I highly recommend it to anyone who wants to learn about the true horrible reality of Communist Russia.
The average married worker had to make do with less than half as much bread and flour and less than two-thirds as much sugar as his counterpart in St Petersburg in the early 20th century. People were short of fat, milk and fruit. Meat and fish consumption in the 1930s was five times less than at the turn of the 20th century. Well, the Russians were better off under the Tsar than under Stalin.
In Penza, thousands of villagers who have travelled 200 kilometres to buy bread sleep outside shops. 'We queue for bread from midnight, and even if you are starving, they give you a kilo loaf at most,' wrote a woman from a collective farm in Yaroslavl to her husband. Yes, in the supposed workers' paradise of the USSR, there were queues for hours for this basic foodstuff, and it was not even certain that people would get it. They often ended up starving and dying. And, of course, other goods were not available either, such as milk, butter, vegetables, not to mention meat. Even fish in areas with developed fishing couldn't be bought, because somehow they weren't. Even such common things as salt, soap and matches were missing from the shops. In the early 1930s, even vodka was impossible to find. Clothes, shoes and other consumer goods were also hard to find. In the factory canteens, workers queued not only for food, but also for cutlery, because there was a critical shortage of that too.
People mostly lived in so-called communal flats. This meant that a family of four, for example, had one room to themselves, in some cases perhaps only ten square metres in size. Several families lived in such an apartment, and the kitchen and sanitary facilities were shared. It is clear that such cohabitation led to quarrels and psychological disorders. But that was not so bad. Almost one fifth of the population of Magnitogorsk in 1938 lived in mud huts with thatched roofs half sunk into the ground, or zemlyanke. In some of the mass dormitories, there were two square meters per person, and people did not even have their own beds, having to sleep in shifts.
Overall, the state of Soviet cities in the 1930s was disastrous, and could be described as smell, filth, and the desolate state of everything. There were no water and sewage systems, the streets were mostly unpaved, and the electricity often didn't work. Not surprisingly, various diseases, such as malaria, flourished in such an environment.
The country was also plagued by a huge crime rate, which took incredibly bizarre forms. In some cities, for example, train tickets could only be bought through criminal gangs at train stations. You can't make this stuff up. Otherwise, murders, robberies, violent assaults on passers-by, mass brawls or drunken brawls became a frequent and permanent feature of Soviet life.
So when Stalin declared that life was better and more joyful back then, people laconically added, "Stalin." Exactly, the communist high command did not know or care about the problems of the majority of the population. The red papalists lived in luxurious apartments, went to luxurious cottages and shopped in stores intended only for selected comrades, where normal mortals had no access, and where, of course, all goods were plentiful. Once a prominent Soviet artist, who was also one of the chosen ones, asked for a cottage with eleven rooms to be built. Well, it was too much for the comrades in the Kremlin and they allowed him a maximum of ten rooms.
Everyone should read the book Everyday Stalinism to understand that communism is injustice, misery and terror. It is good that the author builds on the memories of ordinary people and gives their specific stories. However, there is a catch. This book is currently out of print. At least I have not been able to find it anywhere. I had to borrow it from our South Bohemian Research Library in České Budějovice. It is commonly available in libraries. It is worth borrowing and reading.
Stalin's Soviet Union: terrible misery, worse than the Tsar's
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