I wonder how much valuable memorabilia is just getting thrown away because no one thought to check for it.
Here's your nudge to ask your older relatives about their memorabilia, and record conversations with them while they are still alive.
If you want to put the info online somewhere to increase the chance that it's useful to someone someday, you could try a free genealogy website like familysearch.org or wikitree.com
A famous unit of all women pilots known as the 'Night Witches' made a name for themselves during the war https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Night_Witches
But looking at wikipedia, it's complicated. A lot of different estimates of deaths. I think a lot more men died in ww2 in the Soviet military, from Wikipedia, about 20 million men (see total war deaths by age group table) and 6 million women. The official counts of the dead were supposed to have underreported deaths by a lot.
Looking at different estimates in wiki, about 10 million military dead and almost 20 million civilian dead.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_War_II_casualties_of_the...
Submitters: "Please submit the original source. If a post reports on something found on another site, submit the latter." - https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful. Note this one:
"Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith."
A lot of socialist commentators push back on such portrayals, dismissing them as capitalist propaganda. Michael Parenti was one such. He argued that life in the USSR was in stark contrast to what the world were made to believe by the US State Machinery/Hollywood.
Here is a longish talk on the subject: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6FNOm8hY1QU (It is an interesting listen, even if you do not believe in the ideal.)
Then there is Angela Merkle's "almost comfortable" statement: https://www.reuters.com/article/world/life-in-communist-east... A point she expands in her memoir about growing up in East Germany. There were bad things. There were good things.
Considering the basket case that Russia has become, maybe the USSR wasn't so bad after all.
One thing worth pointing out: Moscow was very different from the rest of the country. It had better housing and infrastructure, the shops were stocked far better than elsewhere in the country, it had more grandiose architecture and richer cultural life and so on.
In many is ways it was the country's showcase city.
Not exactly. While it is true that Moscow had (has) more than any other city in the union - capitals of the republics had more that russian province, for example.
You'd rather live in Dushanbe (where I was born) rather then in russian city of the same population.
https://books.google.com/books/about/Dispersing_Population.h...
By the 1990s it was a forgotten cause: countries weren't willing to give up a few points of efficiency facing the fierce competition and the cold war was over.
(2) Russia was particularly extreme at that time because, under Communism, Russia was transforming from a mostly agrarian country with spots of advanced thinking (Russian Futurists, Konstantin Tsiolkovsky) to an industrial powerhouse that could challenge the United States. Ironically if there was anything about the Stalin years it was that Russia was highly successful at capital accumulation and around that time many "non-aligned" and less developed countries like India were hoping the USSR could help them do the same.
Karl Marx was mainly interested in the advanced industrial "core" but Lenin was more interested in "peripheral" countries that were exploited by the "core". The USSR was more about winning the international competition than it was about advancing the working class and the military threat from Germany, US and other countries meant the USSR had to develop as rapidly as possible so it reproduced an imperialist system internally with a division of labor that advanced industry around Moscow and a few other centers at the expense of the countryside, see
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kulak#Dekulakization
If you're interested in the spatial division of the world you really need to read
https://www.amazon.com/Modern-World-System-I-Immanuel-Waller...
and the rest of the four volume set it is a part of.
It unveils the stark contrast between the carefully constructed façade
presented by the Soviet authorities and the harsh realities experienced by
ordinary citizens.
The thing to understand about the USSR is that Moscow was a flagship city of a continental-scale empire obsessed with projecting an image of power and technological progress. It had grand construction projects, cultural events, subway, good schools, paved streets. Sort of like Pyongyang, if North Korea was a global superpower. The thing that sucked about Moscow wasn't that it looked drab, it was that you could get disappeared to a gulag or outright murdered for political speech or merely pissing off a government official, and that the government managed almost every aspect of your life (including where you work and live). Forget foreign travel, you even had restrictions on domestic travel. People born in rural areas couldn't move to Moscow unless they had political connections of some sort.
Life was far more miserable in the rest of the USSR, including all the republics and satellite states that Moscow approached as sources of cheap resources and labor to prop up the capital. Around 6-8 million people starved in the USSR in the 1930s (most of them in Ukraine). Another million starved around 1947.
While the article focuses on Moscow, the online collection is worth checking out. I'm especially interested in the "ancient burial markers near the village of Ust-byur" which seems to be Khakassia in plains that resemble West Texas.
https://manhoffarchive.org/on-the-road
Edit: Ust-byur is within 300mi of Denisova Cave!
Ah yes, everyone known that in a TRUE democracy parades are spontaneously occurring events, self organizing to show the country's weaknesses and the population's biases.
Seriously tho, what does this mean, has anyone ever been to a parade and concluded it was neither coreographed, planned, or meant give a positive image ?
How do you determine people's enthusiasm is planned and orchestrated by looking at them ?
Are all parades proof the country is actually the torture Truman show or just the countries you're being payed to spy on ?
I'm not sure what kind of special torture you'd employ to make people display that kind of enthusiasm :)
By the age of 6, I was required to carry a standard paper lantern on the November 7th celebration of the Great October* Socialist Revolution, with my parents fully aware that presence and absence lists were maintained by the teachers, who would forward them to the school cadre bureaucrats keeping dossiers on the kids, who could alert the secret police to take a closer look at the repeat offenders, and who would definitely play a big role in allowing you later to enter high school or not.
My grandpa was subject to hearings and threats because his son (my uncle) had bad marks in the compulsory Russian language lessons and the spooks were convinced that he was bad at it on purpose, by being secretly taught animosity against the Soviet Union at home.
I wonder if you ever experienced this sort of paranoia and coercion from your government. In the Czechoslovak Socialist Republic, this was the norm even during the late 1980s.
* Yeah, the October/November mismatch fits, because in 1917, then-Russia was following the Julian calendar and only later switched to Gregorian. Hence the difference of 18 days which was reflected in the timing of that parade.
> MEAT. FISH.
That's some Edward Bernays-level trickery right there. /s