What was it like living in the Soviet Union under Brezhnev?

What was it like living in the Soviet Union under Brezhnev?

Bleak and stagnant.

>What was it like living in the Soviet Union under Brezhnev?

I visited Poland in 1977 with my ex-pat parents when I was 9 years old and one of the things I remember, was going to these huge glittering fancy restaurants and again and again being told by the waiter;

“Oh sorry, we’re out of that today.”
“Ahh, we just ran out of that.”
“We might have some of that tomorrow.”

My point is that Polish agriculture was far more efficient and productive then in Russia and the reason this, that and the other thing wasn’t available, was it was all being shipped off to Community Party member stores in Russia.

So you can image what it was like for the average Russian.

Literally the entirety of russian history.

When Khrushchev visited the U.S. the 1959 and went to an American grocery store, he insisted that it was a false-front built by the U.S. government to fool him, as he simply couldn’t believe that average Americans had access to quantities and selections of food like that.

The Soviet spent 70 years living in a fantasy nightmare.

It wasn't that bad. Retards like
will compare it to life in America and act shocked to find it lacking, while ignoring the fact that Mexico or Brazil might be better reference points.

>will compare it to life in America and act shocked to find it lacking, while ignoring the fact that Mexico or Brazil might be better reference points.

The thing is the USSR was supposed to USA's rival and equal; the only other superpower in the world. That they can't put food on the market yet compete in space shows there were very much a paper tiger.

I don't see what benefit there is in judging history based on official propaganda. The Cold War is over, we don't need further evidence to prove that America won. Focusing on the fact that the USSR never overtook America hides the fact that per capita income went from being one fifth of the US to one half during the Soviet era. From a purely economic standpoint, the Soviet system worked very well up until the Stagnation.

>
The thing is the USSR was supposed to USA's rival and equal; the only other superpower in the world. That they can't put food on the market yet compete in space shows there were very much a paper tiger.
They started off Mexico tier and clawed their way up. They weren't equals. They were just the only other ones in the running. Russia wasn't even western Europe tier when they became commie.

The USSR economy grew much faster then the American economy up until the late khrushchev administration, to the point where khrushchev boasted that meat and dairy consumption in the ussr would be higher then that in American by 1990. To a still largely rural populace that subsided through a combined effort of collective farms and self sufficiency, this was an exciting and interestingly plausible statement during the shift to a consumer focused economy in the early khrushchev period. Of course, those levels of growth are very hard to continue under a centrally planned economy, but for a period of time even some western economists thought it was possible the quality of life in Russia would be higher then in the us, an extraordinary thought considering their relative economic positions in 1900 and now.
For anyone interested in this topic and wanting to know the details of a centrally planned system, I'd recommend reading Hansen's 'rise and fall of the Soviet economy', a great read into the economic transitions from stalin to colapse