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

  1. I was in the Black Sea, October of 1969 on a destroyer. The U.S. was thumbing it's nose at the Soviet Union who considered it their waters; we just sailed around simply to prove a point. We crew were called to quarters to man the rails when a Soviet cruiser came up to give us the once over; they manned the rails too. We passed in review within a few hundred yards and there, under a sponson, I saw one lone "Russkie" jump up and down waving and smiling at us, it was a pivotal moment for me because it was then I realized he was just a simple sailor- not any kind of "enemy"; all he wanted was to be left alone to do his job, hit the beach at night, get drunk, get laid, and do it all over again the next night— just like us Capitalists. I would have never dreamed I would get so much pleasure watching videos of the former "bad guys" in their workshops doing so much with so little and doing it so well. Screw governments, they lie, they spill the blood of the young for money; the ordinary working man has no need of their bullshit.
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  2. I became interested in Soviet Union at a very early age growing up in the US. When I was 8 years old I was given an old map of Far Eastern Russia. I dreamt of places like Vladivostok, Kamchatka and Sakhalin Island and always wondered what it was like there and how were the people that lived there. I’m 60 years old and never lost my like and wonder of Soviet Union. Thanks for all your video’s.
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  3. I like these kinds of videos. You will never read in a history book or hear from a historian what kind of cigarettes Soviets smoked, what laundry day looked like, what kind of jokes were had etc. And it's all important to painting a picture of what life looked like at a certain time. You'll always hear about battles of Napoleon Bonaparte or Alexander Graham Bells telephone, but that doesn't tell us what life was like
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  4. The parade was mentioned in episode 2. It was brought up and Legasov said it should be cancelled and Gorbachev said, no, if we cancel it, people will know there is a problem. When it came to evacuation: This is what I told my son, It seems they didn't tell their own people about the disaster, the danger they were in, and didn't want to evacuate because they didn't want to look bad to other countries/enemies. I said they found out due to other countries and not their own government. I couldn't believe it. On the show Legasov keeps bringing up evacuations and they kept shutting him down UNTIL America got satellite footage of the disaster and even then they lied and gave an extremely low number when it came to radiation. I just can't get over that. Its fucking sad when you have to find out through other countrie's governments that you could be in fatal danger and to move asap. It all makes me sick.
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  5. Once again, great video Sergey. As someone from outside the Slavic world (Irish) living and working in Belarus and coming into contact and having Belarusian, Russian and Ukrainian work colleagues and friends, your observations are spot on. Belarusians love potatoes and vodka, and are hard workers. However they are very reserved but courteous. Russians on the otherhand are more open, crazy and tend to be the life and blood of the party. Ukrainians are very polite. BTW Bulbash is a popular vodka and why Belarusians insist on drinking it, I don't know. It's disgusting. Дикая Утка is my favourite brand. Getting drunk is a good way of catching a glimpse into the Slavic soul.
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  6. I am American. Don't listen to those people. Just as fast as they found your channel, they can find a different one if they don't like your content or what you say that much. I have always been fascinated with the Russian Empire, Russia, and the USSR. The history and accomplishments are absolutely fascinating to me. Hence why I watch your videos. Keep up the awesomeness Comrade.
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  7. This channel is soooo underrated and needs way more subs
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  8. A true story from post-Soviet times (early 1992). We needed to obtain rubber cement to reinforce our collapsible canoes (another story in itself) and not being able to find any, approached a worker at a shoe factory and arranged to trade a half-liter bottle of vodka for three liters of rubber cement. He told us to come with him around to the back fence, where his friend on the inside would meet us. with the goods (obviously the controls were stricter at that point) Three plastic bottles of rubber cement came over the fence, and we handed the bottle over. It was one of those old classic versions with the tear-off top, so in order to share, his confederate held his mouth up to a gap in the fence and his buddy just poured it into his mouth.
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  9. Brezhnev was supposed to give an one hour speech in India. The speech went on and on for three hours. Later the embarrassed Brezhnev screamed at his speech writer. The writer said "Not my fault, Comrade you read all the three copies".
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  10. Wow, your video brought so much memories back! Several more things missing in HBO to add to your work: About Ukraine highest party official, Scherbitskiy. He committed suicide later, possibly because of the guilt he felt to the Ukrainian people for that May 1 1986 parade. During the evacuation: it seems that high party official gets evacuated on a same bus as others, can't be true. They evacuated themselves and their family members using separate transports. Another confirmed by my relative fact: Many pregnant women in Kiev and Ukraine( may be in Belorussia as well) got forceful abortions, because of suspected fetus radiation poisoning. One of them was my wife's cousin, she was born in 1963 in Kiev, got married in 1986 spring, and at that time she was on a 6 or 7 th month of pregnancy with her first child. She got forced to get an abortion in a government hospital ( labor house). Other details are so shockingly accurate, vehicles, license plates, military uniform( I was drafted into Soviet Army I 1985). Dosimeters, they bear another special story for me. My uncle was a chief design engineer for the research institute and a plant that manufactured them. Uncle was multiple times in Chernobyl guiding and instructing on radiation measuring activities during the crisis there. Sadly, he died in 2015 in New York at the age of 93. He was one of liquidators of Chernobyl disaster. Thanks for your work man!
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  11. My parents lived in the Soviet Union for most of their lives. My father was born in 1949 and my mother in 1952 (Stalin was still at power at this time). They were descendants of Germans who emigrated to Czarist Russia in the late 18th century. Central Europe faced widespread poverty after the Thirty Years 'and Seven Years' War and the Russian government offered portions of land to good conditions. 150 years went by and an own republic, north of Tsaritsyn (later known as Stalingrad) and south of Saratov, mostly inhabited by ethnic Germans had formed. Here in Germany the inhabitants of this former republic, who lived near the Volga stream, are called "Volga Germans" by the historians. After Nazi Germany launched its wide scale military operation in Summer 1941, many German communities (mostly located near the Black Sea) and the above mentioned Republic (which at least on paper to this point had something of an autonomous status) were forcefully dissolved by Stalin's order and its people got deported to Siberia and bare steppe of today's Kazakhstan. My paternal grandmother faced this harsh fate when she was only 18 years young and soon saw herself laboring in the "Трудовая армия" (a giant multi-ethnic working force consisting of forced laborers who were considered a severe thread to communism and state integrity during the war). And even after the Red Army and Western Allies won in 1945, my grandmother and her husband, whom she met in the labor camp, didn't get their citizens rights back till 1956, as Khrushchev already began to debunk the constructed myths and lies surrounding Stalin. Wherever they went afterwards, there were soon or later labeled fascist pigs, those who didn't get "rightfully shot or beaten to death". Even as my father and uncle grew older, they were still sometimes confronted with such verbal attacks. My mother's parents... just had bad luck. Her father, an Estonian, tried to flee from his country after Soviet occupation in 1940 with a small boat. 50 kilometers away or so from Swedish territorial waters, he got caught with others following the same intention. Needless to say where he had to went, after he was sentenced a traitor. Her mother, who lived in Ukraine at the time, sympathized with the invading Germans and was soon brought "back to the Reich", as she could prove her German ancestry and ability to speak fluently German, and was housed in Spandau (Berlin). Not knowing of the atrocities the Wehrmacht and SS units did on the Eastern Front and within the conquered territory, she had hoped that Hitler would win the war and free Ukraine (and foremost German villages) from Bolshevist rule. Especially Ukraine has suffered horribly under artificial famines in the 1930s caused by Stalin's five-year plans to modernize and industrialize the Soviet union. April 1945, as the Red Army was about to close its encirclement around Berlin, my maternal grandmother and others in her district were told to wait till they'll be evacuated to West Germany. Preparations were about to be completed but it was too late. All escaping routes were blocked by the Red Army and in 1946, she was sent to where many of my family members already had to work off their labor sentence for some years. This text doesn't have much to do with the video. But I still wanted to share this story. YouTube recommended me your videos recently and I like your content. Keep up the good work. Greetings from Germany, Artur PS: I look forward to buying your book.
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  12. I just came across your channel. Thank you for sharing your unique viewpoint about it, it was really interesting to learn.
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  13. They also lied in France during the catastrophe, the authorities said that the "nuclear cloud" has been stopped at the french border and got back to east, so at the end of the day, not only the USSR lied about the catastrophe.
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  14. These should really be archived for historical purposes
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  15. As has been mentioned by Joanne, Khrushchev established the Patrice Lumumba University in 1960. Its stated intention was to offer higher education to Africans who were unable to obtain it at home. The Soviets made a big deal about how they were practicing racial equality at a time when many blacks were not being admitted to de facto white universities in the US. In reality, the Soviets built the the school in an isolated section of Moscow specifically to isolated them, and black students were not permitted to go to the city centers unaccompanied. Students complained of being segregated from most Russians, and that Russians treated them like a colonial power. The university was admitting students from sub-Saharan Africa that didn't even have a secondary education all the way through students from places like Libya and Tunisia that had educations comparable with most European schools. This not only caused a very high dropout rate, but the more highly educated students, who were generally light skinned, demanded that the black students be segregated to a different section of the university so their lack of education wouldn't hold them back. Although the University started out mostly offering education in engineering and construction, all the students were required to take courses in communist theory and third world liberation. As the school became more political, more and more of the students went back to their countries to become political agitators and revolutionaries. Almost all African countries were dictatorships at the time, and even avowedly Marxist countries like Ghana stopped allowing students to study at Patrice Lumumba. The university started admitting more students form Central and South America to keep up enrollment, but the political education caused the same issues when they returned home, and more racial clashes broke out. There were actually demonstrations by African students in the late 60's and early 70's demanding things like a bus line that would allow them to get to the city centers, the end of prohibition of interracial dating, and more education in science and medicine with less political indoctrination. Over time, the university "social agencies", the ones that really ran the place, gave into these demands after the western press started reporting on the demonstrations. This was the start of African students being able to mingle with the Russian population and the incipient antiblack racism you talked about started to emerge. It was easy to be for racial equality until your daughter started dating an African or Africans demanded the same public accommodations as Russians. There were near riots in Moscow and other cities when Africans were allowed in the same bars as Russians and alcohol fueled fights broke out. Soviet police were rumored to use street beatings as a non-judicial punishment for Africans they felt "got out of line". Some African students left because they felt their treatment was no better than what they would have gotten in the US and the quality of the education was worse. Soviet leadership was aghast at the lack of gratitude when these student returned home ad started criticizing the USSR. The end for Patrice Lumumba U came along with demise of the USSR. The university was renamed The Russian Peoples’ Friendship University, or RUDN. It still exists, but mainly serves students from Russia's minority regions, other former Soviet republics, and a smattering of foreign students. Educational standards have declined dramatically, and, even within Russia and the former CIS republics, an RUDN degree isn't accepted in many places. There have been moves in recent years to increase standards, but that would mean not admitting many of their preferred students, so the battle between education and ideology continues.
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  16. Pets as companions rather than security or pest control were traditionally always for the wealthy in society, this was the case for the aristocracy in France, Egypt, etc. The United States is veritably a very wealthy society just by the amount of pets and what people will spend to groom and care for them. It's nothing against owning pets or the US, just an observation. A vet bill can run every bit as high as a dental bill or a car repair bill.
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  17. My father noticed the balconies aswell 😂. He spent most of his teens in Lithuanian SSR
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  18. My mom and her side of the family grew up under Mao. Always said there was no food in China. So when they came to Canada in the 80s, everything was a shock. My Grandma cried cause there was food everywhere, people had shoes and clothes.
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  19. Pawn shops originated in Lombardy as a way to get around usury laws, hence it was sometimes known as "Lombard banking" and pawnbrokers were called "Lombards" even if they came from other regions in Italy. Russian seems to have a lot of etymologically interesting loanwords, like vokzal/Vauxhall.
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  20. Thanks Russkie, I am really enjoying your videos. My older brother was one of the G.I.s (American soldiers) who shook hands with your grandfathers at the Elbe river. I lived through the cold war and wish it had never been. It's unfortunate that our leaders don't have enough sense to settle their differences with a hand of poker or a game of horse shoes, or whatever the Russian equivalent is. Life is far too short to have any enemies. And sweet iced tea and watermelon in the shade is so enjoyable with friends.
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  21. Sergei, my mother's parents were from Kyiv. I remember as a kid my mom would make borscht served cold with a dollop of sour cream. She also made cottage cheese and sour cream over wide egg noodles (boiled) , topped with cinnamon. I remember boiled meat wrapped in dumplings that were boiled. My dad's parents were from Lithuania, so many meals you showed brought back fond memories. Cheers.
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  22. Grandpa Lenin is our friend :) (unless you're a kulak)
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  23. Grandpa Sergey is making moonshine in heaven, right about now.
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  24. Stalin arrived at his dacha for the summer. After the first night, he discovered his brand new bed was infested with bedbugs. The local pest exterminators tried to kill off the bedbugs but they kept biting Stalin anyway. Finally, a professor who studied bedbugs at the university in Tbilisi was called. He had a simple solution. "You just organize them into a collective farm" he said. "Half of them will flee and the other half will starve to death". Badaboom, badabing!
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  25. I am loughing my arse off with awe at the moment. Back when I was a kid, around the same time we were tortured with the same show in Turkey and the term slaving like Isaura was in our vocabulary.
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  26. Ushanka Show is the best way to spend a Saturday night.
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  27. My friend worked in a telephone exchange before they were automated. When connecting calls to russia, he said all of the telephonists in the Soviet Union were older women who very rude and blunt. If you could not communicate with them clearly, they just slammed the phone down and you had to try again hoping you got someone else who was more patient and understood english better to connect a call.
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  28. You’ve got to love how people try and throw shade, sometimes. “He only lived in the Soviet Union for 20 years, and in Ukraine for 8 more. How could he glean any insight into life in the USSR and Ukraine living under the administration of only four General Secretaries and two Presidents?” Thanks for the video.
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  29. Your daughter has your eyes and nose. What a gorgeous young lady. Greetings from Chile, I love your channel!
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  30. In Mexico, we kind of looked up to the Soviet Union, and the government emulated a lot of the socialist policies. It was a weird mixture of socialism and capitalism, called "Stabilizing Development" with a centrally planned economy, almost zero imports, and nationalist policies. Brazil also followed this model. While there was collectivized agriculture, private property was sacred, and there was (and is) complete freedom to travel and move around the country. Oil and electricity industries are state-owned. There was a sort of free market, but with really bad quality goods. Imports were almost forbidden. This created a huge black market. But since around the mid 80s, neoliberal policies were adopted, and most of the positive aspects of socialism were lost, but high quality goods became available for everyone, and politically the one-party model was abandoned. But personal freedoms were never a problem. They were viewed as sacred. No one was subjected to surveillance or restrictions in travel or freedom of expression. When the first and only nuclear power plant was started here in the 70s, people said wishfully "Hey, maybe one day we'll be like the USSR!" That is, a mighty industrialized nation, a world power. They didn't know about the bad stuff...
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  31. I lived and worked in Moscow in the early 2000s and was fortunate enough to be invited into the homes of Russians to eat. I've had most all of the dishes you feature here and enjoyed them. I was kind of apprehensive of the dish "herring under fur coats" the first time because it was translated to me as "furred herring", so I thought it was herring mixed with fur. As far as dinner, it may be a light meal for everyday eating but for a special occasion, like when you've invited a foreigner over for dinner, there are two parts: the zakuski and then main meal. There are so many dishes set out as zakuski, the first time I thought it was the main meal, and after I'd stuffed myself I learned that the main meal was arriving on the table. Afterwards I was as full as if I'd visited my grandmother for dinner. But the food and the hospitality were great.
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  32. What makes товарищ Philip think that Sergei only addresses US citizens? We are an international crowd, who highly appreciate being called Comrades. We are downright exalted that our Supreme content creator is so magnanimous that he bestows upon us the honor of the Dear Comrade title.
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  33. I'm Canadian, but I learned to drive on my father's imported Lada (you couldn't stop that thing in the snow and the engine ran great, but it handled like a tank and the body rusted out)... later on I joined the Army and was in Germany when the wall came down - I bought a Trabant (my first car!) off an East German who came to the West (US$70 - I thought it was a good deal)... I drove it around for a weekend and ended up getting stuck in the mud just off a forest road somewhere between Amberg and Hohenfels. I left the key in the ignition if you're interested.
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  34. This is the perfect example why I like your channel: you are always honest and open, and every history is a tale of personal growth. Taking in account I'm atheist, I loved your series on the Jewish people on the USSR. It answered many questions about the ambiguity that I perceived on the Soviet treatment of minorities, and at the same time, you treated the subject in an honest light, learning and growing from our own pitfalls, and allways giving an excellent historical and cultural context, that often is alien and distant to people like me. This episode has for me a similar vein; Thank you Sergei (or should I write it now Serhii?)
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  35. Commie Poland kid here we had same problems. Its amazing how Chernobyl makers came close to our Warsaw Pact reality.
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  36. From each according to his abilities, to each who had access to goods...
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  37. I remmber hosting a couple of Soviet guys for a conference in the states about 1985 and when they saw the breakfast buffet they just about freaked out, ended up piling their plates about 4" high with bacon strips. They definitely enjoyed the visit.
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  38. Hanlon's Razor: "Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity"
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  39. Of course the Russians would buy a machine for packaging yoghurt and fill it with vodka... It's like a dad joke that's real.
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  40. This was actually fairly neutral, free of hysterics, and included interesting original research. thank you for not making a video just repeating reddit's options.
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  41. Great to hear that communist family politics is no different from capitalist family politics
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  42. Can't believe you made an episode about the soap opera Escrava Isaura! It was a watershed in Brazil TV and it's still remembered today. I had no ideia it had such an impact on Russian/Soviet society of the time. By the way "fazenda" is Portuguese for "farm". The opening tune talks about how hard the slaves life was. It talks about love and departing from his land and suffering. Thank you for covering that, cheers from Brazil.
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  43. My parents learn Russian from this guy who grew up around the same time you did. He resents the collapse and blames Gorbachev for ruining his dreams. Prior to the collapse he was going to work for a spy agency and they were planning on deploying him overseas but once it collapsed that all disappeared. To this day he’s extremely bitter, hates Gorbachev, dislikes Putin and avoids anything American. I think he went to Cuba a few times just to get nostalgia but this guy is Soviet in his heart and refuses to acknowledge a country called Russia. I think it depends who you are really. Not Everyone mourns the Soviet Union but there’s definitely a significant portion of the Russian population that feels a deep sense of loss and belonging to something great. My mother disagrees with him because Stalin deported my grandmother to China and her childhood was chaos with the cultural revolution and being discriminated for being ethnic Russian at a time when China and Russia were enemies. She dislikes communists due to what she and my grandmother went through.
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  44. And then there was the weather report, which was usually horribly wrong and we had lots of jokes about it...........good to see no matter what country or political ideology you live with.............no one could get a weather report right :)
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  45. In Finland at 80's we have got only two channels. They were broadcasted by national company Yle. Children programs were mostly animations and cartoons from eastern block countries Poland, Czechoslovakia... There was political issues that influenced what was shown in tv. Soviet has heavy pressure to Finland domestic policy.
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  46. I grew up in the US in the 1950s and 60s. The only thing that we knew about the USSR was what we saw on TV, and in the movies. I know now that it was all just propaganda, so I find these little titbits of real life in the USSR very interesting. It has been my experience that the more you learn about other peoples cultures, the more you realize what you have in common. The differences are magnified by people who just want power.
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  47. Love the videos. I like the window into the regular guy perspective of it all. You listen to one side and life was just nothing but gulags and breadlines in the USSR; you listen to the other side, and it was utopia that was choked to death by capitalist aggression. A realistic perspective is good.
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  48. Those were some great anecdotes, particularly about Brezhnev. I can clearly remember when Khrushchev was removed in October, 1964. I listened to the English service Radio Moscow almost every night to catch up on the latest news and propaganda. Every news section of the broadcast always had some mention of Comrade Khrushchev making a speech or visiting a collective farm or factory. For two nights straight, there was no mention of Khrushchev so I figured something was up. There wasn't the usual 24 hours of sad classical music when a leader died so I knew that wasn't it. The nest day, mention was made of Comrade Kosygin making a major address to some organization, and the next night it was Comrade Mikoyan making another big speech. No one knew who was running the Soviet Union. It wasn't until five days had passed that Khrushchev's regular mentions on Radio Moscow were replaced by Comrade Brezhnev, and then we knew Brezhnev was in charge of the Soviet Union. I was only 18 at the time but I remember thinking how strange it was the no one knew who was really in charge of the largest country in the world except by how he was mentioned in radio broadcasts.
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  49. Please do not drop the language parts, they really help understand, and from an American perspective, only knowing English, and very little Russian to hear the phonetic sound of the word, and what it means broken down means so much more than seeing it written. A lot of things I remember this way from your video specifically that the way it sounds to us and what you were explaining at the same time makes it click and we understand so please do not get rid of that. It is a major part of what make your videos not only entertaining but also educational.
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  50. In the 1970's I was allowed to walk to elementary school in the US as well. Times were different everywhere.
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