Work is no bear, it won't go nowhere: With what sayings did Soviet people justify their humiliation

An irreconcilable fighter with Soviet myths, Maxim Mirovich, this time turned to proverbs and sayings popular among Soviet people. The blogger rightly notes that they perfectly convey the true realities of life in the USSR - a society with very poor citizens who no longer even dream of living well and have forgotten how to work. So:

Money is not the main thing

The meaning of this vulgar proverb is that one should not strive to make money, but rather wait for the onset of free Communism. The fear of money and any wealth was instilled in the USSR as a norm, since the authorities needed poor and dependent people - they are easier to manipulate. If you don’t falsify voting protocols, we’ll fire you, you will starve to death. This kind of blackmail ruled the entire system, and a rich and independent person in Soviet society was considered simply an enemy, since he did not need the state. The Soviet person did not realize that money is just a resource that frees a person to do what he loves, not related to the search for his daily bread... To prevent this, propaganda and frightened poor citizens with ferocious rich people and other similar horror stories

They lived poorly but honestly

This false propaganda thesis asserts that all poor people are completely honest, while the rich are evil and insidious. But in fact, everything is exactly the opposite: it is the poor communities that generate crime in their environment. It is the poor who hate not only the rich, but also each other, and the inhabitants of rich countries (for example, Scandinavian) are distinguished by positive thinking and philanthropy.

Squeezed but pleased

This truly eerie saying symbolizes the permanent housing crisis in the USSR. After all, even when they began to settle communal apartments, people moved to supposedly free Khrushchev houses, extremely cramped and uncomfortable, such in which people huddled side by side in two or three in tiny, but their own, rooms, and the size of the kitchen rarely exceeded 5-6 square meters... At the same time, of course, it was silent about the fact that, for example, in the United States, almost all middle-income families live in their own spacious house with separate rooms for all family members, with a common space and a garage.

Work is not a wolf, it will not run away into the forest

This old Russian proverb gained particular popularity in the USSR, in which the overwhelming majority of people professed the principle "we pretend that we are working, and they pretend that they are paying us a salary".

Since in the USSR there was in principle the absence of "bourgeois" unemployment, people were hired somewhere, so that they were only registered and received pennies for openly doing nothing. So they drove teas, wandered around the corridors, played billiards and the like... This psychology has successfully passed into our time - into sweet memories of how good it was in the USSR, you do nothing, and money drips...

We did not live richly - it's no use to start

The average salary in the USSR was 120-130 rubles, which was only enough “to maintain pants”, to buy a wardrobe or women's boots once a year, and otherwise lived “from salary to salary”, but stable, as the fans of the USSR say. And propaganda presented this life as the norm, imposing the idea that this will always be so.

But when the USSR collapsed in 1991, it turned out that it was not always at all, that there are plenty of opportunities to change your life, start your own business, become independent from the state...