By Denis Vladimirovich, Facebook, 8/7/24

The Soviet government was pretty good at developing sophisticated techs and executing grand scale projects — nuclear power plants, supersonic jets, nuclear submarines, various rockets & missiles, space stations and space shuttles, in addition to high-tech factories and general infrastructure.

They weren’t particularly good at making simple consumer goods, though. Or, rather, they were failing to satisfy the demand. Soviet people always desired foreign clothes (even those made by other Eastern Block countries), foreign sweets, foreign cigarettes, foreign cosmetics, and so on. Soviet automobiles, although relatively well made and well suited for their price category, were a frequent subject of ironic remarks.

The Soviet Union, although having high technological capacity and know-how in the high-order things, was lugging terribly in all those little things that constitute people’s everyday experiences.

In the United States, corporations and their research departments have been working tirelessly on coming up not only with the ways to fulfil the consumer demand, but also to create and control it since, like, the 1940, if not earlier. All the advances in Behavioural Science were made, in part, due to big marketing departments trying to figure out the ways to sell people things that they didn’t even know they needed.   

So, in the West, having more resources, corporations were nurturing consumer culture for decades. In the Soviet Union, in contrast, they didn’t really care about those.

Under Stalin, all the down-to-earth consumer needs were being taken care of by small corporate enterprises (so-called artels) that were decentralised and, therefore, could react faster to spontaneous market fluctuations. When Krushchev came to power in the mid-1950s, he cancelled artels, seeing them as left-overs of the Capitalist system. The supply of consumer goods got compromised severely, on a systemic level. Later economic reforms, such as the one developed by Lieberman and implemented by Kosygin in the 1960s, didn’t solve the issue and only worsened it.

It became a huge Cold War factor, with Americans using it to their advantage, waging a cultural war on the Soviet Union. And it hit the hardest in the late 1980s, when the Soviet economy was going through a terminal “Perestroika” crisis. When McDonald’s first opened in Moscow in the year 1990, people were lining up for multiple kilometres, literally, wanting to experience it and perceiving it as a wonder of American superiority.

We all know how it ended for the USSR.

Russia is in another long-term confrontation with the United States and its allies at the moment. It started in a soft phase after 2007, following Putin’s Munich speech, when he criticised NATO expansion and American foreign policy. Then it intensified badly in 2013-2014, and it all went into high-gear in 2022, with large scale proxy-wars, diplomatic boycotts, and intense economic sanctions.

Well, you know, even though the modern Russian Federation is far from being the Soviet Union, in terms of demographic potential and technological capacity (relative to its time), the United States & Co do not have consumer culture superiority this time. It’s not a factor they can bet on anymore.

Russia has overabundance of high quality affordable food nowadays. You won’t impress locals with large American style supermarkets. The general service industry in Russia is arguably better than in the West. Fancy looking cafes, restaurants, and all of that — you can find them at every corner in here nowadays, even in small rural towns (and the fact that they remain in business and multiply indicates that people can afford going there frequently). An average coffee place in Russia is arguably better than a Starbucks outlet in Australia.

Also, don’t forget that Russia is geographically huge and it has virtually all natural resources one might need, so it’s next to impossible to embargo it the same way they have been doing it to smaller nations like North Korea and Cuba.

Speaking of consumer electronics, the shops are filled with Chinese Huawei and Xiaomi laptops and gadgets (I assume it’s similar in professional tech sector, with servers and network equipment; besides, Russia has its own microprocessors that are used in specialised areas nowadays). I got myself a portable 4G router here recently (out of curiosity and because it’s not always convenient to rely on my phone as a Wi-Fi hotspot) from a local mobile carrier, and the package says it was made in China.  

Same with cars — BMWs and Cadillacs are not being officially serviced in Russia by manufacturers, but there are heaps of quality Chinese vehicles and mid-range domestic cars on the market.

As for social media, search engines, and whatsnot — ha! Yandex has been rivalling Google since 1997 (Russia is the only country, besides the United States, China, and South Korea, that has its own widely used search engine). VK and Telegram negate the need for Meta and X/Twitter services.

Russia has a crapload of its own streaming platforms nowadays (START, Wink, PREMIER, and so on). So, unless you want to watch Netflix or Amazon Prime exclusives, you’re very well set with Russias domestic services (Russian TV-shows have been catching up on production values in recent years; there are also lots of Korean, Chinese, and Turkish dramas to choose from).

Speaking of banks and payment systems, even though the US policy makers had cut Russia off the SWIFT system, rendering foreign Visa and Mastercard cards useless in here, Russia has its own Mir system nowadays, with vibrant banking industry, convenient ATM services, instant transfers, and banking apps that are at least a generation ahead of what people use in the West (I’m, for one, not a huge fan of strong privately owned banks and financial institutions, as a phenomenon, but that’s due to my personal political views, and I’m talking purely about customer experience side of things in this post). 

YouTube is still far superior to Russian domestic alternatives, such as RUTUBE and VK Video, in terms of search, suggestion algorithms, and monetisation policies and mechanisms for content creators, yes, but they have come a long way in the last 2-3 years, and they keep improving.

So, I don’t know how the United States & Co are planning to wage propaganda war against Russia and what are they going to use to impress ordinary Russian citizens with this time. F-16 jets? Because the dominant, dominant majority of all the publications in the Western mainstream media regarding the troubles in Russian economy is a mixture of crude propaganda and mean spirited wishful thinking for domestic consumption & self-delusion.