Readers may recall this video of a Moscow supermarket circa 1990, in which shoppers are clearly both thrilled and morally elevated by the egalitarian retail experience. Taking turns to smell the one piece of grey meat available, and then leaving it where it is, was, I’m assured, a way for the proletariat to celebrate the obvious superiority of socialism.
“Meanwhile, in North Korea:
About a third of the students who go to the farms [for a month of state-mandated rice-planting duty] get out of about half the work because they work as informers for the government.“
Heh,
Your agent’s father was a chief economist at the ministry of forests and agriculture in a socialist country run by communists.
In late 50’s early 60’s of the past century, he had to go to work at collective farm for a month every year. The collective farmers were so curious ‘bout them bureaucrats that they forgot they had a job to do, that someone else was doing for them and were keen observers, observers being the key operative word.
Eventually, not being sufficiently ideological, they sent him to do the work permanently. After being a labourer for over 10 years, they apologized to him in 1969 and gave him job at the academy of sciences.
You think this was bizarre?
You ain’t seen nothing yet.
Don’t doubt it.
The commies in Venezuela need to learn from Comrade Mugabe. The trick to maintaining your socialist hell is to keep your country just a small sliver above rock bottom.
Not bizarre to me. That was just SOP in every communist country. Just ask my relatives.
By the time we visited supermarkets in St. Petersburg, Moscow, and in Zaporozhye, Ukraine in 2008 the supermarkets were well stocked and much like ours. Although not as large a floor space as most of ours and there were more of them scattered throughout the cities. The parking lots were quite small. The people there do not have the number of vehicles per capita and many walk to the supermarkets.
One day we walked to the supermarket near our hotel in Zaporozhye and about twenty fellows were paving a small courtyard of an apartment building. There was one small 3′ wide walk behind motorized roller and the fellows were wheelbarrowing the pavement from a pile that a truck had dropped.Others spread the pavement with rakes and shovels.
I recently reread an old book written by the Soviet fighter pilot, Victor Belenko, that defected to Japan in 1976 with a shiny new Mig 25.
He was astounded when he and the rest of their ace fighter squadron had to go to work on the collective farms every Fall,to pick apples or potatoes. These guys were the cream of the Air Force,flying the newest and fastest Fighter on Earth, but they had to go pick fruit!
That was the beginning of his disenchantment with the Soviet system,which eventually led to his defection.