None of us can imagine a New Year's holiday without the participation of its main characters - Grandfather Frost and his granddaughter Snegurochka. If you think that Father Frost is a native Russian character whose main concern is New Year's gifts, then you are very mistaken. In the legends of ancient Rus', there were similar figures: for example, the lord of the winter cold, Moroz, Morozko. It was believed that Frost wanders through the forests and knocks with his mighty staff, causing bitter frosts to begin in these places, rushing through the streets, which is why simple snow-frost patterns appear on the windows. Our ancestors imagined Moroz as an old man with a long gray beard. However, New Year's gifts were by no means Frost's main task. It was believed that all winter, from November to March, Frost had a lot to do, he carried his patrol through forests and fields, helping plants and animals adapt to the harsh, cold winter. We can find especially many prototypes of Grandfather in Russian folk tales: this is Morozko, Moroz Ivanovich, and Grandfather Studenets. However, these characters were not associated with the New Year celebrations. Their main concern is to help nature and people. Suffice it to recall the wonderful fairy tale “Twelve Months” by Samuil Yakovlevich Marshak.
But today's Grandfather Frost, that same New Year's character, has his own prototype. They consider him to be a man named Nicholas, who lived in the 3rd century AD on the shores of the Mediterranean Sea. According to legend, Nikolai came from a fairly wealthy family and happily helped the poor and needy, and also showed special care for children. After his death, Nicholas was canonized and canonized.
There is a legend according to which Nikolai, quite by chance, overheard the complaints of one poor peasant, who had such a hard time that he was going to give away his daughters. The poor man was very sad, but did not see any way out, as he suffered from extreme poverty. Nikolai snuck into the peasant's house and stuffed a large bag of coins into the chimney. At that time, the stockings and shoes of the poor peasant's daughters were drying in the oven. You can imagine the indescribable joy of the girls when the next morning they discovered their stockings and shoes filled to the brim with gold coins in the oven... Since then, in many European countries, the custom has developed of hiding little surprises “from St. Nicholas” in stockings for their children. We have a tradition of hiding “Nicholas” gifts under the pillow. Children always look forward to such gifts and rejoice at them. However, gradually the tradition of giving gifts moved to Christmas in Western countries and to the New Year in the countries of the former Soviet Union. It is noteworthy that in most Western countries, the New Year is a holiday less significant than Christmas. It is not celebrated on such a grand scale, nor is there a tradition of exchanging gifts on New Year's Eve. And some people don’t celebrate it at all.
In our country, on the contrary, New Year is considered the main holiday. And on this day, Father Frost and his assistant Snegurochka give all the children New Year's surprises. It is known that it is very common among children to write so-called “letters to Santa Claus”, in which children promise to behave well and ask Santa Claus for what they want most at the moment.
It is known that in almost every country Frost is called differently. For the Americans and the British it is Santa Claus who comes at Christmas, in France it is Père Noel. In Finland - Jollupuk.
However, there is one feature that makes the Russian Father Frost stand out from the most advantageous side. Only he has a granddaughter and she is called Snegurochka. The Snow Maiden appeared at the end of the 19th century, thanks to A.N. Ostrovsky and his fairy tale "The Snow Maiden". However, in the fairy tale of the same name, the Snow Maiden acted as the daughter of Frost. The Snow Maiden lived in the forest and came out to people, enchanted by the beautiful music she heard from them. Later, the famous philanthropist Savva Mamontov, fascinated by the image of the Snow Maiden, staged the play on the stage of his home theater.
Also, such famous artists as M.A. Vrubel, N.K. had a hand in the image of the Snow Maiden. Roerich, V.M. Vasnetsov. The famous Russian composer N.A. Rimsky-Korsakov dedicated an entire opera to this attractive fairy-tale character.
Nowadays, Father Frost and Snow Maiden are the favorites of all children. They are looking forward to the cherished moment when Father Frost and Snow Maiden will enter their house and give everyone long-awaited gifts.
Interesting things about Grandfather Frost. Story.
A small percentage of people know that Grandfather Frost became who he is because of the existence of a very specific and living prototype. In the 4th century, Saint Nicholas the Wonderworker (in Catholic and Lutheran versions - Saint Nicholas or Claus) lived and performed godly deeds in Asia Minor.
Grandfather Frost was originally an evil and cruel pagan deity, the Great Old Man of the North, the lord of icy cold and blizzards, who froze people, this was reflected in Nekrasov’s poem “Frost - the Red Nose”, where Frost kills a poor young peasant widow in the forest, leaving her young orphans children. Santa Claus first appeared at Christmas in 1910, but he did not become widespread.
In Soviet times, a new image was widespread: he appeared to children on New Year’s Eve and gave gifts; this image was created by Soviet filmmakers in the 1930s.
In December 1935, Stalin's comrade-in-arms, member of the Presidium of the USSR Central Executive Committee, Pavel Postyshev, published an article in the Pravda newspaper in which he proposed organizing a New Year celebration for children. A children's New Year's party was solemnly organized in Kharkov. Father Frost comes to the holiday with his granddaughter, the girl Snegurochka. The collective image of Grandfather Frost is based on the biography of St. Nicholas, as well as descriptions of the ancient Slavic deities Zimnik, Pozvezda, and Karochun.
The unique character of pagan deities gave rise to the behavior of Grandfather Frost - at first he collected sacrifices, stole children and carried them away in a sack. However, over time - as it happens - everything changed, and under the influence of Orthodox traditions, Grandfather Frost became kinder and began to give gifts to the children himself. This image was finally formalized in Soviet Russia: Grandfather Frost became a symbol of the New Year celebration, replacing the most beloved holiday of the Nativity of Christ in the ideology of atheism by children in pre-revolutionary Russia. The professional holiday of Santa Clauses is celebrated every last Sunday in August.
Many foreign guests come to our country. With different goals, with different missions. Of course, not all of them share the views of Soviet people, and one can not agree with everything they write about the USSR. But something else is important: some sincerely want to understand an unfamiliar reality, others are not interested in it. Their goal is to select tendentious evidence on which fakes and provocative fabrications may look more plausible.
We offer two examples from which it is obvious how differently two representatives of the same country - Great Britain - looked at the life of Soviet people.
SINCE THE COLD WAR of the 50s, accusations against the Soviet Union have hardly changed. The alternative remained the same: either the risk of nuclear war and the destruction of humanity, or the danger of “cruel and inhumane domination of the Soviets.” The preferred solution is clearly formulated in the slogan “better to be dead than red.”
So what kind of society is it that attracts such implacable and undiminished hostility from our governments - both Labor and Conservative? What allows NATO to consider itself entitled to launch a pre-emptive strike with the aim of destroying the USSR?
The choice of enemy in the past was often determined by geopolitical factors. Therefore, there are traditional opponents who usually have common borders or controversial interests. Recently, under capitalism, wars have been fought in order to secure access to sources of raw materials and markets. There are many countries that have been enemies over a long history. For Russia and England there is no such tradition. Russia has never invaded British territory, although we twice (during the Crimean War and foreign intervention in 1918) made such attempts in Russia. In the last war, Britain's continued existence was ensured at the cost of enormous sacrifices on the part of the Soviet Union. The British owe a great debt to a country they now view as their enemy.
WHO NEEDS STEREOTYPES
The attitude of the British towards other societies most often comes down to stereotypes with the help of which we evaluate the people living there and their lives. The Soviet Union appears to us as a system that President Reagan calls an “evil empire” and Mrs. Thatcher considers “cruel and oppressive.” This stereotype comes from the presumption that the USSR was, is and will always be Britain's sworn enemy, and this serves as a kind of justification for our intentions.
The stereotype is based on two unproven allegations: first, that the Soviet Union allegedly commits crimes against other peoples, and second, that it allegedly does not respect human rights in its own country. If you believe this, then what about the merits and sacrifices of the USSR in the fight against fascism in the Second World War, when it was our ally? Have the nationwide resistance of the Soviet people to the fascist invaders, the 900-day siege of Leningrad and the Battle of Stalingrad completely fallen out of our memory?
How then to evaluate our NATO partners - the USA and Germany? Germany is responsible for starting two world wars. And the United States, our ally, in both wars has a long list of “militant” actions against other nations: Vietnam, in which several million people died due to the fault of the United States; Chile, where democracy was trampled; El Salvador, where a dictatorship disguised as “democracy” came to power with American support.
The "belligerence" of the Soviet Union is a very far-fetched basis for considering it our enemy.
The second statement concerns the “violation” of human rights in the USSR. But how to understand them? Isn't mass unemployment and poverty in Western countries a violation of human rights? How to classify discrimination against blacks in the United States? What to do with the ban on professions in West Germany? In this context, accusations against the Soviet Union look more than suspicious.
THE USSR CANNOT WANT WAR
When I returned from my three-month trip to the USSR in January 1983, I noticed how often we write that the Soviet authorities prohibit the discussion of nuclear weapons issues. My eyewitness experience refutes these claims. I had the opportunity to move freely from one city to another (by my own choice) and meet with party and trade union workers, leaders and ordinary members of collectives, workers and directors, students and teachers. Everywhere the question of the nuclear arms race aroused lively discussion. This topic seemed very important to everyone.
The Soviet people have serious reasons to hate the war. He does everything to ensure that the horrors of the past war are not forgotten, and educates the younger generation in loyalty to the memory of those killed. As far as I know, not a single Soviet person cynically calculates possible losses and chances of survival in a nuclear war, or talks about “limited” or “tactical” nuclear conflicts.
GUARANTEED FREEDOMS OF SOVIET SOCIETY
Soviet people enjoy all the freedoms that are so highly valued in the West. In the USSR, freedoms have an economic basis. Part of the freedom of Soviet people is providing them with work. And not just full, but also guaranteed employment. The state is obliged to employ any citizen. There are ways to protect yourself from dismissal. No employee can be fired without the consent of the local trade union committee. No new equipment can be introduced until the displaced workers are provided with another location. Soviet people are also guaranteed housing. Basic necessities are very cheap. Rent, lighting, heating and gas cost no more than 6 percent. earnings. Public city transport is almost free; fares for the metro, tram and bus have not changed since 1950. Vouchers to sanatoriums and holiday homes are provided by trade unions on preferential terms. Prices for food products such as bread, meat and potatoes are very low, especially compared to ours.
"DANGEROUS MYTH-MAKING"
Throughout its history, the Soviet state has been anathema. Some circles in the West, and especially in the United States, were happy about the overthrow of the Tsar in February 1917. But with the Bolsheviks coming to power in October 1917, joy gave way to fear as soon as it became clear that Bolshevism would survive. In early 1918, this fear gave rise to hostility, which in turn legitimized the distortion of the truth. Since that time, the activities of the Soviets have never received an objective assessment in the West, with the exception of a short and rather double-dealing period during the Second World War. Thus, right up to the end of the First World War, the Bolsheviks were branded as “German agents in the service of the Kaiser.” After it, all means of propaganda were oriented towards anti-Bolshevism: if previously in the USA they were engaged in converting ordinary Americans into ardent chauvinists and spy-maniacs, now they began to instill hatred of Bolshevism everywhere. Heartbreaking “stories” appeared in the press about, for example, an electric guillotine capable of chopping off 500 heads per hour was launched in Petrograd. The rule in the country was described as a combination of mass murder, robbery, anarchy and general disorder. Bolshevik leaders were called “murderers and madmen,” “pathological criminals.” The official trade union movement joined in this smear campaign in order to get rid of its own radicals.
The attitude of England and France towards the Soviets was also hostile. And the real feelings of the Western powers were expressed not so much in newspaper headlines claiming, for example, that women in Soviet Russia were nationalized (Daily Telegraph, 1920), but rather in the military intervention that began in February 1918 and lasted three years. The intervention of British, French and American troops aggravated the civil war, led to terrible economic devastation and, following it, to a great famine in 1921-1922. The October Revolution was relatively bloodless, and if not for the intervention of the Entente, it might have remained so.
Britain recognized the Soviet government in 1924. This was due solely to diplomatic and trade considerations. But the original hostility towards Bolshevism has not changed to this day. Only the methods have changed. Thoughtlessly, without relying on facts, without the slightest idea about the USSR, we repeat ready-made judgments about Soviet people, their habits, character, and aspirations.
At the same time, anti-Sovietism was also used to legitimize the persecution of radicals, communists and trade unionists at home.
Very dangerous myth-making.
Excerpts from the lecture by W. Allen, professor of sociology at the University of Leeds (England), “The Soviet Union: Myths and Reality,” which, with some abbreviations, was published in the magazine “20th Century and the World.”
If you think that after the collapse of the Union, Western anti-Soviet propaganda died out as unnecessary, you will have to be disappointed. Here is an excellent example of such exhaust: "16 disturbing facts about the Soviet Union." The author of this opus is a former resident of Lithuania, and now a proud citizen (and judging by the style, more likely a citizen) of the United States. Read, just be careful!
The Soviet Union was the largest aggressor of the 20th century. All of Europe had to live with oppression, dictatorship and violence. The Communist Party of the Soviet Union ruled over a vast territory for almost 70 years of its existence, and its leaders - such as Vladimir Lenin or Joseph Stalin - were considered "friends" to the entire Union. Sometimes it seems that the USSR was a mass cult whose supporters were brainwashed. And yes, Soviet censorship was a powerful weapon. Of course, people had the right to have their own opinion, but only as long as it corresponded to the official course of the Communist Party. Otherwise, voicing your opinion could only drive a person into a concentration camp... or into a coffin. It's hard to believe, but Joseph Stalin has more deaths on his conscience than Adolf Hitler. The Soviet Union was the most terrible threat of the 20th century, which everyone feared, and many facts can be cited to prove this.
To this day, people remember the Cold War and how the USSR tried to take control of the whole world. He was even willing to sacrifice his own citizens to achieve his goal. Naturally, patriotism could not last forever, and in 1990 the Union collapsed. This was one of the biggest victories in history as millions of people regained their independence. However, the Soviet Union left behind such baggage that it haunts the world to this day. There is not enough paper to describe all the crimes committed by the USSR, but below you can learn about some of the most terrible and disturbing facts from the history of the most brutal regime of the 20th century.
16. 80 percent of men born in 1923 died before age 22
People always complain that they were born in the wrong place at the wrong time. This is so stupid. However, there is an exception and it concerns men born in the USSR in 1923. Almost 80 percent of these unfortunate guys did not live to see the end of World War II. Yes, most of this generation did not live to see their 22nd birthday. This is terrible and dishonest. But this tragedy cannot be blamed only on the Second World War and the Nazis: the Communist Party of the Soviet Union was also very cruel to its people. At least half of the male population born in 1923 died before the start of the war. Medicine was at such a level that doctors could not cope with the high level of infant mortality. If we add hunger and disease to this equation, we get what we have: 80 percent of the male population had to die. Do you still think that you were born at the wrong time?
15. Deadly deportations of innocent people
Propaganda and censorship were the most powerful tools of the Soviet Union. This country relied on people who believed that the policies of the USSR were correct, fair and protecting the world from the rotten values of the West. It is not surprising that educated people did not listen to all this propaganda nonsense. The Soviet Union decided that the best way to deal with such unruly citizens was to send them somewhere far away, such as the vast Siberian taiga. In 1933, the Soviet Union sent 6,200 people to an island in Siberia and left them there without shelter or food. A month later, when officials returned to check on the poor prisoners, 4,000 of them were already dead.
Mass deportations of innocent people continued for many years. Countries such as Poland, Ukraine, Lithuania and the Czech Republic have lost thousands of their most educated citizens. The government of the Soviet Union claimed that these unfortunate people were enemies of the Union, which had to pay for their (imaginary) crimes. As a Lithuanian, I have met many older people who were sent to Siberia for no reason. And this is just one of the many cruel aspects of the USSR.
14. Soviet soldiers had to fight without weapons during World War II
No other country paid as little attention to its armed forces as the Soviet Union. The Soviets believed that in war it was more about quantity than quality, so they routinely sent masses of untrained and unprepared troops into battle. No one is saying that this tactic of sacrificing millions did not work, but we are talking about human lives. There were quite a few cases where, during a battle, one soldier was issued only weapons, and another - only ammunition. Officials in such cases would say, "The enemy has a lot of weapons, so go and get them," which can be paraphrased as, "Sorry, but you'll probably die, soldier. Still, keep loving your country."
And the unfortunate soldiers had no choice but to go at the armed enemy with their bare hands. All these stories about cannon fodder only confirm how bloodthirsty and evil the Soviet Union was.
13. Kyshtym nuclear disaster
I am sure that everyone knows about the accident at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant and its consequences for the USSR. However, few have heard of the Kyshtym nuclear disaster, which occurred in 1957, 30 years before Chernobyl. The Kyshtym tragedy was the largest nuclear disaster at that time. 270,000 people were affected by radiation, 11,000 people lost their homes. What caused such a tragedy? Instead of fixing the cooler when it started leaking, workers simply turned it off. Naturally, the nuclear waste in the storage tanks heated up and exploded, causing many deaths, mutations and illnesses in the Chelyabinsk region. Yes, Homer Simpson would have done a better job than those workers!
Of course, the Soviet government was not happy about such a disaster, so it decided to keep everything secret. Only 32 years later, in 1989, the first documents about the Kyshtym nuclear disaster were published. And it’s true - why did the government take responsibility if it could just hide everything?
12. NKVD and Lavrenty Beria
They say that behind every great person there is someone else hidden in the shadows. Lavreny Beria was the “shadow” of Joseph Stalin (yes, cruel and evil, but an outstanding man). Beria was the head of the Soviet secret police - the NKVD. When Stalin wanted to kill someone, it was enough to tell Beria about it - the rest was just formalities. Lavrentiy Beria was a very cruel man who developed all the most terrible tortures used by the KGB until the collapse of the USSR. Beria was the only one from Stalin's inner circle who survived, which tells us that he was as evil as Stalin himself. You can be sure that Beria was behind many of the crimes committed by the Soviet Union before 1953.
After Stalin's death, Beria decided that he was ready to become a dictator. However, the poor dude overestimated his capabilities and his power, appointing himself First Deputy Chairman of the Council of Ministers of the USSR. His “friends” did not like this move, so they accused Beria of treason and killed him at the KGB headquarters, using his own methods of torture. As Beria himself used to say: “Give me a person, and I will find the crime.” He didn’t know that these words would turn 180 degrees and kill him.
11. Katyn massacre
Joseph Stalin was a very vicious and pragmatic man. He had no problem sacrificing thousands of people just to prove a point. For example, in 1940, after the Soviet Union invaded Poland, Stalin ordered his subordinates to begin executing prominent Polish citizens. In total, the NKVD killed about 22,000 Poles, including high-ranking officials and intellectuals. Historians call it the Katyn Massacre, and it is clear that the Soviet Union is responsible for this crime. However, at the time, Joseph Stalin and his associates denied any connection with the massacre of Poles. They claimed that this genocide was the work of the Nazis. It was only in 1990, when the Union collapsed, that the Russian government recognized and condemned the Katyn massacre.
The most disgusting fact about this genocide is that one NKVD executioner killed over 7,000 Poles in just 28 days. He worked for 12 hours a day and killed one person every three minutes.
People remember the Holocaust as one of the most terrible crimes against humanity, but the Holodomor is almost comparable to it in terms of the number of victims. From hunger in 1932-1933. Between six and eight million people died, and many more were in an extreme state of exhaustion. What's happened? The government adopted an unrealistic five-year plan, aggressively pursued collectivization, and ignored any signs that it wasn't working. The villagers felt oppressed but were afraid to speak out against the government. And what could have worked in theory did not work in practice. To be honest, almost everything about communism worked pretty much the same way.
Ukraine, the North Caucasus, the Volga region, Kazakhstan, the Southern Urals and Western Siberia suffered the most from this tragedy. In fact, many still believe that the Soviet Holodomor was a planned genocide against the Ukrainians. The USSR wanted all people to stop asking questions and submit. And, apparently, people who were afraid to die followed orders better.
9. The Soviet Union Used Ku Klux Klan Symbols for Propaganda
Even though the Cold War wasn't brutal, it was still nasty. The two dominant countries of the 20th century, the USSR and the USA, did everything to expand their spheres of influence. And more often than not, these countries went beyond what was permitted. For example, in 1984, the USSR wanted to sabotage the Summer Olympics in Los Angeles after the US did the same with the Moscow Olympics in 1980. However, the Soviet Union used ugly methods. They wrote dozens of threatening letters allegedly from the Ku Klux Klan and sent them to Olympic athletes from different countries. The fake letters were meant to scare the athletes and destroy the Los Angeles Olympics.
Let's face it: the fake letter plan could tarnish the image of the United States. But the execution of the plan was monstrously clumsy. No one responded to these letters, and the American government soon found out that the KGB was behind all this nonsense. So yes, this story only spoiled the image of the USSR, and the 1984 Olympic Games went as planned.
8. “The death of a person is a tragedy, the death of millions is a statistic.”
It can be said that Joseph Stalin will forever remain one of the worst leaders in history. His crimes are innumerable, and his treatment of people was outrageous. His words about death speak for themselves: “The death of a person is a tragedy, the death of millions is a statistic.” Oh yes, he not only spoke like that, but he also lived by this rule. He is responsible for many deaths of Soviet citizens. He sent millions of soldiers straight to their deaths just to maintain his power. On top of that, Stalin killed dozens of his most loyal supporters.
People in the Soviet Union knew that if Joseph Stalin called you "friend", the next day you would find yourself in a concentration camp - and only if you were lucky. More often than not, Stalin simply killed his “friends.” He didn't care about the Soviet Union, the people, the economy, or anything else - only about himself. Historians estimate that this man was responsible for the deaths of 20 million. It's good that these are just statistics, right?
7. Useless borehole 12 km deep
In the USSR, all people had to work. It didn’t even matter what exactly they were doing - the main thing was that they worked. This approach kept unemployment low and people were always busy, so they had no time to go on strike. I know it looks just stupid, but we're talking about the Soviet Union here.
One of the most useless things the USSR ever did was dig a borehole 12 km deep. It took 13 years, from 1979 to 1992, to complete this “masterpiece.” The Kola superdeep well never made any sense. From the first day of work on it, the Soviet government said that workers were only drilling the well to see how deep they could drill it. So the government wasted millions and proved the fact that it was possible to drill a well in this place to a depth of 12,262 m. If this type of management was inherent in the country as a whole, then it is clear why it died.
It is clear that during the Cold War the American government also used all possible methods of struggle. They sent a bunch of spies to the USSR to get some valuable information. However, the Union had a very strange way of catching these spies. You see, forging a Soviet passport was very difficult because they used metal clips of very lousy quality. So when American spies came to the USSR, KGB officers could easily identify them by the paper clips in their passports. If it was a real passport of a citizen of the Soviet Union, then all the paper clips would rust after a few years, so all they had to do was wait a couple of years and arrest the people whose passports looked suspiciously good. It seems that this is a case where poor product quality was to the benefit of the Soviet Union.
5. Prisoners got tattoos of Lenin and Stalin
The laws in the Soviet Union were extremely strict, and anyone who broke them had to pay for it, regardless of their status. This led to millions of people languishing in Soviet prisons. However, any law can be circumvented if you know how. And smart prisoners knew how to use the law to their advantage. For example, the law prohibited shooting at images of national leaders, so many prisoners had tattoos of Lenin and Stalin on their bodies. This gave them a kind of immunity from the guards' bullets and resulted in mass prison breaks and even greater chaos. This law is one of the best examples of how much nonsense was going on in the USSR. Stalin and other dictators believed that it was better to allow prisoners to escape than to desecrate images of national heroes. This is simply mind boggling.
4. Smallpox outbreak
The Soviet Union developed biological weapons throughout the Cold War. It was one of the highest priorities to have a stronger military than the US. However, one of the biological weapons tests went wrong, and the USSR had to pay a heavy price for its negligence. In 1971, 400 grams of smallpox caused a major outbreak of the viral disease. The only positive was that the government conducted these tests in a remote area. However, three people have died from the outbreak and ten others have been infected. Yes, this time the Soviet Union did a great job of correcting its blunder, but to the rest of the world it was a clear sign that the USSR was lying about its lack of secret weapons. Moreover, the government only took responsibility for this action in 2002. Until then, they did what they knew how to do best—pretend that nothing had happened and imprison anyone who thought otherwise.
3. Food stamps and shortages
Considering how much money the USSR poured into its military, it is not surprising that its economy was bursting at the seams. To solve this problem, the government introduced food stamps, which could be used to buy some food in stores. These coupons became a kind of currency in the Soviet Union and were supposed to somehow hide the total deficit from the population. Needless to say, if you didn't have coupons, you couldn't buy anything in the store. Yes, while Americans were listening to Elvis and eating their “spoiled Western food,” Soviet people were standing in line for a loaf of bread. Today people stand in lines to buy a new iPhone, but in the USSR there were lines literally for a piece of bread and a stick of butter. These food stamps and shortages of the most common food products are a serious indicator showing that the country was becoming increasingly poor, and the government did not care about it.
2. Voting in a song competition by turning on/off the lights in apartments
It is already clear that people in the USSR lived without much comfort. Naturally, not every home had a telephone. Therefore, when a song contest was organized in the country, they had to come up with a voting method that would allow all residents of the country to vote. The organizers of the show came up with a strange idea: if the audience liked the song, they had to turn on the lights in their apartment. If you don't like it, turn it off. In this way, the state energy company was able to estimate the power of the energy flow for each case and determine which of the competitors received what number of points.
This voting system seems super complicated. Besides, I'm sure the government could easily falsify the results if they wanted to. As a result, the winners of the song competition were announced by the state energy company. Of course, this is better than nothing, but still, such ineffective and funny things could only happen in the Soviet Union.
During the Cold War, both the US and USSR spent billions of dollars on space exploration. It became a sort of “who has the longest dick” competition. The United States was the first to walk on the moon, and the Soviet Union sent the first cosmonaut, Yuri Gagarin, into space. Do you know which country was the first to send an animal into space?
In 1957, the Soviet Union sent the first animal into orbit. For this purpose, Soviet scientists chose a dog named Laika. Laika was a stray dog found on one of the Moscow streets. Scientists decided that she was ideal, since she had already lived in critical conditions of hunger and cold. I don’t know what kind of scientists they were, but Laika died during the flight. This is how the Soviet Union sacrificed a dog, just to show the whole world that it was cooler than the States. And such stupid behavior continued until the collapse of the USSR.
In connection with the World Cup, there has been a new exacerbation of the age-old Russian problem: what will others think of us? In this case, fans from different countries who came to Russia to watch the matches of their teams and, of course, to a distant and terrible country. However, the secret thoughts of foreigners about our homeland have always worried Russians: in ancient times it was the French Jacques Margeret and Scotsman Patrick Gordon, and new eras brought new chroniclers - from John Reid with his “Ten Days...” to the science fiction H.G. Wells with "Russia in the Darkness".
Since about the thirties, all visits of foreigners to the USSR were placed under the strict control of Intourist. Much later, during perestroika, this organization will become, in a sense, a sacred place: here there is currency, and actually foreign tourists with branded clothes. There were many legends, but first of all it attracted those who did not strive to honor the Criminal Code too zealously: black marketeers, currency traders and prostitutes. But at its core, Intourist was just a travel agency that had a monopoly on the market of an entire country, but was limited by many different instructions and orders that regulated the life of its staff.
We can only talk about any noticeable tourist flow since the fifties. Stalin died, a thaw was announced, Nikita Khrushchev began to travel around the world and represent the country. In 1957, the World Festival of Youth and Students was held in Moscow, and in 1959 - an exhibition of achievements of the American way of life with Pepsi-Cola and Richard Nixon. In general, the people of the West went to the USSR. And he left his memories of this visit.
"Left" Marquez. 1950s
Perhaps the strongest influence on the tone of these memoirs was the foreign tourist’s own political views. Gabriel García Márquez, not yet the author of One Hundred Years of Solitude, but a little-known thirty-year-old journalist, came to the festival in 1957 and then wrote the essay “USSR: 22,400,000 square kilometers without a single Coca-Cola advertisement.” He treated the Soviet Union with sympathy, although he noticed many things.
“Moscow, the largest village in the world, does not correspond to the proportions that people are accustomed to,” described Marquez. - Deprived of greenery, it exhausts, suppresses. Moscow buildings are the same Ukrainian houses, enlarged to titanic proportions. It’s as if someone gave the masons as much space, money and time as they needed to embody the pathos of decoration that overwhelmed them. In the very center there are provincial courtyards: here laundry dries on a wire, and women breastfeed their children.”
Marquez was struck by a meeting in the city at night with a girl who was carrying an armful of plastic turtles (“In Moscow, at two o’clock in the morning!” he enthusiastically noted. However, this would probably look surprising even now. Or public toilets, which, Perhaps, all travelers paid attention. And the writer did not draw the most respectful conclusion from his experience, although he noted that “in the Soviet Union there are neither hungry nor unemployed.”
“Soviet people get entangled in the petty problems of life. On those occasions when we found ourselves drawn into the gigantic mechanism of the festival, we saw the Soviet Union in its exciting and colossal element. But as soon as, like lost sheep, they fell into the cycle of someone else’s unfamiliar life, they discovered a country mired in petty bureaucracy, confused, stunned, with an inferiority complex in front of the United States,” he wrote.
"Right" Heinlein. 1960s
Science fiction writer Robert Heinlein was in Moscow in 1960 and left very sarcastic notes about this trip: so sarcastic that they are quoted every time they want to show his “Russophobia”. Of course, Heinlein was not a Russophobe, but was a very meticulous researcher. By that time he was already an accomplished and wealthy writer, his books were published in huge editions. In addition, he had extreme right-wing and conservative views on life and the structure of society. Literally on the eve of this trip, he finished the programmatic novel “Starship Troopers,” which is now considered almost a hymn to fascism. But just at the end of the fifties, Heinlein’s worldview changed once again: he completed work on the book “Stranger in a Strange Land” (which anticipated the appearance of hippies). And it was at this point that he came to the USSR.
What exactly made Heinlein set off on his journey across the three seas is unknown. He refers to the fact that his wife spent two years studying Russian and this skill should have been used somehow. But mostly the writer complains.
“Standing in the Soviet Union without prior psychological adjustment is about the same as jumping with a parachute that does not open during the jump. In order to properly tune in to being in the Soviet Union, you need to be like a man hitting himself on the head with a hammer: can you imagine the joy he feels when he stops this activity? - he writes in the essay “Intourist from the Inside”.
Heinlein complains about the dollar exchange rate (“You buy four rubles for a dollar at Intourist, which means that you are being ripped off”), about the total control of Intourist, about bad numbers.
“I can’t possibly recommend the luxury category to you, because even the best in Russia is shockingly bad by our standards: bathrooms without bathtubs, even entire hotels without bathtubs, lack of hot water, “eccentric”, if not worse, toilets, tasteless food, dirty dishes, maddening expectations,” he writes. However, we have already read about toilets from Marquez.
To brighten up your stay in the USSR at least a little, Heinlein recommends demanding (no matter in English or otherwise) what you need from everyone and being polite.
“If neither polite stubbornness nor noisy rudeness will work, resort to direct insults. Waving your finger in the face of the most senior official present, feign extreme rage and yell: “Nyeh Kuhltoornee!” (“Uncultured!”). The emphasis should be on the middle syllable and highlight the “p,” advises Heinlein.
Heinlein retained his impressions of the USSR until the end of his life, although he admitted in the late seventies that it would be nice to go again and see what had changed. He didn’t go: in his opinion, one trip to the USSR is educational, the second is already masochism.
"The Martian" by Bowie. 1970s
In April 1973, British musician David Bowie finished a super-successful tour in Japan, pleaded aerophobia (and a sign from above) and headed to Europe by train through vast, cold and snowy Russia. However, the traveler saw snow only once, and the entire trip took a little less than ten days. From Yokohama to Nakhodka, Bowie and his entourage traveled on the motor ship "Felix Dzerzhinsky", transferred to an "old French train from the beginning of the century" and reached Khabarovsk, and then his journey began across the whole country. In a slightly less antique, but quite decent (and clean, as the musician wrote) train. Surprisingly, not much evidence has survived about that trip. Ten two photographs, memories UPI journalist Robert Musela and several short letters written by Bowie himself.
“Siberia was incredibly impressive. For days we rode along majestic forests, rivers and wide plains. I couldn’t even imagine that there were still such spaces of untouched wild nature left in the world,” he wrote about the Far East.
Most likely, Bowie was lying about aerophobia. After an exhausting Japanese tour, he needed a break, and new impressions and a change of scenery allowed him to compose several new songs. “I work great on the train. “I stick to my routine: get up early, have a good breakfast, then read or write music all day,” he wrote.
Bowie willingly communicated with fellow travelers and sang for the conductors (one of his escorts believed that they were girls from the KGB), who bought home-made food for him at stops. According to the musician, they listened to the songs with pleasure, although they probably did not understand the lyrics. The identities of some of the first Bowie fans in the USSR - their names were Tanya and Nadya - remained unknown to the public.
“Sleeping on the train is the only real rest that falls to my lot,” the musician complained.
Shortly before this trip, his song “Life on Mars” hit the Western charts, but for the Soviet Union, the real alien was the then Bowie. He was influenced by Japanese culture, imbued with the aesthetics of the Kabuki theater, wore a kimono in the carriage, and before boarding the train he made an indelible impression on everyone who saw him.
“He was tall, slender, young and predatorily handsome. His hair was dyed red and his face was deathly pale. He wore platform boots and was dressed in a bright shirt with metallic thread glinting under his blue coat. There was a guitar in his hand,” Musel described his appearance at the station in Khabarovsk.
In Moscow, David Bowie attended the May Day parade (“The largest Russian holiday, which is held in honor of the founding of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union,” he wrote), went to GUM, visited Red Square and moved on to Europe. He liked the USSR - not completely, but still. In addition, he was constantly afraid of KGB agents.
“Of course, I had some idea of Russia from what I read, heard and saw in films, but the adventure I had, the people I met, it all added up to an amazing experience that I will never forget,” Bowie wrote.
Three years later he returned to Moscow in company with the grandfather of punk rock and his friend Iggy Pop, whom Bowie was then helping to cope with drug addiction. Unfortunately, they then came to the USSR only as tourists, and not as part of the joint “Isolar - 1976 Tour”. But the songs written on the train were included in the album “Station To Station”, and in 1996 the musician came - already to Russia - for the third time. And finally he sang not only for the conductors.
The USSR collapsed, and myths about it continue to haunt the minds of those who have no idea what it was. Or it does, but poorly. Anti-Soviet propaganda lives on to this day, and the following material is a good example of this. Terrifying Stalin, repressions, dogs in space, diseases... The author of this opus is a former resident of Lithuania, and now a proud citizen of the United States named Kasparas Asmonaitis. The article is located on the American portal The Richest, in the “shocking” section:
The Soviet Union was the largest aggressor of the 20th century. All of Europe had to live with oppression, dictatorship and violence. The Communist Party of the Soviet Union ruled over a vast territory for almost 70 years of its existence, and its leaders - such as Vladimir Lenin or Joseph Stalin - were considered "friends" to the entire Union. Sometimes it seems that the USSR was a mass cult whose supporters were brainwashed. And yes, Soviet censorship was a powerful weapon. Of course, people had the right to have their own opinion, but only as long as it corresponded to the official course of the Communist Party. Otherwise, voicing your opinion could only drive a person into a concentration camp... or into a coffin. It's hard to believe, but Joseph Stalin has more deaths on his conscience than Adolf Hitler. The Soviet Union was the most terrible threat of the 20th century, which everyone feared, and many facts can be cited to prove this.
To this day, people remember the Cold War and how the USSR tried to take control of the whole world. He was even willing to sacrifice his own citizens to achieve his goal. Naturally, patriotism could not last forever, and in 1990 the Union collapsed. This was one of the biggest victories in history as millions of people regained their independence. However, the Soviet Union left behind such baggage that it haunts the world to this day. There is not enough paper to describe all the crimes committed by the USSR, but below you can learn about some of the most terrible and disturbing facts from the history of the most brutal regime of the 20th century.
80 percent of men born in 1923 died before age 22
People always complain that they were born in the wrong place at the wrong time. This is so stupid. However, there is an exception and it concerns men born in the USSR in 1923. Almost 80 percent of these unfortunate guys did not live to see the end of World War II. Yes, most of this generation did not live to see their 22nd birthday. This is terrible and dishonest. But this tragedy cannot be blamed only on the Second World War and the Nazis: the Communist Party of the Soviet Union was also very cruel to its people. At least half of the male population born in 1923 died before the start of the war. Medicine was at such a level that doctors could not cope with the high level of infant mortality. If we add hunger and disease to this equation, we get what we have: 80 percent of the male population had to die. Do you still think that you were born at the wrong time?
Deportation of innocent people
Propaganda and censorship were the most powerful tools of the Soviet Union. This country relied on people who believed that the policies of the USSR were correct, fair and protecting the world from the rotten values of the West. It is not surprising that educated people did not listen to all this propaganda nonsense. The Soviet Union decided that the best way to deal with such unruly citizens was to send them somewhere far away, such as the vast Siberian taiga. In 1933, the Soviet Union sent 6,200 people to an island in Siberia and left them there without shelter or food. A month later, when officials returned to check on the poor prisoners, 4,000 of them were already dead.
Mass deportations of innocent people continued for many years. Countries such as Poland, Ukraine, Lithuania and the Czech Republic have lost thousands of their most educated citizens. The government of the Soviet Union claimed that these unfortunate people were enemies of the Union, which had to pay for their (imaginary) crimes. As a Lithuanian, I have met many older people who were sent to Siberia for no reason. And this is just one of the many cruel aspects of the USSR.
Soviet soldiers had to fight without weapons in World War II
No other country paid as little attention to its armed forces as the Soviet Union. The Soviets believed that in war it was more about quantity than quality, so they routinely sent masses of untrained and unprepared troops into battle. No one is saying that this tactic of sacrificing millions did not work, but we are talking about human lives. There were quite a few cases where, during a battle, one soldier was issued only weapons, and another - only ammunition. Officials in such cases would say: “The enemy has a lot of weapons, so go and get them,” which can be paraphrased as “Sorry, but you will most likely die, soldier. However, continue to love your country."
And the unfortunate soldiers had no choice but to go at the armed enemy with their bare hands. All these stories about cannon fodder only confirm how bloodthirsty and evil the Soviet Union was.
Kyshtym nuclear disaster
I am sure that everyone knows about the accident at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant and its consequences for the USSR. However, few have heard of the Kyshtym nuclear disaster, which occurred in 1957, 30 years before Chernobyl. The Kyshtym tragedy was the largest nuclear disaster at that time. 270,000 people were affected by radiation, 11,000 people lost their homes. What caused such a tragedy? Instead of fixing the cooler when it started leaking, workers simply turned it off. Naturally, the nuclear waste in the storage tanks heated up and exploded, causing many deaths, mutations and illnesses in the Chelyabinsk region. Yes, Homer Simpson would have done a better job than those workers!
Of course, the Soviet government was not happy about such a disaster, so it decided to keep everything secret. Only 32 years later, in 1989, the first documents about the Kyshtym nuclear disaster were published. And it’s true - why did the government take responsibility if it could just hide everything?
NKVD and Lavrenty Beria
They say that behind every great person there is someone else hidden in the shadows. Lavreny Beria was the “shadow” of Joseph Stalin (yes, cruel and evil, but an outstanding man). Beria was the head of the Soviet secret police - the NKVD. When Stalin wanted to kill someone, it was enough to tell Beria about it - the rest was just formalities. Lavrentiy Beria was a very cruel man who developed all the most terrible tortures used by the KGB until the collapse of the USSR. Beria was the only one from Stalin's inner circle who survived, which tells us that he was as evil as Stalin himself. You can be sure that Beria was behind many of the crimes committed by the Soviet Union before 1953.
After Stalin's death, Beria decided that he was ready to become a dictator. However, the poor dude overestimated his capabilities and his power, appointing himself First Deputy Chairman of the Council of Ministers of the USSR. His “friends” did not like this move, so they accused Beria of treason and killed him at the KGB headquarters, using his own methods of torture. As Beria himself used to say: “Give me a person, and I will find the crime.” He didn’t know that these words would turn 180 degrees and kill him.
Katyn massacre
Joseph Stalin was a very vicious and pragmatic man. He had no problem sacrificing thousands of people just to prove a point. For example, in 1940, after the Soviet Union invaded Poland, Stalin ordered his subordinates to begin executing prominent Polish citizens. In total, the NKVD killed about 22,000 Poles, including high-ranking officials and intellectuals. Historians call it the Katyn Massacre, and it is clear that the Soviet Union is responsible for this crime. However, at the time, Joseph Stalin and his associates denied any connection with the massacre of Poles. They claimed that this genocide was the work of the Nazis. It was only in 1990, when the Union collapsed, that the Russian government recognized and condemned the Katyn massacre.
The most disgusting fact about this genocide is that one NKVD executioner killed over 7,000 Poles in just 28 days. He worked for 12 hours a day and killed one person every three minutes.
Holodomor 1932-1933
People remember the Holocaust as one of the most terrible crimes against humanity, but the Holodomor is almost comparable to it in terms of the number of victims. From hunger in 1932-1933. Between six and eight million people died, and many more were in an extreme state of exhaustion. What's happened? The government adopted an unrealistic five-year plan, aggressively pursued collectivization, and ignored any signs that it wasn't working. The villagers felt oppressed but were afraid to speak out against the government. And what could have worked in theory did not work in practice. To be honest, almost everything about communism worked pretty much the same way.
Ukraine, the North Caucasus, the Volga region, Kazakhstan, the Southern Urals and Western Siberia suffered the most from this tragedy. In fact, many still believe that the Soviet Holodomor was a planned genocide against the Ukrainians. The USSR wanted all people to stop asking questions and submit. And, apparently, people who were afraid to die followed orders better.
The Soviet Union used Ku Klux Klan symbols for propaganda
Even though the Cold War wasn't brutal, it was still nasty. The two dominant countries of the 20th century, the USSR and the USA, did everything to expand their spheres of influence. And more often than not, these countries went beyond what was permitted. For example, in 1984, the USSR wanted to sabotage the Summer Olympics in Los Angeles after the US did the same with the Moscow Olympics in 1980. However, the Soviet Union used ugly methods. They wrote dozens of threatening letters allegedly from the Ku Klux Klan and sent them to Olympic athletes from different countries. The fake letters were meant to scare the athletes and destroy the Los Angeles Olympics.
Let's face it: the fake letter plan could tarnish the image of the United States. But the execution of the plan was monstrously clumsy. No one responded to these letters, and the American government soon found out that the KGB was behind all this nonsense. So this story only spoiled the image of the USSR, and the 1984 Olympic Games went as planned.
“The death of a person is a tragedy, the death of millions is a statistic”
It can be said that Joseph Stalin will forever remain one of the worst leaders in history. His crimes are innumerable, and his treatment of people was outrageous. His words about death speak for themselves: “The death of a person is a tragedy, the death of millions is a statistic.” Oh yes, he not only spoke like that, but he also lived by this rule. He is responsible for many deaths of Soviet citizens. He sent millions of soldiers straight to their deaths just to maintain his power. On top of that, Stalin killed dozens of his most loyal supporters.
People in the Soviet Union knew that if Joseph Stalin called you "friend", the next day you would find yourself in a concentration camp - and only if you were lucky. More often than not, Stalin simply killed his “friends.” He didn't care about the Soviet Union, the people, the economy, or anything else—only about himself. Historians estimate that this man was responsible for the deaths of 20 million. It's good that these are just statistics, right?
Useless borehole 12 km deep
In the USSR, all people had to work. It didn’t even matter what exactly they were doing - the main thing was that they worked. This approach kept unemployment low and people were always busy, so they had no time to go on strike. I know it looks just stupid, but we're talking about the Soviet Union here.
One of the most useless things the USSR ever did was dig a borehole 12 km deep. It took 13 years, from 1979 to 1992, to complete this “masterpiece.” The Kola superdeep well never made any sense. From the first day of work on it, the Soviet government said that workers were only drilling the well to see how deep they could drill it. So the government wasted millions and proved the fact that it was possible to drill a well in this place to a depth of 12,262 m. If this type of management was inherent in the country as a whole, then it is clear why it died.
Terrible quality of Soviet passports
It is clear that during the Cold War the American government also used all possible methods of struggle. They sent a bunch of spies to the USSR to get some valuable information. However, the Union had a very strange way of catching these spies. You see, forging a Soviet passport was very difficult because they used metal clips of very lousy quality. So when American spies came to the USSR, KGB officers could easily identify them by the paper clips in their passports. If it was a real passport of a citizen of the Soviet Union, then all the paper clips would rust after a few years, so all they had to do was wait a couple of years and arrest the people whose passports looked suspiciously good. It seems that this is a case where poor product quality was to the benefit of the Soviet Union.
Prisoners got tattoos of Lenin and Stalin
The laws in the Soviet Union were extremely strict, and anyone who broke them had to pay for it, regardless of their status. This led to millions of people languishing in Soviet prisons. However, any law can be circumvented if you know how. And smart prisoners knew how to use the law to their advantage. For example, the law prohibited shooting at images of national leaders, so many prisoners had tattoos of Lenin and Stalin on their bodies. This gave them a kind of immunity from the guards' bullets and resulted in mass prison breaks and even greater chaos. This law is one of the best examples of how much nonsense was going on in the USSR. Stalin and other dictators believed that it was better to allow prisoners to escape than to desecrate images of national heroes. This is simply mind boggling.
Smallpox outbreak
The Soviet Union developed biological weapons throughout the Cold War. It was one of the highest priorities to have a stronger military than the United States. However, one of the biological weapons tests went wrong, and the USSR had to pay a heavy price for its negligence. In 1971, 400 grams of smallpox caused a major outbreak of the viral disease. The only positive was that the government conducted these tests in a remote area. However, three people have died from the outbreak and ten others have been infected. Yes, this time the Soviet Union did a great job of correcting its blunder, but to the rest of the world it was a clear sign that the USSR was lying about its lack of secret weapons. Moreover, the government only took responsibility for this action in 2002. Until then, they did what they knew how to do best—pretend that nothing had happened and imprison anyone who thought otherwise.
Food stamps and shortages
Considering how much money the USSR poured into its military, it is not surprising that its economy was bursting at the seams. To solve this problem, the government introduced food stamps, which could be used to buy some food in stores. These coupons became a kind of currency in the Soviet Union and were supposed to somehow hide the total deficit from the population. Needless to say, if you didn't have coupons, you couldn't buy anything in the store. Yes, while Americans were listening to Elvis and eating their “spoiled Western food,” Soviet people were standing in line for a loaf of bread. Today people stand in lines to buy a new iPhone, but in the USSR there were lines literally for a piece of bread and a stick of butter. These food stamps and shortages of the most common food products are a serious indicator showing that the country was becoming increasingly poor, and the government did not care about it.
Voting in a song competition by turning on/off lights in apartments
It is already clear that people in the USSR lived without much comfort. Naturally, not every home had a telephone. Therefore, when a song contest was organized in the country, they had to come up with a voting method that would allow all residents of the country to vote. The organizers of the show came up with a strange idea: if the audience liked the song, they had to turn on the lights in their apartment. If you don't like it, turn it off. In this way, the state energy company was able to estimate the power of the energy flow for each case and determine which of the competitors received what number of points.
This voting system seems super complicated. Besides, I'm sure the government could easily falsify the results if they wanted to. As a result, the winners of the song competition were announced by the state energy company. Of course, this is better than nothing, but still, such ineffective and funny things could only happen in the Soviet Union.
The first animal astronaut was from the Soviet Union
During the Cold War, both the US and USSR spent billions of dollars on space exploration. It became a sort of “who has the longest dick” competition. The United States was the first to walk on the moon, and the Soviet Union sent the first cosmonaut, Yuri Gagarin, into space. Do you know which country was the first to send an animal into space?
In 1957, the Soviet Union sent the first animal into orbit. For this purpose, Soviet scientists chose a dog named Laika. Laika was a stray dog found on one of the Moscow streets. Scientists decided that she was ideal, since she had already lived in critical conditions of hunger and cold. I don’t know what kind of scientists they were, but Laika died during the flight. This is how the Soviet Union sacrificed a dog, just to show the whole world that it was cooler than the States. And such stupid behavior continued until the collapse of the USSR.
