What was it like to live in the USSR?

What was it like to live in the USSR?

I’ve read some hubs relating to a modern history and sometimes the hub authors or commenters wrote their comments about a Soviet regime. I guess it is difficult to judge other country’s life basing just on the scientific researches of American authors. I am not pretending to make a full scale research. Rather – to tell in short about our life at a Brezhnev time.

I was born in 1968, and remember the last years of Soviet history.

Life in the USSR was well predicted and well organized. Children went to kindergarten at the age of 4-5 years and stayed there till the age of 7. At 7 a child went to general school with 8 or 10 years of study. From school you could go to a Vocational technical school or an Institute. If the marks were not good enough and you had no desire to continue studying you went to technical vocational school after the 8^th class. If a child had good marks, was apt to study in most cases he tried after the 10^thclass to enter an Institute or a University to get a higher education.

A diploma of higher education was prestigious and employees with diploma were wanted. Not all could enter higher educational establishments at the first attempt. Medical universities, leading republican or Moscow universities always had the highest competition.

After the University you became a “young specialist” and in fact could easily choose an enterprise to work for. The main criterion was how fast you could expect to obtain an apartment from that enterprise. All big factories, plants, institutes participated in a building of multi-storied buildings for their employees. In general you could expect that as a young specialist you will have an apartment let’s say in 3-6 years of work for a company. FREE of charge!

We had an early marriage. An unmarried girl at the age of 25 was already “old” and everyone said “What is wrong with her not to have kids till that age?”. We did not need time and years to make a career. Why, I have a paid job!

An ideological aspect of life was present almost everywhere starting from big slogans on the buildings ”Long live the Communist party”, “Lenin is alive forever” and others. That was a normal thing that was the way of life and the way of thinking.

A bureaucracy was strong that time but if it was about leaving for a short trip abroad, the bureaucracy was severe. Therefore we, the soviet people could judge about life in other countries just by TV broadcasts and soviet newspapers and magazines. Can you imagine the total censorship of all mass –media sources? Yes, it was. If the article or a broadcast was about a capitalist country than it was about its worst part: “ Pure Negroes in African countries (sorry but the term Afro-American was not known to us at that time) suffer from malicious white capitalists”, “workers fight to defend their rights”, “militarized American society uses the money of taxpayers to buy another dozen of nuclear bombs”, “Capitalist countries are on the edge of economic abyss” and all like that. Much later in the time of Gorbachev one of the most popular jokes was: The Capitalism stands on the edge of an abyss… and looks down: ”What the hell is that Socialism doing down there ?”.

The life abroad was widely described as a continuous striving of simple people to survive. If any TV broadcast from the USA was shown it has shown dull faces of people and we thought, “of course they do not smile there in America, they have such a hard life unlike us”.

Anyone who had to go abroad passed a strict system of sifting. My father was an engineer, my mother worked at primary school as a teacher but among all of our friends and just acquaintances we had only one person who visited Bulgaria and told us how differently they live (mind it was also a socialist country). It was almost impossible to visit a capitalist country.

Let’s say you had a good reason to go abroad. To start with you had to obtain a reference from the head of the local communist party cell. You had to be politically stable, to be active members of komsomol of party organizations. Then you had to obtain a permission to leave the country from local department of visas and registration. To get that you had to pass an exam and to learn almost by heart a small book “100 questions and answers for those leaving abroad”. The book was about typical questions that could be asked abroad about the life in the Soviet Union and the correct answers to these questions. They could refuse to leave the country. We passed the exam to a person from the KGB. If it was a group (in most cases it was a group), each group was escorted by one or two KGB representatives during all stay of a group abroad. They tried to control everything.

Those who came back from abroad could say in a whisper that in fact not all is so bad in those “rotten capitalist countries”. But such people telling the truth were so obsolete and they never said it too loud.

So people were deliberately misled and we were happy to live in a “biggest socialist country in the world in which all people are free and equal”. Absence of knowledge made us happy. Besides we had a communist party leading us.

There were some people trying to tell the truth , but they were called dissidents and the system tried to do everything to get rid of them.

Can I say that most of people had a hard life? Probably not. The life was not economically difficult especially if you had a place to live. At the same time we missed a lot of usual things necessary for living. Some clothes, consumer goods and home appliances were hard to buy. One had to have “connections” to get anything. Queues were a routine. For example people came to know that a furniture shop will sell tomorrow some bedroom sets made in Lithuania. No one knew how many of these sets would be sold. But people made a queue starting from the evening, stood there all night long, checked every hour the list of the people in a queue and if someone did not respond crossed him out of the queue list.

In general you could find goods in shops, but they could be of poor quality and you had no much choice. The population in general had money but could not buy anything because of absence of choice and lack of quality goods.

The government tried to distribute produced goods all over the USSR, so it was normal to buy cosmetics from the Baltic republics, or textile from Belarus. My mother was born in Belarus so every summer we went there to visit grandma and to buy me some clothes to go to school. Not because there was no anything in Ukraine, but because it was made better and had better materials. Gasoline was cheaper than the bottled water and the Soviet Union was proud of this.

Books were a huge problem. Interesting books could be purchased only if you had a friend or a relative in a bookstore. Otherwise you had to enroll to a wait-list for the next edition. Actually a lot of people did not even care for the books themselves, but it was prestigious to have a library. Shops with book exchange were a common thing. For example you could bring a volume of Agatha Christie and ask in exchange a book of Fenimore Cooper.

All publishing was under strict control of the KGB. Everything printed was to be checked. If it was “Uncle Toms Cabin” about slaves in the United States – it is OK, but Sakharov had no chance. My first trip abroad was in 1988. I was in Poland. I brought from there a full suitcase of books printed in Russia. No-one cared about them in Poland but for us it was a real treasure.

It was very hard to make a copy of anything. In the 80-th we already had big copying machines used to copy architectural and engineering projects in A3 format. I was attending music school and my father paid bribes asking to make a copy of musical scores. If the copying was not authorized, you could not do it.

Comparing that life and life in our days I can say that there was more order in the country. The communist party in the USSR was a powerful instrument of keeping order. There was a 24 hours person on duty in a regional party committee whom you could call and tell about any disorder. For example, passengers of a local bus line were told that the bus is broken and can’t go on schedule. Just one phone call to a party committee and just one threat to the director of the coach station and all was fixed.

All leading positions in the country were mostly for party members only. There were only rare exceptions from that rule. It was difficult to enter the Communist party and party members were not the majority of the country still the influence of the party was huge. To be excluded from the party was the end of any career for any person.

So it was. The most interesting that we truly believed in Brezhnev, in the Communist party as a leading force, in peaceful policy of our socialist country. May be it is difficult to believe but people in general liked their life and we never felt ourselves under “pressure of totalitarian regime”. We just could not imagine that life can be different from what we had.

The end of Brezhnev epoch was a tremendous event for the whole country. Did you see how North Korean citizens cry at a funeral of their leader? Well, we did not have it to THAT extend, but still it was a catastrophe. My classmates-girls also cried, boys thought- how shall we live now without Brezhnev? We believed that he is able to protect our country from “malicious Americans” which want to start a nuclear World War. In every school, factory, university they arranged TV sets in big halls to watch the on-line the funeral of Leonid Brezhnev.

Is there anything to miss in the soviet times? Yes. For me it is definitely a system of health protection which was absolutely free. Of course you could give some tips to nurses or doctors but just tips, not more. A free medicine was guaranteed by the Constitution and that was a great benefit.

Would I like to live in Soviet times? Probably not. “A virus” of freedom is already in every person. My kids grew up in another country and just like me in 1980they can not imagine now that life can be different. But unlike me they have an option to see the other world and to compare themselves where the life is better.

Continued here: Perestroika in 1985. Perestroika in 1986-87. Perestroika in 1988. Perestroika in 1989.