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adolph • today at 1:20 PM • 3 replies • view on HN

  It unveils the stark contrast between the carefully constructed façade 
  presented by the Soviet authorities and the harsh realities experienced by 
  ordinary citizens.
I guess without examples of the "carefully constructed façade" its difficult to understand if there is a contrast. To me, the photos just look like ordinary 1950s street scenes. Waiting at Walgreens the other day I spent the time examining the store's decorative antique photos; aside from differences in culture and subject area, so many details of vehicles, building construction, clothing styles are remarkably similar.

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throwaway85825 • today at 11:12 PM

Millions of slaves died building stalins monumental architecture. It wasn't until kruschev that they started building mass housing.

zerobees • today at 1:41 PM

You're arguing with LLM-generated text and yes, I don't think the photos actually show that. They don't seem to be making any political point at all.

The thing to understand about the USSR is that Moscow was a flagship city of a continental-scale empire obsessed with projecting an image of power and technological progress. It had grand construction projects, cultural events, subway, good schools, paved streets. Sort of like Pyongyang, if North Korea was a global superpower. The thing that sucked about Moscow wasn't that it looked drab, it was that you could get disappeared to a gulag or outright murdered for political speech or merely pissing off a government official, and that the government managed almost every aspect of your life (including where you work and live). Forget foreign travel, you even had restrictions on domestic travel. People born in rural areas couldn't move to Moscow unless they had political connections of some sort.

Life was far more miserable in the rest of the USSR, including all the republics and satellite states that Moscow approached as sources of cheap resources and labor to prop up the capital. Around 6-8 million people starved in the USSR in the 1930s (most of them in Ukraine). Another million starved around 1947.

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balalalalalala • today at 1:22 PM

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