Postcards from Big Brother: The Curious Propaganda of a Brutal Soviet Era

Just to add a different kind of answer from atrocities (which most major countries have committed), the USSR was terrible because it collapsed and exists no longer.

kushti2• 8 years ago

"Though most of the memorials were built from the 1960s through the 1980s, the most abstract designs harken back to the Russian Revolution of 1917, when Vladimir Lenin and his Bolsheviks promised to empower workers and take the reins from the Tsarist bourgeois." - the propaganda language of the article is illiterate as there were two revolutions in Russian Empire in 1917, Tsarist regime was overthrown by February Revolution and bolsheviks overthrew bourgeois regime in October revolution, thus talking about "Tsarist bourgeois" vs bolsheviks is simply not literate.

v_lisivka4• 8 years ago

Historically, Russia has one revolution (February Revolution) and October coup (Putsch)[1], which was then renamed into Great October Socialist [bla bla bla]... Revolution much later.

[1] http://grachev62.narod.ru/stalin/t4/t4_38.htm

kushti2• 8 years ago

Then you need to provide a credible source which provides an explanation why FR was a revolution and other is not, not a Stalin's article from 1918 you provided which is not about that at all. Left-leaning historians often define (a real) revolution as a change in ruling class, based on that definition both FR and OR were the very real revolutions (one was about passing power to bourgeois class, another about passing power to the working class), but if you are using other definitions, please provide them.

Mediterraneo10• 8 years ago

That postcard with an aerial shot of housing blocks in Novi Beograd must represent a regional trend. In Romania after the turn of the millennium, I found some old postcards from the 1980s in a bookshop that were still, though covered in dust, for sale. Several of them were the same: aerial shots of new residential neighbourhoods with buildings of not particularly impressive architecture. I don’t know if Communist officials actually thought that Western tourists would be interested in these kind of shots, or if postcards were just exploited as one more disingenuous propaganda medium for boasting about development statistics. Probably a mix of both.

simias• 8 years ago

Even in non-communist France these horrible concrete boxes were once hailed as the future of housing. When they were first built they had all the comfort the middle class yearned for at the time. The problem is that they degraded very fast and soon became synonymous with "poor people houses".

Here's a postcard from the 60's for instance: https://i.redd.it/3ofea4jd6k2z.jpg

V-22• 8 years ago

France wasn't communist, but it was heavily influenced by communist ideas. I believe it had the second largest communist party in the West (after Italy), and Le Corbusier was highly revered in the USSR.

baybal2• 8 years ago

horrible concrete boxes

The cubic shape has the best utilisation of materials per unit of usable space. Houses must be cubical.

rfinney• 8 years ago

Same in the U.S.:

https://duckduckgo.com/?q=cabrini+green+projects&t=ffsb&ia=i...

https://duckduckgo.com/?q=robert+taylor+homes&t=ffsb&iar=ima...

rocky1138• 8 years ago

Hey! I live in one of those types of places. If they are kept up with the times and maintained properly they are a nice place to live

http://www.rentcompass.com/Rentals/Guelph/1407/2-Quebec-Stre...

Symbiote2• 8 years ago

Would there have been sufficient Western tourists for that to be a market?

I think it's more likely they were produced for the residents of those places, to send to friends and relatives. "Look how nice our new home is!" — and it was nice, in 1980, compared to what it replaced.

DenisM• 8 years ago

I can assure that people who lived in the wooden shacks found this picture amazing. An obvious demonstration that the country is moving into the future at neck-breaking speed.

Most propaganda I believe is targeted to their own population.

ptero• 8 years ago

I suspect mostly second. For example, in Soviet Union housing was a huge pain point. Young (and not so young) residents who did not live with their parents lived in dorms for years (sometimes 10+ years) while the queue for their own apartment slowly moved on. Those postcards may be showing something to look up to only several short years away. I think.

reaperducer• 8 years ago

That postcard with an aerial shot of housing blocks in Novi Beograd must represent a regional trend.

Reminds me very much of what I saw in Brno, in what is now the Czech Republic. Also, modern-day Seoul, and many other large Asian cities.

I think it's just a different mindset. Where the West puts a high value on uniqueness, conformity is prized in other cultures.

See also: Vancouver's skyscrapers, and suburban tract housing, both of which are ridiculed for their sameness.

icebraining2• 8 years ago

And yet, pre-soviet Russian architecture doesn't seem to share that trait.

ummonk• 8 years ago

Well, seeing the sorry state of housing development in the Bay Area, that does seem rather impressive to me...

frandroid• 8 years ago

zzzzzing!!

amatecha• 8 years ago

Hmm, I was in Bosnia/Herzegovina, Croatia and Slovenia this past summer, and saw many "spomenik"[0]... It is interesting to see these in person and their size is usually surprising. If you are traveling in the area there's a site dedicated to cataloguing the location & appearance of these monuments.[1]

0: https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/spomenik-memorials-yug... 1: http://www.spomenikdatabase.org/

TaylorAlexander6• 8 years ago

Detractors aside, does anyone here think that we should build subsidized housing en masse for the homeless in, say, San Francisco? If so, how do we do it?

smacktoward2• 8 years ago

"Tax the rich" seems like a decent starting point.

TaylorAlexander6• 8 years ago

I’d be particularly interested in solutions that do not involve taxation or any involuntary contributions. Can we change the law so that building housing for the homeless is cheaper, for example?

tormeh• 8 years ago

Distributed around the city. No more than one affordable-housing high-rise per neighborhood. Clustering them has been tried, and it usually ends with a concentrated low-income neighborhood with all the problems that follow.

mLuby2• 8 years ago

Taking the idea further, wouldn't it be better to have a percentage of each building's apartments be affordable?

philwelch2• 8 years ago

If you create benefits for the homeless, you get more homeless. Homeless people are surprisingly mobile. So thinking anything like this will fix a local homelessness problem is a fallacy; once every homeless person in the Bay Area is housed, you have just as many if not more homeless people showing up in SF with their hands out. You either have to solve the problem nationally or drive homeless people out.

That said, if you have to choose a part of the country as the designated homelessness magnet, at least pick someplace with cheap land and cost-efficient transport in and out. Eventually you’ll have a national hub for substance abuse treatment and unskilled labor, unless it gets so dreary that people would rather be homeless in SF than live in a home there.

TaylorAlexander6• 8 years ago

Cleverly, I never asserted that this would “fix homelessness”, I only asked if anyone was interested in building housing for the homeless.

I see it more as an experiment in radical compassion (where it may only be “radical” because we lack more compassion). Perhaps it’s best to view it as setting an example.

Whatever you call it, I find it absurd that we are as wealthy as we are and yet we don’t build homes for the homeless. You may well be right. We could build homes for the homeless and find ourselves overrun with migrants looking for a cheap place to stay.

But so far, I see little direct work to help these people despite our extreme wealth. It’s disgraceful to me that we have all this wealth and are so unwilling to share it with those who truly need it. I want to find others who care enough to find a way to build a roof for those who would huddle under awnings.

You may be pleased to hear that I am a libertarian, and so I have no desire to force you to contribute. But I am also a socialist, and I believe we can build a better society if those of us born in to wealth help those who are less fortunate.

Surely you like that idea? Or should our society block out those who for one reason or another have no wealth for themselves?

stale20023• 8 years ago

Well, step 1 would be for us to stop making it illegal for developers to do exactly what you are suggesting, ie we should get rid of building height limit zoning laws.

TaylorAlexander6• 8 years ago

Sounds good. How can we convince people sympathetic to the plight of the homeless that burdensome regulations actually raise costs and hurt the disadvantaged?

Quequau• 8 years ago

Something that fascinates and discourages me is how effective propaganda is even when it is transparently (at least to outsiders) propaganda. There is so much media today which is also transparently propaganda but somehow the people it's directed at fail or refuse to recognize it.

ilaksh• 8 years ago

There seems to be a belief (in the US) that the United States stopped creating or commissioning propaganda at some point in the past. Most people might say around the end of WWII. It's part of a greater American exceptionalist belief system.

I am curious to know when people in this thread believe that American propaganda stopped. For me there are so many obvious examples, from misleading explanations on the news for military actions to giant blockbuster films and TV shows.

jvanderbot• 8 years ago

Yes, we switched to media. Easier to distribute.

I was on a flight and noticed a large number of modern war movies produced in China. They were quite like American "Blackhawk down" or "12 strong". Clearly meant to demonstrate the professionalism and ingenuity of their army vs the rest of the world.

maxxxxx• 8 years ago

The human mind is interesting. For example even when people know that they are getting a placebo it still helps them. Or I know commercials are BS but I still trust products I have seen in a commercial more than others.

smacktoward2• 8 years ago

I know we're meant to look at the subjects of these postcards and marvel at how horrible they are, but some of them actually look quite interesting.

You've got plenty of your standard dreary Soviet-era monumentalism, of course, but the Flower of Life memorial is humble and affecting, the Armenian Writer's Union guesthouse annex is straight out of The Jetsons, and the Soldier's Field Memorial is one of the most creative war memorials I've ever seen. Compare the latter to the new-ish, thuddingly literal World War II Memorial in Washington, DC (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_World_War_II_Memorial), for instance, and it's no contest; as a way to remember both war and what war really is, the Volgograd memorial wins hands down.

shortoncash• 8 years ago

Anyone know what to Google to see what the insides of those buildings looked like? They look interesting.

gumby• 8 years ago

That monument to the conquerors of space (it's on top of the Museum of Space) is as impressive today as it must have been in the 1960s. I was there just a few months ago.

As for the pictures of apartment blocks, I remember those kinds of postcards from the 60s and 70s myself in Western Europe, USA, Australia, Malaysia etc. In this regard the Soviet Union and Warsaw bloc were no different.

Postcards from Big Brother: The Curious Propaganda of a Brutal Soviet Era

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