Question by Claude: Do you think the USSR provided people with a better quality of life than the USA?
In the SOviet Union people had a good quality of education,employment, and health care. Everyone had access to essential goods. In the USA during the 1930s, people were losing their jobs because of the great depression and homelessness increased. The USA considered themselves champions of freedom and democracy while frequently violating human rights.
What country provided a better quality of life?
Answers and Views:
Answer by ungodly
The USA.
Read all the answers in the comments.
Know better? Leave your own answer!
silver linings says
On this topic you appear to be very naive. I suppose this is what your college professors are telling you? They've perhaps been to today's Russia and interviewed the men and women who lived under this regime? Or perhaps you've learned it from the many left-leaning articles on the Internet praising the USSR?
I have spent a good deal of time in Russia and personally know older Russians who lived through the years of the USSR. I know families who were blue collar and I know families who where doctors and professors. Trust me. . . there was no magnanimous equality, education, employment and health care unless you paid for it with your integrity. If you were party loyalists you could buy your way through the system to get what you want. . . be it a better flat, a better education for your kids, or life-saving medical care. It all required position, connections and/or cold, hard cash. If you were not sold-out Communist party supporters and did not participate in all the propaganda events you had zero chance for a higher education or a livable flat in a decent part of the city. You would end up in the worst possible job with no opportunity for advancement or improvement. The message was clear . . . play the propaganda game or struggle under the worst conditions just to survive. If you went so far as to express your own views or embrace your own religious faith you could expect to spend time in prison at the best. More likely you would just disappear. . . permanently. I personally know a Russian pastor who baptized a member of his congregation in the Volga river after their profession of faith and spent ten years in prison for it. I'm sure you can find somewhere in the world where such "quality of life" exists today and you won't have to suffer here in the US anymore. China anyone?
Everyone did NOT have access to essential goods. When in America have we not taken care of the poor and needy? Times may have been tough in the 30's but American people took care of those who needed food and shelter. . . meager as it may have been. People who stood in soup lines during the depression were experiencing for a few short years what even the "middle class" Russian people experienced everyday for a lifetime. And don't think there was no such thing as "class" in Russian society. There was a rich, controlling and ruling class just like there is in every other country only in the USSR they didn't just control the economy, they controlled your very right to breath.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn would roll over in his grave if he read your post. So would every other Soviet dissident who gave their lives or were imprisoned for freedom.
Christopher B. says
In the 1930s, yes in the soviet union, they had jobs so you could make that argument. However ever since, USA has had better. WWII demolished Russia, while in the 50s USA was living pretty comfortably. American also had more rights than Soviet Unionists. Also, the USA distributes most products using supply and demand. Thus most people got what they wanted, in the SU, the distribution was done by the government, and could be extremely inefficient. for example, bread was put at a low price. this was so that the poor could afford bread. However it was so cheap that pig farmers used it as pig feed. thus there was a shortage of bread. Also the SU diverted alot of resources to building weaponry, and not so much on toilet paper and soap.
FizzyBubbler Lives F says
I think the US, but in the 1930's it would have been very close.
I think it's funny for those people thrown aback by their propaganda that they think Russia could never have been anything but a slum hole. What about the breadlines they say. What about the American breadlines? What about the Gulags they say. What about the fact America has more prisoners in total and per capita than any other country on Earth? What about the Iron Curtain and women marrying foreigners they say. What about the questioner is referring to the 1930's? There were never any Americans moving to Russia they say. In fact thousands of pro-Communist Americans moved to Russia. Some of them moved to China and gave them the bomb. Communism in the 1930's was spreading like wildfire and took serious root in France, Germany, the US and most industrialized nations. It brought about great advancements like the Labour Union and Socialized Medicine.
You'll never see a rational debate about this though. Russia is the boogieman to Americans who've been fed campfire horror stories about Russia all their lives. And Rational thinking isn't something Americans are known for to start with.
Don't Trickle o says
My answer is in your question.
Sure, the USSR *provided* a better quality of life to its people.
Here in the USA, we let people provide their own quality of life.
Eric S says
In the 1930s, whoever was not murdered by Stalin in Soviet Russia, did work very hard to avoid execution.
This did result in factory workers busting themselves for dear life. They were slaves of Stalin, they had to work or die. The work they did was far more than they earned, this did help the Soviet economy, but at the price of DEATH and misery and slavery.
However, after Stalin's regime, there is truth that certain elements of the Soviet Union offered more than the USA. For example, the artisans in Moscow, the participation in artistic endeavors, the depths of philosophy, communal life…was far more vibrant in Soviet Russia.
Also, people did not envy their neighbors, people were without classes of separation, (with the exception of the beaurocrats at the top) But Soviet Russia had its positive elements, they will forever on be overlooked because the story is told by anti-communists.
electricpole says
Read "Gulag Archipelago" for a first hand account of Solzhenitsyn's, and tens of thousands of others quality of life. Also, well into the 1970's Party members had access to the best Western goods, every one else stood in line for…….. well, what ever was at the end of that line. The black market was huge. More people lived in one crumbling, substandard concrete apt, than probably live in the three houses on either side of you. Row after row of identical sterile housing units, built with shoddy materials, and poor craftsmanship.
I know many individuals who lived in the Soviet Union or it's satellite states. I know them because they all came to the US, as fast as they could figure out how to do so. And they didn't have to swim against a tide of Americans going the other way!
oliver says
Thousands of Soviet-era prisoners rounded up in Joseph Stalin's brutal purges were dumped without food or shelter on a remote island in Siberia where they turned to cannibalism, according to newly disclosed documents from a Kremlin archive.
More than 4,000 of the 6,000 prisoners abandoned on Nazino, an inhospitable and deserted slip of land in a river 1,500 miles northeast of Moscow, died in less than four weeks in the late spring of 1933. Several dozen cases of cannibalism were recorded as prisoners sought to live off the bodies scattered around the island. Others were killed for their flesh.
A new book, Cannibal Island, draws on documents and witness accounts that have been kept secret for seven decades. Nicolas Werth, a French historian of the gulag, reveals that hundreds of people, including women, children and the elderly, were shot by guards or drowned as they tried to flee the island on makeshift rafts. Many more starved to death.
"People were dying everywhere; they were killing each other," a peasant in her eighties told a researcher investigating the Nazino deportation. Barely 13 when the detainees were dumped on the island, she recalled a pretty young prisoner who was being courted by one of the guards. "When he left, people caught the girl, tied her to a tree and cut her to eat everything they could. They were hungry; they had to eat. When you went along the island you saw human flesh wrapped in rags, human flesh that had been cut and hung in the trees. The fields were full of corpses."
The prisoners were the victims of a ruthless campaign by Genrikh Yagoda, Stalin's secret police chief, to deport hundreds of thousands of people to western Siberia and the steppes of Kazakhstan. The aim was to cleanse Russian cities of "undesirables" and use them to populate these inhospitable regions. In Moscow and Leningrad alone, more than 50,000 homeless petty criminals, gypsies, street children and beggars were rounded up. Others included peasants fleeing famine and citizens not carrying a passport. On the final part of their journey the prisoners were crammed onto river barges heading north. But transit camps became dangerously overcrowded and in May 1933 more than 6,000 detainees were unloaded on Nazino, an island 1A miles long and a few hundred yards across, and what was meant to be a brief stop lasted nearly a month.
Thirty deportees died before reaching the island, and a third of those who disembarked were so emaciated they could not stand. There was no food or shelter, and on the first night temperatures fell below zero.
Five days into their ordeal, as the sick and elderly began to succumb, guards dumped 20 tons of flour on the river banks, sparking a stampede. People were trampled to death and fired upon by the guards. Detainees collected the flour with their hats, coats and hands, but having no way to bake bread they mixed it with river water and ate it. Outbreaks of dysentery and typhoid claimed more lives.
Hundreds of deportees tried to flee across the wide river on rafts. Those who were not gunned down by guards were swallowed by the currents. Ten days after the prisoners were dumped on Nazino, the first of several cannibalistic murders was recorded. By mid-June those who had survived were moved to settlements upstream. The rumors of terrible events were investigated by a propaganda journalist. He was so shocked that he wrote directly to Stalin, who sent a commission to investigate.
"What happened on Nazino beggars belief," said Werth. "But what is unique is the detailed documentation that allows us to tell a story buried for so long. The tragedy is that those who perished on the island were only one of those who died that year from the famine. There were many other Nazinos; we just don't know about them."
em says
I know, people have been trying to breech the border into Russia for decades now.!!!
Dumb uneducated troll!
iwasnotanazipolka says
Good heavens, no! Food lines, secret police, gulags, speech and religion suppressed, a stagnant, corrupt economy. And while you are talking the 1930's, Stalin was starving millions of Ukrainians, destroying his military, locking up or shooting dissenters.
You are clearly reading the wrong material, my young friend.
CURIOUS GEORGE says
The USA, the only difference is that in the Soviet Union there was no freedom.
Trout says
From the people I have met that lived in the old USSR and the occupied regions of the eastern bloc
Uh — they were fed and housed and had a job — which some in our own society just can't say — but the people who lived there — are very quick to point out – that is ALL they had and that was poorly delivered most of the time in an oppressive atmosphere of big brother and secret police
So you go ahead and pick which one is better …. none of the people I have met who immigrated to Canada seem to want to go back for more than a visit
zzsleepur says
hahahahahahaha OH BROTHER…the socialits and commies got you pumped full of crap don't they? hahahahaha
God….read some history ok? Don't listen to the libbies and the commies and the socialists!
Shovel Ready says
Have you ever SEEN a Soviet apartment?
Johnathon says
Yeah the USSR was a great place to live that's why it broke apart.
Boss H says
actually in the USSR people had none of those things because the geographic location of many of them along with other nations unwilling to trade with them, made it impossible.
After the Great Depression America provided a better quality of life thanks to the protectionist environment created by the war.
That is gone now, so you can expect American quaity of life to start falling to.
MoltarRocks says
Were you dropped on your head as a child?
Read up about dissidents, purges, pogroms, the Gulag… yeah, some real winners in the human rights arena there in Russia.
The USA has provided a better quality of life, hands down. If the Soviet system was so great, why did it fall apart? Why did they need to keep people in their respective countries?
iamct01 says
The US just had banksters attacking them in the 30s, the same banksters that took out the USSR.
Peace through blindi says
In the Soviet Union people routinely died for lack of basic human needs even in the later 20th Century while the rest of the World lived in opulent plenty. In the Soviet Union, you positively NEEDED connections to the ruling class or to organized crime just to survive.
jdeekdee says
you are kidding, right? USSR people had to wait in line for TOILET PAPER!!
tickles says
You need to open a history book man.
You are comparing the whole bloody Soviet reign to our one depression? Get better facts to compare.
Indy Pendant says
People didn't leave the USA to live in the USSR, that should be a clue.
RayHere says
You really have no knowledge of the old USSR do you? There are two things I find all over the world Chinese merchants and Russia women prostitutes
Chén says
*Facepalm*
Think Outside the Ba says
No, dude. The Soviet Union was not a cool place to live.
Akai says
No they didn't!
Liberal AssKicker says
How many Soviets went to Gulags?
How long were the Russian bread lines (in city blocks and in years)?
How many Russian women are desperate to marry Americans?
When the Iron Curtain fell, how many fled the USSR?
Are you really as stupid as you sound?