Posted on 06/29/2012 9:23:02 PM PDT by moonshot925
Have you even lived in or visited a communist country? What was your experience?
Rejoice, we’ll never be like Soviet Russia, we’ll be like Argentina!
C’mon, these apartment buildings actually had piped water and inside toilets. They also had food available until late 80s and there was no need to carry internal passport all the time.
Sounds like Norway today.
I visited Poland around 1998. The concrete flats were everywhere and there were hardly any radio stations to listen to. But, by gawd, McDonald’s was there. It was surreal. LOVED the Polish peeps, tho, and almost moved there with hubby’s job.
Was very sick from mosquito attacks from a tour stop in E. Germany during the trip. Think it was a parasite. Went to a government hospital TRYING to get meds after the first medic wanted to INJECT me with some $hit. “ENT” (supposedly) at this hospital sterilized his instruments over a Bunsen Burner when I was sitting there. NO autoclave. I just wanted some antibiotics!!!
Went to a government hospital TRYING to get meds after the first medic wanted to INJECT me with some $hit. “ENT” (supposedly) at this hospital sterilized his instruments over a Bunsen Burner when I was sitting there. NO autoclave. I just wanted some antibiotics!!!
That sounds like Amerika in 2014. Or sooner.
Soviet Union: churches had been changed into gyms or indoor swimming pools. Everybody, but EVERYbody, looked poor. No color, no fashion.Cars held together with duct tape, rope, etc. It was like going back in time 20-30 years. Poor dental work. Empty grocery stores, food lines. Lots of drunks. Only goods worth buying were in special stores for, “Westerners only.”
Eastern bloc: To conserve gas, people would push their (very small) cars. Primitive farming and overall lifestyle. Driving through villages people would call out to us, “Americans! Americans!”
Speaking of piped water... here is an example of the glories of the Communist revolution:
I once had a neighbor from Germany and she had been a young girl during WWII. She said that when the Russian soldiers got to Germany they had never seen plumbing and thought toilets were potato washing sinks. They also couldn’t understand why they couldn’t pull a faucet off a wall - stick it on another wall and not get water.
“these apartment buildings actually had piped water and inside toilets”
I said SOME. I would say more than 80% of the flats had inside toilets, sewage disposal, piped water and piped gas.
“They also had food available until late 80s”
There was shortages of everything in the 80s. Which led to the queue lines.
“there was no need to carry internal passport all the time”
Yes there was.
Yes, to the good looking men comment! Albanian men were very handsome.
I visited Bosnia.
You could sense a high level of distrust everywhere.
It’s like...communism makes everyone fearful - to say the wrong thing - to be seen with the wrong person.
That would probably make a good tag line.
I lived in Uzabekistan for a year, right after they seceded from the USSR. Aside from the geographical differences, your physical description of Budapest is remarkably vivid and accurate. It’s difficult to elaborate in a short space. Just a few random memories....1) When I was out of town, the police harassed my host family, trying to find out where I was; 2) The police tried to force a friend of mine to take an AIDS test; 3) Kids swam through muddy run-off on hot days; 4) Medical care was so bad that a friend of mine was sent to Kazakhstan for dental work. When she got there, the Kazak dentist didn’t have anaesthesia; 5) A bus driver tried to kick me off the bus in the middle of the desert if I didn’t offer him a bribe; 6) A friend of mine was kidnapped one night, escaped, then raped by a police officer; 7) you couldn’t drive at night or your car might plunge into a sink hole (though I never heard of it happening); 8) outside the tenements, people generally had pit toilets; 9) the stuff you hear about Russians and vodka is true; 10) DAMN materialistic people...but I’m sympathetic; when you have so little, it’s understandable why they’d want so much more; 11) there was a big crane parked behind the tenement, and it didn’t move the entire time I was living there; 12) cock fights; 13) women didn’t shave their legs or armpits but you got used to it; 14) a lot of gold teeth and unibrows; 15) my host dad was a professor, and his students were always doing major construction work on his home (for their grades, I think); 16) tombstones had engravings of the deceased...my morbid—and likely incorrect—inference is that the engravings were a direct function of their dialectically materialistically atheistic upbringings (i.e., the closest thing to an after-life they could think of); 17...I don’t know...probably other things. I appreciate the chance to share some of this, though I apologize that it’s so rambling!
Needed to be said again.
I went on a bike trip to Poland in 1984. We stayed in college dorms in Gdansk which smelled like urine and were filthy. They were occupied by mostly Africans. Food was plentiful but very limited to bread, plain cheese, crummy apples, canned goods. Beer expensive and hard to find. Vodka -lots. I was struck that during the week, there were thousands of people roaming the streets. They were supposed to be ‘working’. Poles approached us constantly asking the men in the group to exchange zlotys for US $. Apparently there were ‘dollar stores’ there where one could buy items not otherwise avaiable to Poles with US $. Out in the country, we were told at a ‘grocery store’ -empty shelves some bread, bananas, milk, canned goods- that there were no eggs because they were out of season. Maybe a translation error but nevertheless. It was August. Poles only wanted to speak English with us and refused to speak Russian. They hated the Russians. The ferry we took played a lot of American music but all anti=American songs from Vietnam era. American Woman by Guess Who (cover band though!), etc.
I went to Russia in May of 1994, which was early-post-Soviet, but had some Soviet features remaining. The most Soviet thing was the government run stores. At the grocery store, you stood in line at the meat counter. When it was your turn, you selected your cut of meat. The clerk packaged it for you and put it aside. Then you went to the central cash register and stood in line to pay for it. After paying for it, you took your receipt back to the meat counter and presented to the clerk, who gave you your meat. Then you moved on to the milk counter and went through the whole process again. If any of the clerks whose lines you were standing in had a break, they just got up and left. The line broke up and you did not get to save your place when she came back. The rules were designed for the benefit of the workers, not the customers.
If you just needed a cucumber or a loaf of bread in Moscow, you could buy something from a lady standing near the subway entrance. Women from the outlying suburbs would show up at peak commute times with a couple items to sell, and when they had sold them, they went home.
Some things were cheap. My Russian friend got us tickets to the Bolshoi ballet really cheap. The price for tourists would have been much higher. Museums and cultural events were cheap for natives. Also, I rode in Russian trains which were charming and included tea service. I went to the great Ismailova flea market and got beautiful handmade items from the hinterlands, although they also sold some junk.
Worst restaurant meal ever: a microwaved, breaded fish patty with ketchup and peas on the side. Enjoyed in a beautiful, classical European style room, which was clogged with cigarette smoke emanating from noisy drunks. The microwave oven was a new, cool thing, and so was the frozen fish. Ketchup was considered cool, too, because it was a recent, foreign arrival.
A traditional Soviet food: rich, tasty vanilla ice cream whose recipe had not changed since the 1920s, I was told, because the Carnation company had the ice cream contract in the early days of the USSR and when they checked out, the ice cream kept being made exactly the same way, ever after. And only vanilla flavor.
Yep! Lived in the UK for almost a decade. Just you wait, folks! Try scheduling with a GP if you’re sick. Took me a WEEK in some cases. My son’s surgery? Had to pay (privately) to have it done as the wait period was 3 years.
Had an terrible ear infection while pregnant. Face was swollen. Couldn’t get in with GP.....went to ER. D@amned ER doc was incredibly incompetent. Took him 30 minutes to flip through a PDR (Physicians Desk Reference) to find the right drug for me. Then told me that the drug prescribed MAY lead to birth defects. Had to call the US to MY PEDIATRICIAN, of all people, for advice.
I was in labor for a WEEK because they didn’t have a d@mned bed available and was sent home even though I was having hard contractions. Almost LOST my child due to that.
Indeed!
That’s aweful. You’re right-it will get ugly here.
Traveled all through and stayed in Yugoslavia as a teenager in the 1970s - ugly, smelly, everything broken. Visited East Berlin with a native German about a year before the wall came down - the minute you crossed over to the East, you could smell the pollution in the air. Ugly, grim - but both Yugoslavia and E. Berlin were paradise compared to Cuba, to which I traveled a lot in the 1980s and 1990s and lived in people’s home. It’s a concentration camp. The people there have been destroyed. Even if they were liberated tomorrow, it would be no use. Aside from a tiny elite, they are quasi-illiterate, have had no meaningful contact with the outside world, no references, no understanding of right and wrong. It’s a nation of prostitutes, and I’m talking about the professors and doctors.
No toilet paper, scarce food, constant vigilance. It’s like being in the novel 1984.
Visited the USSR back in ‘76 part of a 12-group student exchange program of the college of education & nursing. We went for two weeks to study their education & health care.
A few anecdotes if I may.
There was the fish store (with fish on big tables full of ice), the butcher shop (meat hanging on wall hooks), the tea (chai) and bakery shop (mostly just bread). Then there was the other store that had mostly potatoes, beets, cabbage, onion. That’s about it. Went into the “specialty” store, where, for example they had on display a single can of tomato juice on a pedestal.
The so-called “biggest department store in the world” (Gum) was more like a huge empty train station, with not a lot of retail space. E.g., the “linen department” was two glass cases, about 12 ft long in total, with several sizes of plain white sheets & pillow cases, and about a half-dozen plain blankets.
Most folks rode the trolley or walked, only the apparatchiks had cars. Streets were pretty empty & clean (no trash or other signs of commerce, plus the endless sweeping of the babushka ladies). Very, very few store signs, almost no neon, billboards, etc. Actually went into culture shock on my return to the states, after being in such bleak and bare circumstances, got a little dizzy on the ride home from the airport.
Inside the hallway entrance to an elementary school was a big map with the Russian areas in red (back then, including Cuba, most of Eastern Europe, a few African countries, etc.) above it were the words “Tomorrow the World”. Students as young as three went oustide for “recess”, about an hour a day, in two feet of snow (toughening them up, and getting them prepared for drilling, I suppose).
They showed us with pride some of their newest medical equipment - looked like something from some bad 1950’s sci-fi movie.
Managed to talk to a Russian student (never know if he was a plant or not, but anyway....). Told me if you were good at, say, engineering, State would help you along. E.g., living space was charged by the square foot, and you’d get a cheaper rate. If instead you wanted to go into another field of study, theoretically you could, but you’d pay an exhorbitant per-square-foot rate. In his words, what you’d be doing by going into engineering was better for society. He tried to dissuade me from my belief in such US accomplishments as landing on the moon, Holland Tunnel, etc., telling me I was a victim of US propaganda.
Most harrowing experience - (I suppose I can tell this story now, it’s been decades). One of the girls on our trip was Jewish and was smuggling some information to a young Jewish student in Moscow. She wanted a guy to go with her for safety, and asked me. Scariest walk ever, I kept expecting the soldiers in the wool coats and big fur hats to come around the corner every minute. He was living in a very sparse apartment - he was selling his furniture, books, etc. for food. He was stuck in a Catch-22. Since he had asked the authorities to be able to leave the country, they took his working papers (you don’t want to live here, then obviously you don’t want to work here either). Without working papers, he could not get a passport, visa, or whatever. So he was stuck, on a path to starvation, jail, or worse. I got this strange feeling, realizing I was indeed on the opposite side of the world.
The girl gave him some papers with contact information, almost like an Underground Railroad of sorts to get him through parts of Europe and to the West.
On a lighter note:
Hotels had a concierge of sorts on each floor, basically I assume to keep an eye on us. We would talk in gibberish around them, just to mess with them.
Coming in at the airport, was waiting to move through customs. Looking down the hall (I swear this is true) saw a young woman with blond hair & sunglasses watching us surreptitiouly. When she saw I was looking at her, she slowly backed up behind the corner. Right out of a Bond movie.
On the looooooong ride between Moscow & Leningrad, saw mostly forest. Every once in a while there’d be a clearing with MAYbe one old pickup truck in a small farm village of a few dozen buildings. The stopover hotel was fenced in (probably to keep us in), but they said it was to protect us from the wild wolves (and I believed them after I heard them howling at night). No TV or radio, but our bus guide taught us how to sing “Moscow Nights” in Russian. We taught her how to sing “Take Me Out to the Ball Game”.
The Hermitage was quite beautiful, and seemed so out-of sorts with the rest of our trip - all that decadence, tsk, tsk.
In summary, I never felt like kissing the ground until I returned from that trip. Thank God for the USA.
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