RSSR and other republics Was: DC 2011 Ethnicity and Film Panel

[Kevin Moss]

The situation Yevgeny describes certainly resonates with my memories  
of Georgia in the early '80s. Great wines and great produce to be had  
in all the stores -- rivaling what one would find in Moscow in the  
beriozkas or even the diplomatic stores.

There was even an anecdote from the Brezhnev days: a foreign country  
had sent Brezhnev a small amount of fine cloth, from which he hoped  
to make a sport coat. He went to one tailor after another in Moscow,  
but they all said there wasn't enough material to make anything.  
Eventually he went to a tailor in Tbilisi, who told him he would make  
not only a sport coat, but a three piece suit with two pairs of pants  
and still have material left over for more! Brezhnev, amazed, asked  
how it was that the Tbilisi tailor could do so much better than those  
in Moscow, to which the tailor replied: Леонид Ильич! В  
Москве вы большой-большой, а здесь вы  
маленький-маленький!

Kevin Moss
Middlebury

On Dec 30, 2010, at 7:45 PM, Slivkin, Yevgeniy A. wrote:

> Jules,
>
> I was growing up in Leningrad in the late 1960's and I remember how  
> my parents and their friends would regularly go to Estonia to get  
> dairy products which they could not buy in Leningrad.
> In the 1970's when I was a college student I would take any  
> opportunity to cross the Estonian border to the city of Narva to  
> buy good Estonian cigarettes and hard liquor.
> In the 1980's I spent several summers in Lithuania, in the Zarasaj  
> region, on a farm near the village of Antazove, I remember the  
> grocery store in the village: Russian villages would envy that store!
> Should we conclude that the pattern was different: in Russia the  
> big cities were provided at the expense of the regions, while in  
> the Baltic republics it was the other way around?
> Actually, the Baltic republics had a special status within the  
> Soviet Union, it was "nasha zagranitsa" (our abroad). People who  
> lived in the Soviet Asian republics should pass judgment on Stephen  
> Cohen's comments.
>
> Sincerely,
>
> Yevgeny Slivkin
>
> ________________________________________
> From: SEELANGS: Slavic & East European Languages and Literatures  
> list [SEELANGS at bama.ua.edu] on behalf of Jules Levin  
> [ameliede at EARTHLINK.NET]
> Sent: Thursday, December 30, 2010 3:09 PM
> To: SEELANGS at bama.ua.edu
> Subject: [SEELANGS] RSSR and other republics  Was: DC 2011  
> Ethnicity and Film Panel
>
> On 12/30/2010 2:13 PM, Slivkin, Yevgeniy A. wrote:
>>> But on the other hand,  as Stephen Cohen indicates in his “Soviet
>>> Fates and Lost Alternatives”, even scholars who are proponents  
>>> of the
>>> view that ”USSR fell apart because it was an empire "concede  
>>> that the
>>> Soviet Union was “a peculiar kind of empire” and “differed  
>>> in several
>>> important ways” from traditional ones. “For all the political
>>> repression over the years, there was not, for example, a pattern of
>>> economic exploitation of the other republics by the Russian center.
>>> Instead, the backward ones were considerably modernized under the
>>> Soviet system, arguably to the economic detriment of Russia”.
>>>
>>>
>>
>>
> I'm not an economist, but I was a Fulbright lecturer in Vilnius in  
> 1981,
> from February till June.
> By April there was no cheese for sale in the grocery stores in  
> Vilnius,
> but during a week long Passover break
> in Moscow in April, we passed a deli with a window display filled with
> Lithuanian cheeses.  We laughed at this
> open demonstration of what everyone believed had happened to the  
> cheese.
> By the way, in the 30's Lithuania was the Denmark of Eastern Europe,
> exporting dairy products all around.  No one thinks the USSR improved
> the economy.
> Jules Levin
> Los Angeles
>
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