Carking the 6th wrote:
Remember though, that is Poland. It was a country being colonized and exploited, so of course life there would be worse. In the Soviet Union, the same problems you mentioned existed, but on a lesser scale. Life was very obviously not easy or fun like tankies idealize it, but it wasn’t the same Stalin era hell that an average westerner is taught. Situation depended on time period, and the 60’s -early 80’s era Soviet Union was much more different to Stalin and Gorbachev times. Generally people in Russia, Ukraine and Belarus will say life was better before the collapse, while everyone else benefited from its fall. At least that’s what I see when I read anecdotes. A certain statistic rated the majority of Russians as preferring life in the Soviet Union. That makes sense; Putin’s Russia is as suppressive as the Soviet Union, but with an even worse living standard and worse war to boot. What I mean is that you can’t judge this country like monolith.Let is think about it as if the United States were to see an even worse state in a few years and collapse into different states. Future generations will remember America as that country that challenged say… China and (somehow) lost. It will be remembered for being a very divided country with huge wealth inequality and high living costs. American cultural power falls to China and its greatest songs and movies become Secondary and a relic of the past. Still, some states like Texas and California benefited from the collapse and manage to get back on their feet, while a remnant US with a huge part of the former country under its control becomes worse off and falls to strongmen and nationalism who promise glory… Texans tells you of the declining economy and the dread of watching society collapse, while people in the remnant state of New York tell of back when everyone who had a job could be promised a minimum wage and mostly clean water…
Rather than that contrived and confusing tangent I could have just skipped to the point. This point? Different people were better and worse off, benefitted from or suffered in the Eastern bloc, and that the way we view it all should be more detailed and from different areas, times, and lives. This Eastern Bloc (including other communist states that isolated from the west like China) contained half the world for multiple generations, and while generally life kinda sucked for sure, it’s never that cut and dry. Unless it’s about those damn commies… what was I talking about again?
I think one story will address this quite nicely. Sometime in the 70s, my aunt, who lived in the PRL, went on a school trip to Kaliningrad(CCCP). Remember, this was during the time that both nations were part of the Eastern Bloc. My aunt recalls boarding a bus and getting escorted by several police cars from the Polish border into the city. She and her classmates were amazed that they were being treated as some important visitors. She only realized afterwards that the reason was so that nobody could get a good look at what was happening outside, in the rural parts of the Russian SSR. Now tell me, if living in Russia was so much better, what were they so scared of showing? This is again, not a second or third-hand account, I'm telling it exactly as my Aunt did, and she survived through the PRL. A few years ago, I believed the same thing, that the Western way of presenting life in the Eastern Bloc was exaggerated and extreme, but the more I asked people who were there to witness it, the more I realised that they really aren't far off at all. Sure, some things are certainly twisted, but there's a lot that isn't. Life was really
that bad. As for music and entertainment, there are always a few good things, but overall, everything that came out of the Eastern Bloc was extremely censored. Life was never shown as it actually was, more so like it was supposed to be. There really isn't anything that contains criticism of the gov, and there's good reason for that. The best work from the time was that which secretly opposed communism but appeared to support it. Eastern Bloc artists created ingenious ways to cleverly hide the true meaning of their work. There is one poem, written during those times, that had four paragraphs, arranged in a 2x2 grid. If read one paragraph at a time, from top to bottom, it praised communism and its achievements, but if read from left to right, skipping over the gap from the two paragraphs, you ended up with a poem that talked about the destruction of the Communist party and its ideals. If you want to see the true best work of poles from the era, look at that. Culture and religion was suppressed by the communist governments of the era, don't even get me started on "it flourished".
Kind regards,
Donk
Bytro game addict and avid CoW player.
"Þ" > "th"
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