eventually moved on, found someone else, and we have a great relationship, especially considering i'm gay
I'm sorry. I'm a parent so when you were talking about some of those situations you experienced growing up - while I can't say I've ever been in similar material circumstances, I can in some small way imagine the heartbreak those must've caused for your parents, and it's awful. I'm glad you and your mom are OK now.
for whats it worth, my parents did a very good job of shielding me from the dismal material realities. i did not really spend much time thinking about how poor we were, i was busy with normal kids stuff. most of my schoolmates were in similar situations so it all just seemed normal tbh. the realisation of how poor we actually were came when i was already grown up, just thinking back like "damn"
It really bothers me how, here in the US, the narrative is that the USSR and other Eastern Bloc nations were all just "inefficient" so any economic downtowns after the fall of communism are attributed to just a little bit of "readjustment". So not only does it completely minimize the suffering people like your family endured, it's also just wrong. I'm more familiar with the former GDR, but they had plenty of top notch industries like shipbuilding and optics. The capitalists in the west just came in bought up the assets for pennies and closed them down to further cement their monopolies (this happens within capitalist economies all the time). Not to mention, a lot of what capitalists call " inefficiencies are really just things like not treating workers like disposable cogs.
as far as i saw it at least, a lot of his issues he had were to do with feelings of inadequacy, and not being able to fulfil the role of the manly provider for the family weighed on him for sure. i don't want to play the armchair psychologist too much, and as many men of his generation he never spoke about his feelings directly, there was likely other factors too and you probably can't blame all of it on capitalism, but the dissolution undeniably was a major factor yeah
damn! i gotta be more careful about my digital footprint. but it's ok i'm not actually a real person, i'm a russian bot
lmao somehow I read that as “born 1900” and my brain decided to read “dissolution” as “revolution”
And I’m like “is there even anyone still alive from 1900?”
This is what happens when you start your morning without coffee
Was he really bald or was that just Stalin retouching all his photos to hide his mad hair game?
he actually had a full head of luscious locks but wore a bald cap to appear more down to earth. such a humble man
iirc those polls were specifically done in russia. in my country, i would very much doubt you'd get the same results. people seem to be absolutely brainwashed with liberalism. in school you're taught of soviet times as an "occupation". we have a whole ass "occupation museum". and that's not even going into the nazification, we're not far behind ukraine in that respect. our defence minister is on record calling those who joined the literal SS during the war "the country's pride".
as a teen i was extremely lib, and pictures of stalin i would see on the internet made my blood boil. i had a great great aunt who was sent to a siberian gulag after all! then i learnt that the reason she was sent there was because she married a literal nazi who was caught by the soviets, and she refused to renounce him, being a sympathiser herself. that was fun.
mostly though it was just talking to my grandmother who remembered the soviet times extremely fondly. at first i just thought well, that's just soviet propaganda still rotting her brain. but then just asking about specific things like how much she paid for rent, and slowly realising that she was a single mother with only a highschool diploma who worked in a factory and still managed to have a mostly worry-free life, materially being better off than i expect to ever be (like, owning a flat)
eventually i read "blackshirts and reds" being incredibly apprehensive at first, but nearly cried at passages that mentioned my country, and my transformation into a card-carrying ML was complete
as far as i understand its not like she disagreed with her husband much, so it wasn't even "i can fix him" situation. it's just that she didn't like directly do any nazi shit herself except supporting him. oh and the best part, the nazi husband apparently started a hunger strike in protest when he was imprisoned. and apparently, force feeding a nazi prisoner was not the highest priority at the time, so he just died
Just letting the nazi starve himself is unbelievably based. Like okay die I don't care.
lmao good on him for following his leader. wish they'd all do it.
oh and the best part, the nazi husband apparently started a hunger strike in protest when he was imprisoned. and apparently, force feeding a nazi prisoner was not the highest priority at the time, so he just died
This is what I was referring to.
TBH that generational gap thing is pretty common with my family. My father side hates Mao and shit because of the land reform and how my grand Grand father was a landlord (he took his own life to avoid the persecution). But my maternal grand mother loves Mao because the revolution gave her the opportunity to become a teacher and improve her life in a way
On a scale of :sadness-abysmal: to :desolate: , how bad was the 90s over there?
thankfully i remember very little of it. but apparently my dad, who used to oversee a warehouse, was visited by mafia gently informing him this warehouse now belongs to them. we had to relocate to my grandmothers who lived out of town. my dad got some new job eventually, but lost it quickly because he couldn't afford bus fare to go to work. so pretty :desolate: i would say
my dad, who used to oversee a warehouse, was visited by mafia gently informing him this warehouse now belongs to them.
damn...
when i was a little girl, we went to the village in russia that part of my family was from. like proper farm land. and i tried to buy milk at the village shop. everybody laughed at me for the whole week.
every farm had cows. the shop only sold rubber boots and other stuff farmers wouldn't be able to make themselves
If this is the early 90s, then after the fall of the USSR the Russian agricultural sector basically collapsed from the withdrawal of govt subsidizes and shutting down of state owned farms. нет молоко
this would be late 90s, which technically doesn't qualify as " the beforetimes, the long long ago" tbf
i cried because i knew 30 years later i'll be reading reddit like "i'm from the soviet union! born in 2003! no i only speak english! anyway let me tell you how goomunism murdered my whole family!"
we didn't have one in my family. we just scraped sand on our teeth with our fingertips
just a silly joke, sorry to alarm you:) we did not in fact have to share toothbrushes
no worries that's fair
my mum's biggest complaint about her life in the USSR was that the party meetings took too long, she was bored often. idk, sounds pretty dystopian to me
"The problem with Socialism is that it takes up too many evenings" -Oscar Wilde
The only meeting in history that didn’t take too long is the one in Space Mutiny where one guy gets impaled by the other guy who’s like an expert in ancient dentistry.
haven't read any fiction in so long, so i recently picked up some China Miéville (my guy is so based he's really called China) and read Perdido Street Station and The Scar. it was very fun!
somebody told me i should play Kentucky Route Zero after i told them i loved Disco Elysium and it was amazing. so i'll recommend that too, if you don't mind very abstract, magic-realism-y type of storytelling. there is also significantly less "gameplay" than in DS. but the sad/weird/occasionally strikingly beautiful anti-capitalist vibe is quite similar
yeah i've also heard that, but then, if i screened every authors/artists politics that thoroughly, there wouldn't be much media left to enjoy innit. at least he's not a lib, and so the books aren't annoying because the main character votes in the end to save the world or smth. that's good enough for me at this point
never actually. but my cousin had a Sega Genesis (i assume genuine? not sure) and we would go to this game cartridge rental shop for games sometimes. i wasn't particularly interested in gaming as a kid, so for all i know everybody had NES clones, i just never payed attention tbh. that's until my dad brought home a PC and i got Sims installed on it.
bad enough that i don't live there anymore. i've lived in br*tain for several years now :deeper-sadness: occasionally my mum would sent me a link to some new hatecrime saying "hope you're not thinking about moving back" (worst one was 2021, when they literally
spoiler
burned a gay guy alive after harassing him for months
all the queers i know that didn't leave for western europe, are at least partially in the closet, open only to selected friends, and one is only open at work because she works at a trendy art gallery. so obviously she won't get fired from there. if you work anywhere "normal" that's very much a possibility. she's still not out to parents though, and she's like 30. i don't personally know anybody as open with their parents about their life as i am.
i brought my girlfriend for a visit recently, had to explain we could only hold hands and stuff in like 2-3 selected bars. on the streets, even in the capital, people will stare. and staring is best case scenario, some ten years back i was harassed by cops on the street for "looking gay", like literally that was my crime. put me in their van and everything. well joke's on them, only helped me internalise that ACAB lol
no gay marriage and absolutely no trans rights, of course. basically, some people do it, but it really sucks, and sometimes you don't even get to survive
i did some judo in my teens, pretty sure i could do it then. and that was probably the last time i tried tbh
the second soviet union is pretty good, but to be honest i can't wait for the third one, also ruled by :putin-wink:
