Sociological research shows: Soviet childhood is now in fashion. “I want to go back to the USSR. How good it was then - probably the best time in my life” - more and more often this phrase can be heard not only from veterans, whose biography is tightly connected with Soviet times, but also from those who have barely turned 30.

People who were 13–15 years old in 1991 lovingly collect Soviet movies and exchange memories of pioneer childhood. Nostalgia for the Soviet past is becoming common among thirty-year-olds.

“We were lucky that our childhood and youth ended before the government bought FREEDOM from the youth in exchange for roller skates, mobile phones, star factories and cool crackers (by the way, for some reason soft)... With her own general consent... For her own (seemingly) good..." - this is a fragment from the text entitled "Generation 76–82". Those who are now somewhere around thirty are eagerly reprinting it on the pages of their online diaries. It became a kind of manifesto for a generation.
An analysis of youth resources on the Internet and other text sources shows: the attitude towards life in the USSR has changed from sharply negative to sharply positive. Over the past couple of years, a lot of resources dedicated to Everyday life in Soviet Union. “76–82. Encyclopedia of our childhood,” perhaps the most popular of them. The name itself indicates who the audience of this resource is - everyone who was born between 1976 and 1982.
The LiveJournal community of the same name is among the thirty most popular. Its regulars discuss with sincere love films about Electronics, GDR “Westerns”, “Neva” blades for safety razors and the drink “Pinocchio”.

From the “dumb scoop” to the “golden age”
It's funny that just a decade and a half ago, the same people who today fondly remember the symbols of a bygone era themselves rejected everything Soviet and sought to resemble their more conservative parents as little as possible.
The strange unconsciousness of youth extends to the more immediate past. At the turn of the 80s and 90s, a significant part of young people dreamed of leaving altogether - emigration even to a third world country was considered more attractive than life in a collapsing Soviet state:
“Be it a carcass or a stuffed animal, just get out of this mess faster.”
“Soviet clothes are a nightmare, squalor, impossible to wear, the “farewell to youth” galoshes alone are worth it. Soviet equipment was clearly not made by hand, but by something else: it doesn’t work, it can’t be repaired. Soviet products are sausage consisting of 90% toilet paper, butter from margarine and beer with water”...
Who would have dared to deny these axioms fifteen years ago?!
But, as you know, time - the best remedy from the childhood disease of leftism. Having matured, young people stopped being so categorical. Now the memories of Rubin TVs, Vega tape recorders, Red Moscow perfume, checkered shirts, red coats, ice cream for 15 kopecks and soda in vending machines cause slight sadness and regret that they will never exist again.
The Soviet past is rapidly becoming overgrown with touching legends and before our eyes is turning into a beautiful myth about the golden age of mankind. Modern thirty-year-olds are so hungry for a fairy tale that they are ready to amputate their own memory.
At the end of the 80s, few of them would have thought to admire Soviet pop songs or Soviet films - it was too primitive. It was more important to understand how to get rich quickly, get maximum variety in sex, achieve success and recognition in big city. Instead of VIA "Gems" and films about village life the last Soviet teenagers wanted to watch Hollywood thrillers and listen to Scorpions and Queen.

But time played its usual trick with them: having received in full what they dreamed of at the dawn of their foggy youth, modern thirty-year-olds began to dream of what they once despised so mercilessly. And old Soviet films about the war and the development of virgin lands suddenly acquired in their eyes a meaning that they had once categorically refused to see.
Why did people who rejected everything Soviet suddenly begin to feel nostalgic for a time they barely lived through? According to sociological research, there are two reasons. One of them lies on the surface: nostalgia for the Soviet Union is in many ways simply nostalgia for childhood. It is common for everyone to idealize their childhood years. The bad is forgotten, only bright memories remain of how wonderful the ice cream tasted and how joyful the people looked at the demonstration.
However, it seems that for the current generation of thirty-year-olds, nostalgia has become a kind of religion, largely determining their attitude to life in general. They are proud that they had the opportunity to live in the Soviet Union, and believe that it is the Soviet experience that makes them incomparably better than modern youth who grew up after 1991:
“Still, if I had to choose, I would choose the end of the 80s. I didn’t understand anything then. I was 17–19 years old. I didn’t know how to communicate, I didn’t know how to fall in love, I didn’t want anything from life and generally didn’t understand how and why people live... I didn’t take anything away from these years, but I could have (I just now understood this). This is probably why they are my most favorite times now, chaotic, unclear,” writes roman_shebalin.
He is echoed by another author of the online diary tim_timych:
“How I want to go back to childhood! In our childhood. When there were no game consoles, roller skates and Coca-Cola stands on every corner. When there were no nightclubs and everyone gathered for a rehearsal of a local rock band that played DDT and Chizh. When words were worth more than money. When we were."
The reason for such “unchildish” nostalgia, apparently, is deeper than just longing for a past youth. By idealizing the Soviet past, modern thirty-year-olds unconsciously talk about what they don’t like about the present.
From an unfree state to unfree people
“As children, we drove cars without seat belts or airbags. Riding a horse-drawn cart on a warm summer day was an unspeakable pleasure. Our cribs were painted with bright, high-lead paints. There were no secret lids on the medicine bottles, the doors were often not locked, and the cabinets were never locked. We drank water from the water pump on the corner, not from plastic bottles. No one could think of riding a bike wearing a helmet. Horror!" - this is all from the same “manifesto”.
“We have become less free!” - this cry of despair sounds in many recordings. Here's another quote:
“I remember that time, and the main feeling is a feeling of complete freedom. Life was not subject to such a strict schedule as it is now, and there was much more free time. My parents had a month off, and if someone was sick, they calmly took sick leave rather than going to work, barely alive. You could go wherever you wanted and no one would stop you. There were no combination locks or intercoms, there were no security guards at every entrance or in every store. The airport was most interesting place, where the journey began, and not part of a high-security zone, as it is now. In general, there were almost no signs like “No entry”, “For staff only”, “Forbidden”.
A strange metamorphosis of memories occurs. In the Soviet Union, menacing inscriptions “Passage prohibited!” there was much more than now. But our memory of childhood carefully erases them, and the memory of what we saw a couple of days ago completes these notorious signs.
Objectively, Soviet society was much less free than the current one. And not only in political terms. A person’s life moved along a strictly scheduled route: district kindergarten- district school - college/army - distribution work. Variations were minimal.

It's the same with everyday life. Everyone ate the same meatballs, rode the same bicycles and went to the same Zarnitsa. Long hair, a leather jacket with studs, even basic jeans - all this could attract the attention of the police or at least the disapproving glances of old women at the entrance. Now - wear whatever you want, and if you don’t look like an illegal Uzbek immigrant, the police don’t give a damn about you, and neither do the grandmothers, especially since you almost never see them together with the benches at the entrances.
Anyone could become a revolutionary by being rude to the foreman over little things or coming to school without a pioneer tie. We now live in one of the freest societies in human history. Again, this is not about politics, but rather about culture and lifestyle. The state interferes as little as possible in privacy person. The notorious “vertical of power,” which permeates the political process, never crosses the threshold of an apartment. But society itself has not yet had time to develop sufficiently firm norms and cannot tell citizens what is possible and what is not.
Where does this feeling of unfreedom come from? Most likely it comes from within. Today's thirty-year-olds drive themselves into very strict limits. You need to work and earn money, you need to look decent, you need to behave seriously, you need to have a mobile phone with Bluetooth, you need to eat food without GM additives, you need to read Minaev and Coelho. Needed, needed, needed!
For thirty-year-olds, real freedom is not freedom of speech or assembly, but, above all, the opportunity to live calmly, without stress and have a lot of free time. But they were expected to become the first generation free from the “scoop”, a generation of energetic builders of capitalism. In the early 90s it looked something like this. Young people enthusiastically took up business, careers, and enthusiastically plunged into the world of consumer joys. But gradually the enthusiasm began to wane. At some stage they simply “burned out”.
Today, for most of them, work and career remain the main guidelines in life. However, the drive that was an integral part of their lives in the 90s is no longer there. Most still rate life success as an opportunity to consume as much as possible: “The larger the apartment, the more expensive car- those more successful person" But many things have already been purchased, impressions have been received, ambitions have been satisfied. Life is boring!

KGB in my head
If you conduct a content analysis, you will most likely find that the frequency of use of the word “security” has increased hundreds of times over the past twenty years. In the USSR there was an all-powerful organization - the State Security Committee. They were afraid of her, jokes were told about her. But the idea of ​​security itself was not so intrusive.
But now this word is key at all levels - from high politics to your own apartment. Secret passwords are all around us. Enter the entrance - code, open the apartment - several locks, turn on the computer - password, download your own email- password again...
But no one imposes these rules, people choose them themselves. And they remember their childhood with sadness: “We left home in the morning and played all day, returning when the street lights came on - where they were. For the whole day no one could find out where we were. There were no mobile phones! It is hard to imagine. We cut arms and legs, broke bones and knocked out teeth, and no one sued anyone. Anything could happen. We were the only ones to blame, and no one else. Remember? We fought until we bled and walked around with bruises, getting used to not paying attention to it.”

Toys from the trash heap versus Chinese sabers
Children's toys and games are a whole world. For many, it leaves a much more vivid imprint in the memory than adult fun such as a Toyota car or the position of head of a department.
Millions of Soviet children had a favorite bear - chunky, faded, unconvincing. But it was he who was trusted with the most important secrets, it was he who played the role of a home psychoanalyst when we were feeling bad. And with what ecstasy we played “red” and “white”, armed with rifles cut from sticks!
Let's quote the diary of user tim_timych again: “What it was like to climb through garages, collecting junk that no one needed, among which sometimes you came across such pearls as gas masks, from which you could cut rubber bands for slingshots. And the found bottle of acetone was enthusiastically burned on a fire, where lead was melted from discarded car batteries for buckshot, lyanga, and just like that, out of nothing to do, just for the sake of gawking at the molten metal.”

Market economy gave rise to a simple principle: everything that is in demand must be commercialized. Do you remember how they played knights in courtyard groups? How were shields and swords made from trash found in a landfill? Now plastic armor and weapons are sold at any kiosk: if you want a pirate saber, if you want a Scythian akinak. It's worth every penny: to buy a legionary or cowboy set, you just need to save a few times on Coca-Cola.
Fireworks and firecrackers are already on sale in finished form, and there is no need to conduct chemical experiments behind garages. And you can buy bags of teddy bears made in China. Only less and less often among them is that same cross-eared freak found - beloved and only...
Looking at their children, today's young people experience ambivalent feelings. On the one hand, it’s enviable: to go to a kiosk and for a few pennies buy an exact copy of a Scorpion submachine gun with a magazine and ammunition capacity of a thousand bullets - and for this, a boy of the 80s, without hesitation, would agree to sell his soul or carry out every trash day! It just doesn’t have the scent of uniqueness. No one’s own labor was put into it (when a pale analogue of such a thing was made with one’s own hands), and the exclusivity of the occasion is not associated with it (if it was a gift, say, brought from abroad).
And in the end, this weapon collects dust somewhere under the bed: no problem - dad will buy a new one tomorrow. Dad will not become poor, he makes good money.
But I feel sorry for the child.

Friends remained in the USSR
Another reason for nostalgia is the legend of pure and open relationship between people. Here alta_luna recalls:
“The kind of friendship that my young parents had with other young couples never happened to them again in their lives. I remember something interesting - men are on business trips, women are waiting.”
In another diary we read: “We had friends. We left the house and found them. We rode bikes, blew matches along spring streams, sat on a bench, on a fence or in the school yard and talked about whatever we wanted. When we needed someone, we would knock on the door, ring the bell, or just go in and see them. Remember? Without asking! Sami!
Thirty-year-olds suffer because they have fewer and fewer friends. There is simply not enough time for them. To see an old friend, you have to make an appointment almost a month in advance.
And the meetings themselves are becoming shorter and more formal: everyone is busy, everyone has things to do. The ability to contact a person at any time and cancel or change previous agreements provokes optionality:
“Sorry, plans have changed, let’s go not at 5 today, but at 8, or better tomorrow at 5. Or better yet, let’s call tomorrow as we go along and come to an agreement.”

No time
Most thirty-year-olds are dissatisfied with their lives, but do not see real opportunities change it. To change something, you need time, and that’s just not there. You only have to stop your rapid running for a minute and you are immediately thrown to the side of the road. And thirty-year-olds cannot afford this.
“Soon 30. No time. Tachycardia, pulse 90 beats/min instead of the prescribed 70. I take the medicine without reading the instructions, I trust the doctor. There is no time to read the operating instructions for the purchased machine, only individual points. I signed the loan agreement at the bank after skimming through it. I just made sure that my last name and code were there, the employees also had no time. When was the last time I drank beer with friends? I don't remember, more than a year ago. Friends are a luxury. Only for adolescence. I talk to my mom when she calls. This is not good, you should do it yourself more often. I come home, my wife and children are sleeping. I will kiss my daughter, stand over my son, hug my wife. On weekends I turn on the TV, meditate in front of the screen, flipping through all the channels at the same time; I don’t have time to watch one, and it’s no longer interesting. What book did I want to finish reading? It seems like Anna Karenina, half of it remains. I can't finish reading it, it's too big. Does not work. No time, I'm running. I'm running. I’m running,” contas complains about life.

A revolution in the name of the bicycle?
"IN Lately very often I think about what great country we screwed up. This country was called the USSR. It was great and free country. Which could send everyone and dictate its unyielding will to everyone on our planet Earth,” writes user fallenleafs in his diary.
Nostalgia for one’s own childhood sometimes smoothly turns into nostalgia for political regime. Soviet Union became associated with state development, scope, imperial power, as well as a calm, stable and happy life:
“It was a time when there was no unemployment, terrorism and national conflicts, people’s relationships were simple and understandable, feelings were sincere, and desires were uncomplicated.”
Nostalgia for the past in various eras turned out to be a very powerful driving force of socio-political development. For example, the return of socialist parties to power in some Eastern European states already in the post-Soviet period was also largely caused by nostalgia for Soviet times.
It seems to us that nothing like this can happen in modern Russia. The generation of thirty-year-olds is too apolitical, too immersed in personal life, to provide serious support to any political force. And if dissatisfaction with their own lives grows, this will only further fuel their political absenteeism. Instead of active action, today's thirty-year-olds choose quiet sadness about the bright time of their childhood, which is gone forever.

The last generation of Soviet youth as a whole was marked by the blissful stamp of deep indifference to politics. While adults were breaking down the Soviet system and then trying to build something new on its ruins, young people were dealing with personal problems. The only area of ​​public life in which this generation has succeeded is business. That is why among them there are so many businessmen or managers and so few politicians or public figures.
But the desire to connect the irretrievably gone past with the ruthless present cannot always be interpreted in line with political actions. After all, they yearn not so much for the social system as for teddy bears, Cossack robbers and the first kiss at the entrance. It’s hard to imagine a revolution under the slogan “Give me back the right to ride a bike and be happy!” However, in May 1968, French students built barricades under slogans like “Under the pavement - the beach!” and “It is forbidden to prohibit!”.

It seems that today's thirty-year-olds, lacking political ambitions, see the problem of historical change in a completely different way. The Soviet world allowed them to be humane, but modernity did not. After all the social catastrophes of the twentieth century, for the first time it becomes clear that in any political structure the main and only important figure remains the person. And the riot of consumer instincts is the same deception as communism, promised by 1980. We no longer have any illusions, we no longer have a single hope that human salvation will come from somewhere else - from politics or economics, it’s not that important.
Today's thirty-year-olds seem to be the first generation of Russian people left alone with themselves. Without the crutches of ideology, without a magic wand in the face of the West. And here the memories of the Soviet past really begin to burn the soul with a merciless fire of envy.

In order to feel one's own human value, there were few opportunities, but they were all well known to everyone. Everyone knew what books to read, what films to watch and what to talk about in the kitchen at night. This was a personal gesture that gave satisfaction and instilled pride. Today's time, with endless possibilities, makes such a gesture almost impossible or, by definition, marginal. Man found himself faced with a monstrous abyss of himself, his own human “I,” which until now had always been successfully camouflaged by the problem of social demand.

The generation of thirty-year-olds lost the right to the usual pronoun “we”. This is confusion not in front of time with its economic rigidity, but in front of one’s own reflection in the mirror. Who am I? What do I want? Hence the meditations on the theme of youth. A person tries to find the answer to painful questions where he began as a person. But this is not a journey into the Soviet past. This is a journey into the depths of your own soul and your own consciousness.

I was tired of following the path of democratic reforms, I ran out of money and my neighbors drank themselves to death. And on my TV, the winds of future change howl ominously, and the heads of newscasters vying with each other to scare me about the riches of democracy.
I slowly dream of buying a pie with jam for six Soviet kopecks and wrapping the herring in the latest issue of the unread Pravda newspaper.

I want to turn around and go back. I want to go to a country where there are no terrorists, prostitutes, racketeers, mayors, presentations, dollars and a multi-party system. Well, the question arises, why did we drive out one party ten years ago, only to then put dozens of others on our necks? Well, we still won, having dispersed some officials and raised many new ones.

This means that in order to become free, we had to become beggars. And who did we pay for our freedom and give everything we had?
Oligarchs, politicians, bandits, officials, or are they the same thing?
Once again, I want people to lie to me on TV all day long about the successes of socialism, and not scare me with the failures of capitalism.

Let me go to the USSR. I will be able to find my way back, since we gradually abandoned everything along this road in order to walk lightly. I will pick up all this along the road of our reforms and return back to the USSR, not empty-handed.

In the distant past, I took numerous oaths as an October boy, a pioneer and a Komsomol member, and for some reason I broke them all. And then I completely sold my Motherland. In that past life, back in the USSR, I swore allegiance to the socialist fatherland in the Red Army, and my fingers patriotically sweated on the Kalashnikov assault rifle.

I broke my oath and now must answer in front of my comrades, who, in turn, also sold their Motherland and must answer in front of me.

I often think why I then betrayed my military oath and did not rush with arms in hand to defend the heritage of socialism. It was a massive betrayal of our socialist ideals and the acquisition of capitalist ideals, which today we are also ready to sell.

In principle, I agree to remember my military oath and fulfill my duty, but my Motherland does not give me a machine gun and even searches other passers-by on the streets to take away weapons.
Apparently, the Motherland no longer expects a feat of arms from us, it is offended and tired of waiting. And we again feel that the fatherland is in danger, and we are thinking how to escape from it.

I don’t want to go to America, I want to go to the USSR. I will courageously stand in lines for sausage until the last drop of blood, go to community cleanups and carry the heaviest banners at May Day demonstrations. I swear, believe me, if you can still believe me.

It’s never too late to learn communism, and you don’t even need to learn it, just repeat it. In the morning, stand up to the words of the old anthem, eat a slice of coupon sausage, buy a tram ticket for three kopecks and proudly walk through the entrance of your native factory.
I will be a shock worker of communist labor, honestly, and I will voluntarily buy tickets for the DOSAAF monetary and clothing lottery.

Well, to the point of tears I want to see at least once again the slogan about the victory of socialism and the friendship of all Soviet peoples. We almost surrendered Riga, lost Crimea at cards, and now we are luring the Japanese to us through the Kuril Islands. Yes, bring back your mother, and Kyiv is the mother of our cities.

I want to go to the USSR, where we are all still together, all alive, where we have not yet been shot, blown up, bombed, or divided. If we gave all this for sausage, Tampax and canned beer, then take it back, I don’t want any more thanks.

And we are frightened every day by the ominous changes in the latest Constitution. Yes, there is no need to scare us with this, few people have read it and no one will even notice if something is rewritten on the sly. The right to work will never be taken away from Russians, they will still force them to work, and they tried to take away the right to rest only once, when they cut down the vineyards and banned drinking. Still, they returned it without any Constitution, because it was absolutely impossible without it.

I once tried to compare all our Soviet and Russian constitutions. One turned out to be more beautiful than the other. In principle, each subsequent Constitution was better and more impracticable than the previous one.
For example, I urgently want to take advantage of the constitutional freedom of speech, but I cannot find the appropriate words.

Today I don’t want to take everything and divide it, I just want to return to the USSR and not give anything to anyone there.
I want to go back to 1980, gather in one place all today’s politicians, still young and unspoiled, tell them everything about the next twenty years and see how they change their minds. It would be better for us in the USSR to turn the rivers back again than for the whole country at once.

In the past of the USSR, I will happily hand over all GTO standards, waste paper, scrap metal, Komsomol contributions and money to help oppressed Africa. Take everything, I don't mind. It turned out to be not at all expensive for a quiet life. We will dig up Leonid Ilyich, revive him, kiss him anywhere and hang the remains of his party chest with orders, and let him continue muttering to us about a bright future from the high rostrum of the next congress.

This reliably lulled the whole country to sleep, which there was no need to wake up if they didn’t know exactly what to do with it. Well, who the hell barked in the ear of a peacefully sleeping country, and, not allowing it to get drunk, persuaded it to exchange the values ​​of socialism for US dollars.

We now have more of these dollars than in America itself, but there is no more nichrome left, well, there is, of course, a little, but we are changing it to the euro.

I can no longer follow the path of reform. I don’t trust the Reds or the Whites, the Left or the Right, and for that they all don’t believe me. I would stay with all the other people, but most of all I am afraid of these very people. I was always with him, and suddenly I fell out, well, I thought, by accident, now I’ll be back in line, but suddenly I see that I wasn’t the only one who fell out, there were many attacking around me.

It was apparently a dream. I began to pick them up, but they spoke to me in obscenities that I almost did not understand. I looked at myself and saw that I myself had gradually turned into a contented bourgeois and became like the old “Bad Boy”. I began to shout that in three days the Red Army would come and rescue us from the filthy bourgeoisie, but no one listened to me. I woke up and decided to return to the USSR.

I don’t invite anyone there, I go alone to that country where everyone expected the best and missed the good. I feel that soon almost everyone will want to go to the USSR, and will go there in orderly ranks, perhaps even led by our government. I want to run there first, and get in line for literally everything. The rest will start borrowing after me, but there will still not be enough for everyone.

It will happen, but it will happen later. And I'll leave now. They will throw stones at my back. And then they will throw stones at the backs of those who run to bring me back, but leave with me. And then a monolithic everything will walk along these stones, and so that it does not get lost, I will leave chalk arrows on how to return correctly. It's easy. Yes, it is necessary for Lenin to be alive again, for the party to become an honor and conscience, for children to enroll in the Komsomol and engage in physical education.

It is necessary to ruin all the rich and equalize them with the poor, make vodka for 4 rubles 12 kopecks per bottle, and together with the Ukrainians, Belarusians, Estonians and other friendly peoples, drink so much that you forget the hostility and wake up again in the USSR. This is the only road, and there is simply no other path. Today's children will already live in socialism, even if it goes wrong three times. And our grandchildren will begin to build communism, not immediately, of course, but they will definitely begin.

We will soon return to the USSR, we will once again make a powerful country and an honest party, we will hang portraits of our beloved leaders and their glorious words everywhere, developed countries will again learn to fear us, and we will peacefully get drunk in our small kitchens and begin to fearlessly tell jokes about the government and the ruling party. This is true happiness - to have nothing and to lose nothing.

And then everything will happen again. Once again, someone will bark into the ear of a peacefully sleeping country, and it, reeling from drinking, will joyfully perk up and cheerfully follow the path of new democratic reforms. We will, of course, go a little further than we went today. But we Russians never go strictly forward or backward, but simply walk in a circle (Lenin, out of politeness, called it a spiral), and the most cunning among us turn first.

According to all our proverbs, it follows that our king must be wise, and our people cunning. And if we choose our own ruler for the kingdom, then everyone immediately becomes cunning and turns around together. It is important that this turn is not taken too sharply, otherwise a lot of people may be run over, although no one will be offended, and everyone will blame it on bad roads and destructive forces.

I don’t want to turn with everyone else, I want to go straight back, strictly and along a straight road, and straight to the USSR.

I'll wait for you all there...

Alexey VINOGRADOV (and me too...)

They say that it is no longer possible to return the USSR to its previous form.

On the one hand, this is true - a lot of water has passed under the bridge, the situation has changed, Soviet industry has been destroyed, and it is no longer relevant in its former form - technology has gone far ahead, the very principles of work in many industries have become different.

The former proletariat, which was considered the system-forming class in the Soviet system, no longer exists. Who will bring the USSR back to life? The so-called office plankton? Managers? Trade workers? Or maybe officials? None of them really need the USSR.

Over the past 26 years, an entire generation has grown up that does not know what the USSR is, and if it does, it is only from movies and stories from its parents.

There is already a growing generation of those whose parents themselves were born after the collapse of the USSR or shortly before, in the late 80s, as a result of which they practically do not remember the Soviet Union.

All this is true.

However, let's look at the question from the other side:

Were there many witnesses to pre-revolutionary Russia in 1991?
How many people were there whose parents even remembered pre-revolutionary Russia?

In 1991, only a few old women who were nearly 90 years old remembered something about pre-revolutionary Russia, if they were of sound mind and good memory at all, at their age. However, they did not take any part in the political processes due to their advanced age and poor health.

Neither Yeltsin, nor Gaidar, nor Chubais, nor the other Sobchaks and Sobchachkis, Novodvoryanskys and Novokrestyanskys remembered pre-revolutionary Russia and could not remember, because they were born much later than 1917. Most even had parents born after the 17th.

However, the lack of personal memories of pre-revolutionary Russia did not stop either Yeltsin, Gaidar, or the other Sobchaks and Novodvorskys from picking up the tricolor with a double-headed eagle and waving it over their heads, confidently talking about the Russia they lost, which turned away from its historical path, I made a mistake, I followed the wrong people and went to the wrong place.

And it would be okay if they simply said that Russia had gone somewhere wrong, based on the current state of politics and economics, but they started talking specifically about pre-revolutionary Russia, about which they had no knowledge or ideas of their own. They began to wave not some new flag, but the tricolor, which they had never seen on any administrative building in their lifetime. And they couldn’t see it. As well as the double-headed eagle - they had never seen it on any administrative building either. However, they firmly decided to use it as a coat of arms in a new way.

And those who went to a rally in support of Yeltsin in August 1991, who later voted for him in the ’96 elections, also could not remember pre-revolutionary Russia. Many even had parents born after the 17th, so they knew about pre-revolutionary Russia only from the fragmentary stories of their grandmothers, and even then not all of them.

But this did not stop them from waving tricolors and rejoicing at the double-headed eagle as a new-old symbol, talking about Russia “which they lost” and confidently declaring that in 1917 the country turned away from the right path.

How could they know which path Russia had turned from?

Which of them was present at that historical choice and saw with their own eyes what was happening in order to speak confidently about what Russia was choosing between and what?

All the surviving witnesses to the events of 17 in 1991 sat at home and did not go out anywhere, and if they did go out, it was no further than the bench at the entrance. Many could no longer even go down the stairs to go anywhere.

Among the participants in the events of 1991, supporters of Yeltsin and other “returners of lost Russia” witnesses of this very “lost Russia” there were zero point one horseradish.

After 17, more than one or even two generations changed - three generations changed and the fourth was already in progress.

And the pre-revolutionary peasantry did not exist for a long time so that it was possible to return to the pre-revolutionary agricultural economy with the help of those who once cultivated it.

There were no longer those who were dispossessed during the period of collectivization.

There were no owners of private shops of the pre-revolutionary period, there were no owners of pre-revolutionary factories, newspapers and ships. And the newspapers and steamships themselves that were in service before 1917 are practically gone, only in the form of museum exhibits. There were only a few factories founded in pre-revolutionary Russia, because many were destroyed during the Great Patriotic War, or were evacuated and essentially received a completely new life.

In 1991 there was neither a pre-revolutionary peasantry nor a pre-revolutionary nobility. Neither the former aristocracy, nor the former bourgeoisie, even in the form of residual phenomena.

There was no pre-revolutionary society left as something integral, preserving the way of life and culture of former Russia, no pre-revolutionary economy, no pre-revolutionary life.

However, gentlemen like Yeltsin and Sobchak who came to power, together with hundreds of associates and millions of supporters, began to quickly remember “how it was” and engage in restoration and reconstruction of pre-revolutionary Russia.

They didn’t just liquidate the USSR in order to build a completely new state, with new symbols, a new economy and a new society, but they began to restore what they did not remember and could not remember.

They restored symbols, began to restore palaces, rename cities and streets, the heads of regions were called governors (which in itself is quite comical, because regions are still called regions, not provinces), and so on.

They remembered Stolypin, recreated Russian geographical society and much more.

They began to canonize Nicholas II, whom they had never seen alive and did not feel the results of his reign, but were firmly convinced that he was a saint. Saint because they shot you? Well, he wasn’t the only one shot. What now, should all those executed be considered saints?

They began to increase the role of the church in the state, publicly baptize themselves, light candles, transfer state property to the church - these are also elements of restoration.

The post-Soviet government and its numerous supporters began to actively restore what none of them remembered and which none of them witnessed.

From 17th to 91st, even more has changed, even more water has flown under the bridge, three times as many generations have changed, the old economy has even more so lost its relevance, almost all technologies have changed, practically no old industry has survived, nothing remains of the old society.

But they still set out to restore the Russia of February 1917, which no one living today saw, remembered, or even heard anything about from their parents.

They undertook to restore literally from pictures from museums, from literary works, By historical documents, as well as according to their own fantasies about how it was and how it could have been if not for the Soviet regime.

In fact, we engaged in alternative history - the restoration of what could have been, if only.

So is it possible to say in the light of the above that the restoration of the USSR is such an impossible task?

If after 74 years it was possible to restore and reconstruct something, then why not after 26 or even 36 years?

If after the change of three or four generations it was possible to embark on memories of the state lost by our ancestors, then why is it not possible to embark on similar memories after a change of two generations?

If in '91, when none of them characters and their supporters did not witness pre-revolutionary Russia, it was possible to “return something back”, then why can’t we do the same thing in our time, when half of the country still remembers how the USSR was structured and what it was, and many of them those who remember this are of mature age, have a solid memory and can still hold in their hands not only flags with posters, but also military weapon, and some can hold this weapon no worse than young people.

If in the 90s, when none of the pre-revolutionary nobles, bourgeois or aristocrats remained, it was possible to start forming a new nobility and a new bourgeoisie, then why won’t it be possible to start forming a new proletariat, especially since tens of millions of those who will be alive will still be alive for many years? who was the very Soviet proletariat, Soviet engineers, labor intelligentsia.

If it is possible to return to an agricultural economy a good hundred years after all developed countries have switched to a post-industrial economy, then why will it not be possible to engage in reindustrialization after some half a century?

If you look closely at what the current restorers of “lost Russia” are doing or trying to do, then the restoration of the USSR does not seem at all utopian; on the contrary, it seems completely real and even natural.

If we went back 100 years into the past and began the restoration and reconstruction of Russia in the style of February 1917, then the next step logically should be the restoration and reconstruction of October 1917, then the era of the NEP, collectivization, industrialization and developed socialism.

The truth here is to ask the question: is this necessary?

If you do nothing but remember the lost states and try to restore them, you can become fixated and fall into the historical-reconstructionist trap. So we will restore one thing or another. Some came to power and began to restore the “lost Russia”; others came to power and began to restore the “lost Union”.

But the main thing is to look at what current leaders get out of their attempts to return “lost Russia” - laughter and sin.

Governors without provinces. City governors are called mayors. Administrative center Leningrad region- Saint Petersburg. The tricolor with a double-headed eagle rises to the sounds Soviet anthem, in the text of which several lines were changed. The May 9 parade is held at the closed mausoleum. The Soviet government is criticized - the Soviet victory is celebrated. And this list of strange inconsistencies goes on and on.

Therefore, we need to think three times: is it necessary to engage in the reconstruction of the Soviet Union?

Wouldn't it turn out to be the same funny parody that the reenactors of pre-revolutionary Russia created?

It is possible to return the flag and coat of arms of the USSR - this is beyond any doubt, proven by those who, 74 years later, returned the double-headed eagle and raised the tricolor.

It is also possible to return the position of general secretary instead of the president - this has been proven by those who returned the titles of governors to the heads of regions.

It's easy to return symbols and names.

But will this return the essence?

Attempts to recreate Russia “as it would have been if not for Soviet power” showed that you cannot step into the same river twice - the water has flowed under the bridge, society has changed, the way of life has changed, the way of life has changed, the situation has changed - everything has changed. AND modern Russia is in no way similar to the pre-revolutionary one, except for the coat of arms and some historical names.

It will be approximately the same when trying to recreate the Soviet Union - it will resemble the previous one only in names and symbols, and the people inhabiting it will be different. Even despite the fact that many of those living today were born in the USSR and remember what it was like.

For example, I am no longer the same person I was at the time of the liquidation of the Union. And I will never be like that again. I remember the USSR in the smallest detail, I still have a lot of Soviet things, books and magazines, I even managed to get a job for the first time under the Soviet regime and I remember the situation of the Soviet period very well. But I still won’t be the same as I was before - too many events happened after the liquidation of the USSR, I had to go through too much - I can’t get it out of my memory and thoughts, I’ll never get it out.

And those who were older, who were 30 or 40 years old in 1991, will also not become the former Soviet citizens, even if the USSR with all its attributes and names is returned right now. They will not go to the plant the same way they did in 1991. And the plant most likely does not exist, but until it is restored (if it makes economic sense at all), those who were 30 years old in 1991 will have time to retire.

And it’s not just about the destroyed factories, although it’s about them too.

Over the past 26 years, we have experienced so much that we have become very different. There are no more those naive Soviet citizens who lived in the USSR. There are Russians beaten by the market, angry and deceived, distrustful, largely disappointed, sometimes confused - different, but completely different from what they were in 91 - even those who remember that year well.

We have become different and will never be the same again.

Therefore, it is possible to return Soviet symbols, paraphernalia, names of institutions and departments, but it will only be a wrapper, and the content will be completely different. Because we have become completely different.

Even those who remember the USSR have become different, and those who do not remember it - even more so.

So is it necessary to return the old wrapper to wrap completely new contents in it?

Will the result be yet another deception, when the external is completely inconsistent with the internal and conflicts with it? Won't the old exterior and the new interior destroy each other?

Will we, just like 26 years ago, believe in Lenin’s party, knowing that once it had already led the country to decline and 20 million of its members did nothing to preserve the Union, and the party elite, on the contrary, contributed in every possible way to the liquidation of the USSR?

Is it necessary to stage another experiment to reconstruct a state that collapsed for internal reasons?

Maybe we shouldn’t go back after all, maybe we should build something new?

Of course, the new may turn out to be a well-forgotten old, but at the time of its construction it will be perceived as new and will be built as new, and not as a reconstruction of the past.

In fact, the new may turn out to be similar to the well-forgotten old, but in fact, and not in approach.

Probably not everyone liked what I wrote, but you still think about it.

Because it is possible to return the USSR in the form of paraphernalia.
But it is no longer possible to make it the same.

For the simple reason that we have become different, very different.

A few years ago, a Facebook user named Albert Tolokonnikov wrote a brilliant text that is a must-read for all fans - especially those who want to return there. Albert wrote an almost ready-made manual on how this can be practically accomplished - and the recipe turned out to be quite simple)

So, here is a recipe from Albert: “You can return to the USSR quite simply:

1 Get a job at any dying research institute.

2 Turn off the Internet and mobile phones, leave only the First Channel of Russian Television on the TV.

3 Replace toilet paper with newspapers.

4 For food you buy good quality doctor's sausage, bread, milk, canned seaweed, a bottle of inexpensive vodka, processed cheese, pasta and tea of ​​the poorest quality, dilute beer with water, only rotten vegetables, only apples for fruit.

5 Before buying anything, to simulate a queue, just stand in front of the store from 20 to 2000 minutes.

6 If possible, you can find and repair a Lada “penny”. To work only by tram.

7 Don't wear quality clothes. Shoes should always be wet.

8 Ask to treat your teeth without painkillers.

9 And the most important thing is the feeling of meaninglessness and endless melancholy. If we manage to reproduce it, it will be almost complete immersion in the USSR. Actually, I highly recommend that all young cretins who defend something they don’t know and have never seen do such experiments several times a year.”

This is the recipe for “returning back to the USSR” proposed by Albert Tolokonnikov. What would you say is an effective recipe? Would you like to go back to something like this?

Original taken from mgsupgs in Again about life in the USSR

Just now I talked on vacation with a young woman, well, who knows, but to me 35-year-olds seem young, it’s funny. And the cute creature blurted out that if it weren’t for perestroika, it would have vacationed not in 4 stars in Italy, but at least in 5 stars and in Monte Carlo. I asked if she was the illegitimate daughter of a member of the Central Committee, and noticed that this did not guarantee Montov and Karls, but rather a sanatorium of the Council of Ministers in the Crimea... The girls were offended, however, for many reasons, nothing was in the cards for me...:))

In short, the author of these lines periodically discovers that there are people who are much younger than him. That is, he perceives them as ordinary people, but suddenly it turns out that these people do not know and do not understand things that are obvious to the author. For example, they did not live in the USSR and therefore can talk about it in a very specific way.

Nostalgia for the USSR seems so unnatural to the author, especially among those who did not live there, that he could not resist writing this note. In addition, the author constantly comes across characters who found the USSR in best case scenario at an unconscious age, but who run around the Internet and prove “with numbers in their hands” how good it was there. The author himself never believes in numbers, because for any number there is another number, but many still believe...
In general, I decided to write about the USSR, the way I remember it. Moreover, much of what we have today comes most directly from typical Soviet realities and habits. And even more so, since it turns out that little is known about the USSR. I somehow came across people who didn’t know that there were no elections in the USSR. So there is reason to think.

It makes no sense to write about the Soviet Union in terms of totalitarianism, mass repression, imperialism, etc., they are too hackneyed and therefore no one believes them. I also don’t want to write for the hundredth time about the doom of socialism. Therefore, I decided to simply describe and comment on some aspects of life that are typical for a Soviet person.

I’ll say right away that I have never been a dissident (maybe I just didn’t have time), I come from a wealthy family by those standards of the Soviet Union, what is called my life passed in the Soviet Union best years and I don’t regret them at all. And I don’t regret at all that the Soviet Union collapsed.

Queues

When people remember the USSR, for some reason they most often remember queues. To modern man This doesn’t seem like a very big difficulty, they say, you can stand there, why be indignant? For some reason, those who talk about queues forget to add that the queue was a sure sign that the store was “giving” something or “throwing away” something. That is, the normal, ordinary state of a store without a queue is the absence of goods at least somewhat worthy of exchange for banknotes. Generally speaking, in the USSR there were some “supply categories”, according to which the range and quality of imported products were established. These categories were the subject of bargaining and struggle among bureaucrats. One of my friends, originally from Tver, came to Kyiv and was shocked by the “meat” sign on the store.

Blat

The Soviet people were supplied through connections. There was nothing in the stores, but there was everything in the refrigerators. Blat was the high art of direct exchange. In it, everything was exchanged for everything - positions, connections, acquaintances, food, access to certain benefits, certain people, etc. Blat differed from “speculation”, since goods were sold through cronyism, as a rule, at nominal prices; payment was a mutual service or the very possibility of such a service. However, of course, this was not considered payment; it was “fair”. Blat was considered decent, but “speculation” was not.

Sacred foods

In the USSR there were many inexplicable “tricks”. One of them was sacred bread. There was a constant hysteria around bread. It had to be eaten and could not be thrown away. If the teacher saw that you threw away a crust of bread, there was a scandal. Bread was an integral part Soviet propaganda. For me, Tchaikovsky's first concerto for piano and orchestra is still strongly associated with combine harvesters plowing endless fields. This picture was the screensaver of the “Time” program, which everyone watched every day. I think that the party and the government felt that the availability of bread was a kind of boundary of the social contract. For a Soviet person who experienced several large and small famines, the availability of bread was a litmus test for the stability of the situation. If there was no bread, it meant that it was all over. That's why there was bread. In the bread shop on the current Maidan there were two slogans. The first is “If there is peace, there will be bread,” the second, “If there is bread, there will be song.” I could never understand their meaning.

Books

The Soviet people proudly called themselves the most reading nation. This is probably true, considering how many books they had “per capita”. Since book publishing was strictly censored, Soviet people had very little choice in what they were allowed to read. Therefore, he tried to stock up on any reading for future use as much as possible. Whatever the censorship, books opened up other worlds for Soviet people, far from the stupidity that surrounded them. That's why Soviet people loved books. My great-uncle was a rather big man on the South Western Railway, and therefore possessed untold wealth in the form of works by Jules Verne, Mayne Reid, etc. Sometimes I managed to beg for something. The rhyme “don’t rummage through the shelves with a greedy eye, here books are not given at home” well reflects the relationship around books.

IN bookstores“works of Soviet authors” were sold, that is, waste paper. Books that could be read were distributed. The form of subscription to complete works was popular; not individual books were distributed, but subscriptions. Subscriptions to newspapers and magazines were distributed in the same way. A division of workers (for example, “per department”, “per workshop”) was given several subscriptions and they themselves distributed them among themselves, as a rule, pulling pieces of paper from the cap. Newspapers like Pravda or Trud were usually loaded. The higher your position, the more liberties you were allowed with your reading. A simple engineer hardly had a chance of getting a subscription to the Around the World magazine. In the same way, the party encouraged the proletarians.

The fact that Soviet people understood a little about everything in the world is due to their way of reading. If you win a subscription to Science and Life, you will inevitably become a specialist in thermonuclear fusion.

Money

They often talk about the unselfishness and non-mercantilism of Soviet people. This is not surprising, because there was no money in the USSR. They didn't earn money, they received it. The salary was called pay, which was set tariff schedule, and not the results of labor. Of course, it was good to get more than less, but it was much more important to have permission to spend your money. The subscription already mentioned above, of course, was not free. But access to it was more important than this money. In the same way, you “received” housing, cars, dachas, etc. Depending on the nature of your activity, you were entitled to certain benefits in the queue for an apartment, car, etc. The fight for benefits (that is, the right to receive without queue or before others) was very serious.

There were quite a lot of people, especially among the youth of that time, who “left to work.” Usually, we went somewhere to Siberia and similar places. The party and government paid for work there well above the average, and in addition, it was considered proletarian, that is, class-correct. I think that these people were also traveling “for the smell of the taiga,” that is, away from insanity, closer to the real deal. Interestingly, they didn’t have much to buy with the money they received. The car could be bought second-hand, but the market was small. The apartment could be exchanged. Incredibly complex schemes were invented to “exchange an apartment with an additional payment.” The housing issue was extremely acute.

The famous “free medicine” also had its own degrees of admission. It was believed (and apparently there were reasons) that departmental medicine was better, and the fourth department was even better. The subject of trade “through connections” was access to the services of this medicine. In the sanatoriums and hospitals of the Central Committee one could meet people of various classes, who, in theory, should not be there.

Theft

The Soviet Union was categorically losing in the technology race. Therefore, he was a leader in industrial espionage. They stole weapons, computers, machine tools, etc. They even stole books. They tried to pass off something else as their own. Here, for example, is the brilliant cartoon “Winnie the Pooh and that’s it, that’s it.” There is no Kanga, no Tiger, and most importantly, no boy with the name Christopher Robin. There are animals from central Russia (except perhaps the donkey, but in general it is also not exotic for the multinational USSR). The great actor Leonov, who voiced Winnie the Pooh, recalled that initially these characters were supposed to exist, but then “whoever needed it” said that “it’s not necessary.” The credits say something like “based on the book by Alexander Milne.” Who is this Milne? Probably some Odessa Jew.

The state stole from other states, and people in the USSR stole from the state. This was called “bringing it from work” and was not considered theft.

Production

The Soviet man went to work. He was paid to go there. The essence of his work - production - was to carry out the plan. Vladimir Bukovsky told how he worked at a factory as a young man. After the master gave the task to sharpen some part, Bukovsky began sharpening it. However, when the master left, experienced workers stopped the young enthusiast. At the end of the working day, they went to the warehouse, took from there the finished parts “according to the norm” and presented them to the master. Despite the exaggeration of this story, it accurately reflects the essence of what happened.

I think this is where our understanding of entrepreneurship comes from, as a kind of execution of a plan. We believe that the company does not care what and how it makes and sells and that it is only interested in “ripping off as much money as possible.” We don't believe in competition. People, even young people, talk about this like typical scoops. They completely ignore the existence of the consumer of the product, and the fact that it is he who, with his money, not only evaluates the quality of the work, but also makes its existence possible in general.

Crime

When a Soviet person was growing up (from about 5th-6th grade high school) he was surprised to discover that he was in an absolutely hostile world, which was not reflected in any way in cinema and television. It was a world of hooligans who took away change from the younger ones, massacres yard to yard, street to street, etc. It had its own rules, radically different from those officially propagated. From a certain age, free movement around the city became problematic. It was necessary to know passwords and be able to behave correctly. In Kyiv, saying that you live “in Tampere” was tantamount to an excuse for a fight. True, it would be advisable to know someone there, just in case. As a friend of mine said, “the residents of this street have served thousands of years.” And so it was. Considering that half the country in the USSR was in prison, thieves' jargon was (and remains) a legitimate part of ordinary vocabulary. In the same way, the so-called “chanson”, then called “blatnyak”, originates from the times when the home tape recorder became widely available. Everyone listened to “Blatnyak” - from the professor to the gopnik. So there is nothing new or particularly decadent in it. This is a good old Soviet tradition.

The criminal age ended somewhere between 20 and 25 years old. The older ones were not touched.

When the “crime rampant” began in the late 1980s, it started for a reason. The ground was ready for him long ago. This “revelry” already existed in the USSR in the form of youth gangs. The “old” crime (that is, the “real” bandits and thieves) had almost nothing to do with this. The revelry of the 90s was ensured by “athletes” who recruited “boys” from street gangs. They were the ones who were “lawless.”

Iron curtain

A Soviet person was not allowed to go abroad. He could hardly get into the “countries of people's democracy” and with very great difficulty into the countries of “decaying capitalism”. People were selected very carefully for such trips. Many believed that the abundance there was specially organized for their arrival. We traveled abroad in groups, and there was always a KGB agent in the group.

Policy

Nothing was known about internal politics. The father listened to the “voices,” but everything there was also incomprehensible. Sovietologists were engaged in assessing the future prospects of Soviet politics based on the arrangement of Politburo members on the podium of the Mausoleum. It was about the same as our current political analysis in popular newspapers and talk shows. Therefore, everyone was keenly interested in international politics. A war somewhere abroad was a joyful event for Soviet people; it greatly enlivened life. The Soviet people watched with great interest how the Iraqis exterminated the Iranians and vice versa.

In the USSR there were elections from one candidate. How so? And like this. In general, few people knew when and where these elections were being held. There was no election campaign (except perhaps a forced meeting to meet with the candidate). For some reason, everyone has been going to the polls since early morning, from six o'clock. Loudspeakers with patriotic songs were turned on, everyone went to the polling station, stood in line there, went to the buffet (they threw something away before the elections) and went home. Why it was impossible to go to the polls in the afternoon or evening is unclear. There was no rise in the army on election day. The orderly was forbidden to shout “rise!” The rank and file stood up on their own and, amazed by the voluntariness of what was happening, went to vote. No formation. In general - a circus.

Daily regime

The life of a Soviet person was regulated by the production process (from nine to six) and television worked under this process. Having come to his senses after work, the Soviet man watched the “Time” program, where they explained to him what was what. During the late USSR, after the program, a feature film was shown. There were also some programs before the “Time” program, but no one ever watched them. On Saturday and Sunday, a Soviet person could move away from Soviet reality by watching “Morning Mail”, “Cinema Travelers Club”, “In the Animal World” and “International Panorama” (watched because at the end they can be shown for 10 seconds with a probability of about 5% some group with comments “look, how disgusting”). There were also “Melodies and Rhythms of Foreign Pop” (about once a month) for which the Italian pop festival in San Remo was an outstanding event of our time. There were evening stories for children. We watched them because there was a cartoon at the end. A fairy tale without a cartoon was considered a waste. Big communist events (like the congresses of the CPSU) were a tragedy, since long before them, during them and long after their end, television worked to the detriment of everything else.

By the way, about cartoons. They are now selling you CDs with advertisements for “good Soviet cartoons.” Yeah. You haven’t seen the others who are not from the disk.

Elite

The most respected people in the USSR were people at the final stage of distribution - knife and ax workers (butchers), sellers and other trade workers. Professions that dealt with difficult-to-account cash were highly valued, for example, empty bottle takers and waiters. It was easy to determine the degree of respect; there were only three signs - crystal, carpets and books (later a car was added to them). The more of this goodness there is in the house, the more respected the person is. “Commodity expert, shoe department, like a simple engineer...”

Demonstrations

Soviet people went to demonstrations. They marched in columns at the demonstration. Columns formed enterprises. It was necessary to walk along the podium from which the local authorities were watching and waving. The whole affair was commented on online through loudspeakers. When your company passed by the podium, the commentator said, “here comes so-and-so!” Next came some text about your achievements and everyone shouted “Hurray!” Despite the fact that the demonstrations were rather tedious in terms of organization, they were still loved. It was such a Soviet carnival - balloons, banners, orchestras.

Guests

Soviet people loved to visit. There were few holidays, and guests were such a spontaneous holiday. Those who say that “Soviet people were sincere” are right. This is true in the sense that they were more innocent. They had no sex, violence, allegedly, and no time - the carriage, including work time. We had a lot of fun.

Dachas

The Soviet man was a hamster. He carried everything into the house. He was always in a state of preparing everything - food, things, books, etc. He firmly knew that you couldn’t trust anyone for a second and you always had to be prepared for anything. At the same time, he could completely sincerely shout “Hurray!” at demonstrations and believe in the “Leninist system”. In fact, without realizing it, he never believed him. When the party and government began to allocate (what good and capacious definitions, damn it!) people with summer cottages, the Soviet people did not turn them into vacation spots. There immediately appeared potatoes and storage facilities for all sorts of rubbish that Soviet people had been dragging into the house all their lives. When the USSR disappeared and when it became easier to buy potatoes in the store, he still did not calm down. He doesn't trust anyone.

America

Officially, America was considered the main enemy of the USSR. However, the Soviet people rather respected America (and the West in general) and saw it as a worthy adversary. There was no everyday anti-Americanism that we are now struck by. During the Anglo-Argentine War, teachers of “tactics of military branches” spoke with admiration about the actions of the English landing force. And the teacher called the sunken Argentinian cruiser “Pueblo”, with the emphasis on the last syllable. Everyone giggled, and he pretended that it was so.

Things

Leonid Ilyich receives a letter from veterans. “Dear Leonid Ilyich! Everything is fine with us, but they stopped making the tongue on vodka, it’s very inconvenient to open.” “And why is there a tongue here?” - thought Leonid Ilyich, unscrewing the cap on a bottle of vodka.

Cheap vodka was closed with a lid made of some light metal. Initially, the lid was equipped with a tongue, by pulling which it could be opened. Then they stopped making the tongue and uncorking the bottle became quite painful. As is the use of any Soviet item in general. The screw caps were on vodka, which was being exported.

Imported items were most valued. They were considered to be of high quality. The Balts had a clear advantage here with their Latin alphabet. Their goods were perceived as imports. Cellophane bags, especially imported ones, were not thrown away, but washed. They were not only containers, but also carried a great aesthetic load.

Everyday things were made with some kind of disgust and hatred for all living things. Once, somewhere in the 2000s, I came across quite a lot of these things - all sorts of combs, etc., and I experienced a real shock when I saw how inconvenient and clumsy they were. Chinese plastics, which are sold in passages today, are simply masterpieces of design, synergetics and Feng Shui.

One of my friends once said to another friend, now a famous journalist: “You,” he said, “are disgusting with the disgust of a Soviet teddy bear.” He knew what he was talking about.

Meetings

“Rabinovich, why weren’t you at the last meeting?” “If I had known that this was the last meeting, I would definitely have come.” Soviet people constantly participated in some kind of meetings. The meetings were part of “Soviet democracy.” As a rule, they were approved in advance decisions made. The meetings were disliked not so much for the loss of time as for their hypocrisy. Before making a decision, one had to listen to boring speeches, often completely false. Those sitting in the hall knew that real facts They're not like that at all. For the system, meetings were a way to identify “enemies of the people.” What was happening was so deceitful that, in principle, any person with a normal psyche and at least some self-respect sooner or later began to rage. Typically, such people sought simple local improvements within the framework of common sense. They did not encroach on our Leninist system. But, in the end, it usually ended with such a truth-seeker, at best, becoming an alcoholic.

It’s interesting that people in the system understood that it would be difficult for them to get by without “passionaries.” The most hackneyed theme of Soviet cinema on the “production theme” was the struggle of such a truth-seeking innovator with an ossified director. However, the system was stronger than people and worked according to its own rules.

I think our current world “seems to” and “actually” comes from Soviet meetings. This is where our irrational distrust of decisions made collectively comes from.

New Year

New Year was the only non-Soviet holiday of the year. On New Year prepared all the best pop numbers, films, etc. On New Year's Day, Soviet people were allowed to be just a person. That's why everyone loved the New Year so much. There was a reason. You just thought about one film and I thought about it. It's absolutely true.

Communism

It cannot be said that Soviet people “did not believe in communism.” It’s just that after the year 80 happened, in which it was supposed to come, according to Khrushchev’s promises, communism disappeared from everyday life. Rather, it became a subject for intellectual justification of truth-telling. “Lenin wrote here that it should be like this. What do you have here? Many dissidents started out this way. Your humble servant, in search of truth, also read Lenin and suddenly realized that he was a rare freak. If the scoop had not fallen apart, I don’t know what would have happened to me.

A teacher on “Marxist-Leninist philosophy” once asked at a seminar “what will happen after communism?” This simple question somehow never occurred to anyone. For those who are not familiar with Marxism, it is based on " dialectical materialism”, who sees development as endless. However, his political doctrine considers communism to be the last and final stage in the development of society. There is a problem. 30 years before, our teacher would have gone to camp for such a question...

Art

They say that “high” art was developed in the USSR, for example, ballet, which Vysotsky sang about. However, few people saw him and few people were interested in him. There was not much “kina” and for the most part it was very bad. There were French and, for aesthetes, Italian films. The reasons are the strong communist parties and governments in almost fraternal countries for some time, France and Italy. In Yugoslavia, by the way, there was also socialism, but there was a conflict with the Yugoslavs, so we didn’t have their films and things. Of course, there were no Chinese things either. The Chinese were also enemies. Old-timers fondly recalled Chinese thermoses from Stalin's times.

The art of allegory was highly developed. There was a whole genre of films and plays based on, say, Shakespeare. They had a team of very good actors working in them and they worked from the heart. There was also a fairy tale film genre. Many of them were more for adults than for children. These films had that high naivety that, say, the first generation of the Star Trek series has.

When during perestroika it became possible not to speak in allegories, everyone immediately tried to “cut the truth.” However, nothing but misery came of it. The Soviet man never understood himself.

Sport

Officially, there was no professional sports in the USSR. But it is clear that the Soviet “amateurs” were professionals in practice. This allowed them to receive many medals at the Olympics. Commentators always emphasized the fact of “amateurism,” especially when ours won, say, in hockey against the Canadian national team. The Canadians were called nothing more than “Canadian professionals.” Sports depended on the opinion of the general secretaries. They say that Brezhnev loved hockey. That's why it was "developed". I don’t know which of them loved figure skating, but it was also a great success.

Mythology

Today's nostalgists for the USSR are nostalgic mainly for the Brezhnev era. For those who think that there was order in the USSR, I will say that the Brezhnev era was perceived by the participants in the events themselves as a lack of order.

In the Soviet Union of the Brezhnev era, there was no longer a command economy in its Stalinist version. Such an economy was extremely costly - half the country worked in the camps, the other guarded it, and most importantly, it became unclear, why is all this? Under Brezhnev world revolution and so on somehow faded into the background and the communists wanted to live an ordinary life.

In general, production was planned, but drawing up plans, and especially their implementation, was a complex process that went from top to bottom and bottom to top. All this was pure bargaining and conflict between bureaucrats. Therefore, it was believed that there was no more order. It was believed that there was order under Stalin. Lenin was such a “Jesus”, as if he were a holy man, but Stalin was a real real guy.

Another myth was the myth of a place where everyone knows everything and a place where everything works as it should. The KGB and various kinds of secret industries were considered such a place. We have such devices, but we won’t tell you about them. The scoop also fell apart because this myth collapsed. When glasnost made it clear and publicly available that there were no such places, the scoop disappeared.

Capitalism was considered so bad that there was simply no strength. It is not clear how people even lived there. I established for sure that everyone whose childhood was spent in the Soviet Union was sure that they lived in the best country, because it was definitely impossible to live “there”. This was said completely sincerely. I remember that as children we once found a foreign empty can of the canned food type with a picture of a plump, happy baby on it. We were sure that this was canned food for babies, but for babies. Capitalism…

Crooks

There were few scammers. People had little choice in life and therefore private individuals had little reason to deceive them. Therefore, those swindlers who existed were geniuses. The two characters need to have their monuments placed precisely. The first one invented a non-existent state office, received money from the budget for it, fired and hired workers, and so on for several years before the execution. The second took bribes for admission to university. He did not promise income, he simply said that he would try. If the child did not enroll, he returned the money. The person who turned the theory of probability into a source of income deserves a monument.

Camber

When the Communist Party decided that the purpose of its existence was to “unwaveringly care for the ever-increasing needs of the Soviet people,” the USSR was doomed.

In 1982, after his visit to the USSR, Cato Institute President Edward Crane wrote: “Soviet society appears to be falling apart from within. If we can avoid confrontation with the Soviets in the next 20 years, their system will collapse under the weight of its own bureaucracy."

about condoms

medicine was a source of physical pain. Teeth were treated without anesthesia, tonsils, and, as they say, abortions were performed without anesthesia. There were abortions because condoms were also a source of pain. They were called "product number 2". Condoms were sold in pharmacies; asking for them was considered something shameful, like admitting that you were sick with something. Disasters caused by sexual ignorance have reached such proportions that in the very late USSR they even began talking about “sex education” and even some kind of manuals seemed to be published.

Education

The USSR had a system of compulsory education. Everyone had to complete at least 8 grades. Then you could go to work or finish your studies at a vocational school (help a stupid person get a job). Then you could complete 10 classes and enter a technical school or institute. The technical school allowed one to work in lower engineering positions, and the institute allowed one to occupy senior engineering positions or junior scientific positions. Then it was possible to complete graduate school and defend first a candidate’s and then a doctoral dissertation. This made it possible to occupy senior positions in the scientific community. Among the technical intelligentsia, it was considered unprestigious if a child did not enter a university. And there was a brisk trade in the right to enter through the system of cronyism. There were professional, social and national restrictions and benefits for entering a university.

Rest.

Holidays in the USSR were difficult. Firstly, the time of vacation was determined by the authorities. In democratic teams, the right to take a vacation in the summer was played out. In contrast to salaries (they were higher for workers), the engineering staff received more vacation (24 working days). Even longer vacations were given to teachers, military personnel from difficult service conditions (submariners...) and workers in difficult and difficult production conditions (workers of the Far North...). Secondly, it was possible to go somewhere in the summer or, at worst, in the off-season. Zimry had absolutely nothing to do. Because of this, in the summer, possible places of prestigious vacation (Sochi, Crimea) turned into a can of sprat. It was impossible to rent housing (in the private sector - unofficially), to eat - canteens and restaurants were overcrowded, to sunbathe - the beaches were filled to capacity. Some lucky ones received vouchers to sanatoriums and holiday homes. Mostly, the leadership of various levels of the Red Army rested there, but some went to ordinary people. I was especially lucky to get a trade union voucher, the cost of which was approximately 20% of the usual one. Many tried to relax in the warm republics of the Caucasus and Central Asia. Tourism was a very popular form of recreation. People with backpacks walked literally everywhere (except for restricted areas).

Old age

Old age in the USSR was relatively secure. The pension system provided decent payments, pensioners enjoyed benefits. However, this was not always the case, but only during the Brezhnev years. The medical care system worked. Medicines (the simplest ones) cost a penny. Anything that is a little more rare is again a shortage... And the medicine was far from the best, but there was no other. They tried not to put old people over 70 in hospitals - they spoiled the statistics, but for a small bribe they admitted them and even cured them.