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Shes Not Impressed posted:Having lived in Ukraine 6 months now, I'm convinced nobody remembers anything correctly. That might also have to do with the high levels of alcoholism, because my walks to school in the morning and afternoon are like scenes from The Walking Dead. Please tell me your impressions of Ukraine after 6 months. I assume you're in Kiev?
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Apr 18, 2017 19:48
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Baronjutter posted:Please tell me your impressions of Ukraine after 6 months. I assume you're in Kiev? No, not Kyiv. I spent 3 months in Chernihiv on the outskirts of the city and now I live in Zakarpattska oblast in a small town. I'm a Peace Corps Volunteer so I'm limited in what I can/should say on any form of social media, but if you want me to answer something more specific I could try. I do enjoy your posts and family's perspective by the way.
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Apr 18, 2017 19:55
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Why aren't you allowed to talk about it? Are you a front for the CIA?
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Apr 18, 2017 20:03
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Shes Not Impressed posted:No, not Kyiv. I spent 3 months in Chernihiv on the outskirts of the city and now I live in Zakarpattska oblast in a small town. I'm a Peace Corps Volunteer so I'm limited in what I can/should say on any form of social media, but if you want me to answer something more specific I could try. I do enjoy your posts and family's perspective by the way. Just, anything. Your impressions of the people, your impressions of the places, any changes or trends you've seen over your time there so far. Slices of life, anything.
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Apr 18, 2017 20:05
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mobby_6kl posted:Why aren't you allowed to talk about it? Are you a front for the CIA? We aren't allowed to visit Russia because they think we're spies. We also aren't allowed to travel into the east for obvious reasons, though we are allowed to visit Chernobyl now. But it takes 15 hours on an overnight train for me to get to Kyiv, so travelling isn't something I'm keen on here. And sometimes the buses don't even show up!
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Apr 18, 2017 20:09
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Baronjutter posted:With family who grew up during that period they all say the same thing. Life was... ok but no one had any drive. No one was energized and there was no reward, material or social or emotional, for doing a good job or going above and beyond. It was total emotional stagnation, people had nothing to believe in and were stuck in a system where being lazy and cutting corners wasn't really punished and working hard or giving a poo poo wasn't rewarded. The only ways to get ahead were through corruption, black markets, and cronyism so that's what people focused on if they wanted more in life. If this kind of social-effects-of-Soviet-system stuff is what you're looking for more than economic history, you might be looking for a book like Yurchak's Everything Was Forever Until It Was No More which takes the view that the Soviet collapse somehow managed to be both completely unexpected and completely unsurprising to those living within it. It's academic though.
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Apr 18, 2017 20:19
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Baronjutter posted:Just, anything. Your impressions of the people, your impressions of the places, any changes or trends you've seen over your time there so far. Slices of life, anything. I love the language, but I'm not sure I'll ever love Ukraine. But that has 21 months to flesh itself out. One thing I noticed was that in Cherniniv, with a lot of Russian speakers, there was a lot more nationalist propaganda. Here in the west, I hardly see any. In Chernihiv, every playground, bus stop, fence, etc. was painted blue/yellow and tons of billboards saying "Free Ukraine" and to join the army. People here in the Transcarpathian region speak a different language that most other Ukrainians don't understand and the people here also have a multi-cultural background. I know when Ukraine became independent in this region had a high voter turnout to become autonomous. Maybe that's why it's not as advertised or maybe they're already inclined to want to join Europe. I had dinner with a family tonight who left Dontesk when the war started and now live in Kyiv, so that was quite a cool experience. On the whole, I don't understand what's happening around me 80%+ of the time. The Soviet legacy definitely runs deep in the way people behave though. As a TEFL volunteer, it makes working in the education system very challenging.
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Apr 18, 2017 20:23
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Also during this time is when dacha's really took off. I mean they were always a thing but for so many people they became the only places that held any joy or meaning. You often built the thing yourself with your family over years. You planted those fruit trees, you built the greenhouse, you sowed the garden and you were directly rewarded for all your work and the quality of your work. It was a place you felt in control of and that your labour there mattered. You could take pride in the quality of your little house, it felt good to eat food you grew your self. Or at least that's what it was like for my family and their "soviet middle class" peers. For many the dream of having a nice little chunk of land and a dacha was unobtainable.
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Apr 18, 2017 20:25
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Shes Not Impressed posted:People here in the Transcarpathian region speak a different language that most other Ukrainians don't understand and the people here also have a multi-cultural background. I know when Ukraine became independent in this region had a high voter turnout to become autonomous. Maybe that's why it's not as advertised or maybe they're already inclined to want to join Europe. Since you're in the West, might want to do touristy stuff in Lviv if you get the chance...
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Apr 18, 2017 20:34
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Baronjutter posted:Also during this time is when dacha's really took off. I mean they were always a thing but for so many people they became the only places that held any joy or meaning. You often built the thing yourself with your family over years. You planted those fruit trees, you built the greenhouse, you sowed the garden and you were directly rewarded for all your work and the quality of your work. It was a place you felt in control of and that your labour there mattered. You could take pride in the quality of your little house, it felt good to eat food you grew your self.
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Apr 18, 2017 20:47
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cinci zoo sniper posted:Same was here, for my middle class grandparents who lived in the city. Grandpa assembled the garden house and all the poo poo brick by brick all by himself over like a decade or something. Because you either did that, or you sent your children (i.e. my mother) to camp out grocery store door starting a 4am in winter, because a rumour said there will be fresh sausage sold. Same here. Fortunately he was a civil engineer so he knew what he was doing, and who to ask for help / where to buy stolen construction material. In a way the economy as a whole was skewed towards this black market in services and goods - people learned quickly that if you wanted to get anywhere, you had to be very brazen about stealing poo poo, and consider your role as an entrepreneur (dealing illegally with government property) far above your official role assigned through employment. And people who couldn't get a dacha would often just spend their free time escaping to the woods, camping, drinking and singing around fires, hunting mushrooms etc. well outside civilized areas because there was nothing for them in the cities. (thank god for temperate climate) steinrokkan fucked around with this message at 23:39 on Apr 18, 2017 |
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Apr 18, 2017 23:27
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steinrokkan posted:Same here. Fortunately he was a civil engineer so he knew what he was doing, and who to ask for help / where to buy stolen construction material. In a way the economy as a whole was skewed towards this black market in services and goods - people learned quickly that if you wanted to get anywhere, you had to be very brazen about stealing poo poo, and consider your role as an entrepreneur (dealing illegally with government property) far above your official role assigned through employment.  The place itself still stands as is, and slightly less than 40 years old. Main building has only seen some rooftop patching, and has a slightly sagged down floor under a wardrobe. Edit: Like, there were people legitimately so mad with my grandfather that they would drive to our garden, during construction, and count bricks against the material purchase sheets.
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Apr 19, 2017 00:36
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cinci zoo sniper posted:Edit: Like, there were people legitimately so mad with my grandfather that they would drive to our garden, during construction, and count bricks against the material purchase sheets. Do you remember any of these people's names? I think they're my neighbors now.
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Apr 19, 2017 14:21
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spacetoaster posted:Do you remember any of these people's names? I think they're my neighbors now.
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Apr 19, 2017 14:37
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Not stealing during communism? Your gramps sounds like a big old square, friend
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Apr 19, 2017 14:40
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dex_sda posted:Not stealing during communism? Your gramps sounds like a big old square, friend
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Apr 19, 2017 14:45
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cinci zoo sniper posted:I get that you are joking, but no, with the garden construction predating me by two decades, all I know is that these people were various employees in local interkolkhoz building company, mad with grandfather, who held a leadership position of some sort in it, making unpopular decisions, such as "let's not steal" or "let's work overtime to make up for our mistakes" and so on. My father-in-law writes for the local paper (it's like a paper for the factory where everyone works) in his town in Russia. He uses it as a platform to complain about the local preacher that he's been feuding with for years. Inserting insults and comments about the guy in articles. I love it because everyone in the town knows them both, and they do hard eyerolls whenever they read the stuff. These disputes add to the color of a community, but what your people went through sounds worse (dangerous?).
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Apr 19, 2017 14:52
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cinci zoo sniper posted:He's an example of Soviet textbook propaganda about working class - manual labourer, lives in a farm, politically active member of the Communist Party, and so on. Good guy, were it not for rampant alcoholism and continuously developing ego, as well as "drat lame Western burger bootlicking gays, don't even hold shame for being so masterfully outplayed in 17th-dimensional geopolitic chess by Putin". Just taking a bit of a piss. My dad was the exact opposite, he was a maestro in bullshitting and getting away with it during the soviet era. For example, re: illegal poo poo and cutting corners as the way economy worked. When he was about 20, he had an illustrious business selling vodka without needing the rationing coupons. He figured out that you could get a coupon for one bottle if you returned 10 empty ones to salvage, and you got a slip which you could easily forge to say you brought back ten times as many bottles - coming back to one coupon per empty bottle. He would sell those bottles for a very decent price but with one requirement: the next time, you bring the bottle back. Had to stop after returning dozens of bottles a day became suspicious at every salvage yard. I've no idea if this is even true but I love the story. I feel it illustrates the times really well. Another thing he liked to remember fondly was signing up as a blood donor in all the blood donor places in my city, and in one more place in the most neighbouring city. You see, you got one day off if you donated blood, but you couldn't donate for 3 months afterwards. So my dad was registered in many places and donated using the blood donor ID that could donate every time he needed a day off for some jobs on the side. Sometimes would donate four times in a month, which is definitely unsafe, and definitely the most metal way to get a day off. Re: lack of drive someone mentioned. I notice that people that miss the soviet era the most are the ones without any ambition or drive to work properly. Perhaps they just liked everyone being the same as them. 
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Apr 19, 2017 14:55
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spacetoaster posted:These disputes add to the color of a community, but what your people went through sounds worse (dangerous?). If he seems to be an upright fellow, that must mean he is hiding something. If he tells us not to steal for ourselves, that must mean he steals that much more for himself. Everything is a zero sum game, and the only reason somebody would appeal to morality is to enrich himself at your cost. And so we must hate him and conspire against him to break up his private con against us. Fine Soviet mentality.
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Apr 19, 2017 14:56
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spacetoaster posted:My father-in-law writes for the local paper (it's like a paper for the factory where everyone works) in his town in Russia. He uses it as a platform to complain about the local preacher that he's been feuding with for years. Inserting insults and comments about the guy in articles.  That must own so hard to take a thinly veiled piss every now and then in a newspaper over the course of years (decades?) about some guy you have a beef with.And no, it was just annoying, not dangerous. The entire "plan" of the "opposition" was to catch my grandfather stealing something and cause both the law enforcement and the party come down hard on him for being out in the open with it. Since it was painfully obvious, he did avoid doing any of that, and nothing went further than snide comments and foul rumours, to best of my knowledge. E: dex_sda posted:Re: lack of drive someone mentioned. I notice that people that miss the soviet era the most are the ones without any ambition or drive to work properly. Perhaps they just liked everyone being the same as them. cinci zoo sniper fucked around with this message at 15:08 on Apr 19, 2017 |
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Apr 19, 2017 14:57
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dex_sda posted:Just taking a bit of a piss. My dad was the exact opposite, he was a maestro in bullshitting and getting away with it during the soviet era. The worst as far as private enterpreneurs go was that since the state ran everything, being given a job with any measure of control over anything basically gave you a monopoly on a service or on goods in the area. You became a lord of a petty chiefdom, and used it to screw people over or exact your petty revenge. If you were the manager of a small town grocery store, for example, then you became the gatekeeper of the entire town's access to luxury goods (and anything could be a luxury, depending on what sector was failing its quotas). Sure, nominally your stock was supposed to be sold at a determined, fixed price, but nobody would care that you took products in short supply off the shelves, and sold them at your own discretion at an arbitrary price. And the locals had to suck it up because there was no competition, or rely on the dutifulness of local authorities to bother with investigating such crimes. Or if you were a plumber, you technically were supposed to work equitably according to unified guidelines, but you could just spend your workdays doing jobs at your own schedule with no regard for official timetables, depending on which customers provided the best "incentives" - again resting knowing fully well that there was nobody to compete with you because you couldn't become a plumber outside a government utilities company.
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Apr 19, 2017 15:10
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dex_sda posted:
Now I'm just a big fat American who spends a lot of time in Eastern Europe, but my experience is that it's people who didn't actually experience the Soviet Union that seem to miss it. They see the old shows/books and think it seems great. They never froze during the winters, or starved. cinci zoo sniper posted:
It's not veiled at all. He flat out refers to him as the rooster.
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Apr 19, 2017 15:12
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steinrokkan posted:The worst as far as private enterpreneurs go was that since the state ran everything, being given a job with any measure of control over anything basically gave you a monopoly on a service or on goods in the area. You became a lord of a petty chiefdom, and used it to screw people over or exact your petty revenge. If you were the manager of a small town grocery store, for example, then you became the gatekeeper of the entire town's access to luxury goods (and anything could be a luxury, depending on what sector was failing its quotas). Sure, nominally your stock was supposed to be sold at a determined, fixed price, but nobody would care that you took products in short supply off the shelves, and sold them at your own discretion at an arbitrary price. And the locals had to suck it up because there was no competition, or rely on the dutifulness of local authorities to bother with investigating such crimes. Or if you were a plumber, you technically were supposed to work equitably according to unified guidelines, but you could just spend your workdays doing jobs at your own schedule with no regard for official timetables, depending on which customers provided the best "incentives" - again resting knowing fully well that there was nobody to compete with you because you couldn't become a plumber outside a government utilities company. Yes. This is one of those things I had to learn about the culture early on. I'm in the Army (people in the US are usually interested in things like: "Do you get to drive a tank?" and the like). In Eastern Europe it immediately goes to: "What are you in charge of? How many people do you control?". And it weirded me out at first because I hadn't learned about what you just said.
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Apr 19, 2017 15:16
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spacetoaster posted:Now I'm just a big fat American who spends a lot of time in Eastern Europe, but my experience is that it's people who didn't actually experience the Soviet Union that seem to miss it. They see the old shows/books and think it seems great. They never froze during the winters, or starved. spacetoaster posted:It's not veiled at all. He flat out refers to him as the rooster.  drat, dude's not pulling any punches.
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Apr 19, 2017 15:17
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cinci zoo sniper posted:They're just used to the big daddy state spoonfeeding them jobs, housing, and whatnot. I've seen so much of this in Latvia that I get irrationally mad even thinking about it. spacetoaster posted:Now I'm just a big fat American who spends a lot of time in Eastern Europe, but my experience is that it's people who didn't actually experience the Soviet Union that seem to miss it. They see the old shows/books and think it seems great. They never froze during the winters, or starved. spacetoaster posted:It's not veiled at all. He flat out refers to him as the rooster. steinrokkan posted:The worst as far as private enterpreneurs go was that since the state ran everything, being given a job with any measure of control over anything basically gave you a monopoly on a service or on goods in the area. You became a lord of a petty chiefdom, and used it to screw people over or exact your petty revenge. If you were the manager of a small town grocery store, for example, then you became the gatekeeper of the entire town's access to luxury goods (and anything could be a luxury, depending on what sector was failing its quotas). Sure, nominally your stock was supposed to be sold at a determined, fixed price, but nobody would care that you took products in short supply off the shelves, and sold them at your own discretion at an arbitrary price. And the locals had to suck it up because there was no competition, or rely on the dutifulness of local authorities to bother with investigating such crimes. Or if you were a plumber, you technically were supposed to work equitably according to unified guidelines, but you could just spend your workdays doing jobs at your own schedule with no regard for official timetables, depending on which customers provided the best "incentives" - again resting knowing fully well that there was nobody to compete with you because you couldn't become a plumber outside a government utilities company.
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Apr 19, 2017 15:21
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cinci zoo sniper posted:
It's a back and forth. Dad has been banned from the church. Although he still attends, and wears gloves so that he doesn't have to shake hands with "those people". Even in summer, lol.
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Apr 19, 2017 15:20
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spacetoaster posted:It's a back and forth. Dad has been banned from the church. Although he still attends, and wears gloves so that he doesn't have to shake hands with "those people". Even in summer, lol.
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Apr 19, 2017 15:24
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spacetoaster posted:It's a back and forth. Dad has been banned from the church. Although he still attends, and wears gloves so that he doesn't have to shake hands with "those people". Even in summer, lol. hahaha this is the greatest
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Apr 19, 2017 15:27
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spacetoaster posted:It's a back and forth. Dad has been banned from the church. Although he still attends, and wears gloves so that he doesn't have to shake hands with "those people". Even in summer, lol. lmao This reminds me of the priest in the parish in the countryside where my mother hails from. Said individual would only perform three things at each mass: the rounds of gathering donations, the main lecture, and the final parish announcements. If someone didn't give an amount of money deemed sufficient as a donation, he would either name them or describe them in the announcements; if this repeated a few times, he would start feuding with that person, going as far as crafting the main lectures specifically to condemn and shame certain members of the community. Some of those feuds lasted for years and ended in literal fisticuffs. Dude had an ego, too. He commissioned new stations of the cross images from one of the parishioners, and then coerced the painter to insert him as Simon (the dude who helps Big J carry the cross) into the relevant image, while inserting all the people he was feuding with as the evil romans and cruel onlookers. dex_sda fucked around with this message at 15:35 on Apr 19, 2017 |
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Apr 19, 2017 15:29
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My grandfather loves communism, Stalin and the USSR but is secretly a hardcore capitalist. Like even before the fall he'd hustle his rear end off to provide for the family, working his way to a director of a construction company. That enabled all sorts of less than completely legitimate opportunities to become more equal than others, including building a dacha with building materials that mostly fell off trucks or got lost somehow. My great-uncle (or something) got busted by the KGB for fraud involving ethanol production, IIRC. E: remember, if you're not stealing from the government, you're stealing from your family. mobby_6kl fucked around with this message at 15:37 on Apr 19, 2017 |
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Apr 19, 2017 15:31
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https://twitter.com/MoscowTimes/status/854707512851001345
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Apr 19, 2017 21:56
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dex_sda posted:He commissioned new stations of the cross images from one of the parishioners, and then coerced the painter to insert him as Simon (the dude who helps Big J carry the cross) into the relevant image, while inserting all the people he was feuding with as the evil romans and cruel onlookers. That's just the best.
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Apr 19, 2017 22:27
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Shes Not Impressed posted:we are allowed to visit Chernobyl now. But it takes 15 hours on an overnight train for me to get to Kyiv, so travelling isn't something I'm keen on here. And sometimes the buses don't even show up! I was in Kiev last year for work and took one day off to go to Chernobyl/Pripyat. Honestly, it wasnt worth the price or the time it took.
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Apr 19, 2017 22:40
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echomadman posted:I was in Kiev last year for work and took one day off to go to Chernobyl/Pripyat. Honestly, it wasnt worth the price or the time it took.
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Apr 19, 2017 23:11
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cinci zoo sniper posted:Netflix could make a bank with sitcom like that for Eastern Europeans. I sometimes wonder why there's no equivalent to Netflix for Russia and then remember that there's no need since you can find everything via pirated VK uploads anyway, if it's not just uploaded by the creators themselves (as appears to be the case with TNT). It's kind of a shame, since I'd like to pay for a professional service that bothers to close caption its stuff (as low a low effort means of improving my listening skills), but whatever.
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Apr 20, 2017 03:30
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Man, everyone's grandparents having dachas. What a bunch of crypto-bourgeoisie.
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Apr 20, 2017 03:41
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anatoliy pltkrvkay posted:I sometimes wonder why there's no equivalent to Netflix for Russia and then remember that there's no need since you can find everything via pirated VK uploads anyway, if it's not just uploaded by the creators themselves (as appears to be the case with TNT). It's kind of a shame, since I'd like to pay for a professional service that bothers to close caption its stuff (as low a low effort means of improving my listening skills), but whatever.
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Apr 20, 2017 10:36
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woodenchicken posted:If you're talking about video subscription services, there's tons of them: ivi, Megogo, etc. etc. Can't promise that they do captions though, that seems like a lot of effort.
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Apr 20, 2017 10:37
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I'm sure they exist just for the lols.
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Apr 20, 2017 10:39
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cinci zoo sniper posted:Netflix could make a bank with sitcom like that for Eastern Europeans. I will jump at every opportunity to shittalk my country and all its neighbors, but I'd sooner die fighting for my Motherland's honor on a mountain of fellow fallen countrymen than suffer a filthy foreigner disparaging her!
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Apr 20, 2017 10:42
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