Stuff about the ussr

[Ballyfornia]

I was going over a book that my parents must have bought more than 30 years ago "a day in the life of the soviet union"

There is some things i wanna ask about it there is a body builder in it who comes from a working class area. I found that interesting isn't one of the points of socialism to remove class status. So why are certain areas deemed working class over others??

There is also mention of a lottery. Why would there be a need for a lottery in socialism, another note why is there a lottery at all?

and lastly why was Pepsi being sold in the ussr since khruschev isn't obviously a capitalist company??

[bezdomni]

There is some things i wanna ask about it there is a body builder in it who comes from a working class area. I found that interesting isn't one of the points of socialism to remove class status. So why are certain areas deemed working class over others??

Most of the Soviet Union was working class, but there were still intellectuals (writers, poets, musicians, academics), bureaucrats and a military officers who obviously had a higher standard of living on average than most people.


There is also mention of a lottery. Why would there be a need for a lottery in socialism, another note why is there a lottery at all?


I don't see why there couldn't be a lottery or any other form of gambling in socialism. People like to gamble. Why shouldn't people gamble in socialism?

Then again I have not given this much thought. It isn't particularly important to me.


hy was Pepsi being sold in the ussr since khruschev isn't obviously a capitalist company??

Many communists (Mao, for example) have claimed that the USSR under Khruschev was a capitalist country. Others claim that the USSR was capitalist before that even.

According to this view, it is obvious why Pepsi was being sold in the Soviet Union.

[Agent Ducky]

I agree that they kinda failed on the "classless" part... And I don't understand lottery/Pepsi. All that kinda lends cadence to the argument that USSR was capitalist all along (but with more government control) therefore not really communist/socialist.

[JustMovement]

What is wrong with having pepsi? since when does a socialist country have to be autarky?
"The Capitalists will sell us the rope with which we will hang them"

[Obs]

If the book is 30-something years old it's from either the late 70's or the early 80's. This is a long time after the Soviet Union became revisionist beyond any reasonable doubt. During this period, all pretense of upholding worker control of society was abandoned in favour of allowing a growing and all-consuming bureaucracy to seize power, becoming the de facto capitalist class of the USSR. While it may be debated whether or not there was any hope of saving the USSR, what stands is that it collapsed, and it was this development away from socialism and towards capitalism that caused this collapse.

While this really answers all three of your questions, those three things really aren't as important as the Big Picture (see above) which damns not only the leadership of the late Soviet Union, but also class-collaborationist faux-socialism in which the working class is not allowed the freedom it needs to destroy the remnants of the exploiting classes during the dictatorship of the proletariat.


What is wrong with having pepsi? since when does a socialist country have to be autarky?
"The Capitalists will sell us the rope with which we will hang them"
Yes, obliterate the class enemy with fucking soft drinks. That sounds like a plan.

[Olentzero]

I know that book; I have a copy somewhere back in the States. It's a large format book of photos from across the Soviet Union taken all on one day, definitely sometime after Gorbachev came to power, so late 80s. It was part of a series - I think done by National Geographic - and they did a number of countries including the United States. No idea how long Pepsi had been on the market there but I would guess it got in after relations thawed somewhat in the post-Brezhnev era.

As to why there would still be 'working class' areas and a lottery in the USSR - well, there's a whole lot to say about that and I wouldn't be surprised to find that several billion pixels have been spilled here already on that very subject. There are almost as many answers to that question as there are revolutionaries posting on this board. My view is that it was state capitalist, i.e. run like a capitalist economy with the state supplanting the capitalist bosses, and it was still very much a class society as the Communist Party had long separated from its base of support in the working class and had become a class in itself.

Initiating 'mass rebuttal wave' in three... two...

[Sickle-A]

No idea how long Pepsi had been on the market there but I would guess it got in after relations thawed somewhat in the post-Brezhnev era.


It was in 1972, in exchange for import rights for Stolichnaya vodka, or so I have heard.

[bailey_187]

i think i read once that Bulgaria made their own version of coke? Can anyone confirm/correct?