Quote Originally Posted by Deborski View Post
Some of what you say is true, but not all. As regards televisions in the 1980's, my apartment and my neighbors' apartments each had two, and it was not so uncommon. There was a TV in the living room and another in the кухня where my friends went to smoke and watch Yeltsin and Gorbachev debate. Those TV's were there since the 1980's.

Foreign goods were not officially available, however they were on the black market and the black market was everywhere. The kiosks which lined the metro were always full of black market goods and no one arrested you for going there. But even without foreign goods, many Russians still had nice furniture, although much of it looked the same and came from the same factories, so there was less variety. Still, they had nice china cabinets made of lacquered wood, and this was not just privileged families but most of the families I visited. Those who had less were similar to those who have less here in the states - young singles on their own, living in communal apartments for example.

The Soviet system was not perfect and I have never said it was. But it was not as evil as western propaganda has made it out to be either. My issue is that terrible atrocities have happened everywhere in the world. The US is not innocent in this respect. I don't like comparing and contrasting our systems or saying this one is better and that one is worse. I prefer to look at what works in all systems and hold on to that, and throw out what doesn't work.

Nationalism only divides the world. But people everywhere, despite their cultural differences, have the same basic needs. They have tried so many different systems, and all of their systems fail one after the other. It is how we evolve. We keep trying and failing. Will we ever find utopia? Perhaps not. But we can make better progress if we are more open to each others' ways of doing things, if we can learn from each other.

In the Soviet Union, university was paid for and jobs were provided upon graduation. Today, kids worry that they will not be able to find jobs. In America, kids are saddled with so much debt from universities that they often have no hope of ever paying it off. The Soviet education system, while it certainly had flaws, was also one of the best in the world and I saw this first hand when I toured universities and primary schools. What is the solution? Perhaps neither way is perfect, but if we completely ignore one part of history or refuse to listen to it, how can we learn from it?

Most Russians I knew during perestroika were happy to do away with the old system because they thought America was paradise. I tried to tell them that America has lots of problems, but no one would listen to my warnings. They were convinced that America was utopia and that they must copy it and have it for themselves. So they copied us, perhaps a little too well, and now many are disillusioned with capitalism too, and they wax nostalgic about the Soviet era.

As I said, no system is perfect. They are all just evolutionary steps as we grasp for that illusive utopia we all dream of. In reality, it simply doesn't exist.
First, I totally agree that every country has problems of its own. The point I was trying to make is that there are countries that create new problems instead of solving the ones they already have.

When you say "since the 1980s", what exact period of time do you mean? Because I was saying that as the Perestroika began, people actually started to get what they couldn't get before; it's no wonder if you were talking about the second half of the eighties.

And I was slightly amused by the thing you said about Soviet universities (no offense meant); you say the graduates were "provided" with jobs, but do you know that those were compulsory jobs? Graduates had to work off for the state for no less than several years, and they just couldn't say no! They even had a special law about it. I would compare that system to legalized slavery. Not to mention, it was pretty often that people had to go somewhere thousands miles away from their home, it was often some places in Siberia, etc. I certainly wouldn't want anything like that for those Harvard graduates who received scholarship, would you?