Comments by "Kasumi Rina" (@KasumiRINA) on "Paper Skies"
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Their entire argument is basically claiming "Soviet man's burden", saying they somehow "civilized" us, savages, who had universities, cathedrals, and roads, centuries earlier than moscow. Look up history of Kyiv, Tashkent, Riga, Lviv, Vilnius, Dushanbe – all the major cities in countries they colonized at some point – how brainwashed someone has to be to claim that Bukhara was just wild fields before White Slavic Men brought it Lenin's lighbulb?
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Odesa here. Grandpa was a taxi driver, bought bananas or citruses in entire palettes, but only near the port, and when he could catch someone selling them. It was very random. One of mum's brightest memories was standing in a multi-hour line for oranges with grandma and they ran out of them just as her turn came... but lo and behold, someone noticed a single orange that rolled behind a counter. She bought it, and carried it home like a treasure... only to be met with grandpa who bought an entire sack of them as he was driving by someone who sold a bunch from a ship. Mom couldn't understand why she feels so bad when theoretically she must have been feeling happy?
She sent some oranges to a relative in another town, and they cried because kids tried to eat those like apples, without peeling, as they never seen an orange before. Mum also met a kid who didn't see a banana too, probably traveler from non-port city, she shared a bunch... Herself went sailing so she could buy underwear and elite goods like plastic bags – these were reusable and washed many times... but then every house had antlers and wooden owls, and our family had to force feed each other entire box of mandarins to prevent them from being spoiled.
USSR was full of stories like people in some warm Central Asian village getting dozens of warm coats when Siberia was freezing, and then the guy who bought the coats in a hot place, full price and all, and traveled far and wide to sell them to people who needed them, was arrested for "speculation", and coats promptly returned back to warm lands, because, you see, government had it all planned out and knew better than you who needed what. Like the country wasn't as poor as it was mismanaged. And inequality was ridiculous! Again, there were TONS of resources but they arrived somewhere they were literally rotting and re-distributing them was illegal.
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My mum moved from Bakhmut (then Artemivsk) to Odesa, always much more developed city than muskovia, and once she was walking eating bananas as some man with a kid stopped her, ans asked to show his watery-eyed son a banana upclose, as he has never seen one. She gave them a bunch but never forgot that. When our family sent oranges to relatives "somewhere there", said relative later said she cried as her kids never seen citruses and started eating them with the skin on...
My cousin who was born here was forcibly moved to Rybinsk after college, and they got bread lines and got, once he survived a month on just water by finding a book about starvation diet, as there was literally no salary for a week. If you lived far away from a port that gave you a window to foreign countries, you didn't have stuff. Plain and simple. And sailors were the elite, as they could get some rare goods like pantyhose and Deep Purple, Abba & Boney M vinyls people copied onto X-ray plates.
The biggest reward for party bonzas was getting Western goods, Japanese players, and the elite clothing of first worlders: blue jeans. The status symbol that got you all chicks.
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