I was born in USSR and Mongolians were our Asian brothers, together with Uzbeks, Kazakhs and Tadjiks and all the other tribes in the 'stans. I remember perusing Uzbekistan main daily in Tashkent as a young child, seeing gobbledygook in Cyrillic and thinking that it was really funny.
My mother was had some really wealthy Mongolian clients who were parking money in USA real estate post 2009 meltdown and for a while they were visiting a lot. We had them over at my place and their Russian was remarkable. Basically everyone in the ruling classes was educated in USSR and spoke perfect Russian not only conversationally, but down to the cursing and jokes. My uncle went out with these guys to fish for flounder in Puget Sound and confirms pretty good command of those last two. They brought me a bottle of Chengiz Khan vodka with Cyrillic label and poitless flakes of gold in it that just sat there for a few years until I re-gifted it. Fun times.
Say what you will about USSR, they brought out a lot of people from nomad lifestyles to the modern life with widespread education, without barriers to entry that we have here in USA. Ken Alibek (https://www.amazon.com/Biohazard-Chilling-Largest-Biological...) was one of the examples of going from village to bacteriological weapon design and on the strength of being smart.
One of my good friends growing up was Kazakh(which is quite rare here in the US) and I met her mother who spoke fondly of the USSR; she spoke fondly of Russians(the people) but not of the government. Meeting them taught me a lot about the difference between people and their government.
I don't think it is a good example when we are talking abouz adcancement of civilisation and how the USSR helped with it. Because bio weapon research is not helpful with that I think.
Burbs of Moscow. But my family traveled extensively, more than usual for average soviet person, so I've been to every republic but Tadjikistan (all of course now countries) before the age of 14. It sounds like a lot, but it was just a spot here and there, that empire is a vast and incredibly varied land full of so many different people and even more full of nothing human related, it is difficult to comprehend unless you experience it.
> Burbs of Moscow. But my family traveled extensively, more than usual for average soviet person, so I've been to every republic but Tadjikistan (all of course now countries) before the age of 14
There been a huge wave of post-Soviet immigration to New York in early nineties.
A certain amount of people still presume that people in that wave were all Soviet dissidents, intelligentsia, and repressed jews, and etc.
It only came to New Yorkers years later that whom they let in were faaaar from being some poor average Soviet citizens. CPSU members themselves, mafia, ex-spooks.
Back in nineties, an average Russian citizens would need to save for years just to buy a one way ticket to US, and legal paperwork.
Nobody, no regular person in early nineties Russia had money to just to fly to US, and buy a NYC apartment for cash.
A price of a NYC apartment was a few lifetimes worth of savings for even best paid people in union's government.
You're making the assumption that "travel a lot" implies "ruling class". Like I said, you can't possibly know that. You don't know anything about them, other than that they traveled a lot.
FWIW I have a friend from Azerbaijan who saw a lot of the USSR as well. I don't know the details, and there will likely be people here on HN with first-hand USSR experience who can tell me why my memory makes no sense. But his story was that there was money but you couldn't use it for much, except train tickets. They saved it up and then took epic train trips through the USSR, once up to Estonia and once east towards Kyrgyzstan (not sure they got that far though), stopping in every republic along the way.
His parents were a craftsperson and a high school teacher. Don't make assumptions about strangers on the internet.
> You're making the assumption that "travel a lot" implies "ruling class".
Not necessarily ruling but definitely highly privileged. You definitely could not just travel on a whim inside the USSR. You needed special permission from the government, which was most commonly (but not exclusively) given to people whose job depended on travel.
The restrctions might have been somewhat more relaxed in the middle of nowhere in Asia, but they were extremely strict for example in occupied Estonia where I'm from. You couldn't even travel inside the whole capital city of Tallinn, even if you yourself lived there. The city was divided into zones and there were border guards protecting these zones. You can only go to a zone that has a shoreline when you directly reside there. Otherwise you might try to escape the utopia. -- The restrictions of course go way beyond just Tallinn. Want to visit one of the 1500 islands of Estonia? Too bad, not allowed unless you live on the specific island. Want to just explore the countryside? Might be somewhat possible, but better be careful not to get close to any of the secret closed cities or any of the numerous missile silos, unless you want to be labled as a threat to the USSR.
> Not necessarily ruling but definitely highly privileged. You definitely could not just travel on a whim inside the USSR. You needed special permission from the government, which was most commonly (but not exclusively) given to people whose job depended on travel.
No, you did not need permission to travel inside the USSR. I don't know about Estonia, but we were living in Tashkent and before I was 13 I have visited Moscow, Leningrad, Sverdlovsk, Alma-Ata, Vilnyus, and several other places. All that travel was pretty much leisure.
My parents were engineers - very not elite.
On business my mom traveled to Tbilisi, Talinn, Baku and god knows where else.
And yes, we lived in "the middle of nowhere in Asia" (aka Tashkent) and had been in pretty much every corner of a huge country.
> Say what you will about USSR, they brought out a lot of people from nomad lifestyles to the modern life
MMhh OK, lets not ignore the fordable settlement that literally wiped out the majority of the wealth of the steppe and and killed or starved to death up to 50% of people while inducing severe starvation and malnutrition on the rest of them.
It basically was basically genocide that attempted to destroy a whole culture.
And then forced to do basically forced labor on state farms for the next couple of decades on low efficiency state farms.
The elites of those groups were moved to the gulags in large numbers as well.
I understand that your experience are from a decades after that and a lot had changed.
But while the mass death of Ukrainians is in the news often because of Crimea, the much higher % of death Kazakhs is basically ignored.
Not sure which barriers to entry you're thinking of, but Asian Americans, as a whole, are wealthier than White Americans, better educated, stay married more, commit much less crime, and live longer.
Your comment would have been much better without the unnecessary dig, which was also wrong.
Their comment was on people moving from traditional nomadic life to modern education within a lifetime. How are Asian Americans relevant to that situation in the slightest? Because both groups of people happen to be Asian?
You just witnessed modern US propaganda in action. We are all constantly barraged by messages about "if you look non-white you must be oppressed, poor thing". And because it is constant it is making people perform snap judgements rather than actually think.
Of course someone from Uzbekistan is quite different from an an American with a vaguely Asian looking face, both culturally and economically. Any yet the parent comment author's brain automatically filed them in the same bucket. This kind of automatic thinking is exactly how propaganda works.
Speaking to Mongolian clients who likely belonged to the oligarchy before and after the fall of the USSR does not provide an accurate picture of the situation at large.
My favorite part of Mongolian history is when their head refused to mass kill monks... I mean fight with the enemies of the people, so he was invited to Yalta (or some other resort?) and killed. And a new head was appointed instead.
Say what you want, there are countries that achieved way more than USSR, not to mention Mongolia, without mass killings, man made famines, slavery camps, serfs (1960s was the year when Soviet "collective farmers" were salaried for the first time and got a right to get a passport and leave their "farms").
Please don't take HN threads into total flamewar hell. I realize that the USSR remains a difficult and polarizing topic in a lot of ways, but the GP commenter was posting in a human way and you responded with the internet equivalent of guns blazing. That's not cool. We're trying to have curious conversation here, not smite enemies.
I'm sure that you have excellent reasons for feeling the way that you do on this topic. Nevertheless it's not cool, on this site, to rush into ideological or political battle when strong feelings are activated. If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.
I grew up in East Germany. I was part of the mass events leading to the wall coming down, so you can tell what side I'm on.
Still, I hate it with a passion that anytime someone dares to mention some good points of what happened in the "socialist" Eastern countries, and on a purely human level there is plenty even on the system level, comes up with this whataboutism normally thrown at others.
Yes those systems had to go. But there was plenty of good stuff there, and rebuking anyone who dares mention some is unhelpful. It's such a random uncontrolled reflex.
Godwin's law does not apply to the situation when Stalin is mentioned and someone introduces a Hitler comparison. They were both evil but Stalin had the ideological framework that presented him as good.
There’s always this guy on the internet that thinks in absolutes. The world is black and white for him, without any historical context. It’s all about strong words like “man-made famine”, “slavery camps” etc., all feelings and no thinking.
> I don’t want to take any side. It’s just that I really don’t believe in absolutes.
Do you believe that absolutely?
On a more serious note, how can you lump the Soviets (and socialist regimes like the CCP) with everything else? It's like conversing with someone who, having been told that Bob murdered Alice, responds by saying that everyone makes mistakes and that, on a good day, Bob could be a nice guy. Communist regimes were at a whole different level of evil. The sheer number of people murdered, the social and cultural destruction and dysfunction it wrought, the deeply warped wordlview it imposed through the tyrannical apparatus of the almighty and pervasive state. The list goes on. I guess dissidents were just being ungrateful, eh? They didn't appreciate the good parts!
I will agree that Americans and others should engage in more self-criticism because American culture and its establishment are degenerate and share some eerie similarities with their Soviet counterparts. But this sort of whataboutism doesn't dismiss the glaring truth about the Soviet regime. For someone who says he doesn't believe in "absolutes", you basically demonstrated that you actually do. We're talking about different magnitudes and variety of evil here. People made lasting friendships in concentration camps and gulags, they even found their calling in those awful places[0] in a kind of metaphor for life in general, but no one would say "Eh, you know, it wasn't so bad. There were some good things in those gulags. And after all, American public schools are traumatic and soul-destroying, so..."
Lies. They got passports in 1974 only.
https://www.kommersant.ru/doc/1147485
(that pertains only to Kolkhoz workers. Sovkhoz workers were free and had passports from the very beginning, but there were many times fewer of them).
I mean, "good old" Soviet Union was a prison for all of it's population throughout it's existence, but it was also a prison within a prison for 37% of it's population till as late as 1974. Human existence there could hardly be called a modern life at any point of it.
> Say what you will about USSR, they brought out a lot of people from nomad lifestyles to the modern life with widespread education
The USSR also took a lot of educated modern lifestyle people and sent them to Siberian forced labor camps. The whole thing was very much a calculated plan to replace the educated upper and middle class with new people that would be more loyal to Stalin.
