What is the validity of these post on tik tok about the quality of life in the soviet union?

by Queasy-Reference

On TikTok there was a post making some interesting claims about the soviet union pre collapse. Personally I have always considered the soviet unions quality of life to be much worse and would be happy to have my mind changed. My question is how true are these statements and if they are is there any other factors I should be aware of?

The post in question: https://imgur.com/a/gLypxrG

Kochevnik81

So some of these are true, some are half-true, some are outright false. I don't think I could go through all of them, but here are some helpful places to start:

Higher Calorie Consumption than the USA - I addressed this in an answer here

"Second Fastest Growing Economy of the 20th Century" and "25 Years Away from Reaching Parity with the Western World". No and lol no. It sounds like a garbled misinterpretation of Robert C. Allen's Farm to Factory. The USSR did have impressive estimated GDP growth rates in 1928-1970 (this does ignore the massive exception of World War II, and the fact that a lot of postwar reconstruction technically counts as GDP growth will inflate these figures), and arguably was growing at one of the fastest rates in 1950-1970. But this was from a poor base, and the growth rates substantially declined after 1970 (addressing this was a major headache for Soviet leaders and eventually led to Gorbachev's perestroika). The USSR was not closing the gap with Western countries - this gap was obviously growing larger in the 1970s. Japan interestingly came from behind the USSR in the 1950s and surpassed it by the end of the Soviet era.

About homelessness in the USSR, see this answer by u/kieslowskifan.

About unemployment, I would recommend starting with this answer by u/Ayebraine on the Soviet job market (it was a market of sorts). One thing I would note in particular about Soviet homelessness and unemployment is that while by the 1960-1980 period the Soviets got these numbers very low, part of what the USSR did was outlaw unemployment and homelessness, ie you were at risk of being criminally prosecuted as a "social parasite" if you were unemployed or without a legal residence for too long a period.

About the drop in lifespans and the increase in mortality, yes but those mortality figures are lol no. More info on post-Soviet demographic issues in an answer by me here, and about the GDP collapsing (in Russia and Ukraine) is here.

Holy_Shit_HeckHounds

That's a lot of claims. Here are a few posts about Life in the Soviet Union that may be relevant

During the 1920s, the Soviet Union was the most sexually liberated society on earth, decriminalizing homosexuality and abortion... written by u/Georgy_K_Zhukov (with a brief comment by u/Kochevnik81)

This comment by u/Kochevnik81 links to a number of their previous answers tackling the changes to quality of life following the end of the Soviet Union

mikitacurve

"end racial inequality"? That might be the most ludicrous thing in the list, and I don't see any other comments mentioning it yet, so I'll give it a response. This response, in fact. And some more specific cases in this response as well, which I'm actually rather proud of. But the point is, if saying that "the Soviets ended famines" is like saying "the British ended slavery", then saying "the Soviets ended racial inequality" is like saying "the British ended slavery".

Also, "zero homelessness" — the numbers of homeless people decreased over time, to be sure, broadly speaking, but Soviet policies in the 1920s and 1930s also created millions of internal refugees and unhoused millions more. Moscow in the late 1920s and early 1930s faced a housing crisis of vast proportions, and although it was definitely a holdover from a legacy of tsarist inaction and pre-revolutionary crash-industrialization programs, that doesn't diminish the fact that housing conditions were absolutely horrid for millions of people, whether they were technically living under a roof or not. I've written about that in this answer about changes in Moscow over the course of the Civil War and 1920s, in Part 2 of this answer about the Moscow Metro and the housing crisis, and in especial detail in this answer on working conditions on the Moscow Metro.

I'll quote some salient parts here, in fact.

Even though the city's population has shrunk [over the course of the Civil War], you'll probably have moved into a smaller, older, more crowded apartment than you're used to.

See, just because Moscow had been able to house all 2 million people before the war, that didn't mean they were living well. In order to improve living conditions for the abject and working poor who had lived in slums before the revolution, the Bolsheviks almost certainly appropriated your apartment and moved you into a working-class neighborhood. Not that that's at all bad, by a reasonable person's standards, as schools began to offer free lunches, and libraries and theaters were established in working neighborhoods even with the shortages.

So the Moscow you are waking up to in 1922 is a massive city, still, by all measures, where poor and working people have much better access to education and recreation, but it's also an underfed, weary, empty place, and it's not the comfortable city you lived in before the war — not for a bourgeois man like you, anyways.

[...]

The NEP, though, was what brought things back to "normal," and again, it's a normalcy that really does have a lot in common with pre-war capitalist society. The main change of the NEP is that grain and other produce was no longer requisitioned for the army; instead, the state took a 10% tax in kind on surplus production, and the peasants were allowed to sell the rest of the surplus on the free market.

[...]

Comparisons to the Roaring '20s in the West may be a little specious, but in plenty of ways, they're not wrong. The NEP turned Moscow "into a vast marketplace," to quote Emma Goldman. People pour back into the cities, Moscow especially. By 1926, Moscow reaches the 2 million mark again, and by 1933 it will be over 3.5 million. The war is over, you want to celebrate, and contrary to the popular image of life under Communism, you almost certainly have the liberty and means to do so — as a middle-class man, at least. Urban unemployment rose under the NEP, as did the number of people begging on the street and being forced by economic circumstance to sell sex.

[...] It is a busy city again, and you will certainly feel it, because you are almost certainly not getting your old apartment back — it's most likely been subdivided and repainted already. Similarly, you'll feel it on the streets, which are bustling with people — and on the tram cars, which are growing more and more hilariously overtaxed by the day. But that's another topic.

On the transit crisis:

The main means of public transport in Moscow in the late 19th and even into the 20th century was the horse-drawn tram car. Electrification of the tram network began in the late 1890s, and was completed by 1911, but even then, much of Moscow remained reliant on horse-carts. Although trams didn't produce manure, they caused terrible congestion in the center of Moscow too. Dietmar Neutatz, whose book Die Moskauer Metro is the gold standard on the history of traffic planning in Moscow until 1935, describes a tram network already "at the borders of the possible" in the 1910s, with the main streets completely "jammed with trolleys" [my translation]. (38) This is, in fact, what led to the first ideas for a light rail/rapid transit network in Moscow in 1902, but that never got off the ground.

Congestion was improved, in a very darkly comic way, by the war. WW1 forced the tsarist regime to shelve plans for a subway due to budget concerns, but then the need for those plans was suddenly removed by the Civil War, which led to a massive depopulation of Moscow and a massive decrease in tram ridership (nearly half the 1915 population fled Moscow for the countryside by 1920). However, as soon as the Civil War ended, people began to trickle, and then flood, back to Moscow, especially because of the economic flexibility introduced with the NEP. In 1924, the Moscow City Council (Mossovet) came to the conclusion that, by 1928, the tram network would be entirely incapable of handling the required load. They began a new plan for a Metro, but for reasons I will talk about later, it was not implemented.

By 1929, the tram network was operating at 150% capacity, sidewalks were impassable, streetcars were overflowing with people, and dozens of preventable injuries happened each week when people lost their hold or were pushed off overcrowded trams and fell behind them, or even worse, in front of them. This is all according to the other great work on the planning and construction of the first line, William Wolf's Russia's Revolutionary Underground. And this is all as industrialization and dekulakization are beginning to send an even further mass of people into Moscow. Between 1928 and 1933, thanks to those programs, the population of Moscow ballooned from 2.3 million to 3.6 million, and I'll say it again: that's 1.3 million more people in just five years.

So something desperately did need to be done by 1931. But in order to answer the question of whether Stalin and his subordinates really were motivated by altruism, we have to ask, was a Metro really the best way to improve the lives of Moscow's people? I would say it wasn't the best way — investment in new housing was even more desperately needed, and transport to outlying parts of the city would probably have helped more people, even if the problem was mainly in the center. Building a Metro certainly did improve many people's lives by giving them a shorter and easier commute. But that didn't really become accessible to many people until the later 1930s, or even after WW2 for some parts of the city. So the idea of the altruistic motive isn't wrong, but it's not the full picture either.

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