Soviet Identity
Looking back at the decade when it was strongest - 1970s
The 1970s was a decade when official CPSU doctrine unsuccessfully attempted to revise Leninist national policy of formally independent and culturally segregated republics, united in their attempt to create a classless society on a worldwide scale, and introduce the concept of Soviet people - a multi-ethnic supra-nation, consisting of all ethnicities within the borders of the USSR.
The failure was not complete. The attempt was partially victorious among the most privileged Soviet ethnicities - anti-nationalist Russians, Russophone or bilingual Ukrainians, and Russophone or bilingual Belarusians. Nationalist Russians, strictly Ukrainophone Ukrainians, and strictly Belarusophone Belarusians always had their own, separate trajectory which was somewhat similar to the position of Baltic people. How exactly the Russophone Ukrainians and Russophone Belarusians became so common is a subject of grievance for their respective nationalists and a story for a possible text about the 1920s and 1930s. Soviet Ukrainian high-ranking officials of the 1970s were as split on the Russification question as ever, with Petro Shelest favoring re-Ukrainization and Volodymyr Shcherbytsky being the Russophone conservative.
It is not a coincidence that the Soviet Union was finished off by the representatives of these three ethnicities - Yeltsin, Kravchuk, and Shushkevich. Regardless of what Slavic post-Soviet right-wingers say, Soviet ethnic minorities were less equal than others. This is why the Soviet loyalism of Central Asian republics did not affect decision-makers in the Kremlin. Nazarbayev was not needed at the signing of the Belovezha Accords. Ukrainians and Belarusians however always had serious lobby groups in the Kremlin despite all the purges.
The 1970s is the favorite decade of the Soviet people. By that time no one remembered what Lenin originally wanted and even fewer cared. World War II, endless Stakhanovite competitions, and ambitious industrialist projects burned people out. An enthronement of Leonid Brezhnev was a populist move on behalf of the CPSU, as he indeed represented the desires of the Soviet people and was truly loved by them. One of the few politically useful memories of my mother was related to the death of Brezhnev. When she came to her workplace in Kharkiv on the day of his death, all but the Jews were utterly distraught and were crying. The Jews were rejoicing and hoping that the new government would finally allow them to leave the country. That’s not surprising, because despite marketing itself as a victor over Nazism, the USSR was shadowbanning the Jews from entering the most prestigious universities and working in important jobs.
Whereas Khrushchev was a genuine believer in the imminent arrival of a classless communist society and expected its appearance sometime by the 1990s, Brezhnev was not. He declared that what we have right now is good enough already and called this idea developed socialism. Both of them can be considered partially Ukrainized Russians, having spent a significant share of their life in the Ukrainian SSR. Brezhnev is often considered a bigger Malorussian because of his greater involvement in the creation of the so-called Dnepropetrovsk Clan. Yulya Tymoshenko and Ihor Kolomoysky are sometimes considered the modern successors of this lobby group. Still, when Khrushchev was being ousted, he briefly considered calling up the army of the Ukrainian SSR to aid him against Brezhnev. These events are told in a fairly good and historically realistic movie “The Gray Wolves”, which I can recommend to everyone.
This text uses a soundtrack consisting of the most recognizable foreign and domestic melodies of the decade, many of which were used in Soviet TV shows and as such became de-facto folk melodies of the Soviet people. Other songs are by the most popular domestic and foreign artists of the decade. To listen to their full versions, open this text inside Google Chrome on a Substack website, not inside the e-mail client or Substack app.
I also took great care to pick the most average, believable, and representative photos. It is not always easy, because many pictures on your average Soviet photo aggregator fall into two traps - 1) propagandist communist Potemkin photos, which try to paint the situation in overtly favorable tone, and 2) propagandist anti-communist photos, which overplay the poverty and decay.
Welcome, comrades, to this live broadcast from the age of developed socialism. We’re starting with the iconic theme of the main Soviet news program “Time” - Georgy Sviridov’s “Time Forward!”, which just might be the most communist theme ever. It suits the 1920s better, but there was no television to popularize it at the time.
Each segment of Soviet existence appeals to a specific audience. Leninist era - to radical communists, Stalinist era - to Russian red nationalists and third-world anti-Westernists, Khrushchevist era - to the left wing of left-liberals, and Gorbachevist era - to left-wing state capitalists. Within the old-school Marxist lens, Brezhnevism is to the right of everything except Stalinism. This is exactly why it is liked by its core audience - Soviet nationalists or the Soviet people. Perhaps later I will write about all the other eras and how they shaped each other, but if we were to write just one text about the Soviet people and Soviet identity - it is this one.
Within the modern lens, Brezhnevism is actually to the left of almost everything. The specific set of choices and consequences that led to its appearance and disappearance will not be repeated again. This is why no one should count on those 27,000 people who self-identified as Soviet during the population census in Russia in 2010. Even if under some unexpected turn of events Marxism gets a widespread resurgence, it will look too different to these people to be recognized as Soviet Marxism.
Because the Soviet identity is only competitive among the aforementioned Slavic ethnicities, all the right-wingers of these ethnicities necessarily include anti-Soviet elements when dealing with their own citizens, but promote Sovietist elements among the neighbors. Poor ethnic minorities are forgotten once again. The Communist Party of the Russian Federation issued a number of public statements condemning the ban on the Communist Party of Ukraine, and the issue remains central to CPRF’s anti-Banderite stance. Yet when the Communist Party of Kazakhstan was banned in 2015, CPRF failed to notice the event.
The next track is late Brezhnev’s favorite waltz, composed by Moldovan Eugen Doga in 1978.
Brezhnev was a huge sybarite and hedonist. Especially when it came to food and drink, where he was known as a serious connoisseur. His cooks were considered the best among all Soviet leaders and he cared a great deal about their continuous self-improvement. Perhaps this is why he did all he could to increase the variety of foods, available to Soviet people. According to many memoirs, the availability of sausages, the most sought-after Soviet delicacy, tripled within one week after the removal of Khrushchev. His rule was not exactly even when it came to the economy, there were ups and downs tied to the level of Western hostility and oil prices, but on average it was considered the most prosperous time for Soviet workers. Of course, this prosperity was relative to Soviet standards, which were way behind Western standards. Yet, starvation was out of the question - the Soviet salary of the time allowed everyone to move one step up on the Maslow pyramid, and all the basic needs were covered.
Down the road, this will lead to new problems with new generations. Because the Soviet people were so spoiled in this safety of theirs, because they got a lot of free stuff (free apartments, education, and healthcare), they started dismissing the valid concerns of young people who arrived at the market economy naked. To a large extent, the continuous rightwards drift of post-Soviet millennials and zoomers is a generational struggle against Soviet boomers who were lucky enough to suck all the possible perks out of the Soviet system and use them to their advantage in the post-Soviet environment.
Despite the more modest aspirations, Brezhnev considered himself a theoretician equal to his predecessors. The most common complete collection of his works consisted of nine volumes and was often a forced purchase for those who wished to buy rare sought-after books, such as collections of Alexandre Dumas or Jack London. Meaning you had to buy both Dumas and Brezhnev to buy Dumas, otherwise no sale. The percentage of actual Brezhnev’s input into his own works is disputed. Many suspect that most of the job was done by the most literate official Marxist of the era - Mikhail Suslov. That guy was actually respected by the ideologues of most foreign communist parties. He spent much time traveling around and synchronizing the CPSU line with foreign opinions. Check out this speech of his made in East Germany in 1977, to get a basic understanding of what a highbrow version of Brezhnevism sounded like. Suslov is also the best counter-argument to use when someone accuses you of having a mishmash in the brains. The guy was an extreme nerd, he had read all the immense classical texts from A to Z and was able to explain any obscure part of them when woken up in the middle of the night. Nevertheless, there were about 5 versions of him throughout his life. He adapted and evolved. He is a proof that anything can be combined with anything, as long as there is a will and ability to tie it to the realities on the ground.
In the same 1977, developed socialism was carved into a new Soviet Constitution which fully reflected the lessened emphasis on the imminent arrival of communism. Here is what it said:
A developed socialist society has been built in the USSR. At this stage, when socialism develops on its own basis, the creative forces of the new system and the advantages of the socialist way of life are increasingly revealed, and the working people increasingly enjoy the fruits of the great revolutionary achievements.
This is a society where powerful productive forces, advanced science, and culture have been created, where the well-being of the people is constantly growing, and where increasingly favorable conditions for the comprehensive development of the individual are being formed.
This is a society of mature socialist social relations, where, based on the rapprochement of all classes and social strata, the legal and actual equality of all nations and ethnicities, and their fraternal cooperation, a new historical community of people — the Soviet people — has emerged.
This is a society of high organization, ideology, and consciousness of the working people — patriots and internationalists.
This is a society where the law of life is the care of all for the welfare of each and the care of each for the welfare of all.
This is a society of genuine democracy, whose political system ensures the effective management of all public affairs, increasingly active participation of the working people in state life, and the combination of real rights and freedoms of citizens with their duties and responsibilities to society.
A developed socialist society is a natural stage on the way to communism.
Such an elaborate attempt to balance leftist, rightist, and liberal motives. And yet, susceptible to criticism from all sides.
Moving on to the International Panorama, a program dedicated solely to foreign politics and its theme by the American band The Ventures.
When it comes to foreign relations, the 1970s were way better for the Soviet Union than we are taught to think nowadays. The main war of the decade - the Vietnamese one - was won by pro-Soviet forces. Dmytro Korchynsky’s “War in the Crowd” book contains a lot of interesting memoirs of Soviet servicemen who were there on the ground. In short, although the result was achieved with only a handful of Soviet casualties, the effort’s nature was entirely statist in nature. The last idealistic volunteers, willing to risk their lives for the cause of proletarian internationalism, ended in the 1960s. Back then they were turned around away from draft centers and discouraged from such thoughts by the political commissars themselves, who were afraid that Fidel’s popularity might destabilize the domestic situation. In Vietnam, Soviet people were just doing their state-mandated job. They weren’t impressed with the attitudes of the Vietnamese and rightfully considered them nationalists who only adopted the red banner out of momentary geopolitical considerations. Perhaps this is why that banner still flies over there - it was right-wing to begin with.
Comecon and adjacent observer countries were just okay in the 1970s. This is a very interesting and large topic in itself, which I might cover sometime in the future. Their citizens perceived themselves as living in a solidly socialist society. But that was not how Soviet people viewed them. To the Soviets, these were half-capitalist countries that combined socialist labor guarantees with greater availability of Western goods and capitalist gender relations. They were participating in the sexual revolution in the same timeline as the West. While in the USSR it was still possible to get into serious trouble with the law for possessing the Penthouse magazine, its founder Bob Guccione was opening his eroticized luxury hotels in socialist Yugoslavia.
In the proper West, Brezhnev recognized just two sources of authority - America and France. West Germany was openly mocked and disrespected as pure American slaves without their own will and agency. Not a single Soviet man will name you a single British Prime Minister from the time after Churchill and before Thatcher. Francoist Spain was condemned on ideological grounds but was left alone in practice, being deemed as irrelevant. France was the main partner in cultural and technical collaborations. Soviet television operated on the French SECAM system, while Soviet car makers continued to study at the plants of Citroen and Renault after they were barred from Ford plants in America. Renault 16 was one of the very few Western cars that was officially exported to the USSR during the Brezhnev era. In most cases, foreign cars were smuggled in by sailors, semi-officially. So the ports of Odesa and Murmansk were the main spots of shopping for such luxuries. The most recognizable Soviet car of the era - VAZ-2106 - was a clone of the Italian Fiat 124. Only because the Italian communist comrades organized a timely strike in their country, helping to drive the costs of such collaboration lower than what the French were offering.
The following song is the source of the theme of the main Soviet biological show, “In the world of animals”.
Nixon’s détente policy helped a great deal to mitigate the divisive consequences of the Vietnam war and the Brezhnev Doctrine. This period saw significant arms control agreements such as the Strategic Arms Limitation Talks (SALT I) and the Anti-Ballistic Missile (ABM) Treaty. It is possible that Nixon and Brezhnev had compatible tempers because it often seemed as if they understand each other without the help of translators. Both were shifting their respective societies to the right.
Brezhnev’s relationship with Gerald Ford was slightly worse, with the Democrat Jimmy Carter - much, much worse. Modern American left-wingers who self-identify as lifelong Democrats are often Sovietophiles, yet it is Carter’s policy on foreign human rights issues that led to the formation of Soviet liberalism as a right-wing current. Leftist opposition to CPSU existed, with Evald Ilyenkov and Aleksandr Tarasov being the most notable names. Yet the Democrats always preferred social Darwinists of the Sakharov variety. To this day, it is still impossible to place any Western socialist above any anti-Soviet dissident when dealing with post-Soviet liberals.
The next tune is a theme of Soviet weather forecasts.
In the society of developed socialism, salaries varied significantly across different professions. These variations were influenced by the sector, level of specialization, and the state's prioritization of certain fields. Here's an overview of the average salaries for various professions during that period:
Industrial workers in factories typically earned about 120-200 rubles per month, depending on the industry and skill level. Highly skilled workers in key industries like mining or heavy machinery manufacturing could earn more.
Collective farm workers (kolkhozniks) had lower incomes, often supplemented by in-kind benefits like access to food and housing. Their cash income was around 70-100 rubles per month.
Professionals. Engineers were relatively well-paid, reflecting the state's emphasis on industrial and technological development. Their salaries ranged from 130 to 250 rubles per month, with more experienced engineers earning at the higher end of this range. Medical doctors had salaries between 120 and 250 rubles per month, depending on their specialization and experience. Teachers generally earned about 90-150 rubles per month. University professors and senior academic staff could earn around 200-300 rubles per month. Salaries for scientists and researchers varied widely, but senior researchers and those working in prestigious institutes could earn between 200 and 400 rubles per month.
Administrative and Service Workers. Salaries for government officials varied by rank and responsibility. Lower-level officials might earn around 120-180 rubles per month, while higher-ranking officials could earn significantly more. Salaries for service sector workers, such as those in retail or public services, were generally lower, often between 70 and 130 rubles per month.
Military personnel pay also varied significantly by rank. Regular soldiers earned about 50-80 rubles per month, while officers could earn from 150 to 300 rubles per month, with higher-ranking officers earning more.
Factors influencing salaries:
Seniority and experience: more experienced and senior professionals typically earned higher salaries.
Location: salaries could be higher in certain regions. In industrialized areas or remote locations with bad climate or ecology, where higher wages were offered to attract workers.
Sector prioritization: the Soviet state prioritized certain sectors, such as heavy industry, military, and scientific research.
It's important to note that the Soviet wage system was not market-driven but heavily influenced by state planning and priorities. Non-monetary benefits, such as housing, healthcare, and education, also played a crucial role in the overall compensation of Soviet workers.
Here is another weather track by the state-promoted Paul Mauriat.
To put these numbers in the correct context, let’s look at the prices of basic goods.
Basic food items:
- Bread (1 kg): 0.20-0.25 rubles
- Milk (1 liter): 0.20-0.25 rubles
- Butter (1 kg): 3.50-4.00 rubles
- Sugar (1 kg): 0.90-1.00 rubles
- Potatoes (1 kg): 0.10-0.15 rubles
- Beef (1 kg): 2.00-3.00 rubles
- Chicken (1 kg): 1.70-2.00 rubles
- Eggs (10 pcs): 0.90-1.10 rubles
Furniture items:
- Single bed: 50-70 rubles
- Sofa: 150-300 rubles
- Wardrobe: 100-200 rubles
- Dining table: 50-100 rubles
- Chair: 10-25 rubles
Electronics:
- Television set (black and white): 200-300 rubles
- Television set (color): 600-1,000 rubles
- Refrigerator: 300-500 rubles
- Washing machine: 300-450 rubles
- Radio: 50-150 rubles
- Record player: 150-300 rubles
Prices were controlled by the state to ensure affordability and prevent inflation. This meant that price fluctuations were minimal compared to market-driven economies. Still, when we compare them with wages we get the idea that this society was far from wealthy. You had to balance your budget, even if in a different manner than today. While prices were stable, availability could be an issue. There were often shortages of consumer goods, leading to long queues and waiting lists for items like electronics and furniture.
From the next track onwards let’s get acquainted with Soviet hits of the time.
One of the questions I continuously ask the Soviet people and continuously fail to get an answer that would satisfy me: just how successful was the official state atheism among the average folk and how exactly did it coexist with Orthodox Christianity. Many self-identified Sovoks are also Orthodox fundamentalists. Were they always like that or is it a post-1991 phenomenon? In the Soviet Union, there was a practice of burial under communist symbols instead of Christian crosses. Do all those graves really belong to hardline atheists or is it just a consequence of state control? Casual atheists of that generation seem very apolitical - they internalized atheism exactly as they were taught to, not perceiving it as an issue worth investigating further. A few hardline atheists I knew personally either remained radical communists or… found themselves in various sects. A woman responsible for the popularization of scientific atheism among theatrical workers adjacent to my mother became the leader of the local Jehovah's Witnesses after 1991.
Atheist or Christian, Soviet sexual ethics of this decade was highly conservative. People married really early and really fast. A few months of casual sex were seen as a solid reason to go to the matrimonial palace. Continuing the relationships without doing so was frowned upon. Kids appeared really fast after that, and by the age of 25 many Soviet women often had one or two of them. Add the fact that the abortion rates in the Soviet Union were the highest in the world at that time, and you will get a bizarre picture of culturally conservative people who did not care about contraception at all. In my view, this was an indirect result of this economy’s stagnant stability and official values. No one expected to become a millionaire, there was no Soviet version of the American dream. But there was no reason to be too worried about pregnancy either - even the most inefficient worker was able to provide for his kids unless he was morally corrupt. Thus, the women were less eager to seek Soviet condoms, crude and often unreliable.
Otherwise, Soviet healthcare was unquestionably the best feature of the Brezhnevist system. Healthcare was officially free for all citizens, as it was considered a fundamental right guaranteed by the state. Medical consultations, treatments, hospital stays, and surgeries, including complex procedures like heart and brain surgeries, were provided free of charge. The healthcare system emphasized preventive care and public health measures, aiming to reduce the incidence of diseases through regular check-ups, vaccinations, and health education. Still, the low wages of the medical staff encouraged tolerable corruption. Giving gifts to doctors was a culturally ingrained practice. These gifts could range from food items and alcohol to more expensive goods. While smaller gifts were sometimes seen as tokens of gratitude, more substantial gifts could be interpreted as attempts to ensure better care or express appreciation for special attention. Then again, the cost of these gifts was vastly lower than what you need to pay today officially for advanced medical care.
Thanks to the very romantic art scene of the time, many modern young or foreign people mistakenly believe that Soviet people were romantic themselves. That’s a serious error. It is important to remember that while the economy was already revisionist in the 70s, art was still Leninist. Poet Vladimir Mayakovsky gave the best definition of the Leninist attitude to art: "Art is not a mirror to reflect reality, but a hammer to shape it". If there was no Party at the time, no doubt that the Soviet people would produce the art of the 90s twenty years in advance. This is proven by the fact that the remaining Soviet people who now populate the comments sections of various YouTube videos related to this time leave solely nostalgic remarks. They reassure themselves that their youth was not spent in vain, which is true. Yet their cognitive abilities cannot correctly assess the positive sides of this era: romanticism, optimism, and futurism. After all, they were on the receiving end of these sides, they did not produce them.
As such, which qualities can adequately describe them? Soviet people were: easy to trust, not inquisitive, simple, neutral to the Party’s continuously changing doctrines, skeptical, down-to-earth, in a constant pursuit of deficit goods, moderately promiscuous, conservative, prone to alcoholism and heavy smoking, pro-Western, unable to discern the positions of Western politicians from the positions of Western commoners (Radio Liberty says thanks), moderately racist, stern with their kids, conformist with their superiors.
Behold traveler, now you enter the forbidden lands of Soviet luxury. For there were people in the 1970s who could already afford to shop on a level slightly below our average 2020s mall. These lucky ones belonged to one of the following categories: CPSU members, KGB employees, foreigners, and Soviet people who were working abroad. Since owning foreign currency was illegal in the USSR, such people were allowed to exchange it for a special kind of rubles - hard rubles, the rubles tied to capitalist market values. They looked like cheques and were called as such by commoners. The price lists of Beryozka/Vneshposyltorg, specialized shops with Western goods, made no such clarification and listed their prices as being in rubles, but everyone who entered such shops knew what kind of rubles they had in mind. It was sometimes possible to buy their products for regular rubles in regular shops, only the price was much higher and the assortment much lower. This shopping is the reason why my father went to Prague immediately after siring me - he wanted these foodstuffs.
This is a nice occasion to add the most popular Western songs of the decade to our soundtrack.
Unlike the foodstuffs, consumer goods presented in Beryozka were less Western. For the most part, it were Soviet products, except with a guarantee of immediate availability and immediate sale. The exceptions were furniture from the GDR, Poland, and Yugoslavia, shoes from Bulgaria and Romania, and cassette tapes from France and West Germany. Nothing was Chinese in this decade.
The 70s were the last decade when the Soviet people consumed movies solely at cinemas or on the state TV channels. Their tastes were different from ours and that of Western Sovietophiles. Darling of Western intelligentsia Andrei Tarkovsky was barely known in the USSR. This is the issue where I am on the side of the Soviet people - Tarkovsky is overrated and “The Mirror” is his sole good movie.
Soviet comedies of this decade have remained largely relevant to this day and still have a decent viewership. Today the most popular of them are “Mimino”, about the specifics of Caucasian-Soviet ethical differences, and “Ivan Vasilyevich Changes His Profession”, about the Czar Ivan Grozny being transferred to the 1970s with a time machine. This movie partially influenced the entire sub-genre of cheap Russophone science fiction literature - quite a few takes on this plot were produced after 1991, with most of them involving Stalin.
Dramas struggle more, with the dramedy “The Irony of Fate” being an exception - it is shown annually during New Year’s Eve.
The next track was used as a source for the theme of the main Soviet TV program about cinema - Kinopanorama.
The situation with Soviet preferences in foreign movies was far more weird. The Party’s censorship was not merely selective in its approval of which movies should be allowed into the country, it sometimes cut the parts it deemed reactionary or provided dubbing with completely new, fake content. It wasn’t as bad as in the 1930s when Stalinists turned the American science fiction horror “The Invisible Man” into Stalinist propaganda, completely rewriting the verbal content from the beginning to the end. But it was fairly frequent. The Party also tried to uphold its various international cultural commitments, which is why second and third-world movies had a serious share in the Soviet movie market. Finally, although moderately racist, Soviet people were also very xenophilic and open to wildly different cultural elements. Soviet women liked Latino women, Soviet men liked both American cowboys and native American Indians, and no one minded traditional Bollywood dancing and singing. The main American craze of the 70s - “Star Wars” - was defined as infantile space Western by Soviet critics and was banned. “Star Wars” will also lose the illegal VHS competition to Rambo, Bond, and Emmanuelle movies in the 80s and will have next to zero fandoms in post-Sovietia until the release of “Phantom Menace”.
The Soviet music scene was less tightly controlled than the film industry. Cultural and political views of most of the famous performers were to the right of most people from the film industry. Many musicians attempted to emigrate to the West and exchange their domestic stardom for guaranteed access to Western goods. Vladimir Vysotsky, the main authority for Soviet men of this generation, was actually very right-wing despite being allowed trips to the West, where he met his French wife Marina Vlady. Marina was known as an actress of far-left Western director Jean-Luc Godard at the time, she was active in the French New Left movement and even joined the French Communist Party to make Vysotsky’s life easier. Yet despite all this, Vysotsky was known as a hardline anti-Maoist both in the country and in France, he was not influenced by the Godard-adjacent crowd in the slightest and he paved the road for the right-wing liberalism of the Carter-Sakharov variety.
Another prima donna of the time, Alla Pugacheva, showed signs of humanist social democracy in her early works. Although already a top celebrity in the 70s, she peaked in the 80s, so that’s where I will talk about her more.
Another interesting aspect of the Soviet music of the time is the popularity of non-Russophone performers and songs among Russophones. Sofia Rotaru, a Ukrainian-Romanian singer, was the main competitor to Pugacheva. The question of who is better - Pugacheva or Rotaru - had a cultural and identitarian background. The most popular band of the time was the Belarusian folk-pop band “Pesniary”, with many songs in the already marginal Belarusian language. Rotaru and “Pesniary” did great even in Moscow - because at the time Ukrainian and Belarusian languages had a counter-cultural but non-Russophobic flair. They just seemed edgy to the average MGU student.
The Party’s censorship of foreign music was much less severe than in the case of foreign movies. Recording company “Melodiya” was an active producer and distributor of vinyl records not just in the socialist bloc but in the West as well. Only the metal genre was strictly banned in the USSR. Regarding rock bands, decisions were made depending on the content of their lyrics, their visual aesthetics, and their political statements. A perfectly compatible Western artist could get banned solely because of his anti-Soviet interviews. Still, Soviet choices between those musicians who were available to them were different from American choices. Led Zeppelin remained a niche nothing-burger forever, The Queen’s popularity had to wait until the 80s.
This is the most detailed description of Soviet people I care to give. It is more detailed than they themselves will care to elaborate, probably because all these things are very partial to them. I am too young to share their insecurity.
From our age, their strengths and weaknesses are very obvious. Yet they themselves failed to find a man capable of preserving their civilization and were buried under their own contradictions.
Just how Soviet I am? I guess partially. I prefer their music to modern Ukrainian and Russian music. Yet I also spent my childhood battling the drinking and smoking habits of adults. I like the global and xenophilic ambitions of their ideology. But I also recognize the difficulties with restoring the sanity to regional international relations. Had I been young in the 70s, I would probably try to be more radical than Suslov. And that would probably get me to asylum sooner than to the CPSU cabinet.
Let me know if you wish to see the continuation of this theme. If so, I will start in the 1910s.
Coming up next:
One movie analysis and one celebrity retrospective.
After these, you will have the ability to choose my next themes by voting in polls on my Twitter account.
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All Soviet news programs ended with a weather forecast. Let’s continue the tradition.
As I heard Beryozka (Birch) isn't a universal name of this trade network but a local. It had different names in different Soviet republics.
Практика книжок у доважок мені відома. Теж про неї писав: https://drukarnia.com.ua/articles/spogad-radyanskogo-chitacha-b0_rm