> By the time the USSR collapsed, many Soviet citizens had positive/neutral views of Western culture if not politics. It was a total soft power defeat.
If by propaganda you mean "having a demonstrably better quality of life", then yeah, the West had a better propaganda machine which successfully persuaded many in the Soviet Union that maybe our system wasn't so bad after all.
But if we take a more narrow definition of propaganda that doesn't include actually having a better lifestyle, the Soviet Union propaganda machine had a lot more work on their hands in order to persuade a substantial portion of the West that their system worked. Under that definition of propaganda I think it's no contest which propaganda machine was more effective—to this day we have people in the West who will insist to an Eastern European's face that life in the Soviet Union wasn't so bad.
Ozempic is but one of the available insulin's. Now I get that Ozempic is the best and most comfortable, but when push comes to shove, truth is, even an insulin from 50 years ago will do. Some of those cost A LOT less and will definitely work.
And yes, it sucks that the most comfortable one is more expensive. But ...
Ah small correction here: Ozempic isn't insulin -- it's a GLP1 Receptor Agonist[0]. While the companies that make these kinds of drugs do make Insulin (for example IIRC that's now Novo Nordisk got it's start), that's not what the drugs actually are.
It is very dishonest of you to dismis his impressions as if they were anything political. The shock and bewilderment of people from USSR when they first traveled abroad is well known; I know people who touched fruits as they walked through aisles at a supermarket thinking that "it can't be real, they must be plastic" when they visited Finland for the first time. The constant shortage of goods was such an established fact of everyday life in the USSR that a regular western supermarket looked like something out of a fairy tale, and not only to regular citizens, but also to party elite who had their own luxury stores, which were also much much crappier than any Walmart.
There's nothing "very dishonest" about being skeptical of Yeltsin's anecdotes. The guy was a tool that was instrumental in the ultimate dissolution of the USSR.
USA undoubtedly had better access to a wide variety of groceries due to its geography and agrarian economy. Russia doesn't have a California or Mexico (the best candidate, Turkey, was part of NATO).
That doesn't mean USA also didn't have a vastly superior propaganda ecosystem, from Hollywood to the NYT.
> USA undoubtedly had better access to a wide variety of groceries due to its geography and agrarian economy. Russia doesn't have a California or Mexico (the best candidate, Turkey, was part of NATO).
Basic goods like sausages, stockings and toilet paper - which had constant shortages - aren't some high tech that only a selection of countries are able to produce, geography permitting. It was USSR's choice to focus so much and so wastefully on the military that western stores looked like an unbelievable dream to Soviet citizens who lived their entire lives deprived of most mundane consumer goods.
Who even needs a propaganda ecosystem, when western plastic bags with graphic prints were such a luxury item in 1980s USSR that people proudly paraded them around in the public, then came home, carefully folded them (some even ironed with a cold iron to get rid of wrinkles), and put away for the next time - until the bags became completely faded.
Nobody in the west would've believed the sheer absurdity of everyday life in the USSR.
> The guy was a tool that was instrumental in the ultimate dissolution of the USSR.
As I've said elsewhere in this thread, the people who tore apart the USSR did so because the USSR didn't work. That he went on to be instrumental in the ultimate dissolution of the USSR is not evidence that his shock and awe at the abundance in the US was staged.
> USA undoubtedly had better access to a wide variety of groceries due to its geography and agrarian economy. Russia doesn't have a California or Mexico (the best candidate, Turkey, was part of NATO).
Your parent commenter is talking about the reactions they got from people visiting Finland.
> That doesn't mean USA also didn't have a vastly superior propaganda ecosystem, from Hollywood to the NYT.
The USA had a better propaganda system if you include the facts they had at their disposal as part of that system. If we instead look at how well each country did with the facts that they had, you are living proof that the USSR's propaganda system was incredible.
Faced with the fact that people in the USSR starved by the millions while people next door in Finland had abundance, you somehow manage to place the blame on geography instead of on the human systems that the Soviets put in place.
You think my nuanced understanding of the world is based mainly on Soviet/Russian propaganda, while yours is mainly objective. This is an impossible local minimum to escape from.
Yes, it is, though I'd add to the problem that you think that "taking a controversial opinion" is equivalent to "nuance". Some opinions are controversial because they're flat-out wrong, and "the Soviet Union wasn't that much worse a place to live than the West" is one of those opinions.
But I agree that there's nothing more to be gained by continuing this conversation.
Yes, it does go much deeper than that. People only let their country dissolve when it completely and utterly fails them.
I'm not saying it happened because we had a slightly better GDP, I'm saying it happened because their system legitimately sucked. To try to attribute it to western propaganda does a disservice to the people who actively worked to end communism in Eastern Europe because they were tired of the abuse.
> Better lifestyle for whom? Racial minorities? For-profit prison slaves? Disenfranchised migrant laborers? "Commies"? Hollywood stars?
If you are under the impression that communism didn't have "prison slaves" or gross mistreatment of ethnic minorities, then it seems pretty clear that their propaganda system was at least somewhat effective.
As OP says, in an attempt to be edgy you're just showing how effective Soviet propaganda was.
Joseph Stalin alone signed off on multiple genocides [0]. Tatars, Cossacks, Ukrainians, Poles, Jews, there were plenty of ethnic groups that the Soviets identified as the enemy and purged or deported en masse.
The US is far from perfect, but the whataboutism isn't very effective when Stalin alone has a body count numbered in the millions.
No, it takes the example a leftist poster gave, and pointed out that while the US was racist, the Soviet state was genocidal. The question being asked was "which was worse" and for this particular example, the Soviets were A LOT worse.
Whataboutism is asking "what about" and take something unrelated. This is taking the exact example given by a commie and pointing out that leftist propaganda and reality were VERY different. And here you are ... defending the propaganda, demonstrating exactly what is going wrong here.
There are actually some aspects of Soviet life where Western states were on the whole worse than Soviets (e.g. pure science education, or labor participation and independence for women) by current moral standards. But not many, and frankly, mostly not for good reasons.
Of course we all know that this was true in nearly all cases. Obviously some Russians (e.g. state employees) had it better than some American groups. Although even there it turned out they often preferred American lifestyles.
If by propaganda you mean "having a demonstrably better quality of life", then yeah, the West had a better propaganda machine which successfully persuaded many in the Soviet Union that maybe our system wasn't so bad after all.
But if we take a more narrow definition of propaganda that doesn't include actually having a better lifestyle, the Soviet Union propaganda machine had a lot more work on their hands in order to persuade a substantial portion of the West that their system worked. Under that definition of propaganda I think it's no contest which propaganda machine was more effective—to this day we have people in the West who will insist to an Eastern European's face that life in the Soviet Union wasn't so bad.