Survival In Times Of Uncertainty: Growing Up In Russia In The 1990s

[cybervigilantes]

News about political upheavals, signs of impending economic disaster or projected natural catastrophes tend to generate strong 'fight or flight' emotional reactions in readers. We want to sell all we own, run for the hills and barricade ourselves in a fully stocked compound - preferably one with a bomb and meteorite shelter attached to it.

Major changes to our lifestyle are inevitable; yet the time frame and the exact way the changes will occur are uncertain, which only adds to our stress. I grew up in Russia during the collapse of the Soviet Union and the accompanying economic upheaval, i.e., during the time of high uncertainty. I was 10 when the Perestroika started in 1985. The economic situation got progressively worse, with the very worst hitting in the early 90-s. I admit I don't remember things as well as I should have. Psychologically and physically, I was sheltered by my age and its petty egotistical concerns, by my parents' effort to provide for the family, and by living in a close-knit community that had a lot of strength, spirit and intellectual resources. Now that I think about it though, memories and conclusions are coming up that I never thought about. Some of them are unexpected and counterintuitive to the prevailing survivalist mentality; but they may be relevant to the coming changes and end up being useful to someone.

more:>>http://www.sott.net/articles/show/147683-Survival-in-Times-of-Uncertainty-Growing-Up-in-Russia-in-the-1990s

[Wario]

Thankyou, good to have some real-world experience fed into the HPC pressure-cooker. Couple of things that stood out. Currency turns into toilet-paper. I'm with you on that. In fact, I'd stick my neck out and say 100% correct. Guaranteed.

I like the "get a horse" idea. Good way of avoiding roads and other ambush spots. I could always eat the ba5tard if it got too much to keep on.

Not so keen on the "get a great big ******-off doggie" (I know you're not advocating these ideas, it's just what happened). Noisy ba5tards, eat you out of house & home, and usually bottle it in a proper emergency, if they haven't already devoured your kids because you're too skint to feed them much.

I realise the article's for a USanian audience, in Blighty things are a bit tighter. No dacha for us, even if we managed to deep-six every last hereditary feudal landlord in the island. There's barely enough room here for everybody to sit down at the same time now. Do you think the French might let a few of us in? Naah. Didn't think so. Only joking. The situation would be more Warsaw ghetto than the Waltons.

Our problem isn't Organised Crime. It's DisOrganised Crime. The first lot have a brutish but perfectly rational philosophy and can be accommodated, albeit with a lot of misery.

Here all the weapons are in the hands of a vast underclass of braindead drug-and-alcohol sodden savages ( no, not the army!), and the government appears to like it that way. Keeps regular citizens off the streets when they're not flogging themselves to work and back, no need to provide public facilities, or police. Get mugged, did we sir? Should have followed police guidelines, stay at home and brick your windows up, it's your own fault.

Reminds me of Solzhenitsyn's explanation of the role of "class allies" in the form of ordinary violent criminals being encouraged to terrorise the intellectuals and other class enemies in the Gulag. The political class isn't afraid of them, and consequently hasn't seen fit to completely disarm them, in the same way as it has the idiot taxpayers and workers. Of whom it is patently, mortally, afraid. The remorseless accumulation of insane petty regulations, obsessive-compulsive levels of surveillance, the increasing centralisation of unaccountable decision-making power while fobbing the fools off with ridiculous toy "parliaments", "assemblies" and "councils", rights both ancient and civil being arbitrarily abrogated, bogus states of emergency, hogwild peculation of the public purse and a predilection for associating with absurdly wealthy persons who, if not proven criminals, certainly have some explaining to do (are you listening, Tessa? Tony? Peter?(the other one)) and the general whiff of utter, entirely understandable in the circumstances, contempt for the ordinary public drive this home every day.

Or am I perhaps being a little over-sensitive? Time of the month, I suppose. (Christ! Is that the time? Only seven days left to render my tithes to these extraordinarily talented and accomplished benefactors, or they'll loose the hounds ...)

[frozen_out]

Thankyou, good to have some real-world experience fed into the HPC pressure-cooker. Couple of things that stood out. Currency turns into toilet-paper. I'm with you on that. In fact, I'd stick my neck out and say 100% correct. Guaranteed.

I like the "get a horse" idea. Good way of avoiding roads and other ambush spots. I could always eat the ba5tard if it got too much to keep on.

Not so keen on the "get a great big ******-off doggie" (I know you're not advocating these ideas, it's just what happened). Noisy ba5tards, eat you out of house & home, and usually bottle it in a proper emergency, if they haven't already devoured your kids because you're too skint to feed them much.

I realise the article's for a USanian audience, in Blighty things are a bit tighter. No dacha for us, even if we managed to deep-six every last hereditary feudal landlord in the island. There's barely enough room here for everybody to sit down at the same time now. Do you think the French might let a few of us in? Naah. Didn't think so. Only joking. The situation would be more Warsaw ghetto than the Waltons.

Our problem isn't Organised Crime. It's DisOrganised Crime. The first lot have a brutish but perfectly rational philosophy and can be accommodated, albeit with a lot of misery.

Here all the weapons are in the hands of a vast underclass of braindead drug-and-alcohol sodden savages ( no, not the army!), and the government appears to like it that way. Keeps regular citizens off the streets when they're not flogging themselves to work and back, no need to provide public facilities, or police. Get mugged, did we sir? Should have followed police guidelines, stay at home and brick your windows up, it's your own fault.

Reminds me of Solzhenitsyn's explanation of the role of "class allies" in the form of ordinary violent criminals being encouraged to terrorise the intellectuals and other class enemies in the Gulag. The political class isn't afraid of them, and consequently hasn't seen fit to completely disarm them, in the same way as it has the idiot taxpayers and workers. Of whom it is patently, mortally, afraid. The remorseless accumulation of insane petty regulations, obsessive-compulsive levels of surveillance, the increasing centralisation of unaccountable decision-making power while fobbing the fools off with ridiculous toy "parliaments", "assemblies" and "councils", rights both ancient and civil being arbitrarily abrogated, bogus states of emergency, hogwild peculation of the public purse and a predilection for associating with absurdly wealthy persons who, if not proven criminals, certainly have some explaining to do (are you listening, Tessa? Tony? Peter?(the other one)) and the general whiff of utter, entirely understandable in the circumstances, contempt for the ordinary public drive this home every day.

Or am I perhaps being a little over-sensitive? Time of the month, I suppose. (Christ! Is that the time? Only seven days left to render my tithes to these extraordinarily talented and accomplished benefactors, or they'll loose the hounds ...)

It's here where Orwell was really on to something isn't it?

The ruling class don't care what the proles do, they are absolutely no threat. They can steal, mug, kill, whatever. Theyre too dumb to take a look around them. It's the next rung up that has to be kept in line.

[Maggot_with_halitosis]

Our problem isn't Organised Crime. It's DisOrganised Crime. The first lot have a brutish but perfectly rational philosophy and can be accommodated, albeit with a lot of misery.

Here all the weapons are in the hands of a vast underclass of braindead drug-and-alcohol sodden savages ( no, not the army!), and the government appears to like it that way.

Hmm.

Organised crime run protection rackets.

A protection racket is where money and/or other assets are extorted from the victim under threat of menaces from the representatives of the racketeers.

A government runs taxation.

Taxation is where money and/or other assets are extor...

Oh.

Edited February 7, 2008 by THEBIGMAN

[Austin Allegro]

Thanks for that, Cybervigilantes - a very interesting article. People in the UK have not known hardship on anything remotely like that scale for at least sixty years. I understand now why the Russian girls I've been out with have always been keen to know how much money I had!

[Wario]

You Sir, are a genius.

Durch love, I don't know how to put this, but are you, er, stalking me?

The problem is that it takes at least half a gallon of quality homebrew to anaesthesise the rheumatism in my typing fingers, and then it's downhill all the way.

Maybe I should get NaturallySpeaking or something, then I can rant without fear of being appalled by what the madman has scrawled the night before ...

[1929crash]

(There seem to be parallels with the US in the Great Depression):

The statistics make really grim reading...

Statistics from the Great Depression*

+ Marriage........... : -15%

+ Divorce............. : -25%

+ GNP................. : -50%

+ DJIA................. : -90%

+ Wages paid...... : - 60%

+ Unemployment... : 3% to 25% (1933)

+ Farm income..... : $6bn to $2bn (1933)

+ new investments : $24bn to $3bn (1933)

+ defaults on debt. : 1,300 counties

+ lost homes........ : 600,000

+ failed banks....... : 5,000

*(from a Q-line call on FS, xx jan. 2008: about 34 minutes in)

= =

But look at these comments, from someone (my father!) who lived through those times:

My father's memories of the depression are chilling, like a scene from a movie about a distant country, or distressed planet. A lot of things we take for granted, like cheap food and energy, were simply not affordable. Prices were low, but no one had any money then:

"Our family situation was very bleak. I remember on several occasions, taking a bushel basket in my wagon and going down to a store on Wyoming Street to get a bushel of coal for twenty-five cents to keep us warm for the night. When we didn't have any money to buy a bushel of coal, which occurred sometimes, we all gathered in the kitchen and lit the gas oven to keep us warm. Usually after a few days of this, we would get our welfare allotment of coal dumped into our coal bin and be good for another few weeks.

For our food, we depended upon welfare coupons. We used them at our local C.F. Smith store, which in those days could be found at strategic locations all over the city of Detroit. We never seemed to have enough food! I remember we ate a lot of potatoes, pork and beans, eggs, homemade navy bean soup, biscuits and corn bread, but not much meat. When we did have meat it was cheap ground beef. I'm sure this was because my mother was trying to get as much as possible with welfare coupons." (Ibid., page 11.)

When I read this, I am amazed when I recall that our modern concept of "core inflation" excludes food and energy. As if we could ever get by without these items. Instead, our current low inflation has been kept low by all those cheap things, from clothes to shoes to phones, which can be manufactured in China, which is maintaining its currency link to the US dollar, perhaps artificially, by recycling all those excess dollars from export sales to us.

Here's what my father wrote about how his family coped with minimizing those other expenditures:

"We seldom got any new clothes, but my mother always kept the old ones clean and well mended. I came up with a system of wearing socks with holes in the heel. I folded the good part of the sock, which was above the hole, down under my heel before I put my shoe on. Ingenious! I also became quite adept at cutting out card board inserts to place over the holes in my shoes. I could go on with this list, but you get the idea."

It does sound bleak, and very miserable. But the human spirit does not get crushed so easily. When everyone is enduring hardship together, something often blossoms from hardship: co-operation, generosity, and a sense of kinship. My father felt that too:

"Actually, we kids were happy at the time. I think one of the things that got us through the depression was that we didn't really know how bad off we were. Because most of our own neighbors were experiencing the same difficulties, I guess we thought that was the way things were supposed to be."

If hard times do return to America, I believe that once we get over the initial shock over the changes in our living standards, things will be alright. In times of abundance, we forget our neighbors. In times of hardship, we remember them, and they remember us.

/see: http://www.financialsense.com/fsu/editorials/2005/1003.html

Interesting that the latest divorce figures show a drop. People can't afford to get divorced because they will have nowhere to live. Is this good or bad?

Edited August 30, 2008 by 1929crash