The typical stereotype of Russia is pretty bleak. I even saw a funny post about someone saying “I do not like syrup on my pancakes” and the response being “where are you from? the Soviet Union?”
Again, Russia is a bleak place with an evil dictator that just makes people suffer. However, in Russia’s People of Empire : Life Stories From Eurasia, 1500 to the Present, the stories are more the opposite. On page 311, it says “Rabfak schools, which were first founded in Russia and then spread to other parts of the Soviet Union, sought to educate, and politicize, the urban working classes. This move suggests some of the ways that Obidova’s own marginal status shaped her opportunities. Burnsheva;s teachers’ school for Uzbek women became a very important institution in Soviet Tashkent, attracting the daughters of the urban intelligentsia..”. A few lines before we read “within four years, she ‘learnt to read and write and divorced her husband, who had discovered her whereabouts and was constantly threatening to murder her'”.
Even with my own studies of communist East Germany, once the wall fell, people still stayed in the East when you would think they would want to run as fast as possible.
These stories show the hope behind the Soviet Union where we have just been depicting it as a group of abused and brainwashed group of people.
Was Russia actually caring for its expansion or was it all for business? Why do you think people wanted to stay in the Soviet Union and work?
