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Lmao 2.5kg of meat? Forget it. If you got any, it was a day to celebrate. You couldn’t get shit for stamps and you had to stand in long queues to get the scraps that you could get. You waited for hours for a delivery that immediately disappeared or didn’t come at all. You literally bought what you could. People used to barter the stamps and a grey market to get what you needed popped up. The only way to get what you wanted was to pay with dollars.
You sound like you were actually there? If so, please continue.
My wife was born in ( but too late to remember) a former Soviet state.
Talking with her grandma is pretty interesting. Recently with global inflation, some of the grandmas friends were speaking fondly about government controlled price of bread.
Then my grandma (in law) who still has more of her marbles than any 91 year old I’ve ever met said “lol, yeah that was the price on the sign, but there was no bread in the store!”
“Ooooohhhhh yyyeeaaaaahhhh…”
The Soviet Union was a fun place. People whose great grandparents happened to be German were put on a train to Kyrgistan and just dumped out onto the steppe.
The 50% who survived the first winter and actually managed to build up villages were later banned from buying or selling at the local market, forcing them into the black market to survive, which was obviously illegal as well.
But they weren’t allowed to emigrate to Germany either.In the 90‘s they were allowed. And Germany welcomed them.
“would you like your tea with no milk or no cream?”
And no tea?
I had the opportunity to visit Russia in 1987 at the hight of the USSR. It was a hell-hole. Communism doesn’t work.
Authoritarian dictatorships that move wealth and power to the top at the expense of the peopel don’t work. “Communism” is barely on the radar, you can stick whatever label you want on it.
1987 certainly wasn’t the height of the USSR
I had the opportunity to visit Detroit in 2017 at the height of the USA. It was a hell-hole. Capitalism doesn’t work.
Who the fuck is down oting this on Lemmy?
People sick of the “Capitalism Bad” circlejerk when the alternative isn’t much better as shown in the above post.
Capitalists!
deleted by creator
And far too few darts
Meet the black market.
How many cigarettes do I get if I trade in all my soap, washing powder, flour and rice?
Two.
worth it!
Seriously. It’s what I’m buying for myself for a gaming evening if I don’t want to get drunk.
0.5 liter of vodka? What were they supposed to do the other 29 days of the month?
Let alone the rest of the first day?
Would they have been expected to grow their own vegetables, or did they just embrace the average young male diet?
I believe vegetables weren’t rationed
What was the reason for rationing, was it inflation, unemployment, drought or what? I though Poland economy was free to do what it wanted, or was it subject to the same problems as the Soviet Union?
Same essential problems as the SovUnion, but in the early-mid 1980s, the Polish economy was struggling.
I fail to see how limiting how much product can be bought and sold would stimulate an economy, outside of a major excess issue like the one that led to The New Deal in the USA.
You’re thinking too much in market terms. It should be more “Our allocation of production has resulted in shortages of these goods; we must figure out a way of distributing these goods without resorting to ‘highest-bidder’ style market economics.”
Typically, in market-oriented economies, this happens during wartime when the government doesn’t trust market economies (rightly) to deliver the needs of the war while there are still civilians willing to outbid the government. In command economies, this happens whenever the priorities of the government and the civilian population are at odds (such as Poland exporting most of its sugar to the SovUnion despite massive domestic demand for sugar and higher sugar production per capita than ever before).
I have a game wishlisted on Steam called Workers & Resources: Soviet Republic that I’m hoping might prove educational to better understand how that system worked because sometimes it seems so foreign to me.
Market economies are very psychological - “How do you encourage people to consume/produce X?” But command economies are simpler in a sense, because it’s all very material - “What do we make, and who do we give it to?”
Excellent game, btw
It’s hard to take your very legitimate explanations seriously when your username is bolded as OP, and top of mind to me. Haha. Seriously though, thanks for taking the time to type it out.
ah 12 packs of cigarettes and a half a litre of vodka. a complete balanced breakfast.
ah…
blin.
Only if Abe is into cheeki breeki hardbass.
Sure, but what will you eat for the rest of the month?
That is around 970 calories a day if you take 1/30th of each edible item on the Table.
It’s not enough, but surprisingly almost half the needed amount.
If Poland is anything like the US, families were expected to keep a garden where they grew many vegetables and fruits, and often kept chickens.
Are you referring to ‘Victory Gardens’ in WWII?
If so, that’s a bit of an apples to oranges comparison, since Poland had been at peace for over 35 years.
I’m Estonian, not Polish, but I’ve helped my mom grow potatoes and stuff. Because of the peasant history, our people have always grown our own food. Only in the least few decades has it been getting less common.
Prior to WWII, during the depression.
You supplement it with potatoes, carrots, cabbage, cucumbers and other veggies. And some apples and seasonal fruit.
Things sucked but people weren’t malnourished back then.
Also not shown here: gasoline was also rationed, as were cars themselves.
I find it funny that a lot of people seem to be assuming that this is everything that they were allowed to eat. Fruits and veggies have been completely banned, in this world! Haha
Fruit is often hard to grow, but simple veggies like potatoes and onions are a no-brainer. Garlic too!
Have fun obtaining them.
More on the history of this photograph here: https://rarehistoricalphotos.com/food-rationing-communist-poland/
Thank you for the effort, that was an interesting read.
Who the hell writes like this, felt like a student that had an x word paper due and added literally every adjective they could think of to pad it.
Sounds like a miserable existence. You’re going to need a lot more vodka than that to cope.
Rationing in the early 80s is considered to be one of the major agitating factors that led to increased labor union activity and, thus, the eventual end of the Communist regime in Poland. Would seem that it was not nearly enough vodka to quietly cope!
I can see why. Like if I was flat broke, these rations would be super welcome, but as an ongoing totality of what I could have for all of my labor? No, fuck that! The people at the top were obviously hoarding all the wealth, which seems to always happen every time this form of government is tried.
Well, you still had to purchase the food, you were just limited by ration cards in how much of certain goods you could purchase.
Oh shit, that’s even worse!
It happens every time any form of government is tried to be honest. The problem is with people, not the system of government.
The major problem—one of the major problems, for there are several—one of the many major problems with governing people is that of whom you get to do it; or rather of who manages to get people to let them do it to them. To summarize: it is a well-known fact that those people who must want to rule people are, ipso facto, those least suited to do it. To summarize the summary: anyone who is capable of getting themselves made President should on no account be allowed to do the job. To summarize the summary of the summary: people are a problem.
-Douglas Adams, The Restaurant at the End of the Universe
Right. Which is a fundamental reason why the government should not be trusted to act in the best interest of the people. There must be checks and balances, and they must be held accountable and be forced to do their duty. The USA had a great run of this, but over the last 4 decades politicians have changed the lay of the land to benefit themselves and their donors more and more, and the people haven’t the gumption, will, or faculties to challenge them and hold them to account. Politicians have also realized that much of our system relied upon integrity, or the assumption that the individual would follow the system, with very little to no consequences if they just do whatever they want.
I’m no historian, but I see the cycle of [Brave New World -> Prosperity / Dominance -> Decline -> Corruption -> Oppression -> Revolution -> Brave New World] as a fairly common pattern, with timescales from decades to centuries. It might be cognitive bias, but it seems kind of inevitable, really.
Scandinavia seems like a good place to live ATM.
12 packs of cigs seems like a huge luxury
For a month? It’s just dried shredded leaves wrapped in paper, cigarettes are super cheap to produce, tax makes them expensive.
You didn’t live in the eighties I bet. It was cheap back then and everyone smoked.
average smoker smokes about 20 cigarettes a day. so it’s a little less than half of a monthly use of cigarettes.
from what i understand the ration was meant to supplement what you consume, not provide everything
Is 20 cigs a day honestly the average nowadays?? Mind blowing and sad. My mum who was an addicted smoker since she was 10 years of age and went through maybe 5 to 10 cigs a day.
it’s been the average for a long time. it’s due to nicotine’s pharmacological effects. its half life is roughly 1~2 hours. so a smoker on average will feel the compulsion to smoke an hour or so after the last cigarette. since most people are awake somewhere 16 hours a day, that’s about ~16 cigarettes a day.
your mom’s smoking habits were definitely atypical
I was trying to figure out how to make it work for week but a month?
Their priorities were fucked up. Cigarettes and alcohol, obviously, but more sugar than rice? Huh?
Also, lots of meat but no other food groups?
Elsewhere in the comments it’s mentioned that these were just the rationed things; there were unrationed foodstuffs.
Rice is not precisely native to Poland… The staple food is potatoes, which weren’t rationed.
Four and a half kilos of carbohydrates and sugars, goddamn.
For a month, that’s only about 600 kcal/day from carbs. Maybe potatoes are unrationed.
That’s a starvation diet for a full grown male. Hell, that’s even less than a very small female adult would need.
A loaf of bread is about half a kilo of flour, that’s not much for a whole month!
I wonder why it’s 1.3kg. The soviet union adopted the metric system, so it seems like an odd choice. Maybe Poland had a historical measure that size.
lot of problems, but not diabetes
Unpopular opinion: we need to ration electricity consumption as well as fuel today, even in capitalists countries. Because that stuff actually has incredible impact on the planet, and will (must) drive consumption down, so that companies / individuals start integrating “efficiency” into their thinking
I don’t see any other solution to the “exponentially growing power consumption” problem.
I don’t see any other solution to the “exponentially growing power consumption” problem.
In the U.S., at least, power generation has been roughly flat for the last 20 years, not growing exponentially:
That’s excluding our hard on for AI the last few years. Would love to see this updated.
I’m surprised by how much natural gas makes up the mix.
Power usage levels in the US, though, are insane compared to mother countries.
electricity is only a tiny fraction of energy use.
c/selfhosted has entered the chat
Power for the power god
time to self-host a powerplant?
Pigouvian taxes are a traditional solution to negative externalities, and they are often better received by the public than rationing.
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It’s expensive to be poor - the lights turning off a few days before the end of the month will incur even more costs than a higher electricity bill.
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Taxes raise money for other programs, instead of costing money to enforce rationing.
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Higher taxes in general will also help reduce inflation.
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Tax revenue can be spent on stimulus checks to offset the cost for people who use less energy than average.
Rather than stimulus checks we need to be using the money to subsidize alternatives. And we can just switch subsidies. Some examples of that include that by reducing cattle subsides we can subsidize lower emissions meat alternatives or even offer free classes on how to cook meals that happen to be lower emissions, and we can stop funding airports and put that money into rail systems, similarly by removing mandatory minimum parking and reducing road funding that money can be put into transit solutions that enable less car centric lifestyles.
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Half a liter of vodka monthly? Aren’t the Poles known for their consumption of vast quantities of the stuff?
Yeast is not on the list but the 2kg of sugar wasn’t just for cakes I’m sure.
What they were officially allowed to drink vs what they did drink.
