{"id":15386,"date":"2017-07-03T12:49:07","date_gmt":"2017-07-03T16:49:07","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/philip.greenspun.com\/blog\/?p=15386"},"modified":"2017-07-03T12:49:07","modified_gmt":"2017-07-03T16:49:07","slug":"what-does-the-socialism-to-capitalism-transition-feel-like","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/philip.greenspun.com\/blog\/2017\/07\/03\/what-does-the-socialism-to-capitalism-transition-feel-like\/","title":{"rendered":"What does the Socialism-to-Capitalism transition feel like?"},"content":{"rendered":"

Nobel laureate\u00a0Svetlana Alexievich’s\u00a0Secondhand Time: The Last of the Soviets<\/em><\/a> is available is available in an English translation. The transition of wealthy economies from a market economy (“Capitalism”) to a welfare state (“Socialism”) has apparently pretty painless for most citizens. Nearly half of the U.S. economy is now centrally-planned or taxpayer-funded and people pay their property tax, sales tax, gasoline tax, payroll tax, Medicare tax, income tax, etc. without complaining too much.<\/p>\n

Alexievich interviewed people in former Soviet republics, including Russia, to find out what it was like to go in the other direction: from Socialism to a free-market Capitalism that demands much more of citizens than the U.S. or Western Europe.<\/p>\n

Everything below is a quote from someone she interviewed:<\/p>\n

Today, people just want to live their lives, they don\u2019t need some great Idea. This is entirely new for Russia; it\u2019s unprecedented in Russian literature. At heart, we\u2019re built for war. We were always either fighting or preparing to fight. We\u2019ve never known anything else\u2014hence our wartime psychology. Even in civilian life, everything was always militarized. The drums were beating, the banners flying, our hearts leaping out of our chests. People didn\u2019t recognize their own slavery\u2014they even liked being slaves. I remember it well: After we finished school, we\u2019d volunteer to go on class trips to the Virgin Lands, and we\u2019d look down on the students who didn\u2019t want to come.<\/p>\n

So here it is, freedom! Is it everything we hoped it would be? We were prepared to die for our ideals. To prove ourselves in battle. Instead, we ushered in a Chekhovian life. Without any history. Without any values except for the value of human life\u2014life in general. Now we have new dreams: building a house, buying a decent car, planting gooseberries\u2026 Freedom turned out to mean the rehabilitation of bourgeois existence, which has traditionally been suppressed in Russia. The freedom of Her Highness Consumption.<\/p>\n

My wife and I graduated from the Philosophy Faculty of St. Petersburg (back then, it was Leningrad) State University, then she got a job as a janitor, and I was a stoker in a boiler plant. You\u2019d work one twenty-four-hour shift and then get two days off. Back then, an engineer made 130 rubles a month, while in the boiler room, I was getting 90, which is to say that if you were willing to give up 40 rubles a month, you could buy yourself absolute freedom. We read, we went through tons of books. We talked. We thought that we were coming up with new ideas.<\/p>\n

There were new rules: If you have money, you count\u2014no money, you\u2019re nothing. Who cares if you\u2019ve read all of Hegel? \u201cHumanities\u201d started sounding like a disease.<\/p>\n

There was so much love! What women! Those women hated the rich. You couldn\u2019t buy them. Today, no one has time for feelings, they\u2019re all out making money. The discovery of money hit us like an atom bomb\u2026<\/p>\n

Before, I had hated money, I didn\u2019t know what it was. My family never talked about it\u2014it was considered shameful. We grew up in a country where money essentially did not exist. Like everyone else, I would get my 120 rubles a month and that had been enough. … Back then, books replaced life\u2026 This was the end of our nightly kitchen vigils and the beginning of making money then making more money on the side. Money became synonymous with freedom. Everyone was completely preoccupied with it. The strongest and most aggressive started doing business. We forgot all about Lenin and Stalin. And that\u2019s what saved us from another civil war with Reds on the one side and Whites on the other. Friends and foes. Instead of blood, there was all this new stuff\u2026 Life! We chose the beautiful life. No one wanted to die beautifully anymore, everyone wanted to live beautifully instead. The only problem was that there wasn\u2019t really enough to go around\u2026<\/p>\n

The Soviet was a very good person, capable of traveling beyond the Urals, into the furthest deserts, all for the sake of ideals, not dollars. We weren\u2019t after somebody else\u2019s green bills. The Dnieper Hydroelectric Station, the Siege of Stalingrad, the first man in space\u2014that was all us. The mighty sovok! I still take pleasure in writing \u201cUSSR.\u201d That was my country; the country I live in today is not. I feel like I\u2019m living on foreign soil.<\/p>\n

Socialism isn\u2019t just labor camps, informants, and the Iron Curtain, it\u2019s also a bright, just world: Everything is shared, the weak are pitied, and compassion rules. Instead of grabbing everything you can, you feel for others. They say to me that you couldn\u2019t buy a car\u2014so then no one had a car. No one wore Versace suits or bought houses in Miami. My God! The leaders of the USSR lived like mid-level businessmen, they were nothing like today\u2019s oligarchs. Not one bit! They weren\u2019t building themselves yachts with champagne showers. Can you imagine! Right now, there\u2019s a commercial on TV for copper bathtubs that cost as much as a two-bedroom apartment. Could you explain to me exactly who they\u2019re for? Gilded doorknobs\u2026 Is this freedom? The little man, the nobody, is a zero\u2014you\u2019ll find him at the very bottom of the barrel.<\/p>\n

A cult of money and success. The strong, with their iron biceps, are the ones who survive. But not everyone is capable of stopping at nothing to tear a piece of the pie out of somebody else\u2019s mouth. For some, it\u2019s simply not in their nature. Others even find it disgusting.<\/p>\n

Did I believe in communism? I\u2019ll be honest with you, I\u2019m not going to lie: I believed in the possibility of life being governed fairly. And today\u2026 as I\u2019ve already told you\u2026 I still believe in that. I\u2019m sick of hearing about how bad life was under socialism. I\u2019m proud of the Soviet era! It wasn\u2019t \u201cthe good life,\u201d but it was regular life. We had love and friendship\u2026 dresses and shoes\u2026 People hungrily listened to writers and actors, which they don\u2019t do anymore.<\/p>\n

Everywhere you look, you see our new heroes: bankers and businessmen, models and prostitutes\u2026 managers\u2026 The young can adapt, while the old die in silence behind closed doors. They die in poverty, all but forgotten. My pension is fifty dollars a month\u2026[ She laughs.] I\u2019ve read that Gorbachev\u2019s is also fifty dollars a month\u2026 They say that the Communists \u201clived in mansions and ate black caviar by the spoonful. They built communism for themselves.\u201d My God! I\u2019ve shown you around my \u201cmansion\u201d\u2014a regular two-bedroom apartment, fifty-seven square meters. I haven\u2019t hidden anything from you: my Soviet crystal, my Soviet gold\u2026<\/p>\n

The first thing to go was friendship\u2026 Suddenly, everyone was too busy, they had to go out and make money. Before, it had seemed like we didn\u2019t need money at all\u2026 that it had no bearing on us. Suddenly, everyone saw the beauty of green bills\u2014these were no Soviet rubles, they weren\u2019t just play money. Bookish boys and girls, us house plants\u2026 We turned out to be ill suited for the new world we\u2019d been waiting for. We were expecting something else, not this. We\u2019d read a boatload of romantic books, but life kicked and shoved us in another direction.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

More: read\u00a0Secondhand Time: The Last of the Soviets<\/em><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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