I was born in 1979 and caught the tail end of USSR. Once the collapse started it was pretty subtle, small things started getting worse, you’d see shortages of stuff, public services not working as well, and so on. And this process goes on for a while where life seems normal for the most part, but things are just getting shittier all the time. And then things start getting worse very rapidly.
One of my memories is of food shortages. And getting food was like going to a black friday sale. Everyone would gather and wait for the store to open, and then they’d just wheel out a cart with whatever food they had that day. And people would just rush to grab what they could. Me being a small kid, I was able to squeeze between people easily. Looking back at it though, I was basically risking getting trampled just to get bread and milk for the day. And we go to that point from everything seeming mostly normal in under a year.
I grew up in Moscow, and from what I’ve heard things never got that bad there relative to many other places. So I can only imagine what things were like for people in smaller towns.
Out of curiosity and if you don’t mind me asking, what collapse did you live through?
I was born in 1979 and caught the tail end of USSR. Once the collapse started it was pretty subtle, small things started getting worse, you’d see shortages of stuff, public services not working as well, and so on. And this process goes on for a while where life seems normal for the most part, but things are just getting shittier all the time. And then things start getting worse very rapidly.
One of my memories is of food shortages. And getting food was like going to a black friday sale. Everyone would gather and wait for the store to open, and then they’d just wheel out a cart with whatever food they had that day. And people would just rush to grab what they could. Me being a small kid, I was able to squeeze between people easily. Looking back at it though, I was basically risking getting trampled just to get bread and milk for the day. And we go to that point from everything seeming mostly normal in under a year.
Which region are you from? (if it is safe and reasonable for you to answer)
I grew up in Moscow, and from what I’ve heard things never got that bad there relative to many other places. So I can only imagine what things were like for people in smaller towns.