I’m old enough to remember the 90s. It’s really gross but (cw: human trafficking?)
spoiler
I remember the endless jokes about “mail order Russian brides”. It was just this weird phenomenon that no one bothered to examine, just laugh about. Only now do I realize that conditions in the former USSR were so awful that you had so many women that were so desperate they would do anything - including marry some American loser sight unseen - just to get out of there. Really gross stuff.
Also, take a look at any measure of economic output in the eastern bloc from the 80s through the present. In the 90s there’s this massive dip that only gets to the ~1990 level in recent years. Like in Russia, you could take where the economy was in 1990 and assume very mediocre growth, and they would be better off now had the USSR stuck around just by the numbers (and that’s before considering how unequal the pie is split now vs how things were under communism). Obviously some countries like Czechia and the Baltics fare better, but they’ve been plugged into the imperial core for nearly 30 years now.
I saw all of this on the evening news, everyday for years, when I was a kid. It always leaves me baffled when the topic of the Soviet collapse comes up and boomers (who saw the same news) act like this was a victory for the people of the USSR.
What the fuck are they talking about? I think they’ve so thoroughly dehumanized these people that all of the terrible shit they saw on the news just didn’t seem like a big deal. I guess if all of the images of post collapse deprivation were going to be impactful they wouldn’t have been broadcast.
I think Americans were so deeply propagandized about the USSR that they believed any real suffering the people endured under capitalism was a balloon party compared to what life was like under communism in their imaginations. Absolutely insane shit like “if they find you own a Bible you are immediately executed”.
And for the more economically “sophisticated”, I remember hearing a lot of “well the Soviet economy was so inefficient that some pain must come along with restructuring, but they will be better off in the end”.
I’m old enough to remember the 90s. It’s really gross but (cw: human trafficking?)
spoiler
I remember the endless jokes about “mail order Russian brides”. It was just this weird phenomenon that no one bothered to examine, just laugh about. Only now do I realize that conditions in the former USSR were so awful that you had so many women that were so desperate they would do anything - including marry some American loser sight unseen - just to get out of there. Really gross stuff.
Also, take a look at any measure of economic output in the eastern bloc from the 80s through the present. In the 90s there’s this massive dip that only gets to the ~1990 level in recent years. Like in Russia, you could take where the economy was in 1990 and assume very mediocre growth, and they would be better off now had the USSR stuck around just by the numbers (and that’s before considering how unequal the pie is split now vs how things were under communism). Obviously some countries like Czechia and the Baltics fare better, but they’ve been plugged into the imperial core for nearly 30 years now.
I saw all of this on the evening news, everyday for years, when I was a kid. It always leaves me baffled when the topic of the Soviet collapse comes up and boomers (who saw the same news) act like this was a victory for the people of the USSR.
What the fuck are they talking about? I think they’ve so thoroughly dehumanized these people that all of the terrible shit they saw on the news just didn’t seem like a big deal. I guess if all of the images of post collapse deprivation were going to be impactful they wouldn’t have been broadcast.
I think Americans were so deeply propagandized about the USSR that they believed any real suffering the people endured under capitalism was a balloon party compared to what life was like under communism in their imaginations. Absolutely insane shit like “if they find you own a Bible you are immediately executed”.
And for the more economically “sophisticated”, I remember hearing a lot of “well the Soviet economy was so inefficient that some pain must come along with restructuring, but they will be better off in the end”.