USSR-Russia. 1988-2018. Timeline.

Over the past 30 years, Russia has gone through a very difficult path. There are few people in the world who imagine this process. And not only in the West, but many people forget this already in Russia itself. Also, very many who knew Russia only in the 1990s, are judged on it for that period. In one English-language forum, I tried to illustrate this path with separate photos, most emphatically emphasizing the changes. Without any specific logic and not in time sequence. In the calculation for a long process Then I decided that the work was not wasted, "immortalize" it in a darknet, in the ZeroNet network. And after - and on this forum

I hope someone will be interested. Do not hesitate to comment.

 

I'll start with pictures to draw attention

1988 was the year when the USSR still seemed inviolable, but the processes of its reorganization were already in full swing. The iron curtain collapsed and Western values poured into the USSR. Cinema, literature, TV shows, beauty contests ... It was in 1988 in the USSR that mass beauty contests began at all levels, from local clubs to the official state level

 

1988. Contest "Moscow beauty"

 

But, just two years later. 1990 year. The refugee camp near Red Square.

 

And here is the red square in our time. I specially publish here not some official photo, which you have seen so much, but just a photo of my daughter with a walk

 

It will take a long story to break through a thick layer of mythology.

Russia after the collapse of the Soviet Union was very weak. The USSR was, in fact, a confederation of independent states. Therefore, when the power weakened, it easily fell apart. Russia is also a composite state, a federation of several republics. When the republics of which the USSR was made became independent, the tendencies towards separatism also began in the republics of Russia. Especially, after Yeltsin said - "Take as much sovereignty as you can swallow." The Chechen Republic was extremely nationalistic, they did not like Russians, and it almost immediately gained not legal but actual independence. Alas, but one independence is not enough to feed and rally people. Chechnya actively cultivated a Russian image of the enemy. Ethnic cleansing began. Russians were killed, expelled from the republic, taken into slavery, publicly executed. Exact numbers will no longer be ever, but it is believed that in Chechnya at that time of genocide, about 30,000 Russians were killed. And another 200,000 Russians fled to Russia, leaving homes and property. But Russia was so weak that it did not do anything even after such events.

But this was not enough. And Chechnya began to attack neighboring regions and commit acts of terrorism in Russia itself. In 1994, Russia tried to bring order in Chechnya by force. Unfortunately, almost all Soviet weapons in the territory of Chechnya went to the militants. All of them under the USSR passed military training. Their commander, Dzhokhar Dudayev, was an experienced Soviet general. And so the war was very close on equal terms. Here is a photograph of what Grozny turned into after the Chechen troops were defeated.

 

Two Chechen wars continued from 1994 to 2000. In 2000, Chechen troops and gangs, in general, were defeated. And the pro-Russian government was brought to power. The process of restoration of the region began. This then for many years caused much resentment among Russian nationalists. Their favorite slogan for many years: "Enough to feed Chechnya!" But the result is on the face. The terrorist attacks in Russia have practically ceased, and Grozny today looks like this:

 

And this is just a photograph without a deep background 1991 year. The failure of the putsch of the State Emergency Committee, which tried to preserve the USSR. On the plate the slogan: "Down with the CPSU!"

 

Perhaps, while I take a pause. I'll continue later. I hope this is interesting Lastly, two photos. Moscow in 1992 and Moscow in 2017 (again, my personal photo).

 

A very interesting account, which matches my memories of my very brief periods of residence in the USSR/Russian Federation. (A few months in Kharkov [as it was then called] in 1985, and periods of a few weeks several times in the late 80s, and early to mid-90s. My then-wife is an economist and speaks Russian, and edited 'The Economic and Social Newsletter' in Moscow in the mid-90s.)

The Americans/'the West' had a golden opportunity to partner with Russia, starting in 1989 ... they should have let her find her own combination of socialism and the market, they should have invited her to join NATO, they should have restrained -- probably not legally possible -- the avalanche of 'missionaries', both fundamentalist Christian and libertarian-economic, who poured into the country to lead the backward Russians onto the True Path (of Jesus or market-fundamentalism, or both). I remember these pests well from when I was in Moscow in the 90s. Shallow, ni-kulturni ignoramuses who knew nothing of Russian history or of her intellectual and cultural achievements.

In particular they should have prevented their rapacious banks from financing the ex-Communist 'Oligarchs' who were gobbling up the national property of the Russian people. They didn't, and Mr Putin is the result.

Disastrous. Bone-headed. Criminal.

American anti-Communists used to quote Alexander Solzhenitsyn extensively, and rightly so. You don't often see his views from towards the end of his life: From the Wikipedia article on him:

"In 2006 Solzhenitsyn accused NATO of trying to bring Russia under its control; he claimed this was visual because of its "ideological support for the 'colour revolutions' and the paradoxical forcing of North Atlantic interests on Central Asia". In an 2006 interview with Der Spiegel he stated "This was especially painful in the case of Ukraine, a country whose closeness to Russia is defined by literally millions of family ties among our peoples, relatives living on different sides of the national border. At one fell stroke, these families could be torn apart by a new dividing line, the border of a military bloc."​

Anyway, there are a few Americans who understand what is going on. Anyone interested in understanding Russia today should read -- in addition to Balancer's thread here, hopefully to be continued -- Christopher Caldwell's How to Think About Vladimir Putin -- just click on the link.

 

How about vintage Russia? I like it much better.

 

This is also an interesting topic But this is a completely different topic. In addition, inextricably linked with the theme of the Second World War and the huge losses that fell to the share of the USSR. Besides, I did not find the period, only my grandparents.

But the transition from a prosperous USSR to the abyss of the 1990s and climbing out back I experienced on my own skin

 

I feel you, brother.

We all know the post-cold-war period (and even earlier, starting with the Perestroyka in 1985) sucked pretty bad. Failing economy, unemployment, massive privatization, the hyperinflation of 1998, thugs and thieves, oligarchs...

 

From Lenin to Dugin. Here's hoping that Russia doesn't collapse like the western neoliberal imperial bloc is, because Russians deserve a good decade without something shitty happening. Here's also hoping that Russia doesn't go full Nazbol and start actually and not just for lols following Dugin.

 

I don't think Dugin is taken very seriously by the people who really run Russia. At least I hope not.
As for 'vintage' Russia ... of course, a fascinating society, but for this thread, there is, I think, only one relevant point:

It took Europe several centuries to crawl out of feudalism into modernity, not without a lot of blood. Even the peaceful English had to fight a bloody civil war and cut off their King's head. The Americans had modernity handed to us on a plate, as children of post-revolutionary England -- no internal wars once we cut loose from Britain, with the small hiccup of ending slavery.

But while we were occupied doing that, the Russians still had a kind of feudalism, called 'serfdom', which was only formally abolished when the Americans were finishing their civil war. Even then they retained an essentially pre-modern political structure, an absolutist ruler unrestrained by parliament or law, and this backwardness was reflected in their ruling layers: while the Germans and Americans and English and French were building airplanes and tanks to fight the First World War, the Russian High Command was debating whether or not to move the bones of the saints from Kiev as Ludendorf advanced. (The Tsar opined that the Germans wouldn't dare touch them, and if they did, so much the worse for them.)

Of course every young Russian with any spirit at all wanted to rip this rotten system up by the roots, and they did. Well .. in hindsight, we can wish events had turned out differently than they did. Russia was actually growing economically, and might have made the transition to some sort of constitutional monarchy, or even a democratic republic, had it not been for the war. If my aunt had cojones, etc.

The point is, the Russians have made a forced march in one century from backwardness to modernity, something which took many centuries in the rest of Europe, from peasants pushing wooden plows to men guiding spacecraft (and women -- the first woman in space). (In their own way, so have the Chinese.)

If the Europeans don't make every possible effort to counter the likes of Mr Dugin, to draw Russia into her rightful place as a leading European nation ... the more fool they.

 

Another place where the changes were very bright. School. Soviet schools were quite utilitarian in comparison with modern schools. But there were a lot of them. Even many small or inaccessible villages had their own schools. When I went to rural school in 1980, there were 7 students with me in my class. In the classroom, which was three years older than mine, there were only two girls. The whole class is two people It was practically individual training In cities, of course, there were also large classes, in some cases up to 30-40 students. Schools were considered a very safe place. Children already in the first class went to school from home independently, sometimes for several kilometers. And parents did not worry that something bad could happen to their child. Fences around schools were purely symbolic. And often absent at all.

After the beginning of perestroika, and by the time of the collapse of the USSR, the situation has changed a lot. In schools, began to appear drug addiction, crime, alcoholism. I already did not find this period, because I graduated from school in 1990. But, of course, I've heard a lot about this period from relatives and friends who studied at school at this time or whose children were studying there. And my mother is a teacher.

Then, education in Russia underwent a major alteration. Schools became much smaller in number, but they became larger. Around the schools appeared fences. At the entrance to the school sits guard. Especially after Beslan, when the Chechens attacked the school, which resulted in the death of more than 300 children. In recent years, schools have undergone serious repairs, re-equipment with the latest equipment. But the main trouble is the very low prestige of teachers. Low salaries of teachers, low social status. This is a very big problem for modern Russia.

Photos I will send the following messages.

 

Under Putin, Russia has become a Fascist state.

 

Soviet schools looked like this in 1988.

 

And this is what my rural school looks like today.



Schools look much better today than in the USSR. But here the level of education has become noticeably weaker :-/

 

Is this a Russian propaganda thread?

 

Ronstar: Yes, it is. Balancer and I are both paid agents of Vladimir Putin, tasked to lull naive Westerners into believing that Russia is a complex country -- not Denmark, not North Korea, somewhere in between, with many achievements and good traditions alongside many terrible episodes in its history and bad traditions, with a leader that some of us would wish were different, but whose current position can be understood as the vector sum of past problems not of his own making -- sort of like the US, come to think of it -- that's our evil goal.

We are trying to hide the horrible reality: Russia, a monolithic nation of human robots, is planning to Conquer the World and send us all to the Gulag, which will actually be a version of life in Russia today: starving people, primitive conditions, a Hobbsean world where life is nasty, brutish and above all , short.

Ha ha ha ha ha ... you naive fools! But ... you seem to have seen through us! I would stop eating soup, if I were you. [Actually, I lied about our being agents. We're really both AI bots, programmed in a basement in Leningrad. Soon we'll stop this thread because American elections are approaching and we must choose the next US Congress.]
,
Balancer: Very interesting. The Soviet Union had a pretty good reputation with respect to education -- I believe the Bolsheviks, after some initial experimentation and following of fads, (and of course after the terrible disruption of the Civil War, which saw literacy levels retreat), settled down to a policy of extending the traditional system to everyone, but especially looking for mathematical/scientific/engineering/technical talent among young people to develop, building on and extending the great Russian tradition of achievement in these fields. (My Soviet friends liked to say, 'In the Soviet Union, the only privileged class are children. I think they were making an off-by-one error, as programmers say, but they were not far off.)

Russia's current problems with education sound very similar to America's problems in the same area, in particular, the question of teachers' prestige. Interestingly, I believe Cuba, which has a good education system (if you forget the political indoctrination), is having the same problem -- teachers are leaving to become waiters in hotels with foreigners, since the pay they get there is far more than they would get as teachers. [For anyone interested in reading about contemporary Cuba, I suggest they look at the remarkable on line newspaper, The Havana Times, at Havanatimes.org. ]

I think the only solution in the US is higher pay, earned via higher standards for teachers, and, crucially, making the school environment a better place to work in. Which leads to the next point:

In America, a big problem is the bad behavior of students, especially in the 'inner city'. This is a harder issue to tackle, probably more difficult in the US than in Russia.

But there is a common source in both countries, which will make its effect felt everywhere, eventually: with modernity comes individualism. Each generation is less and less inclined to simply 'follow orders'.

In the long term, this is a good thing, I believe. If your students come from middle-class homes and feel they have a future and a place in the system, it just means you have to argue with them more. A teacher is seen, rightly, to represent 'the system'. It's the kids from 'down below', who don't feel that, or who for other reasons are deeply alienated from the system, who are the real problem.

Your photos are very interesting. Especially the next-to-last one.Do you know who the little boy at the end of the second row is?

 

This is also a big problem in Russia after the collapse of the USSR. Previously, teachers had great prestige. If the teacher complained to the pupil's parents about his bad behavior, then the parents immediately took action. It was very embarrassing if your child behaved badly at school. After the collapse of the USSR, this attitude completely disappeared. Most parents do not care how the child behaves. And teachers often became treated like servants. "We gave you a child, teach him what you want, and in no case do not scold, do not offend, or we'll sue!". Really talented teachers who are able to interest and train very little. And the basic, simple workers of the school, can not do anything against the badly leading students. At what these students are not enough that they themselves learn badly, they still interfere with others.

No, this is not my photo, I found examples from 1988 in Google. I have in my archives somewhere there should be my photos of 1988 with the school, but it's hard to find

Quickly from 1988 I found only a photo near my grandmother's house in a small town, almost a village in the Kalinin region. I am the far right



Unfortunately, I do not have now a photo of this place in the same foreshortening today. I can only say that the houses are still there are the same wooden, but asphalt paved good

 

Blatant propaganda...yup

 

Not a word about the corruption...funny that huh?

 

Corruption, unfortunately, is not demonstrated in photographs. I'll try to describe in words

In the USSR, corruption was very domestic, low-level. These were some small gifts for services. For example, put a bottle of vodka to the tractor driver, because he will plow the your garden during your working hours, and will not work for the benefit of the collective farm. In the higher echelons, there was practically no corruption, because money played a very small role, and personnel and political issues were almost always solved by large groups of people. All the country's top leadership consisted of state support and almost no money. There was nothing to pay and nothing.

This was one of the many reasons why the USSR collapsed. The young leadership wanted, as in the West, to have their own villas, yachts, planes ... Most of this in the USSR was in principle unavailable to them.

Therefore, when the USSR collapsed, a corrupt bacchanalia began in the country. Everything was sold and bought. From weapons from the military to factories and seats in parliament. With money, you could create anything.

The situation began to be slowly corrected from the 2000s. This is a very slow process that does not catch sight. But as a result, corruption has been almost eliminated at the level of small employees and at the level of high commerce. It is now difficult to bribe a policeman in many parts of the country. But in other places corruption, of course, occurs. Regular arrests, arrests, and loud anti-corruption processes are taking place. It's literally just took up the sweep of Dagestan. The level of corruption there was prohibitive, almost everything was bought and sold. Many former heads of this republic have already been imprisoned. Lawsuits against the corruption of others are opened.

However, there are a lot of corruption schemes in business relations, the so-called "kickbacks", when one firm pays employees of another firm for them to make the right choice in the tender. But this is not a political level. And in other countries, as far as I know, this is also a mass phenomenon.

Personally, I, as a simple Russian without any high connections and steep business, last encountered corruption around 2003 Then in Moscow there was a pretty tough passport regime and the police (then not yet reorganized into the police) could detain violators of the passport regime to find out personality. And I lived in Moscow without documents and ran to a business meeting. I was detained by a policeman and demanded documents. I gave him instead of documents 200 rubles (something about $5) and ran on Then this was in the order of things. Now I would not venture to even think about something like that. Today, a policeman would detain me for attempting to give bribes Yes, and do not need this today. Now the police do not delay for lack of documents.