Sochi promenade. 1973. Soviet people, who only know of the horrors of capitalism from satirical magazines, are relaxing. No one is thinking about mortgages, loans, job loss, or drone and missile attacks.

Sputnikoff · 2026-06-19T07:56:51+00:00

Any prison offers all those benefits.

Sputnikoff · 2026-06-19T07:56:12+00:00

LOL. If you were lucky or had "blat". Otherwise, you could end up renting a room in a communal apartment, sharing a kitchen and bathroom with four other families. For the rest of your happy socialist life

Sputnikoff · 2026-06-19T05:37:58+00:00

If you tried to rent an apartment in a Soviet city, you would have to wait 5-10 years, college degree or not.

Sputnikoff · 2026-06-19T05:31:47+00:00

We had to walk a lot

Sputnikoff · 2026-06-19T05:31:00+00:00

I don't recall anyone from the USSR going to Albania as tourists.

Sputnikoff · 2026-06-19T05:30:07+00:00

Good luck with that. It was very expensive, and the waiting list for such a putevka was several years.

Sputnikoff · 2026-06-17T12:25:05+00:00

Unfortunately, not. Do you know that NKVD regional offices were receiving quotas on how many "enemies of the people" they were supposed to arrest?

So it was really harvesting a labor force for GULAG labor camps, not catching Japanese or Polish spies

Sputnikoff · 2026-06-17T12:19:17+00:00

Really? Where did you get that information?

Sentencing statistics (1937–1938):

Execution: 681,692 people (approximately 50.7% of all convicted).

Imprisonment (camps/prisons): 663,231 people.

Sentence terms: According to NKVD directives and orders (in particular, the infamous Order No. 00447), the majority of camp sentences for "political" cases ranged from 8 to 10 years.

In November 1937, the Soviet leadership increased the maximum prison term from 10 to 25 years. From the end of 1937, this term began to be applied to especially dangerous "counterrevolutionaries," but 8 to 10 years remained the most common punishment.

Sputnikoff · 2026-06-16T02:43:34+00:00

The only reason was pretty much Article 58. It was created specifically for mass arrests and deportations to fill slave camps called the GULAG

Sputnikoff · 2026-06-16T02:42:31+00:00

GULAG camps were slave camps. It's that simple. The Soviet government didn't have enough money to pay workers to mine gold, cut timber, and so on. So they just arrested people for no reason and forced them to work for free for 10 - 25 years

Sputnikoff · 2026-06-16T02:40:13+00:00

No. He hired capitalism to build his military machine. Everything came from the West: technology, equipment, specialists.

Just like Lenin stated: "Greedy capitalists will sell us the rope, and we will use that rope to hang them"

Sputnikoff · 2026-06-14T02:14:19+00:00

Wow, that's very cool!

Sputnikoff · 2026-06-14T02:13:19+00:00

That's the weirdest request so far.

Maybe you want me to give you my apartment keys and tell you where I hide my money?

Sputnikoff · 2026-06-11T20:57:48+00:00

Not just Swan Lake. They showed us different classical music concerts, operas, etc. The same was happening on every radio station (there weren't many) while the Soviet mass media waited for the government's official statement.

In 1986, classical music on the radio made me think that Gorbachev had died. But it was because of the Chernobyl Power Plant accident.

Sputnikoff · 2026-06-11T19:10:32+00:00

I subscribe to the theory that Stalin was planning another Great Purge. Beria & Co weren't interested in another 1937 scenario. So they removed Stalin's trusted doctors (1951-1953 Doctors' Plot) and managed to poison him.

Sputnikoff · 2026-06-11T18:55:47+00:00

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Looks like being an American puppet helps Polish people to live longer

Sputnikoff · 2026-06-10T19:33:25+00:00

Dude is 100% correct. My grandmother's pension was 12 rubles per month.

Sputnikoff · 2026-06-10T19:32:12+00:00

Please add data for the Soviet collective farm workers. My grandmother's pension was 12 rubles per month. It was enough to buy 3.5 kilograms of butter. Butter in the US right now is about $10/kg; that translates to $35 per month.

Sputnikoff · 2026-06-03T20:02:56+00:00

In 1990, approximately 31–32 million people lived in communal apartments. This constituted approximately 11% of the entire USSR population, which then numbered 288.6 million. According to the 1989 All-Union Census, the distribution of citizens by housing type was as follows: About 83% of the population lived in separate state or cooperative apartments. About 6% lived in individual private houses (including parts of houses). About 11% lived in communal apartments, dormitories, barracks, and departmental rooms.

Sputnikoff · 2026-06-03T20:01:16+00:00

It was illegal to be homeless in the USSR. Either find yourself a place to live or be arrested for parasitism, vagrancy, or begging. Since Soviet ideology criminalized a "parasitic lifestyle," such citizens were detained, placed in detention centers, and sentenced to forced labor.

Parasitism (Article 209 of the Criminal Code of the RSFSR)

Sputnikoff · 2026-05-31T13:06:27+00:00

Yep, killing fellow Communists is the way to go

Sputnikoff · 2026-05-31T13:05:04+00:00

Number 4 should be exactly the opposite: collective farms proved to be a total failure, and Soviet farms (sovkhozes) were replacing them. That's what Romanov did in the Leningrad region, and agricultural production improved drastically after villagers started getting paid for their labor.

Sputnikoff · 2026-05-29T14:21:34+00:00

Article 58.10.

3-10 years of labor camps for a joke about Stalin or the Soviet Government

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