An Old Soviet Joke .... now come true!

An old Soviet joke asked, 'What would happen if Communism came to the Sahara Desert?'
Answer: In three years, there would be a shortage of sand."

But ... now it's actually happened! Cuba, which was the sugar-producing center of the world, whose main crop was sugar -- which the revolutionaries complained about, maybe correctly -- is now importing sugar!!!!

Read all about it in that remarkable journal, The Havana Times.

And by the way, anyone who would like to help advance liberty in Cuba -- peacefully -- should PM me and I'll tell you how you can do it.

 

it doesn't even sound Russian, such jokes are not CCCP originated.

 

bullshit, there's a ideological agenda behind this publication designed for the likes of you to react as you just did. Khrushchov once helped America save face & subsidised its grain producers. US ideologists rushed to grab an opportunity to present that as what it actually never was, for meanwhile the overall Soviet import was merely 3% from overall Soviet production, so the grain import was much less, in fact it was a drop in the bucket.

 

I don't know if this joke actually originated in the Soviet Union. As you know, it was dangerous to make such jokes until the last days of that society, so it may have originated outside the USSR.

But ... how true it was, and is. This great country, potentially so very wealthy, was strangled by its economic system.

Originally, the centralized planned economy seemed to work. Russia was dragged into the 20th Century -- a nation of illiterate peasants became a world power. Whether this could have happened in any other way, I don't know. But give it credit for what it achieved.

But when the economy became complex -- when you had to do more than put up apartment buildings and make dams, and dig new coal mines -- the limitations of the centrally-planned, no-competition economy became more and more obvious. They are brilliantly described in the novel, Red Plenty, by Francis Spufford. When I lived there (just for a few months, in 1985) it was clear to me that they knew they were falling behind ... they couldn't make microcomputers, they couldn't make blue jeans. Something had to change, and it did.

The Chinese understood this quicker than anyone, and eased their way into capitalism, although not democracy. Now the Cubans face the same dillema -- everyone there knows the economy doesn't work, and although the American 'blockade' is not helpful, it's not the main cause of their problems.

Everyone who is a democrat -- small 'd' -- should hope that Cuba finds a way to make the transition to a more open and free society, starting with its economy but not limited to that.

 

You have no idea about the old soviet union

The russians would make jokes as a way of getting around state censorship

And they were quite good at it

 

The USSR was one of the worst shatholes on earth to live in, and one of the worst militaries to serve in.

Lee Harvey Oswald was all gung ho to get there, but he wouldn't stay there even with special privileges when he got an opportunity for a way out. And it's too bad that doors opened for Oswald to come back.

I still hate the USSR with all of my heart.

 

left wing ideological views, destroying societies since the Communist Manifesto was published in 1848

 

No, Sharik may be right. There certainly were Soviet jokes, but I'm not sure about this one. You had to be careful with your jokes under that regime.

Here are a couple of genuine one, although it is from the last years of the USSR, when, under Gorbachev, things were lightening up and changing fast. It was an exciting and hopeful time to be alive there. Almost every day, something would be printed in Pravda, critical of the system, that would never have been seen before. Thus the next joke -- (I used to know these in (basic) Russian, and they sound much better in that language.)

One person rings up another, and asks, excitedly, "Whoa... did you see what Pravda said this morning??? ... amazing!" The other says, anxiously, "Comrade ... we mustn't talk about such things on the telephone!" (In Russian it's something like "that's not telephone-conversation").

Another joke: You need to know a bit of Russian history for this one, so maybe first click on this link.

Four Russians are sitting around the kitchen table, drinking vodka and eating zakuski, talking about what went wrong with their country.
The first says, "Well, I blame Brezhnev ... he derailed the 'thaw' that Kruschev started." ...
they all toss back a shot of vodka and think about this for a while .. then the second one says,
"No ... the real problem started with Stalin... he perverted the ideals of the Revolution ... "
Again, they ponder this, and have another vodka.
Then the third one says, "Well... since we're speaking frankly, comrades ... in reality ... I think the problems started with ..... Lenin!"
This (at that time) was a very bold, shocking thing to say ... and there is dead silence ... and the third one continues ... "Yes ... he may have meant well, but we were on the path to democracy under Kerensky ... and the Bolsheviks derailed us."
Again, a long, brooding silence while they have another shot of vodka and think about it ...
Then finally the fourth one, his speech a bit slurred, says ..."Ah, you're all wrong ... the real author of all our misfortunes was ... Peter the Great!"
This surprises the other three, and they want to know the logic behind his thinking.
So he says, "If that bastard had not won the Battle of Poltava ...... we'd all be living in Sweden!"

I told this joke to two 'tankie' (Stalinist) friends of mine, as the USSR was collapsing, and the female of the two burst into tears and ran out of the room. I felt terrible.

Another, also Russian, although again from the 'late period'.

It's the 19th Party Congress, late 1930s, and Stalin in speaking to a rapt audience of delegates.
Suddenly, from the middle of the hall, is a loud sneeze. AH-CHOO!!!!
Stalin halts, looks up frowning, and says, menacingly, "Who sneezed?" (Something like 'kto cheeknul' in Russian ... with a Georgian accent.)
Dead silence. No one moves.
He asks again, "I said... who sneezed?" Again, nothing but fearful silence.
So Stalin turns slowly to Beria (head of the NKVD) and says, "Comrade Beria -- shoot the first row."
Beria walks off stage and a few seconds later a squad of NKVD men rush in with drawn revolvers and shoot the whole first row of delegates dead.
Then Stalin looks up and says, "Now ... WHO SNEEZED????" Again, a shocked, fearful silence.
So Stalin says to Beria, "Comrade Beria, shoot the second row!"
Again, the NKVD squad, having reloaded, blazes away at the second row of delegates ... all of whom then are draped dead over their seats, twitching for a few seconds ... then silence. Blood everywhere, including on the delegates in the third and fourth rows, but they're too frightened even to wipe the blood off.
Silence again reigns. "Now," says Stalin, "I'll ask again ... WHO SNEEZED???"
This time, from the middle of the hall, a deathly-pale delegate holds up his hand, half-rises from his seat, shaking uncontrollably, and says, "Comrade Stalin ... it was me... I'm sorry I'm sorry .. I didn't mean to ... I didn't ...."
Stalin interrupts him, and says, "Comrade ... .comrade ... sit down... it's all right... but next time, if you're ill, stay home and rest."
He then starts to resume his speech ... but, aware of the shocked silence of the audience, he looks up and frowns, and says "Stalin is strict ... but just."

A wonderful cartoon from that period, in the Moscow News (which was a relatively liberal paper then): It's the dead of night, and a man is in an alley with a can of paint and a paintbrush, looking nervously over his shoulder as he hastily paints a slogan on the wall, which is "Long Live the Communist Party!" [free translation]

This post is too long already. I've got one more, from the pre-perestroika period, told to me by the KGB guy who was our 'minder' when my then-wife and I resided there in 1985. I'll save that for later.

 

bullshit. CCCP had no crises the West had, it also had no taxes & prices growth.

every economy is central planned. CCCP also had free market, literally market places where you could buy any food you want, although at higher prices; besides there was black market too.

such novels describe fiction reality to order of your local authorities to keep you brainwashed.

CCCP did make computers - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agat_(computer) , https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iskra-1030

change just for jeans?.. you must be joking. USA should change for valenky if so.

 

i was born and lived there, it is you with no idea on what the place was like.

 

he would have stayed here alright, but they sent him back to participate in the assassination hoax.

 

Do you disagree that russians made political jokes as a way to avoid getting in trouble with the communist dictatorship?

 

hope you do realise the destruction of CCCP would not have been possible without KGB preparing & conducting it all?

 

those were different jokes, for gosh sake... and what do you mean by 'avoid'?.. you see 'communist dictatorship' was not something you'd bump into that often. Russia is a huge place, as you might notice.

 

Yes, you could go to the rynok and get food from the collective farms, grown on the private plots. When we lived there, that's what we did. Not 'any food you want' though. When I lived in Kharkov, you couldn't get cheese. No one knew why. When people went to Moscow or Kiev on business, they brought back as much cheese as they could carry. Maybe someone forgot to put cheese on the five year plan, maybe the kolkhozi were selling it to the Armenians ... but you couldn't get it.

The quality of Soviet manufactured goods was crap. The TV in our hotel regularly stopped working -- in fact, the maintenance man in the hotel was an expert at fixing TVs. He had to be. Sometimes they caught fire. I had a friend who had been a foreman in a factory that made color TVs and I asked her, once, why they were so bad ... she burst out with a strong of cursewords --- drunk workers, couldn't sack the incompetent ones, etc etc.

Soviet computers were copies of the IBM360 (mainframes) and the PDP11 (minis). They had to buy micros from Japan, and the Cyrillic character set was wrongly burned into the chips. Everyone who lived there knew that something wasn't working. Red Plenty is a brilliant novel -- the author knows his stuff. But the Russian programmers I met were brilliant. It's just that Moscow bureaucrats couldn't do the impossible and make socialism work.

No, not change 'just for jeans'. Change for Sony Walkmans, microcomputers, the chance to own a decent car that you didn't have to wait ten years for, the chance to travel, the ability to give your graduate students a paper to photocopy .... the Soviet system was awful and that's why it collapsed. By the way, if people wanted valenky, I promise you they'd be on sale everywhere in a month. That's how the free market works.

But ... Russia is a great country. More cultured than the US, and the Communists did a lot to get it that way. Give them credit. Classical literature and classical music was subsidized, the education system was rigorous and good, no one starved (after the war). And they beat the Nazis.

As for the KGB bringing down the system. This is true, in a way. The KGB knew what the West was really like, unlike the dull bureaucrats in Moscow, who half-believed their own propaganda about the West being full of starving unemployed.

There's a Russian saying: "You can't fool life." Not even with firing squads and labor camps and secret police ...you can't fool life.

When the system was on its last legs, still socialist but letting people travel, we had friends from Kharkov come to visit us in London. We took one of them to the local Sainsbury's supermarket. She disappeared for a while, walking up and down the aisles ... when she came back to us, she was crying. We had all this, and she didn't, and yet she and her friends and her country were just as smart and hardworking as we were ... it was the system they had to live under. True story.

Too bad the arrogant greedy West blew the opportunity to bring this great nation into the European community, and just saw the collapse of communism as an opportunity for looting Russia's wealth.

 

does not take change to open home market to the world market. CCCP was destroyed because the West had been going bankrupt for its numerous bluff projects like all these much advertised national trademarks designed mainly for propaganda purposes but in fact completely dependent on new resources coming in over and over again. CCCP thus would have won the Cold War, because CCCP was self-dependent and could go on forever, because its financial system was simple and transparent, it had only one bank for the entire country, it had no dodgy financing schemes that would make money make money. CCCP had only as much as it produced; it was a honest system of values; no Western-like fraud involved.

 

True... Old collective farm joke...

Interviewer to worker: Describe how workers are treated in the Great Workers Paradise - USSR.

Worker : Well it is very simple. We have an understanding with the government in that they pretend to pay us and we pretend to work.

 

That makes two of us plus millions of other clear thinking people.

 

BTW the city is back to being called Kharkiv ... what is a "valenky " ? I know what " vareniki" are but not "valenky".

When two of my cousins visted from Ukraine in 1989 ( our family's) first contact in 40 years ) I took them to a average food store super market.
They just about cried when they saw the pet food aisle. They asked me is this aisle just fir dog food. I said no only one side, the other side in For cat food, bird food, gerbel food.

They really loved to watch me get money out of the ATM machine.

We got our wires crossed so they showed up two weeks early so it took over two hours for us to get to the airport. They told us that they could not believe that there were so many cars here because Soviet propaganda said that it was the same cars circling round and round at the pickup at JFK. They finally believed me when they saw that I had three "machini" as they called cars, my sisters had two each, and my parents down to one since we took my dad's keys away from him- Alzheimer's.

They both worked for a collective farm but they grew vegetables and raised animals on what was left oh my grandfathers land. I asked how they fed the animals. Answer - stole Fed from collective and bought bread from bread magazine which was subsidized therefore cheap.

Yes they said the same you say , all Soviet goods were junk. Even trying to get good soap was nearly impossible. They made "samohonka" home made booze or moonshine, they brought us some.

Too many stories to tell here! They were surprised that we who had never set foot in Ukraine spoke Ukrainian and that we had Ukrainian churches, clubs, credit unions here.

Yes both of my parents are from Halychina Western Ukraine.

 

And there is

 

Very interesting! One of the nice things about these forums is that you get to hear from people who actually have experienced life in different countries ... so you learn things that don't make it into the newspapers. I think people here would be interested in your experiences.

I know it's supposed to be 'Kharkiv' but I still think of it as 'Kharkov'. I have many fond memories of my time there -- such warm, friendly people.

I think vareniki are good things to eat ... but you'd only eat your valenky if you were starving.

Your story of the private land fits exactly with what I believed: the private plots were very productive ... but that wasn't ONLY because of the inefficiency of collective enterprise compared to working for yourself, but because a lot of 'socialist' resources, like fertilizer, were diverted to them.

And the unintended consequences of subsidizing bread -- it was so cheap you could feed it to the pigs -- is also well-known to people who have studied the Soviet economy. (But ... there was some bread, and some chocolate, that I thought was very good: "Siberian Soldiers' Bread" and "Fairytales of Pushkin" chocolate -- perhaps because they didn't use preservatives? )

Which brings me to another story you will appreciate:

It's the 1970s ... a Soviet trade delegation is visiting New York City. One of the Soviet delegates is an official who overseas bread production in the Moscow region. After a few days of touring around, they are asked by their American host, "Is there anything else you'd like to see, anyone you would like to meet?"
The Bread Production official says, "Yes, there is. Of course we in the Soviet Union produce plenty of bread, cheaply, for our people. But ... I have to admit, you do seem to have done very well in the varieties of bread you produce. All your "delicatessins" ... so many kinds of bread! We might be able to learn something from you there ... so ... I would like to meet the man who is in charge of bread production for the New York City region!"
There is an embarrassed silence. Finally, their American host says... "Well ... you see... there is no such man ... that's not how bread gets produced here."
The Russian smiles cynically and says, "Oh, come on. Dozens, maybe a hundred, different kinds of bread... thousands of shops selling different mixes of each kind ... all those different kinds of flours, and grains, and other ingredients ... and you don't seem to over-produce or under-produce ... that obvously takes very intricate planning ... probably several computers ... now come on, I'm not asking for your military secrets ... I just want to talk to my counterpart ... how does he do such a complex task? "
His American host tries to explain ... "It doesn't work that way ... no one is in charge ... if someone has an idea for a better kind of bread, he just tries it ... if it sells, he makes more ... if not, he doesn't ... if he is really successful, he buys a lot more flour ... the price of flour goes up ... so more people start making flour ... there is no plan .."
"Okay, okay...", says the Soviet official. "I understand ... you're not allowed to talk about your system... we do the same... but ... really .. you ought to just say, 'It's a state secret' rather than trying to tell me such a ridiculous tale."

 

Well ... Winston Churchill said, after Hitler invaded the Soviet Union, that he, Churchill, would not retract one word that he had said against Communism, but now the Soviet Union was an ally. And, he said, if Hitler invaded Hell, he, Churchill, would contrive to make a favorable reference to the Devil in the House of Commons.

So it can be done.

Let me try: "Hell has had a very bad press for many centuries. You who think it's a bad place have just been brainwashed by Heavenly propaganda. Down in Hell, we aren't hypocrites ... we don't pretend to be nice, to be kind, to be virtuous. It's an honest system! Just one Ruler, and you know where you stand with him. And we never get cold!!! Plenty of natural resources to keep the fires burning! No idle parasites -- they're all busy twisting and writhing and screaming (for pleasure, of course, praising their Ruler) ..And ... you actually depend on Hell! If we didn't exist, you wouldn't be able to say "Go to Hell!" ... your nuns wouldn't be able to frighten little children into doing as they're told! So ... Hell ... not such a bad place after all!"

The world needs a few contrarians. Bless them all.

 

Good Lord! Socialism doesn't work because it can't produce enough, capitalism doesn't work because it produces too much and eats up the world.... what are we to do?

But thanks for this. Now I'll add some bags of sand to my survivalist store in the basement.

 

That is a fantastic post. LOVE thatvstory about the Bread Czar. The fertilizer story yes, that is exactly what my cousins said they stole fertilizer from the damned collective farm.

The left over land that my family over there still had control was put together by my fathers father a WWI veteran of the Austrian Army. He was severely wounded and the Austrian emperor had money put aside to pay wounded veterans even after there was no empire anymore. That part of Ukraine was occupied by Poland not the USSR so my grandfather received that pension until 1939. He used the pension and hard work to set up two small businesses and a small village farm. When the Soviets arrived they took that away and later on sent him to Siberia for being a "Capitalist and a Nationalist". He was a Nationalist that is true but hardly a big capitalista.

Vareniki are stuffed dumplings that Western Ukrainians call "pirohiy" similar to the Polish ". pirogiy". Are valany the flat pieces of unstuffed vareniki made when poor peasants did not have the money to buy cheese? My mom would make hem when she had too much dough left over and used up all the stuffing. We as kids laughed at her when she tried to explain that back "home" that is all they had at times. As stupid ignorant kids growing up in the US we thought that she just made up that story.

My dad's father survived Siberia but my mom's father who lived up near the Belarus border never returned from Siberia.

I really enjoyed your posts!!

 

Thank you for your kind compliment.
When young people are taught history in school, they tend to be taught only the 'big facts'. "Stalin made an agreement with Hitler and both of them invaded and partitioned Poland; Stalin also invaded the Blatic states.."

What they don't hear is the actual stories of real people. But this is what history is made of, and it's also what makes history interesting. So these stories ought not to stay within families, but be published. By the way, the grandfather of a previous wife of mine (#2, as I recall) was the Chief Rabbi of the Austro-Hungarian Army. The Austro-Hungarian Empire gets a bad press (when it gets any at all) but it did hold together a lot different nationalities which later flew at each other's throats. Too bad it couldn't have evolved peacefully into some sort of democratic federation.