Well, I was fourteen when things came apart. It is pretty conscious age.
1. Education was free, but it was not as good as sovok-worshippers used to say. It depended on how lucky you were with your teachers. And with school at all. Many of my schoolmates never bothered to learn. They knew they will be tansferred to the next class and the next and graduated and then stuffed in professional school somehow, and then get "distributed" and then work till the pension. So why woud they want to overstrain themselves with studying? They preferred to bully those unlucky ones who studied properly.
And mind you that people with higher education were usually paid less than workers. The salary of a Soviet engineer was a running gag at a time. "They pretend to pay us, we pretend to work" and so on.
2. I was lucky to be pretty healthy kid and went to hospital only once. My verdict was: NEVER AGAIN! Nurses and doctors just hated us. They bullied cryinh kids into silence. An example from my mother: she had the thyroid resection which left her with an ugly scar across the neck. And surgeons never told her that from now on she has to take tyroid hormones pills. They thought it's the therapist's job, and the therapist thought it is done by surgeons, so she left hospital knowing nothing about her hypothyreosis and her health state had become worsening day by day until she was told by my aunt (not by the doctor!) to go get a receipt and take hormone pills. But that medicine servise was fot free, ha-ha-ha.
3. My father got his apartment for free from the factory he worked in. That was a 1-room (not 1-bedroom, 1 room at all!) apartment of 18 m2, and four of us lived there: dad, mom, me and sis. We shared one bed with my sis until I was 15. And my dad was underpaid all the time he worked in that factory. Can you imagine an IT-man who earns 366 $ a month? And he was never considered an OWNER of that apartment. To get himself a proper living, he had to leave his position in a construction bureau and starte to work at a building site as a common worker fir 3 years. And he was lucky to have such a possibility.
4. As it was said, it was ILLEGAL not to have work. If you had no work you were judged for "parasitism" and jailed.
5. God spared me, I was born a woman... But, mind you, there was a time I DREAMT to enlist despite I was a girl. There were so many movies about how good our army is. But when my male relatives had known of it, they started to tell me about terrible reality.
6. FUCK WHAT? Clothes of Soviet productuon were mostly ugly and uncomfortable to wear. You should see my first bra... Sometimes I wish I did a picture of it to show to all the female USSR-fans^ THAT's what you'd had to wear, were you born in SU, stupid hens!
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1. Education was free, but it was not as good as sovok-worshippers used to say. It depended on how lucky you were with your teachers. And with school at all. Many of my schoolmates never bothered to learn. They knew they will be tansferred to the next class and the next and graduated and then stuffed in professional school somehow, and then get "distributed" and then work till the pension. So why woud they want to overstrain themselves with studying? They preferred to bully those unlucky ones who studied properly.
And mind you that people with higher education were usually paid less than workers. The salary of a Soviet engineer was a running gag at a time. "They pretend to pay us, we pretend to work" and so on.
2. I was lucky to be pretty healthy kid and went to hospital only once. My verdict was: NEVER AGAIN! Nurses and doctors just hated us. They bullied cryinh kids into silence.
An example from my mother: she had the thyroid resection which left her with an ugly scar across the neck. And surgeons never told her that from now on she has to take tyroid hormones pills. They thought it's the therapist's job, and the therapist thought it is done by surgeons, so she left hospital knowing nothing about her hypothyreosis and her health state had become worsening day by day until she was told by my aunt (not by the doctor!) to go get a receipt and take hormone pills.
But that medicine servise was fot free, ha-ha-ha.
3. My father got his apartment for free from the factory he worked in. That was a 1-room (not 1-bedroom, 1 room at all!) apartment of 18 m2, and four of us lived there: dad, mom, me and sis. We shared one bed with my sis until I was 15. And my dad was underpaid all the time he worked in that factory. Can you imagine an IT-man who earns 366 $ a month? And he was never considered an OWNER of that apartment. To get himself a proper living, he had to leave his position in a construction bureau and starte to work at a building site as a common worker fir 3 years. And he was lucky to have such a possibility.
4. As it was said, it was ILLEGAL not to have work. If you had no work you were judged for "parasitism" and jailed.
5. God spared me, I was born a woman...
But, mind you, there was a time I DREAMT to enlist despite I was a girl. There were so many movies about how good our army is. But when my male relatives had known of it, they started to tell me about terrible reality.
6. FUCK WHAT? Clothes of Soviet productuon were mostly ugly and uncomfortable to wear. You should see my first bra... Sometimes I wish I did a picture of it to show to all the female USSR-fans^ THAT's what you'd had to wear, were you born in SU, stupid hens!