Memories of the Soviet Time
Though I was young when the Soviet Union collapsed, my childhood and teen years were spent in the Soviet Union; I was brought up as a typical Soviet girl, who attended a good school, was a pioneer and then a Komsomol member, and later became a student of a classical Soviet-time university.
I can’t say that my childhood was bad or uninteresting; all the life of that time was not as bad as it may seem to westerners. One of the common western misconceptions about life in the USSR is a feeling that Soviet people lacked everything and lived in misery and fear. Well, I’d say it was not really so.
Every Soviet person had a very small but stable income. In my mind, this feeling of stability was the greatest gain of the Soviet time that so many people in my country are missing today. Everyone was absolutely sure that the payment will come on the 5-th and on the 20-th of each month, even if the whole world will go upside down. And everyone counted on this, and took the pleasures of life which were available to them.
The feeling of stability was set deeply into people’s minds, along with realization that there is no need to strive for something better. Our small wages were enough to live on (anyway, the stores were almost empty, and those who had a bit more money than the others, inevitably gained a headache of having to look for goods to buy and spend the extra money!).
So, the typical Soviets of the 1970s – 1980s were happy. The life was so stable and cloudless that no one could realize it could change. The horrors of world wars and Stalin’s time started to smooth down in our parents’ memory; the ideological pressure did not seem so bad and, though no one really was committed to building the mysterious communism, the socialism seemed quite OK.
In some aspects life was much more “normal” than westerners think, while in other respects the conditions were far more bizarre than one can imagine.
The communism ideology was the original foundation stone of all the Soviet time governments and rulers.. Some movies of that time present the communist ideology as a kind of fanatical cult where people were ready to sacrifice themselves for the highest ideals. This may indeed have been the case in the 1920s and the early 1930s, but none of this survived till 1970.
In the Brezhnev’s «era» (1968 – 1984), most people ceased to believe in the ideology. No one believed that they were building a classless stateless society anymore; no one wanted to approach the time where everyone would have everything according to their needs. We also didn’t believe that the USSR was about to overtake the USA in living standards, or that socialism was the most efficient economic system, and all that. At least in a family like mine (I grew up in a family of talented scientists and intellectuals). Those who had remembered the hardships of the past decades, were thankful that wars were over; the younger generation was trying to reveal the mysteries of Western life by listening to the Beatles and BBC Radio instead of watching TV news glorifying the genuine party leaders’ decisions of the time.
In short, people saw obvious “differences” between what they were told and what they experienced in their lives. But it would be wrong to say that most people were anti-communist. Decades of ideological indoctrination had taken their toll. Most people still believed that USSR society was fairer then western societies, that the Bolshevik revolution ended “capitalist oppression” and was a good thing, that Marx’s and Lenin’s teachings were fundamentally correct, etc.
I find Orwell’s 1984 a very accurate description of Stalin’s system. But those who lived inside the system were hardly capable of analyzing the whole complexity of the process, for the ideology was planted in their minds since the first days of their lives.
Study of Lenin’s teachings began pretty much from the first year of primary school, where stories about Lenin’s childhood were primary reading material. All first year kids were made members of the Little Octobrist Organization and had to wear a special badge with a portrait of Lenin as a kid. Teenagers of 9-14 years of age all joined the Young Pioneers Organization, which promoted communist party values to those kids. At the age of 14-15 everyone was expected to join the Komsomol, the real communist youth league.
Communist ideology and party decisions touched upon every subject taught at school, but did not penetrate much past the introductory pages. I can still remember some citations of Lenin’s study, which we learned by heart at school. History (taught from the Marxist perspective) and literature (only ideologically approved books were studied). All high school students took a course called “social science”, essentially introduction to Marxism-Leninism. University students had to study this in much more detail, beginning with History of the CPSU (year 1), Marxist philosophy (year 2), Political Economy of capitalism (year 3) and socialism (year 4), Scientific Communism, and Scientific Atheism (year 5).
My parents were both Communist Party members. Though I know that my father had always had some issues with the Soviet ideology, he was a true diplomat by nature, and he never spoke about politics or ideology in family. My parents were afraid to share their disagreement with the Party leaders with me, for I was a little girl and they did not want me to say «too much» to friends and teachers at school.
I guess that my parents did not believe what they read in papers or saw on TV. From time to time, banned books about Stalin’s purges would appear at home (my mother was a historian and worked in a museum, she brought home the most interesting books now and then); and my dad listened to BBC radio broadcasts, voice of America, and Radio Svoboda every evening. This time brought about an interesting phenomenon called “kitchen talk”, where people discussed various philosophical, historical, cultural and political questions in the privacy of their kitchen, while sipping tea late at night (with children safe in bed and away from “heretic poison”).
I remember that I loved to sense the secrecy and the mystery of those kitchen talks, when I had a chance to listen to them a little. At first, I did not understand what it was all about, but with time, my teenager friends started to bring up the same topics, and before we could realize, we started to occupy kitchens at my classmates’ homes and tune radio sets to Radio Svoboda’s bandwidth…
Tags: politics, Socialism, socialist
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