Recently I had to choose a toilet for my house. Honestly, this was the second toilet I bought in a year, it did. I also experienced embarrassment in the spring: purely by chance, a reader wrote to me who wanted to share his story. He worked in a plumbing factory, on the toilet bowl design line. And he talked about his job. Of course, I was very curious, I immediately ran to see what this factory was producing. For two weeks after that, I was shown toilet ads. I complained about this to readers and got more from this promotion.
Thus, I began to understand the types of toilets well in the summer months. And it turned out that, despite political difficulties, there are at least 300 models on the market in Russia today.
Every day, I looked at carousels of toilet advertisements. Red, blue, retro, Venetian style, with hanging cistern. With eyeliner next to it. With oblique and direct release. With a shelf. You know what I thought then? Never guess! I suddenly realized that the Soviet Union’s approach, for example, implying at most five types of toilets, one for children and one for the summer residence, was not so bad. Why do we need three hundred toilets and more? The burden of choice alone is worth it. As someone who wrote anti-consumer articles on an anarchist site years ago, I wonder why there are so many. Yes, production, new jobs etc. They tell me like a kitten: How do you not understand, stupid shoe covers, new goods mean new business. Of course I understand everything. But there are nuances: firstly, the places are in places, but the resources that the greens advocate are spent on the production and distribution of these toilets around the world. How much gas does it take to move all the toilets on the planet? And how much was spent in vain on the release of unnecessary toilet bowls? And how much more will it take to get them to a landfill and shred them?
But this was the first. Secondly, I’m just curious: there were a few toilet bowls in the USSR, but there were works. Yes, part of the population at that time was almost forcibly kept in the countryside, wages were low, goods were expensive, a person did not change furniture and toilets every 3-5 years, even saved and took care of a mixer. IT. Now mixers sometimes have to be purchased every year. It’s nice that they do that much, there are jobs, but it would be wiser to produce mixers that will last 20-30 years and create other jobs that will be paid for by the economy or the government, not by ordinary people. those who constantly have to throw away cheap mixers… After all, in an economy based on a production race, in the final analysis, the burden of sustaining a significant part of the population rests with another part. A worker at a factory that makes hair dryers that broke down after a month has only one job and salary because someone has to buy a cheap hair dryer every month.
Note that this was said, perhaps more than any other journalist in our country, by a man who was attacked for his anti-Soviet texts. And now I am having a moment of personal enlightenment. No, the history, economy, lifestyle, customs of the USSR suddenly did not seem to me the best, but at that time I began to understand that many things in the country were effective, efficient and profitable. And most importantly, it aimed to protect human dignity. We are used to mocking the meager Soviet life, where one person siphons sweet water with jam at home, instead of freely going out day and night and buying soda. Remember the siphons? And I still remember modern jokes: they call this the land of freaks, the shops are not working, they walked three kilometers to the grocery store, soda was expensive and they could not drink it every day, bought a refrigerator for life, wore coats for ten years.
All terrible, of course. Isn’t it terrible to live on long credit for all the new refrigerators and TVs? By the way, note the difference: in some Finland or Italy you will not find such a large number of grocery stores. Because it is believed that these are not essential services and it is not necessary to torture people in order to provide them. Of course, there will always be those in need who are willing to work the night shift. This is where the state comes in and says that a person should be respected and the right to have soda at night should not be acquired by such sacrifices of other people who are forced to work at the cash register instead of sleeping.
In fact, the USSR said the same thing. But then it was funny to us, even though no one laughed at the Finns who sleep at night and don’t work in the store. At least I’ve never heard of it.
Oh yes, drinking sweet soda is harmful. And it’s good that they couldn’t buy at night. Today, its sea and what, has anyone benefited?
Our country, of course, was difficult for life, difficult, sometimes even starving. However, there is nothing more foolish than to deny everything without exception, because in practice a lot turned out to be an advantage. The same meager furnishings and kitchen appliances were of perfect design. Of course they stole something, but it was also theirs. For example, I furnished the whole house in the style of the early 70’s, it is completely original, even the wallpaper is original. I’ve been researching, researching, buying for years. Because then the state followed, the design of the vacuum cleaner was developed over the years with the participation of scientists.
Another field: children’s literature, cinema. It is clear at that time that children’s art came from adult censorship, often out of money, as they were banned in large-scale literature. But still, its quality was achieved not only due to the influx of serious writers and artists into the industry: books were evaluated by the art council, there was some kind of minimal quality control … And on television. With a dialect, mistakes, unpleasantly dressed people were not taken there. There were guides for the announcers: try to say “ringing” on the air. And now there are such books and televisions that it is worth looking not only for Hudlit, but also for Stalin sometimes.
Call it what you want, but the USSR as a power state had its advantages. For example, common sense may limit it to the manufacture of toilet bowls or the night trade. He could ban a children’s book about a counselor’s romantic relationship with a child. It can also limit margins. In the heat, cold water costs 100 rubles per stall. Let’s say we have 100 bottles in stock. But if you raise the price, there will be enough water not for the first hundred buyers, but for the hundred buyers with the extra money. And if you keep raising the rent in the city center, only the rich will be able to buy there. Now we are told that this is a market. No, this is not a market, this is discrimination. In the USSR, there was a trade margin in goods for regions far from Moscow, and food in restaurants. The products in the city center and the suburbs are the same price. He is being watched by the KGB.
Another example where a strong, totalitarian state is more effective: I recently saw two mothers walking with their children in strollers, sipping beer and swearing. The next day, I saw a video among a local: the same two girls, quite drunk, started beating one of the noisy boys.
Of course, little attention was paid to family cruelty before. Now only notorious outcasts fear custody, and advertising child maltreatment is a guaranteed problem. The attitude towards children in modern Russian society has radically improved. And I keep thinking: this is our new humanism and the resources of the USSR. Something needs to be done to these mothers. with reduced culture.
Today, in order to turn the USSR back for a while, he could, for example, drag swearing people into a neighborhood in a crowded place. Or write a warning to parents who instill a reduced culture in their children. It would help us all a lot: loud music in front of the children, swearing, smoking – fine, and the next morning at work all colleagues know and scold at the meeting. The whole family went for a walk, threw garbage, was rude to passersby, chased dogs, threw stones at swans – immediately on the board of shame. did you remember? There are too many of us, a huge social stratification has occurred, even a transparent world cannot regulate the common life of such diverse people in constant view – state intervention is needed. This can only be done by a strong state.
There are a lot of people in China, only the Chinese older brother could discipline them – the global monitoring and social rating systems. The Chinese say they stopped spitting on the subway only after nationwide surveillance began. Roughly speaking, he spat on the pavement – in the evening you have goods without a discount on Aliexpress, and the loan rate at the bank has increased. In 2020, I saw the Chinese in the Hermitage cafe: they did not buy anything, they opened the containers with their food, threw them at each other, took napkins, some even took off their shoes and put them on a chair nearby. to ventilate them. I honestly asked their chefs: do they really behave like that in China? No, the guide answered me honestly, you can’t do that in China.
And we can. Although, to be honest, sometimes I wish some of them were treated like they are in China.
By the way, we all appreciated its advantages during the pandemic. Who got the least sick? Who let 50 million security guards into cities and locked a billion people in their homes? It was then that the world’s press carefully realized that nothing can inspire respect for someone else’s life more than a guarantee of losing yours. In China, everyone sat quietly at home and sang because they promised to shoot people who violated the quarantine. As a result, several million lives were saved. We’ve all seen what happens to countries where corona skeptics go to rallies to defend their rights.
We see another effect in the fight against the fashion agenda. It may turn out that in three decades, nations that have survived these difficult times under the control of conservative power regimes have successfully infiltrated waves of fashion for the same children’s crossovers. Have you seen that the movement of those in the United States, England, who underwent a complete gender reassignment according to the prescription of a psychotherapist in their youth, is already gaining momentum? People are terrified, corpses are being dismembered… But we don’t have such people. And in the middle of the millennium, there is much more missing that humanity can already recoil, as it has undergone great sacrifices among citizens of countries with liberal democracies. In the United States, for example, it is far from all states that provide responsibility for intentionally transmitting HIV, and now, one after another, states are canceling it under pressure from advocates of the rights of HIV-infected people. Let’s behave well – live long and find out who is right: defenders of the infected or the healthy. A small cut in the production of antiretroviral drugs or a new brutal strain – and many will regret that epidemiologists are no longer working with the KGB.
No, I don’t miss the USSR. I am an active anti-Soviet. But now I understand a little more clearly why tens, over a hundred million people at once hold so much in this country where there are only five kinds of toilet bowls, but they know how to stop the smallpox epidemic. and has published faultless children’s books.
The author expresses his personal opinion, which may not coincide with the editors’ position.