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Rick Suddeth: USSR: Moscow 1989 Grocery Store

Rick Suddeth · 1.1M views · 2012-11-27 · 4:21

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Overview

A short amateur clip of a Moscow grocery store from 1989, filmed by a visiting production worker. The shelves look sparse, and the uploader adds a note on the hard-working people living under a system that did not reward them.

On Hacker News

Cited as visual evidence of Soviet command-economy scarcity, usually in arguments about choice and central planning.

Discussed on HN; no positive recommendation is recorded in this export · HN mentions 2015–2021

Topics

World historyMacroeconomics & financial crises
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ussrgrocery storecommand economymoscow 1989scarcity

What people said

cbozeman · 2021-02 · Criticism

> a communistic state Yeah that worked out well for the Союз Советских Социалистических Республик! It managed to give the world the worst nuclear disaster ever seen! And also managed to keep an entire nation with vast resources so fucking poor that their supermarkets - lol, who am I kidding? There were no supermarkets in Soviet Russia. Hell, there were barely even markets... but they basically looked like this: [VIDEO] Keep your goddamned "Ridiculous idealism that will never work because it defies human nature" to yourself. You will never, and I mean ever have a successful communist state. There's never been a single one, and never will be.

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TimTheTinker · 2020-07 · Reference

> democratically planned economy Sounds like an absolute nightmare on anything but the most local scale. Think about the number of economic decisions made daily by individuals in a free-market economy. That’s many orders of magnitude more than the number of decisions that could be made by a democratically elected group of representatives at the federal level, even if assisted by computer systems. And that’s not even considering secondary effects. Command economies have been tried many times and have never worked well. Beyond a certain limit, the larger the scale the more colossal the failure. The USSR was only able to go as long as it did because Stalin was shipping trainloads of grain out of the Ukraine leaving millions of people starving. EDIT: Video of a grocery store in Moscow, USSR, 1989: [VIDEO]

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akurilin · 2019-05 · Reference

[VIDEO] - linked from the article. I still remember walking into those stores with my mother during that era, to my eyes at the time that looked "just fine", I didn't know any better. Looking back now, not so much. And as someone on YouTube pointed out, that was in Moscow, which had it much better than regions further away from the sources of power.

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Sources

Video by Rick Suddeth, played through YouTube.

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