Hearted Youtube comments on USHANKA SHOW (@UshankaShow) channel.

  1. Greetings from the Polish audience. It was aired during my childhood and I can confirm that the town was getting empty and quiet at that time. 😂
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  2. I remember the good old days listening to Radio Moscow. There would be a huge international crisis and the lead story on the news would be about the wheat harvest.
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  3. Once Stalin received a delegation of workers from the Urals. When the workers left Stalin looked around for his pipe but did not see it. He called the Chairman of the KGB Lavrentiy Beria and said Lavrentiy Pavlovich my pipe disappeared after the visit of those workers.Yes Yosif Vissarionovich I'll immediately take proper measures.Ten minutes later, Stalin pulled out a drawer in his desk and saw his pipe he struck a match, puffed out a ring of smoke, and dialed Beria's number.Lavrentiy Pavlovich, my pipe's been found.What a pity Beria said all of them have already confessed.
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  4. I can't believe I haven't found this channel before. Your recounts of events are absolutely fascinating!
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  5. I visited the Soviet Union in November 1984. Moscow was cold, bleak and depressing, and I've never seen so many drunk people in my life. To get back to hotel room I had to step over the sleeping drunks who were too hammered to get back to their own rooms. Some of reason for this may lie in that it was bleak and depressing but also, perhaps people had no personal agency over their lives. They had little control, little say and little responsibility.
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  6. When your government officials leave town in a hurry, you should leave too.
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  7. Those are very cool details. I heard from the Chernobyl podcast that they have no choice but to cut out many scenes due to time constraints. I would like to see them in the show too
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  8. Thank you for mentioning the "enemy voices" and the May 1st parade. A friend of mine was a high schooler in Minsk (250 miles away), and her dad DID find out about the radiation from "enemy voices". On May 1, he forbid her from leaving the house to go to the big Mayday parade that all the students were supposed to attend. The next day her school started proceedings to throw her out of the young pioneer organization for missing the parade and for spreading misinformation about the dangers of being outside. Eventually those proceedings were cancelled after her information was proved to be correct.
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  9. I was never that fond of the term 'butthurt' till I heard it in your accent.
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  10. road head hahaha, nice
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  11. Tankies: I wonder how life was in the USSR. Actual ex-Soviet citizen: Here is my experience - Tankies: NO 😠
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  12. Anton comes home from work and finds his wife in bed with another man. "What a waste of time you two. Shouldn't you be standing in a queue in a shop somewhere at this time of the day? Now we don't have any food for dinner" says Anton as he tries to contain his anger.
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  13. My son used to get his hair cut by an older Russian lady. I would talk to her when we brought him in, and she told us about growing up in Moscow, going to college, and moving to the US right after the fall of the Soviet Union. She said the first time she went into an American grocery store, she put her face in her hands and cried. She couldn't believe how much food there was, and how easy it was to get compared to her time in Moscow. This was also not in a major American city, but a smaller city in Wisconsin, and yet food was much easier to get than in the capital of the Soviet Union.
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  14. It's all the Chernobyl stuff, since the HBO special came out and you're talking about it Youtube is pushing it into everyone's video feeds. I'm kinda happy it is though because your vids are interesting.
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  15. A peasant attends a meeting at the collective farm and is told communism has appeared on the horizon. So he goes home and asks his nephew what horizon is, and is told that it's a line that can only be seen but can never be reached.
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  16. Thanks for your interesting videos. I once heard an anecdote from the Stalin era. Three man in prison camp discussed why they were there: 1. Prisoner: I came 10 minutes to late to my job and I got twenty years for sabotaging the Five Year Plan. 2. Prisoner: I came 10 minutes to early to my job and I got twenty years for spionage. 3. Prisoner: I came exactly at the right time to my job and I got twenty years for having a wristwatch from the West.
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  17. I'd never thought my mom's favorite soap opera from her youth was so famous abroad, much less in the Soviet Union, of all places! Thank you, Sergey.
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  18. I have been watching your videos for a while now and i like them, you give the point of view from a Russian Citizen unlike these so called experts on Soviet culture who just recite what they have learned from books. Thank You for making them and you have a new subscriber.
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  19. Radio tochka - i can confirm - we had the same back in communist Bulgaria.
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  20. I spent some time in Cuba a few years ago and I was told by the locals that the first question one asks when one gets a job is : ¿Aqui qué se puede arreglar?"... "What can we embezzle here? (the Spanish word is more euphemistic though). So it seems that what Sergei describes in this video is a common feature of every communist society.
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  21. Ha ha ha, your theory about smoking in the army and getting smoke breaks, I was in the Marines here in the US when I started smoking. It was just like you said, they would call for people to do some work, I would start to put my cigarette out but someone would always say "just finish your smoke, there are other people who aren't doing anything."
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  22. My Italian Grandpa drowned kittens. My mom felt so bad about that that she became a cat lady with 40 cats and made it on the news. Hey that’s life.
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  23. Yes, Escrava Isaura( Slave Isaura). It was a popular soap opera, here in Brasil. It also was played in China. A funny story about it: in 97 ,my mother was visiting Turkey. She, and my tounger sister,lost herselves into that country. When the turkish people, went to help them, and discovered ,that my Mother and sister, were brazilians, they brought to my mom, a Lucélia Santos( the main caracter of this soap opera) poster! Slave Isaura,was being aired in Turkey that days!! Gospodin Sputnikof, congratulions for your job, and greetings from Brasil!!!!
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  24. We don't usually get to hear what life was like as a soviet during those times, especially being American and outside of former Soviet land. I'm interested in the Soviet Union so I like learning about the life of the citizens, especially when it's told by someone that lived in the Soviet Union. вы прекрасны
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  25. 3.5k likes? Not great, not terrible!
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  26. I'm a Japanese but lived in Soviet era Moscow (1968-72, 1978-1983) as a kid, I still remember how good russian breads were. My family used go to this large bakery store near our apartment and my favorite choices were handbag-shaped bread and sweet pastery with cheese cream which I think was very rare back then in Russia. By the way, we also went to Kiev in the summer of 1981, to visit family friend who was a ukranian citizen but his father was a chinese and mother was a japanese. So many good memories.
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  27. Sergei, my friend, this had to be one of the most difficult videos for you to make. Though I know about many of the horrors of oppression, this one was entirely new to me. I have thousands of stamps from the USSR. When I watched your other videos about handicapped people, I came to realize that none of my stamps show a handicapped person. Yet there are plenty of men in uniform, medals, and other military themes. Regimes such as the Soviet Union and North Korea (another one I have studied a lot) try to hide their disabled (or, as we see here, do much worse), for they do not like any image of a less-than-perfect society. Things like this video really need to be out, no matter how hard they are to accept. Thank you for doing this. I know I will never forget it. Peace and blessings to the victims and their loved ones 🕯️🕯️🕯️🕯️🕯️😥
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  28. How dare you put forth such balanced, informative and entertaining videos!!! Outrageous! Just joking, of course. The disinformation you address reminds me of the old saying, "The grass is always greener on the other side of the fence." I particularly enjoy the photographs you choose. They are really excellent and full of life.
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  29. Your haters are weird. Half of them think youre creating anti communist propaganda and the other half think youre promoting communism.
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  30. I guess they weren't joking about the workers seizing the means of production.
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  31. In the US bikes that you pushed the pedals backward to apply the brake which was in the rear hub were called, 'coaster brakes'. They were usually single speed bikes.
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  32. Here's some jokes from Romania when I was a child.... 1. Question: Why in communist Romania the shops were made at least 5 km away from each other? Answer: So that the queues do not tangle. 2. In Ceaushescu's time, there is a stamp with Ceaushescu. Ceaushescu, disguised, goes to a post office to see how the stamp is sold. "It's not sold," says the clerk. - Why? - It does not stick. Ceaushescu asks for a stamp, spits on the glue, put it on an envelope, and tell the clerk: "Why do you say he does not stick?" Look, it sticks! "Yes," says the clerk, "but everybody spit on the other side. 3. Ceaushescu goes to Russia on a visit to Brezhnev. Amazed by the luxury he lives in, he asks him where he has so much money. The Russian says, "Well, you see the bridge there? - Yeah ... - That cost 100,000 rubles. And from such a large amount a part goes into my pocket ... Brezhnev is coming to Bucharest next year and he is amazed at the luxury in which Ceaushescu is living, so he asks how he can afford it. Ceaushescu replies, "Well, you see that bridge?" - Which bridge? - That bridge costs 100,000,000 lei ... 4. Two people are talking. At one point, one of them says, "Come on, let me tell you the last joke with Ceaushescu that I heard. The other one says, "God, that's a shame of you, I see you a good man, why do you need trouble?" I work for the Securitate (Secret Police). - Oh, are you working on the Securitate? Then there's no problem, I'll repeat the joke until you get caught up. 5. In Ceausescu's time a guy enters a store: "Excuse me, do you have fish here?" - No, here we do not have meat, next door there is no fish.. (this is very similar with one you told Sergei) 6. Question: - What is Securitate (Secret Police)? Answer: - The heart of the party, which beats hard! 7. Question: - In Ceaushescu's time, what was coldest than cold water in the winter? Answer: Hot water.
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  33. Man, I really miss the days when you could get into Canada, and get back, without a passport. A fellow Michigander. :)
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  34. I suspect it's the reason some guys liked being in the army. Don't have to worry too much about what to do with yourself, you're told where to go to work and live, told where to eat, etc. Sure the quality of care is usually substandard, but you're rarely in doubt about what to do next. And for a certain kind of guy, that's comforting. All you have to do is show up.
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  35. Congratulations being married 20 years, that's becoming a rare thing for people in this land.
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  36. Hello from Ohio! Thank you for your stories, Sergei. You've inspired me to expand upon the backstory of one of my characters (in a book I'm working on) who grew up in the USSR. Keep up the great content!
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  37. i know this is two years old, but i found you through your HBO Chernobyl review vid and i wanted to say thank you for talking about your experiences in the USSR so openly! i like to listen to stuff like this when i'm working and i've found all of your life in USSR videos super fascinating!
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  38. Another side of owning a car in USSR never mentioned was maintenance and repair. Cars were very low quality and required lots of it. And in USSR it was horrific nightmare. That was the reason I never wanted to have a car in USSR seeing what hell all the car owners I knew had to go thru. In the fall of 1974 my friend offered me a ride from Yalta, Crimea to Simferopol Airport via mountain road. He was going pretty slow making me worrying about missing my plane. After top of the mountain pass when the road went 20 something km downhill he slowed down even more and his car started sounding strange, like no other car I heard before. I caught my plane OK and while thanking him for the ride I mentioned him being very careful driver. He explained: "My brake pads are completely worn out and I can not find new ones anywhere! Even on black market! So..... I was going 20+ km DOWNHILL thru the MOUNTAIN ROAD in a car with NO BRAKES.
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  39. Chernenko became the third Soviet leader to die in less than three years. Upon being informed in the middle of the night of his death, U.S. President Ronald Reagan is reported to have remarked "How am I supposed to get anyplace with the Russians if they keep dying on me?"[13]
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  40. I love Ushanka's 'aw shucks, I'm just a simple engineer' attitude about socio-economic theory in general, "I'm very weak about all this theory." Yet his description of early Soviet communism is spot on. Anarcho-communism is what the average Soviet citizen was taught, no need for police, nor army, since the proletariat would be ready and able to perform those extra-curricular activities at a moment's notice, the Soviets were to be self-regulated and even 'autonomous.' Like so many utopian visions we humans have invented since Plato's Republic, Soviet style socialism looked much better on paper than it ever could in reality.
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  41. When l was a kid in the 80s living in the USA l used to hear many bad things about the USSR. l was curious as to what life was REALLY like over there. Because of your videos, l am learning alot about that. Thanks.
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  42. Roses are red So is the state Let us be comrades Because you are great.
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  43. "The place where citizens shared rumors and germs" 😝😝😝 oh ...funny!
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  44. Your videos are the best!  I am so interested in the Soviet Union and there is not a lot of real stories from that time online, just propaganda about how bad the USSR was.  Keep up the great work
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  45. Jewish and Ukrainian here. You're clearly not the antisemitic type, and I actually appreciate the unfiltered stories you tell. It brings a realness to the events that actually happened, and in this context I'm not offended at all!
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  46. My fiancée was raised in a closed city. As she says, she was raised in a city that doesn't exist anymore in a country that doesn't exist anymore.
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  47. Don't dwell on these ridiculous comments. You've done a great thing with this channel and have taught many people so much about such a fasinating part of history. Thank you 🙏
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  48. The cigarette going out several times is a sign that the tobacco inside is not treated with chemicals. You get the same experience with smoking a pipe and a cigar, both of which are made with untreated tobacco (aside from fermentation, drying, and aging). The cigarette not going out and continue to burn means it's treated with chemicals that keep it burning.
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  49. I think the thing with claiming everything was free in the USSR by outsiders who never lived in any of the countries it encompassed is that we can easily conflate “cheap” with “free”. They’re not alike, but may give the illusion of being so by people who don’t bother to take a closer look! Either way, this was a really entertaining video to watch. As someone who is interested in this side of history but didn’t live anytime around it, these videos really help putting things into perspective! Thank you Sergei, this was really informative! :^)
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  50. I taught myself to read Cyrillic by first looking at a Pepsi can in Moscow in 2006. I figured out the п=P and so on. That was the beginning of my journey. Now I can read Cyrillic alphabet pretty easily.
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