Hard times: Eighteen-year-old prostitute Katya scours the street for work as a police car drives past in Moscow in 1991 shortly before the collapse of the USSR
Daily Mail: Poverty, prostitutes and the long, slow death of the Soviet Union: Haunting pictures show desperate struggle to survive in last days of USSR
These shocking pictures may look like something out of the Great Depression - but in fact they show life in the last years of the Soviet Union, less than three decades ago.
Shop shelves were often bare, it was normal to have to join a long queue if you wanted to buy groceries and many of the people looked ground down after a century of desperate poverty.
The dismal state of the USSR's economy, during a time of rapidly improving living standards in the West, was a result of its dogmatic Communist political system, which stifled free enterprise and stopped the country moving on from its feudal past.
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WNU Editor: These pictures bring back bad memories. I was lucky than most .... I was working for the UN and being paid in a foreign currency .... but that only meant that everyone else was dependent on me. The images that strike me of the time are the train stations being packed with homeless people/families sleeping, the young girls prostituting themselves around Red Square, everyone selling their belongings to make ends meet, the long lines in front of state stores with nothing to sell. Sighhh .... yup .... I still shudder when I think of those days.
6 comments:
I thought this was an interesting comment. [Taken from the top of the comments section]:
"Not a fan of communism at all but ironically it was probably most relaxed time in my life. It may sounds weird but people in Soviet Union had quite lot of money in their hands but nothing to spend that money on in the state-run stores with its low state prices. The very same time you could buy almost everything from a private seller, or just from small free markets with prices 3-4 time higher and a line no longer than in modern supermarket ( except for a very few last months of 1991 after the cope when Gorbachev was ousted from power) Grim: It's what began AFTER 1991. No more state-run stores with low prices, no queues for amazing pictures. No more salaries to buy anything. No former middle income class. Every engineering and production company goes bankrupt. All the property goes into the hands of former comy parteigennoses. The whole country now has only choice to suck out oil as quick as possible."
I also read that comment Anon. But trust me on this one .... it was not a relaxing time.
WNU
I was just a little boy in Argentina in the 80' and Raul Alfonsin was President of the country with the radical party ( radical ).
I do remember how much people sofered ,overinflated economy looting starving people waiting for a dump truck to give a box of free groceries called (caja pan)
Endless lines of people waiting for mediation services .I know how is to live with food rasion at home my parents couldn't find any other solution than leave the country .
This will happen next in the US if we don't change direction.
The only thing I got from the article is, not wearing a bra makes you a prostitute.
Phill .... you have to live under such an environment to appreciate these pictures .... consider yourself very lucky because it is something that I wished I had never lived under.
Coming soon to a country near (or surrounding) you....
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