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Fish of hemp posted:Were there any Soviet porno? Porno was strictly forbidden under the Soviet system. There is a somewhat apocryphal story that once Yakov Smirnoff came to the U.S. He locked himself in his room for 'bating purposes.
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Dec 15, 2014 10:28
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Opposite posted:As a Romanian I can assure you that my country was basically viewed pretty much like a colony, something like Siberia. Good only to retrieve basic materials from. After WW2 the political echelon was infested with Russians, mainly of Jewish origin, whose sole purpose was to spoil the country of as much industry and prime materials as possible. The story is a bit more complex than that (and things got increasingly complex as Gheorghe Gheorghiu Dej died and Nicolae Ceausescu came in his place) but basically every single economic endeavor was nationalized and assigned a Russian-Romanian (by the name only) management that practically moved everything of use abroad. Would you be willing to give the Jews a break, since they got a pretty raw deal under Stalin, since Stalin really didn't like the Jews much more than Hitler. thrakkorzog fucked around with this message at 11:10 on Dec 17, 2014 |
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Dec 17, 2014 11:06
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Fish of hemp posted:Clearly Soviet Union was capable producing quality stuff: you can't get dude to space and back alive if you put him in a lovely spaceship. How come this quality never transferred to consumer products? Because there was a hell of a lot more political political capitol invested in putting a man on the moon, than say manufacturing shoes. The problem was there wasn't any real feed back from consumers, so a party official put in charge of a shoe factory would be told from up above they had to produce 10,000 shoes a month. That would be a tall order, so the easiest way to accomplish that goal was to just make 10,000 mens shoes, all in size 10. Technically, they met their quota, so the person in charge of the shoe factory kept their job, even if it sucked for everybody who had feet that didn't fit into size 10 shoes. At times, the people above them would demand that the shoe factory also produce women's shoes. That was an easy fix, just keep on doing what you were doing and relabel half the men's size 10 shoes as women's size 14, same difference. And again the quota was met. But since the people wearing those shoes had no real say in shoe production, they just had to take whatever was available whenever they could buy some shoes. Party leaders could get bespoke suits from terrified tailors and custom made shoes from terrified cobblers. Everybody else had to wear off rack numbers, and had to hope that the rack had anything.
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Dec 23, 2014 11:10
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AKA Pseudonym posted:Did the coup plotters stand a chance or was that enterprise doomed from the start? It was pretty much doomed from the start. Military Coups only work if the soldiers have loyalty to the people giving them orders, rather than their political leaders. The Soviet Union had just come out of a disastrous campaign in Afghanistan, so the average Soviet soldier wasn't all that crazy about the Politburo leaders that sent them into the meatgrinder to prop up some backwoods puppet state. (And yes, as an American, I fully understand the historical irony of that.) The coup leaders just tried to stir up patriotic fervor in their countryman, but it didn't work on cynical drafted soldiers. They weren't about to open fire on their brothers and neighbors. thrakkorzog fucked around with this message at 11:16 on Dec 29, 2014 |
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Dec 29, 2014 08:30
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MothraAttack posted:Not necessarily Soviet, but more Russian: I know many Russians are weird about mold, but is there some common belief in dangerous magnetic or solar energies? I seem to recall hearing about this'll something similar at one point but Googling around proves fruitless. Well, some Koreans are worried about Fan Death, where leaving an electric fan running all night without opening a window will cause suffocation.
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Jan 5, 2015 12:31
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