USSR through the eyes of foreigners. Soviet people through the eyes of foreigners

Each nation has its own characteristics. For example, a German can be recognized by excessive pedantry, an Italian by emotionality and active gestures, an American by smiling, etc. The citizens of the Soviet Union also had their own recognizable demeanor, thanks to which they could be figured out in a multinational crowd - at least, so did the inhabitants of Western countries.

So, what was the Soviet man in the eyes of foreign guests?

frown

According to the Americans, in the Soviet Union it was not customary to smile without a special reason. Foreigners noted that our citizens liked to put on a stern or even gloomy look. If an American, when meeting a stranger, will definitely smile with all 32 teeth and affably ask how he is doing, then the face of a Soviet citizen will shine only at the sight of a person he knows well.

clothing

Rough fabrics, simple cut, black, gray and brown shades - these were the characteristic features of the clothes of a Soviet citizen. When in the late 1950s the French Fashion House Christian Dior came to Moscow with a show, the townspeople looked with surprise and even fear at the dressed-up models with catchy make-up. Muscovites against the background of these "birds of paradise" looked very faded and dull.

dirty shoes

There were rumors that a Soviet spy could be identified by his shoes. Even if he is wearing a fashionable suit made of expensive fabric, dirty shoes will definitely be on his feet. It was said that there was no cult of shoes in the Soviets. The main thing is that the boots are comfortable, and cleanliness is the tenth thing.

Way of talking on the phone

It is now that every apartment has a landline telephone, and in the distant Soviet times, people had to use telephone booths. Communication, of course, left much to be desired, so I had to shout loudly so that the subscriber heard what they were trying to say. The habit of talking loudly on the phone has come down to our days.

Alcohol

The Soviet man had his own unique manner of drinking alcoholic beverages. They drank cognac, vodka and others like them in one gulp, no one thought about any savoring. The reason for such a culture of drinking is very banal - the rapid ingestion of alcohol led to delayed intoxication, and if a foreigner got drunk after the second glass, then our men, in order to reach the same condition, needed 2-3 times more alcohol.

tea drinking

Only Soviet citizens drank tea without removing the spoon from the cup, but it was not a matter of bad manners, but that the liquid cooled faster this way.

Cigarettes

Soviet citizens were also calculated by the manner in which they knead and purge a cigarette before lighting it. The Soviet tobacco ritual arose from the fact that cigarettes were so densely packed with tobacco that it was very difficult to light them, so they had to be carefully kneaded.

P. S . This is what our compatriots looked like from the outside. You can argue or agree with this opinion, but it would not be entirely fair to ignore it. However, what is noteworthy is that it was foreigners who saw Soviet people gloomy and stern, not knowing that distrustful alertness to everything alien was the result of Soviet upbringing. Whereas the inhabitants of the USSR communicated with each other in a completely different way: openly, affably, sympathetically.

Foreigners, for example, could also be easily identified from the crowd by unnaturally glued smiles and the on-duty question “How are you?”, the answer to which was not interesting to them - it’s just how it is with them. The well-known satirist writer Mikhail Zadornov even somehow sneered about this: only our man answers this question in all seriousness and begins to talk in detail about how he is doing. The mentality, however!

Many foreign guests come to our country. With different goals, with different missions. Of course, far from all of them share the views of the Soviet people, far from everything that they write about the USSR, one can agree with. But something else is important: some sincerely want to understand unfamiliar reality, others are not interested in it. Their goal is to select tendentious evidence, on which fakes and provocative fictions 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 the Soviet people.

SINCE THE COLD WAR in the 1950s, the accusations against the Soviet Union have hardly changed. The alternative remains the same: either the risk of nuclear war and the death of mankind, or the danger of "cruel and inhuman domination by the Soviets." The preferred way out is clearly stated in the slogan "better to be dead than red."

So what kind of society is it that evokes such implacable and unrelenting hostility from our governments, Labor and Conservative alike? What allows NATO to consider itself entitled to deliver a preemptive 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. In recent times, under capitalism, wars have been waged in order to secure access to sources of raw materials and markets. There are many countries that have been enemies throughout history. For Russia and England there is no such tradition. Russia never invaded the territory of England, although we twice (during the Crimean War and foreign intervention in 1918) made such attempts in Russia. In the last war, the continued existence of Britain was secured at the cost of huge sacrifices on the part of the Soviet Union. The British are indebted to a country they now regard as their enemy.

WHO NEEDS STEREOTYPES

The attitude of the British to other societies most often comes down to stereotypes, with the help of which we evaluate the people living there, their life. The Soviet Union appears to us as a system that President Reagan calls the "evil empire" and Mrs Thatcher calls "brutal and despotic." This stereotype comes from the presumption that the USSR was, is and always will be the sworn enemy of Britain, and this serves as a kind of justification for our intentions.

The stereotype is based on two unproven allegations: first, the Soviet Union allegedly commits crimes against other peoples, and second, that it 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? Has the nationwide rebuff 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?

And how then to evaluate our partners in NATO - the US and Germany? On account of Germany - the unleashing of two world wars. And on the conscience of the United States, our ally in both wars, there is a long list of "militant" actions against other peoples: Vietnam, in which several million people died through the fault of the United States; Chile, where democracy was trampled; El Salvador, where a dictatorship masquerading as "democracy" came to power with American support.

The "militancy" of the Soviet Union is a very far-fetched reason for considering it our adversary.

The second assertion concerns the "violation" of human rights in the USSR. But how are they to be understood? Isn't mass unemployment and poverty in Western countries a violation of human rights? And how to classify discrimination against the black population in the United States? What about the ban on professions in West Germany? In this context, the accusations against the Soviet Union look more than suspicious.

THE USSR CANNOT WANT WAR

When in January 1983 I returned from my three-month trip to the USSR, I noticed how often we write that the Soviet authorities forbid the discussion of nuclear weapons. My eyewitness experience refutes these claims. I had the opportunity to move freely from one city to another (of my own choice) and meet with party and trade union workers, leaders and ordinary members of collectives, with workers and directors, students and teachers. Everywhere the question of the nuclear arms race aroused lively discussion. All this topic seemed very important.

The Soviet people have serious reasons to hate the war. He does everything so that the horrors of the past war are not forgotten, he educates the younger generation in loyalty to the memory of the dead. As far as I know, not a single Soviet person cynically calculates possible losses and chances of survival in a nuclear war, does not talk 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 the Soviet people is the provision of 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 may be fired without the consent of the local trade union committee. No new equipment can be introduced until the redundant workers are provided with another place. Soviet people are also guaranteed housing. Essentials are very cheap. Rents, lighting, heating and gas cost no more than 6 percent. earnings. Public urban transport is almost free, the fare for the metro, tram and bus has not changed since 1950. Vouchers to sanatoriums and rest homes are provided by trade unions on preferential terms. The prices of foodstuffs such as bread, meat and potatoes are very low, especially compared to ours.

"DANGEROUS MYTH-CREATION"

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 coming to power of the Bolsheviks in October 1917, joy was replaced by fear, as soon as it became clear that Bolshevism would hold out. 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, except for a short and rather double-dealing period during the Second World War. So, until 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 focused on anti-Bolshevism: if earlier in the United States they were engaged in converting ordinary Americans into ardent chauvinists and spy addicts, now they began to introduce hatred of Bolshevism everywhere. Heartbreaking "stories" appeared in the press that, for example, an electric guillotine capable of chopping off 500 heads per hour was launched in Petrograd. The power in the country was described as a combination of massacres, robbery, anarchy and general disorder. The Bolshevik leaders were called "murderers and lunatics", "pathological criminals". The official trade union movement joined this smear campaign in order to get rid of their 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 the newspaper headlines, asserting, for example, that women in Soviet Russia were nationalized (Daily Telegraph, 1920), but in the military intervention that began in February 1918 and lasted three years. The intervention of the British, French, and American troops aggravated the civil war, led to a terrible devastation in the economy and, after it, to a great famine in 1921-1922. The October Revolution was comparatively bloodless, and had it not been 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 commercial considerations. But the initial hostility to Bolshevism has not changed to this day. Only the methods have changed. Thoughtlessly, without relying on facts, without the slightest idea of 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.

A very dangerous myth-making.

Excerpts from a lecture by V. Allen, Professor of Sociology at the University of Leeds (England), "The Soviet Union: Myths and Reality", which was published with some abridgements in the journal "XX Century and the World".

The USSR collapsed, and myths about it continue to haunt the minds of those who have no idea what it was. Or represents, 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 US citizen named Kasparas Asmonaitis. The article is located on the American portal The Richest, in the "shocking" section:

The Soviet Union was the biggest 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" for the entire Union. Sometimes it seems that the USSR was a mass cult whose supporters were brainwashed. And yes, Soviet censorship was the strongest weapon. Of course, people had the right to have their own opinion, but only as long as it was in line with the official line of the Communist Party. Otherwise, voicing one's opinion could only drive a person to a concentration camp ... or to a coffin. It's hard to believe, but there are more deaths on the conscience of Joseph Stalin than on the conscience of Adolf Hitler. The Soviet Union was the most terrible threat of the 20th century, which everyone was afraid of, 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. It 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 find out 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 the age of 22

People always complain that they were born in the wrong place at the wrong time. This is such nonsense. 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. It's terrible and dishonest. But World War II and the Nazis alone cannot be blamed for this tragedy: 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 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 policy of the USSR is correct, fair and protects the world from the rotten values of the West. No wonder educated people didn't listen to all this propaganda nonsense. The Soviet Union decided that the best way to deal with such rebellious citizens was to send them somewhere far away, for example, to the vast Siberian taiga. In 1933, the Soviet Union sent 6,200 people to an island in Siberia and left them without shelter or food. A month later, when officials returned to check on the unfortunate prisoners, 4,000 of them were already dead.
Massive 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 met many older people who were sent to Siberia for no reason. And this is just one of the many cruel sides of the USSR.

Soviet soldiers in World War II had to fight without weapons

No other country paid as little attention to its armed forces as the Soviet Union. The Soviets believed that quantity, not quality, was more important in war, so they usually sent masses of untrained and unprepared troops into battle. Nobody says that this tactic of sacrificing millions didn't work, but we are talking about human lives. There were quite a few cases when during the battle one soldier was given only weapons, and another - only ammunition. Officials on such occasions would say, "The enemy has a lot of weapons, so go get them," which can be paraphrased as "I'm sorry, but you're probably going to die, soldier. However, continue to love your country."
And the unfortunate soldiers had no choice but to go to 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, only a 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, the workers just turned it off. Naturally, the nuclear waste in the storage tanks heated up and exploded, causing many deaths, mutations and diseases in the Chelyabinsk region. Yes, Homer Simpson would have done better than those workers!
Of course, the Soviet government was not happy about such a disaster, so they decided to keep everything a secret. Only 32 years later, in 1989, the first documents about the Kyshtym nuclear disaster were published. And that's true - why would the government take responsibility, if you can 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, a cruel and vicious, but outstanding person). 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 is just a formality. Lavrenty Beria was a very cruel person who developed all the most terrible tortures used by the KGB until the collapse of the USSR. Beria was the only one of 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 abilities and his power by 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 in the main headquarters of the KGB, using his own methods of torture. As Beria himself used to say: "Give me a man, and I will find a crime." He did not know that these words would turn 180 degrees and kill him.

Katyn massacre

Joseph Stalin was a very vicious and pragmatic person. He saw no problem in sacrificing thousands of people just to prove his point. For example, in 1940, after the Soviet Union invaded Poland, Stalin ordered his subordinates to start 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 to the massacres of Poles. They claimed that this genocide was the work of the Nazis. It was not until 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 worst crimes against humanity, but the Holodomor is almost comparable to it in terms of the number of victims. From hunger in 1932-1933. six to eight million people died, and many more were at the extreme stage of exhaustion. What happened? The government adopted an unrealistic five-year plan, began to push for collectivization and ignore any sign that it was not working. The villagers felt oppressed but were afraid to oppose the government. And what could work in theory did not work in practice. To be honest, almost everything related to communism worked in 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 Ukrainians. The USSR wanted all people to stop asking questions and submit. And, apparently, people who were afraid to die were better at following orders.

The Soviet Union used the symbols of the Ku Klux Klan for propaganda

Even though the Cold War was not brutal, it was still vile. 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 Los Angeles Summer Olympics after the US did the same with the Moscow Olympics in 1980. However, the Soviet Union applied ugly methods. They wrote dozens of threatening letters purporting to be from the Ku Klux Klan and sent them to Olympic athletes from around the world. The fake letters were supposed to scare the athletes and destroy the Los Angeles Olympics.
Let's face it: the fake email plan could have tarnished the US image. 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 took place as planned.

"The death of a man 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 incalculable, and the attitude towards 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 this, but lived by this rule. On his conscience, 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 calls you a "friend", you will end up in a concentration camp the next day - and even then if you're lucky. More often, Stalin simply killed his "friends." He didn't care about the Soviet Union, people, economy or anything else - only about himself. Historians estimate that this man is responsible for the death of 20 million. Well, that's 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 didn't have time to go on strike. I know it just looks stupid, but we're talking about the Soviet Union here.
One of the most useless things the USSR ever did was digging 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 claimed that the workers were only drilling a well to see how deep they could drill it. So the government wasted millions and proved the fact that a 12,262 m deep well could be drilled in this place. If this type of management was inherent in the country as a whole, then it is understandable 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, it was very difficult to forge a Soviet passport, because they used metal clips of very lousy quality. So when American spies came to the USSR, KGB officers could easily figure them out by 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 it was only necessary to wait a couple of years and arrest people whose passports looked suspiciously good. It seems that this is the case when the low quality of products was in the hands of the Soviet Union.

Prisoners got tattoos depicting Lenin and Stalin

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 forbade shooting images of national leaders, so many prisoners got tattoos with Lenin and Stalin on their bodies. This gave them a kind of immunity from the bullets of the guards and resulted in mass prison breaks and even more chaos. This law is one of the best examples of how much nonsense was going on in the USSR. Stalin and other dictators felt it was better to let the prisoners escape than to desecrate the images of national heroes. It's just mind-boggling.

smallpox outbreak

The Soviet Union developed biological weapons throughout the Cold War. It was one of the top 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 a viral disease. The only positive was that the government was conducting these tests in a remote area. However, three people have died from the outbreak and ten more have become 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 not having a secret weapon. In addition, the government took responsibility for this action only in 2002. And before that, they did what they knew how to do best - pretended that nothing had happened, and imprisoned anyone who thought otherwise.

Food stamps and shortages

Considering how much money the USSR was investing in the 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 had 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 listened to Elvis and ate their "spoiled Western food," Soviet people stood in line for a loaf of bread. Today, people stand in line to buy a new iPhone, but in the USSR, people lined up literally for a piece of bread and a pack of butter. These food stamps and the shortage of the most common food products are a serious indicator showing that the country was becoming more and more impoverished, and the government did not care about it.

Voting at the song contest by turning on / off the lights in the apartments

It is already clear that people in the USSR lived without much comfort. Naturally, the telephone was not in every house. 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 light in their apartment. If you don't like it, turn it off. Thus, the state energy company was able to evaluate the power flow for each case and determine which of the contestants received which number of points.
This voting system seems super complex. Also, I'm sure the government could have easily faked the results if they wanted to. As a result, the winners in the song contest were announced by the state energy company. Of course, this is better than nothing, but still - such inefficient and funny things could only happen in the Soviet Union.

The first astronaut animal was from the Soviet Union

During the Cold War, both the US and the USSR spent billions of dollars on space exploration. It became a kind of competition "who has a longer dick." The United States was the first to land 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 a Moscow street. Scientists decided that she fits perfectly, as she already lived in critical conditions of hunger and cold. I do not 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 is 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 aggravation 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 a French Jacques Margeret and Scot Patrick Gordon, and new eras brought new chroniclers - from John Reed with his "Ten days ..." to science fiction H. G. Wells with Russia in the Dark.

From about the thirties, all visits of foreigners to the USSR were put under the strict control of Intourist. Much later, during the time of perestroika, this organization would become, in a sense, a sacred place: here both the currency and the foreign tourists themselves with branded clothes. There were many legends, but first of all, it attracted those who did not strive too zealously to honor the Criminal Code: black marketers, currency traders and prostitutes. And at its core, Intourist was just a travel agency that had a monopoly on the market of the whole country, but was limited by many different instructions and orders that regulated the life of the staff.

We can talk about any noticeable tourist flow only from the fifties. Stalin died, declared a thaw, Nikita Khrushchev began to travel 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 the 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 exerted by the foreign tourist's own political views. Gabriel Garcia 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 an essay "USSR: 22,400,000 square kilometers without a single Coca-Cola advertisement." He treated the Soviet Union with sympathy, although he noticed a lot.

“Moscow - the largest village in the world - does not correspond to the proportions familiar to a person,” Marquez described. “Deprived of greenery, it exhausts, overwhelms. Moscow buildings are the same Ukrainian houses, enlarged to titanic proportions. As if someone gave the masons as much space, money and time as they need to embody the pathos of embellishment that overwhelms them. In the very center there are provincial courtyards: here clothes dry on a wire, and women breastfeed their children.

Marquez was struck by a meeting in a city at night with a girl who carried a whole armful of plastic turtles (“In Moscow, at two in the morning!” He enthusiastically noted. However, this would probably look amazing even now. Or public toilets, on which, perhaps all travelers paid attention, and the writer drew a conclusion from his experience that was not the most respectful, although he noted that “there are neither hungry nor unemployed in the Soviet Union.”

“Soviet people get entangled in petty life problems. On those occasions when we were 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 established 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 in the late fifties, Heinlein's worldview changed once again: he completed work on the book "Stranger in a Strange Land" (anticipating the appearance of hippies). And it was on this break that he came to the USSR.

What exactly made Heinlein go on his trip across the three seas is unknown. He refers to the fact that his wife spent two years learning the Russian language and this skill should have been used somehow. But mostly the writer complains.

“Being 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 correctly tune in to stay in the Soviet Union, you need to become like a man hitting himself on the head with a hammer: can you imagine what 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 per dollar at Intourist, which means that you are ripped off like a sticky”), about the total control of Intourist, about bad rooms.

“I can’t recommend the luxury category to you in any way, because even the best in Russia is shockingly bad by our standards: bathrooms without baths, even entire hotels without baths, no hot water, “eccentric”, if not worse, toilets, tasteless food, dirty dishes, crazy expectations,” he writes. However, we have already read about toilets in Marquez.

To brighten up your stay in the USSR at least a little, Heinlein recommends demanding (whether in English or otherwise) what everyone needs and being polite.

“If neither polite stubbornness nor loud rudeness work, resort to direct insults. Waving your finger in the face of the most senior officer present, feign extreme rage and yell "Nyeh Kuhltoornee!" ("Uncultured!"). Emphasis should be placed on the middle syllable and the “r” emphasized,” 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 did not go: in his opinion, one trip to the USSR is educational, the second is already masochism.

The Martian Bowie. 1970s

In April 1973, British musician David Bowie ended a super-successful tour in Japan, pleaded aerophobia (and a sign from above) and traveled to Europe by train through huge, cold and snowy Russia. True, the traveler saw snow only once, and the whole trip took a little less than ten days. From Yokohama to Nakhodka, Bowie and his companions got on the Felix Dzerzhinsky motor ship, transferred to the “old French train of the beginning of the century” and reached Khabarovsk, and then his journey across the country began. In a slightly less antique, but quite decent (and clean, as the musician wrote) train. Surprisingly, not much evidence has been preserved of that trip. A dozen or two photographs, memories UPI journalist Robert Musel and several short letters written by Bowie himself.

“Siberia was incredibly impressive. For days on end we rode along majestic forests, rivers and wide plains. I could not have imagined that such spaces of untouched wilderness still remained in the world,” he wrote about the Far East.

Most likely, Bowie was still cunning 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 conductors (one of his escorts believed that they were girls from the KGB), who bought homemade food for him at bus stops. They listened to the songs, according to the musician, with pleasure, although they probably did not understand the texts. The identities of some of the first Bowie fans in the USSR - their names were Tanya and Nadia - 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” shot up in 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 made an indelible impression on everyone who saw him.

“He was tall, slim, young and predatory handsome. His hair was dyed red and his face was deathly pale. He wore platform boots and a brightly colored shirt with metallic thread gleaming from under a blue cloak. He had a guitar in his hand,” Musel described his appearance at the train station in Khabarovsk.

In Moscow, David Bowie went to 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 the KGB agents.

“Of course, I had some understanding of Russia from what I read, heard and saw in films, but the adventure that I had, the people I met, it all came together in an amazing experience that I will never forget,” Bowie wrote.

Three years later, he returned to Moscow in the company of his punk rock grandfather and his friend Iggy Popom, whom Bowie then helped 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.

If you think that after the collapse of the Soviet Union, Western anti-Soviet propaganda has fallen into disrepair, you will have to be disappointed. Here is a perfect example of such an 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, rather, a citizen) of the United States. Read, just be careful!

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. It 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 find out 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 they were 22.

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 policy of the USSR is correct, fair and protects the world from the rotten values of the West. No wonder educated people didn't listen to all this propaganda nonsense. The Soviet Union decided that the best way to deal with such rebellious citizens was to send them somewhere far away, for example, to the vast Siberian taiga. In 1933, the Soviet Union sent 6,200 people to an island in Siberia and left them without shelter or food. A month later, when officials returned to check on the unfortunate prisoners, 4,000 of them were already dead.

Massive 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 met many older people who were sent to Siberia for no reason. And this is just one of the many cruel sides of the USSR.

14. Soviet soldiers in World War II had to fight without weapons

No other country paid as little attention to its armed forces as the Soviet Union. The Soviets believed that quantity, not quality, was more important in war, so they usually sent masses of untrained and unprepared troops into battle. Nobody says that this tactic of sacrificing millions didn't work, but we are talking about human lives. There were quite a few cases when during the battle one soldier was given only weapons, and another - only ammunition. Officials on such occasions would say, "The enemy has a lot of weapons, so go get them," which can be paraphrased as "I'm sorry, but you're likely to die, soldier. Still, keep loving your country."

And the unfortunate soldiers had no choice but to go to 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, only a 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, the workers just turned it off. Naturally, the nuclear waste in the storage tanks heated up and exploded, causing many deaths, mutations and diseases in the Chelyabinsk region. Yes, Homer Simpson would have done better than those workers!

Of course, the Soviet government was not happy about such a disaster, so they decided to keep everything a secret. Only 32 years later, in 1989, the first documents about the Kyshtym nuclear disaster were published. And that's true - why did the government have to take responsibility, if you can 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, a cruel and vicious, but outstanding person). 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 is just a formality. Lavrenty Beria was a very cruel person who developed all the most terrible tortures used by the KGB until the collapse of the USSR. Beria was the only one of 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 abilities and his power by 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 in the KGB headquarters using his own methods of torture. As Beria himself used to say: "Give me a man, and I will find a crime." He did not know that these words would turn 180 degrees and kill him.

11. Katyn Massacre

Joseph Stalin was a very vicious and pragmatic person. He saw no problem in sacrificing thousands of people just to prove his point. For example, in 1940, after the Soviet Union invaded Poland, Stalin ordered his subordinates to start 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 to the massacres of Poles. They claimed that this genocide was the work of the Nazis. It was not until 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 worst crimes against humanity, but the Holodomor is almost comparable to it in terms of the number of victims. From hunger in 1932-1933. six to eight million people died, and many more were at the extreme stage of exhaustion. What happened? The government adopted an unrealistic five-year plan, began to push for collectivization and ignore any sign that it was not working. The villagers felt oppressed but were afraid to oppose the government. And what could work in theory did not work in practice. To be honest, almost everything related to communism worked in 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 Ukrainians. The USSR wanted all people to stop asking questions and submit. And, apparently, people who were afraid to die were better at following orders.

9 The Soviet Union Used Ku Klux Klan Symbols For Propaganda

Even though the Cold War was not brutal, it was still vile. 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 Los Angeles Summer Olympics after the US did the same with the Moscow Olympics in 1980. However, the Soviet Union applied ugly methods. They wrote dozens of threatening letters purporting to be from the Ku Klux Klan and sent them to Olympic athletes from around the world. The fake letters were supposed to scare the athletes and destroy the Los Angeles Olympics.

Let's face it: the fake email plan could have tarnished the US image. 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 man 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 incalculable, and the attitude towards 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 this, but lived by this rule. On his conscience, 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 calls you "friend", you will end up in a concentration camp the next day - and even then with luck. More often, Stalin simply killed his "friends". He didn't care about the Soviet Union, people, economy or anything else - only about himself. Historians estimate that this man is responsible for the death of 20 million. Well, that's 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 didn't have time to go on strike. I know it just looks stupid, but we're talking about the Soviet Union here.

One of the most useless things the USSR ever did was digging 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 claimed that the workers were only drilling a well to see how deep they could drill it. So the government wasted millions and proved the fact that a 12,262 m deep well could be drilled in this place. If this type of management was inherent in the country as a whole, then it is understandable 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, it was very difficult to forge a Soviet passport, because they used metal clips of very lousy quality. So when American spies came to the USSR, KGB officers could easily figure them out by 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 it was only necessary to wait a couple of years and arrest people whose passports looked suspiciously good. It seems that this is the case when the low quality of products was in the hands of the Soviet Union.

5. The prisoners got tattoos with the image of Lenin and Stalin

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 forbade shooting images of national leaders, so many prisoners got tattoos with Lenin and Stalin on their bodies. This gave them a kind of immunity from the bullets of the guards and resulted in mass prison breaks and even more chaos. This law is one of the best examples of how much nonsense was going on in the USSR. Stalin and other dictators felt it was better to let the prisoners escape than to desecrate the images of national heroes. It's just mind-boggling.

4 Smallpox outbreak

The Soviet Union developed biological weapons throughout the Cold War. It was one of the top priorities to have a stronger army 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 a viral disease. The only positive was that the government was conducting these tests in a remote area. However, three people have died from the outbreak and ten more have become 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 not having a secret weapon. In addition, the government took responsibility for this action only in 2002. And before that, they did what they knew how to do best - pretended that nothing had happened, and imprisoned anyone who thought otherwise.

3. Food stamps and shortages

Considering how much money the USSR was investing in the 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 had 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 listened to Elvis and ate their "spoiled western food," Soviet people stood in line for a loaf of bread. Today, people stand in line to buy a new iPhone, but in the USSR, people lined up literally for a piece of bread and a pack of butter. These food stamps and the shortage of the most common foodstuffs are a serious indicator showing that the country was becoming more and more impoverished, and the government had nothing to do with it.

2. Voting at the song contest by turning on / off the lights in the apartments

It is already clear that people in the USSR lived without much comfort. Naturally, the telephone was not in every house. 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 light in their apartment. If you don't like it, turn it off. Thus, the state energy company was able to evaluate the power flow for each case and determine which of the contestants received which number of points.

This voting system seems super complex. Also, I'm sure the government could have easily faked the results if they wanted to. As a result, the winners in the song contest were announced by the state energy company. Of course, this is better than nothing, but still - such inefficient and funny things could only happen in the Soviet Union.

During the Cold War, both the US and the USSR spent billions of dollars on space exploration. It became a kind of competition "who has a member longer." The United States was the first to land 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 a Moscow street. Scientists decided that she fits perfectly, as she already lived in critical conditions of hunger and cold. I do not 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 is cooler than the States. And such stupid behavior continued until the collapse of the USSR.