this post was submitted on 27 Aug 2026
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The experiences of my family (in the USSR) were not as you describe. Things were cheap and necessities were available. Getting some things was more difficult for non-price reasons. That also seems to align with studies like what the CIA conducted about access to nutrition in the USSR.
Overall, that was a significant improvement over what came before, as well as over what came after.
Where did they work, and did they live in Moscow? Some regions or particular stores by key plants were much better supplied, but honestly I'm not sure if you could find one family in USSR that would claim stores were well supplied in the 80s.
Also I come from one of the satellite state. Food was taken out from the country, while there were protests over look of food in the stores. Kinda hard to claim it did not happen. There were rail carts welded to tracks to by workers trying to stop it...
And yeah, Russia was an absolutne shitshow both before and after, no question about it. I'm just addressing oversimplified vision of what money meant in state capitalism.
Ignoring the fact that this conversation has been steered towards an explicitly liberal/market economics/consumerist framing...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nostalgia_for_the_Soviet_Union