The power of comparison: what was it - the disorder of the “damned 90s”

Blogger Germanych drew attention to an advertisement on one of the cable channels of the popular in the 1990s: film “You are mine alone”: a tragic voice inspired the audience that this film was about “post-Soviet disorder”.

These words aroused the curiosity of the blogger so much that he decided to find out what this “post-Soviet disorder” is? After all, people continued to live after the fall of the USSR, all in the same apartments in which they had lived before, with the same furniture, with the same household items, including Soviet electronics .... What did not suit them?

Ah, yes, their salary collapsed, and many only had enough money for the cheapest food ...

So what? Did they eat otherwise in the USSR? Is it true that in the USSR, in every family there was a car, and of the finest quality? Haha

Nothing like that! But why then groaned from frustration?

And here is why. Since 1992, the country finally finally for the first time in 70 years has the opportunity to buy anything and any quality! What used to be an inaccessible deficit and was only reserved for the lucky in special distributors, now a real abundance has come. Moreover, it became possible to freely go abroad! That's just almost nobody else had money in those same 1990s for this abundance, they appeared later.

And people continued to live in a Soviet way, surrounded by their Soviet household appliances, in old Soviet apartments, drove old Soviet cars (who they had). And with longing we looked at everything new, high-quality, foreign, inaccessible! With involuntarily compared their Soviet life with a new, radiant, Western. And they realized how much worse the Soviet ...

Here comes the disorder, from an involuntary comparison of the terrible and ubiquitous past and the good, but inaccessible present. And it is no secret that at the first opportunity, people bought instead of the new and once so desired Soviet “Lada”, the ancient right-hand drive “Toyota”.

“Now of course it has all been forgotten. When everything Soviet finally disappeared from the stores, when it was no longer possible to conduct a full-scale experiment, then nostalgic memories began, which very quickly grew into violent fantasies about “the best Soviet ice cream” and “the best USSR”. And of course - about the “post-Soviet disorder”, which didn’t differ from the authentic “best in the world” Soviet life, ”the blogger concludes.