Do FSUW Harbor a Soviet Mentality?

[Boethius]

The portrayal I have given you is not the portrayal of life of most Soviet citizens, Pat.  Yes, you couldn't say certain things, but, for the most part, by the late 1960's to the 1980's, if you were part of the working class, you generally enjoyed a tolerable standard of living.  If you were from the nomenklatura (by this I include professors, who were inherently a part of the system, though many deny it now), your standard of living was even better yet.


There were shortages of material things - foodstuffs at times, though that varied from place to place, and different things were in shortage, in Kyiv you had to wait 10 years on a list to get a car, my MIL waited 13 years for a phone, and 10 years for an apartment, but summer camps for kids were free, education was free (though of dubious quality), you could save up and, relatively inexpensively, travel through most of a country that covered half the globe, with a variety of cultures and experiences.  Of course, this wasn't the case for peasants, and you could see how hard their lives were  by the time they hit 40, but in Ukraine, by the late 1970's and beyond, those that lived near big cities were able to sell produce and made fairly good money.

[Patagonie]

The portrayal I have given you is not the portrayal of life of most Soviet citizens, Pat.  Yes, you couldn't say certain things, but, for the most part, by the late 1960's to the 1980's, if you were part of the working class, you generally enjoyed a tolerable standard of living.  If you were from the nomenklatura (by this I include professors, who were inherently a part of the system, though many deny it now), your standard of living was even better yet.


There were shortages of material things - foodstuffs at times, though that varied from place to place, and different things were in shortage, in Kyiv you had to wait 10 years on a list to get a car, my MIL waited 13 years for a phone, and 10 years for an apartment, but summer camps for kids were free, education was free (though of dubious quality), you could save up and, relatively inexpensively, travel through most of a country that covered half the globe, with a variety of cultures and experiences.  Of course, this wasn't the case for peasants, and you could see how hard their lives were  by the time they hit 40, but in Ukraine, by the late 1970's and beyond, those that lived near big cities were able to sell produce and made fairly good money.

My wife has some chinese blood due to the fact that her family emigrated to this place.
One member of her family have been killed by the regime.
However her mother was assistant director of a shopping mall during the soviet time where of course the elite was coming.
I am in trouble to figure out the place and role of every member of this family, but that's captiving.