Friday, February 7, 2014

Soviet Grocery Store 1986

This is what central planning does to exchange and entrepreneurship. It destroys it.

LiveLeak writes:
This is what a typical grocery store in Russia was like during communism. You couldn't buy certain foods on certain days, and even when you were allowed too buy something - the store most likely didn't have it. And this is not a depiction of a store in a rural part of Russia - this is a store in the capital city of Moscow. It can be imagined that rural stores were much worse.

I once asked a friend, who came to the United States in 1986 from Russia, what she found most different about the US. She said the variety and easy access to so many goods.

Video here.

(ht Anders Elmgren)

24 comments:

  1. So that's what the worker's paradise looks like. But...but this time we'll get... get it right.

    ReplyDelete
  2. A dream come true for JW.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Really. Is this the kind of system we want to run healthcare, or anything else for that matter? Hello fucking idiots? THINK please!

      Delete
  3. Maybe this is the equality that Pope Francis is talking about.

    Someone needs to teach the Pope about the NAP.

    ReplyDelete
  4. Russia's past, America's future.

    Someone get me a gin & tonic.

    ReplyDelete
  5. The people look pretty fat. What are they eating? Boot Kiev? 19th century Russia was really a paradise. Serfdom wasn't so bad. You could pick cotton and sing songs. Then they emancipated the serfs in 1861 and next thing you know everyone was a Commie. They should have never freed the serfs.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. They were eating junk, Jerry. As for never freeing the serfs, please remind me who you are if we ever meet by any chance. You see, my grandparents were these serfs you mentioned. I will enjoy beating the crap out of you.

      Delete
    2. Jerry, I thought the USSR was your ideal!

      Delete
    3. Jerry just likes pressing buttons. Even he knows this is a horrific existence. No idea what Jerry really believes but there are few die hard socialists that would want pure socialism. Socialism today is about exploiting a wealth generating capitalist host.

      Delete
    4. JW: Troll.

      "Jerry just likes pressing buttons."

      that's why RW should have enough sense to ban him. He's just trolling the website. These "hit & run" posts are pointless.

      Delete
    5. Meanwhile, good old Jerry Wolfgag will run over to the Trader Joe's and buy a inexpensive gourmet frozen meal to whip up for dinner tonight. Only good thing about a Soviet Union, if Jerry were living there at this time, is the fact he would not have the time to write his bonehead comments...he would be standing in line after working in the truck factory....oh and no computers.

      Delete
    6. Some 40 million dead at the hands of the Soviet government and you STILL have people singing the praises of socialism. I'm speechless in the face of that kind of complete stupidity.

      Delete
    7. The sweaty smell of JW's desperation is palpable.

      Delete
  6. When I was in college (1997), I took a photo journalism course at University of Texas. One day we had a guest lecturer who had recently won the Pulitzer Prize for photography. He was showing us pictures from his most recent project where he spent a month or two living in a village 100 miles outside of Moscow. The pictures showed people from a time that looked like early America. Everyone drank from a well, horse and carriage were common on their dirt roads, and the people appeared to be wearing simple, hand-made clothing. The lecturer talked about how they had a village Shaman who would sing into a jug of water which the people believed gave it healing powers for the sick. That is where their advancement stood 100 miles outside of their capital city in 1997.

    Also, I heard a Russian author on the Peter Schiff Show recently who mentioned that there are more paved roads in Finland than Russia. That is 130,000 square miles vs. 6.6 million square miles of land.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Meh, that's nothing. You should travel to India to see the wonders of a sovereign socialist secular democratic republic! In 2014!

      http://lawmin.nic.in/olwing/coi/coi-english/Const.Pock%202Pg.Rom8Fsss%283%29.pdf

      https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vmpe4RuTTmw

      These people have not given up - it's not human nature to give up. No matter how hard the Govt tries to keep the population enslaved and ignorant, the human spirit seeks a way to be free. It's like herding cats. You can scare them and manipulate them, but you cannot own them.

      Delete
  7. Yeah, but as long as we're all equal and our leaders care for us, it's all good.

    ReplyDelete
  8. This was one well-stocked "gastronom" (a food store)! Looks like Moscow... (and for those of you not familiar with Soviet realities, Moscow and St. Petersburg were the major shopping destinations - people were going there to buy food; the reason being that powers-that-were tried to make food riots less likely in the cities they themselves lived in, so the food supply was much better in the capital cities).

    Americans who think socialism is a good idea are truly and absolutely clueless.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Absolutely spot on. Those who have not seen it for themselves will not believe that this is a WELL stocked food store. The only thing we could consistently find was vodka and imported mustard. But we did develop a taste for mustard martinis.

      [Funny, I don't seem to remember much about my trips there...]

      Delete
  9. But they had FREE healthcare AND housing.

    ReplyDelete
  10. Jerry is no longer useful, he's just incoherently spouting off, trying get a reaction. BANHAMMER!

    ReplyDelete
  11. This is a distraction from the real issues. The real reason for the empty stores is that the Soviet government did not build roads and did not provide sufficient number of police to patrol the roads. That's why it was difficult to get the goods into the stores where they could be sold. This is basic Obamanomics 101 - it's amazing that you clueless supply-sider Americans cannot understand this. It also did not help that the Soviet government did not provide enough teachers to train the farmers and manufacturers in modern techniques consistent with officially approved Science. With proper distribution of licenses, the supply of goods available would easily have increased ten-fold.

    ReplyDelete
  12. The cameraman at 3:08 was like, "Ooh, a pretty one! Zoom in!"

    ReplyDelete