Quote Originally Posted by SergeMak View Post
Hanna, your opinion is very accurate, I can only make one or two small remarks.
First. You say, private property was not allowed in the USSR before the so-called "glasnost'" period. It's not completely true. The thing is, the communistic ideology distinguished two different kinds of properties that Western people call "private". The one that was forbidden was called in Russian "частная собственность на средства производства" which means "private property on the means of production" and it was recognized as to be the source of exploitation of a human being by another human being. The other, called in Russian "личная собственность граждан", was allowed and it included such things as cars, small plots of land with a little cottage called "dachas", flats in the houses built by cooperatives and so on. But all the factories, plants and other enterprises where many people worked were all in the state property.
The second remark is, we never lived under "communistic regime". Even Stalin never called the Soviet regime "communistic". We were building communism but we have never lived in a communistic society. Stalin called the Soviet society "socialism", Brezhnev decided that in the time of the late 70s we built a "developed socialism". Gorbachev tried to build so-called "socialism with a human face" whatever that means, but nobody of the Soviet leaders was crazy enough to describe the Soviet reality contemporary to them as "communism" with maybe an exception of a short period of the civil war in 1918-1921 when it was "war communism", but you of course understand, that that kind of communism was not the aim of the communist party. The real communism was declared as a remote future aim almost unattainable like The Kingdom of heaven in Christianity.

Thanks for the explanation. I knew some of what you said - it's just hard to keep the terminology perfect Private property was too broad a term.

I guess it's "means of production" that wasn't allowed, but limited private property for personal use was ok. That's what I should have said!

One thing occurred to me; what about inheritance in Soviet times? For example, if somebody lived in a nice flat or had a dacha or owned a nice car: could their children or other relatives inherit?

And what about in the 1990s when they started giving back land to the original owners in some parts of Eastern Europe? Did that happen at all in Russia?