For DUers who were alive and politically conscious during the Cold War...

[Gravitycollapse]

What was your general opinion of the Russian people? Is it different from today?

On a similar note, what were your feelings toward the Soviet state at the time? Is it different from how you feel about the former USSR today? Is this different from how you feel towards the current Russian regime?

[geek tragedy]

1. It's gone down since the mass persecution

of GLBT Russians began. The general embrace of rightwing nationalism and militarism has also been a turn-off.

[Aerows]

3. I wasn't old enough to really know the whole cold war

But I concur - the anti gay and militarism makes me ill.

[Gravitycollapse]

4. The LGBTQ community was heavily persecuted in Soviet Russia. Probably worse than today.

That isn't to say that it isn't horrific today.

[geek tragedy]

11. It has become resurgent in recent years

and is undeniably supported by the Russian people as part of Putin's demonization of the 'decadent West'--the gay-bashing is bound up with national pride in preserving traditional culture.

Russia had a brief window in which it could have put itself on a path to democracy and modernity. But, Yeltsin created a class of oligarchs and torpedoed the economy, so all things modern and democratic became irredeemably tainted.

Frankly I have more hope for Saudi Arabia and Iran going down a good path than I do Russia. But, they have nukes.

Bottom line is that their government is going to be a bad actor for the rest of our natural lives, and culturally there's just not any common ground or areas to explore.

[Aerows]

37. I don't know

how much hope I have for Saudi Arabia or Iran, but I do know that the dark path Russia is going down is not a good one for the world. I detest their policies toward the LGBT community, and something will have to change at the heart of their leadership for it to improve.

[underpants]

2. We were convinced that they were all 10 feet tall and ate babies

Now we realize that they are basically Wisconsin - they root for the team in red and drink a lot

With all due respect to Wisconsin. I have been there it is nice and so are the people.

[wandy]

8. Try as I might I could not have summed it up better.

[randys1]

26. Yep, wasnt there a popular movie in the 80's about scary soviets invading?

Then there was "The Russians Are Coming, The Russians are Coming"

classic, funny, and not propaganda

[Comrade Grumpy]

44. "Red Dawn." I think somebody just did a remake recently.

Here's the original:

http://www.imdb.com/media/rm3495134208/tt0087985?ref_=tt_ov_i

[GusBob]

5. If you seek an understanding of recent russian history

Read GULAG by Anne Applebaum. The people have always been repressed including during that phase of the cold war you are addressing. There is a new cold war starting and with it a propaganda machine.
Growing up I always felt that the Breschnev era of the cold war would end with a victory for the west. The Russian people craved our freedom even our blue jeans and music.

ETA the new Russian regime is still repressing the population now more for money than power. There are many natural resources still in Russia worth vast amounts of wealth. The new bosses are in it now for the glory of money more than theglory of the motherland. There is also a criminal element involved in the oligarchy

The new cold war will be vastly more dangerous than the old one ' IMO. With or without tactical nukes

[Gravitycollapse]

9. I've read The Gulag Archipelago.

The abridged single book and I am currently working my way through the unabridged multi-volume monstrosity.

But I'm not looking for the history of the Russian people. I want to know how the opinions of Americans toward the Russian people and state have changed over time.

[GusBob]

12. my answer reflects my point of view

The were poor powerless repressed pawns by the Soviet and the remain so under the oligarchy

[northoftheborder]

28. Agree, and this was my feeling during the Cold War. The Russian history is tragic.

[closeupready]

6. I never had strong feeling about Russians; the Soviets, on the other hand,

I thought to be corrupt technocrats who were sort of like Vatican priests - pushing an ideology they neither believed in, nor practiced, but being rewarded well for talking as if they DID believe it.

As to Russians as people, here's an anecdote: On my first trip to Germany, I took a train from Berlin to Warsaw, and in my cabin I met a lovely young Russian girl. We had no common language, but somehow managed to communicate with each other rudimentarily - what struck me about her, as I recall, was how assured she was, and intelligent - not some simpering serf, and clearly quite brilliant. 25 years later now, I can't explain precisely how I came to that assessment, but later encounters with other Russian nationals underscored my initial encounter with them (as to this girl), on a personal level.

[joeybee12]

7. I think most of the Cold War was BS...both sides making the other side to look

worse than they were for political gain at home.

Today, though, it's clear Putin is the scum of the earth.

[HuckleB]

10. Overall, I suppose I thought most Russians were fairly oppressed.

Thus, I may have bought into some US propaganda. Of course, I was also a big reader of Mikhail Bulgakov, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, and Czesław Miłosz, which certainly painted a dim picture of life for people in the USSR.

I suspect that the bigotry that is noted there in this era derives from the past era, as well as from a massive propaganda news machine that somehow makes Fox and the other nincompoops pale in comparison. Still, I suspect most Russians are fine people in person. It would be very odd if it were otherwise.

[Thirties Child]

13. I'm old enough to remember Stalin

I was in high school when he died, my only political exposure was Texas, I was horrified by Stalin and afraid of him. I thought the people were enslaved, had to do whatever they were told, otherwise Siberia.

We lived in D.C. in the early 60s and I was very politically aware then. For some odd reason, I wasn't worried about the missile crisis.

[Elwood P Dowd]

20. I remember hearing the announcement of Stalin's death on the radio.

It was in the early 1950s during the Korean War. We didn't have a TV then, so radio shows, books, and movies at the local theater were our only entertainment.

[Brickbat]

14. I was a teen in the 80s and was fascinated by the Cold War. It inspired me to pick Russian as a

major in college. The idea of building an entirely new state was fascinating to me, and I found the early successes of the Bolsheviks inspiring. Living in Russia for a couple of years showed me why the revolution failed; if it had started in Germany, the world would be very different. The current situation there makes me sick.

[BKH70041]

15. I felt sorry for the people.

They weren't free and all people deserve to be free. I still feel for them (although they are more free) as things have not progressed for them as would have been desirable.

It was their leaders who kept them under the thumbs of the government for their own purposes, and that was evil. As for the current regime, it looks like they want to go back to being the USSR.

[Uben]

16. I never hated the people, just the government....

....after all, they are just like us, only in a different place. We are all humans, we just have different beliefs, different colored skin, and speak different languages. We all bleed, we all suffer, we all die. While we exist, we should endeavor to do so in harmony with all creatures on this earth. I'm not a tree hugger, I'm just a war-weary human who is disgusted with the path humanity has chosen.

[RebelOne]

17. I was around at the time, and not politically savvy,

but I was convinced Russia was the enemy. I used to have nightmares of mushroom clouds.

[GeorgeGist]

18. I felt safer then ...

than I do now.

[cpwm17]

19. Americans made fun of them for being fat

not so much any more.

[Skidmore]

21. I had an argument once about the Russian people with

Last edited Thu Jul 24, 2014, 07:57 PM - Edit history (1)

my mother (one of only a couple in our lifetimes together). I was an old teen or a young woman then and I, for the life of me, could not see why the people of Russia should be considered to be bad. That they were certainly not unlike us in wanting to have the security of shelter, food, and clothing as well as a means to achieve those things. I also couldn't understand why it is up to us to determine that all other nations should be made over in our image since we are doing such a bang up job of it here. I think we arrived at a draw but it hurt my heart to argue with my mother.

[HereSince1628]

22. I thought they lived an Orwellian existance in a paranoid state...

I'm pretty sure that grew out of statements I heard around the dinner table.

I spent a couple of years doing research in NW Russia, and with respect to the basic wants in life, there's nothing much different between the Russians I knew in Karelia, and people I know from Wisconsin and Minnesota above Hwy 2.

The academicians I knew were wonderfully competent and working with them was terrific.

One thing that I did notice was small towns were often almost devoid of men 18-50, having gone south looking for work. If something was important to get done n town, you went looking for a woman. Woman made things function and understood their system. Men it seemed not so much, and unemployed men were often heavy drinkers.

[lunasun]

36. Maybe we were in an Orwellian mindset here too

"The citizen of Oceania is not allowed to know anything of the tenets of the other two philosophies, but he is taught to execrate them as barbarous outrages upon morality and common sense. Actually, the three philosophies are barely distinguishable…"

"It was curious to think that the sky was the same for everybody, in Eurasia or Eastasia as well as here. And the people under the sky were also very much the same--everywhere, all over the world, hundreds or thousands of millions of people just like this, people ignorant of one another's existence, held apart by walls of hatred and lies, and yet almost exactly the same--people who had never learned to think but were storing up in their hearts and bellies and muscles the power that would one day overturn the world."
- George Orwell, 1984,

[jwirr]

23. I have always been open minded and recognized that the USSR was different than the people of

that country. I assumed that we did not know the whole story of the people and they did not know about us. I expect that it is much the same today. They may be better informed today but are they listening to their version of faux news?

I knew about propaganda so I was not sure that I knew enough about the USSR to hate/distrust them as we were expected to. I knew they had a government that was different than ours and I assumed it was not as good. Especially when you look at the Stalin years with the mass killings of their own people. (If that was true.) Today I recognize that the USSR was probably never as strong as we were told. It was propaganda to keep the cold war going (MIC). Yes they were militarily strong because they had nukes but they were never as strong in the economic sense as we were - our middleclass and poor were doing better than theirs due to shortages etc.

Today I feel sorry for the lower classes because they are living through the robber baron era we did and it is NOT trickling down. As to the regime? Their president is ex-KGB or is he? I think he is not a whole lot different from the old USSR regime except that they are now more involved in the world economy. I do not trust him to be working for the common people of Russia.

[treestar]

24. I was kind of fascinated by them as they were shut off from the rest of the world

Therefore, they seemed mysterious. You got a glimpse of some of them watching the Olympics (in those days, they covered the whole contest, no matter what country was winning).

We had drills in case we were attacked by Soviet nukes, but knew both countries could blow up the planet several times over and so hiding under the tables was useless.

I thought of the Soviet Union as gray, colorless.

It actually seemed like a miracle to me when it fell and was no more. It had seemed hopeless that the US vs. USSR would ever change.

[Codeine]

30. Grey and colorless. Yep.

With the only color provided by those green missile carriers with the big-ass whitewall tires they were forever parading in front of the Kremlin.

[sadoldgirl]

25. During that time I lived in Europe

as a youngster. I thought the idea of a socialist country sounded great ( in a way I still do ), but that the repression of the people was terrible. However, as much as I admired the US, I saw that both superpowers were in competition to interfere with other countries. This could not lead to good results. As a young person I feared that Worldwar III would start during the Cuban missile crisis in Europe. Luckily both sides stepped back.

Later on, already in the States, I had great hopes that Gorbachov would lead the countries into a kind of velvet Revolution. I don't know whether the apparatchnics would not allow for that or whether he was still too much grounded in the old system.Yeltsin seemed ignorant and belligerant, but my distaste came with Putin, an old KGB officer.

Now I wonder if the governments did not purposefully installed fear on each side, which only harmed both of them as well as other countries. Far too much so called patriotism, which actually was stirred up nationalism.

Unlike many, if not most DUers, I can see Putin's reluctance to give up the Ukraine: a) for historic reasons and b) for fearing NATO missiles right at the Russian border. I don't think that he has handled it well, as a matter of fact terribly, yet neither has the West done so.

That is my experience and my opinion for the little it is worth.

[Codeine]

27. I remember being fascinated by the Cold War.

My friends and I would play these elaborate Cold War boardgames for days on end in the 80s, and I read anything I could on the Red Army. I guess it just didn't seem that real to me even while it was going on.

Then I self-radicalized a bit and went through a teen phase where they were "the good guys" and such. That didn't last long I suppose.

As for the people, I knew they were just like us. I don't think me or my friends ever responded to the atmosphere of "othering" that went on at the time.

[Capt. Obvious]

29. Very different

I remember being terrified of the Soviets dropping a nuclear bomb on us. They were evil.

Then Rocky beat Drago and the Soviet Union collapsed.

[ProudToBeBlueInRhody]

31. "Because if I can change.......

......and you can change........EVERYBODY CAN CHANGE!!!!!!"

[Capt. Obvious]

32. Rocky ended the cold war

but he couldn't protect Adrian from the woman's cancer.

[sadoldgirl]

33. Anybody,who believes

that Reagan caused the collapse of the UDSSR has been mislead. It did so due to economics and worldwide changes. Sorry, but give Gorby some credit here.

[madamesilverspurs]

34. Back in the fourth grade (mid 1950s)

we got a magazine-sized booklet about the Russians. It might have been done by Life Magazine or one of many others, don't recall that particular detail. Anyway, it was full of pictures and horror stories.

The pictures weren't chosen to portray the Russian people as attractive. Rather, the people, we were taught, were bloated and backward and socially crude, and they wanted to kill us and take all our stuff. This all tied in quite nicely with the duck-and-cover drills. And, in truth, when Nikita Krushev (sp?) came along and banged his shoe on the desk at the UN, he didn't exactly dispel the myth. After a while they became the default 'bad guy' in any given scenario; even our cartoons got into it (think Boris and Natasha on Rocky and Bullwinkle.) The character of Chekov on Star Trek totally played to the inculcated stereotype.

Quite honestly, I didn't give it much thought until I started college and, for the first time in my educational life, I had history teachers who weren't the off-season coaches. We were given some real information about the Soviet Union, how it had come into being; the fascinating demographics of the population, their relationships with their neighboring countries, the depredations of the tsars. Literature had begun to break through the counter-propaganda, humanizing those who had been so demonized; Pasternak's characters in Doctor Zhivago brought a depth and breadth we had been all too willing to deny the Russians. Herman Wouk's Winds of War and War and Remembrance were compelling in the realistic portrayals of history as it played out in WWII.

Subsequent to all of that, a number of friends have had the opportunity to spend time in that part of the world, some as tourists, some going there on business. They have all said that the people are just as delightful and frustrating as anywhere else, including here. And they also noted that, just like here, the leaders aren't necessarily representative of the people.

[Caretha]

39. You & I must be

of the same age & similar in our world views. You have stated well what my experience/memories were/are.

I did have a great desire though at about the age of 8 or 9 to have a bomb shelter in our backyard. I begged my dad to build one & told him how scared I was of the "Russians". I wasn't really, but thought it would be so cool to have a bomb shelter.

My father was a WWII Vet and had worked for the Pentagon after the war. He said he didn't really see a need for a bomb shelter.

[REP]

35. My grandfather escaped Russia in 1917 so I never feared nor hated Russians

Thought they exchanged one bad system for another, and that is was never a good place to be a Jew (like my grandfather and his family; they were escaping Tsarist pogroms).

[KT2000]

38. It was just about nuclear bombs

for me and my friends. The Russian people seemed drab and behind the times but were hardly mentioned or considered. We knew it was the government that would drop a bomb and start World War III and it would be the US government that would also drop bombs - then, the world as we knew it would end.

[aint_no_life_nowhere]

40. We were scared of the Russians

I was born at the end of 1949 so I was alive during most of the cold war. My dad was an Air Force officer stationed in Germany when I was born, so I kind of owe the circumstances of my birth (at Munich, Germany) to the cold war. After coming back from Germany, my dad was stationed there again for another three years when I was six. In the mid 1950s, I remember sleeping in our air force base apartment and being awakened by loud sirens at 3:00 o'clock in the morning, calling us to go down into the fortified basement as a bomb shelter. In West Germany, we certainly were within easy striking distance of the Russians and things weren't that amicable during the mid 1950s. We were also afraid of the communist East German soldiers, who were supposed to be even more fierce than the Russians.

However, despite all that I loved Russian culture as a kid, their classical music and their writers. One of the first stories I ever read as a kid was a horror story about vampires entitled Viy by the great Ukrainian-born Russian writer Nikolai Gogol. I even took a Russian language course by mail when I was a little boy. I guess my love of Russians comes from my dad, who knew them during World War II. Despite the fact he was a U.S. officer and flew the Berlin airlift, my dad spoke very fondly of a Russian he befriended during World War II. My dad was a B-17 pilot shot down over Germany and shot in the legs when his parachute landed. Nearly dead, he was taken to a German military hospital where he made two important friends; one was a Free French pilot who had been shot down. The other was a gigantic Russian named Ivan who had taken a bullet through the stomach at Stalingrad. The Russian giant Ivan became my dad's nursemaid and constant companion, bathing him, feeding him, and literally bringing him back to life. The three of them hatched a plan to escape by stealing a German plane from a nearby airfield during an air raid. Unfortunately, my father eventually became healthy enough to be transferred to a regular POW camp, Stalag Luft III, the same camp as featured in The Great Escape.

I still greatly admire Russians but I'm not fond of their current leadership at all.

[TheKentuckian]

41. I always just pictured care worn, rustic folks standing in line all day for toilet paper in the cold

[moondust]

42. Heavy drinkers,

corrupt Soviet bureaucrats, rather drab/boring (thus the heavy drinking), oppressively totalitarian, implementation of communism bad thanks largely to megalomaniac Stalin.

Today somewhat better. I had an exchange with a Russian guy online a year ago and this was his comparison:

ME: Better or worse now than Soviet era?

RUSSIAN GUY: Everything is complicated. For example:

Situation with consumer goods and services - better (of course, if you have money to buy them). Soviet Union had shortages of many goods, lines in shops, many things could be simply unavailable etc. - "shortage economy".

Freedom of speech - better than in USSR. Still far from ideal.

Poverty and equality - much worse than in USSR, one of the biggest negative changes. The poor are poorer, less social spending, rich oligarchs who don't deserve their wealth etc.

Crime and violence - much worse than in USSR.

Racism, nationalism - again, worse.

Conservatism, homophobia - actually better than in USSR (despite of state atheism).

Alcoholism - about the same.

Traffic and transport - much worse. USSR had few cars and no traffic jams, buses were much faster and better because of it.

[Puzzledtraveller]

43. A decent post aimed at creating real discussion and no recc's?

I will give it its first.