Those who thought the 50's and early 60's were innocent times

[Koch Ebola]

watch this video

[samnsara]

1. i remember going to the county fair with my parents and seeing booths selling bomb shelters..

[MuseRider]

3. My Grandfather had one.

He bought one and had a large garden dug up and put one in for his tenants, he owned a row of duplexes. We loved to go in it when we were kids. It was very small and he let us turn the handle that brought in air or more likely recycled the air in the unit. We thought it was cool!

[Dial H For Hero]

2. A rather superior version: "The Obsolete Man".

https://www.dailymotion.com/video/x6ywhnei

[NCDem47]

4. Also,

Just ask people of color, women and gays what they thought about this period too.

I'm sure everyone lived Father Knows Best.

[TomWilm]

5. Even in 1962 this was far from Soviet reality ...

In the 1960ties the Soviet economy was competing with the economic growth in the United States - and actually winning that race. The daily surveillance and indoctrination was very far from the movies depiction. I turned it of when the telephone operator was blocking an ordinary call, since that was not the life over there.

But yes, KGB was sometimes listening, you needed to be very friendly with the system to get any success - and many dissidents was sent to camps in those early years. When US propaganda is made this bad, it is way to easy to contradict it with the actual less grim reality of those Soviet days.

[PoindexterOglethorpe]

6. In the 1960s the Soviet economy was hardly winning the race with the U.S.

Huge numbers of people lived in communal apartments, shared toilets and kitchens, many of which did not have refrigerators, even in the largest cities. Hardly anyone owned a car. Having a telephone was uncommon. People stood in long lines just to get toilet paper. Well that sounds slightly familiar. But here, it didn't go on for years. Grocery stores routinely ran out of everything. Often young couples would live with their parents for years before they could finally get into an apartment of their own.

[TomWilm]

7. The US Senate seems to differ ...

I was distinctly writing only about economic growth - and my claim is supported by many sources, like this report from the US Senate Subcommittee on Economic Statistics in 1960:

... If one compares gross national products in the last few years, say 1955-58, the results are exceedingly favorable to the U.S.S.R., due to its own extraordinary harvest in 1958 and the recession in business activity in the United States at the same time. If one takes very long periods, 1870-1913 and 1913-55, the average annual growth rate in Russia, in both of them seems to have been only slightly higher than in the United State. ...

There is no obvious contradiction between having both economic growth and missing toilet paper. It is very possible to have a totally f*cked up system of government, and still have them running a decent economy.

BTW, your description that huge numbers of people lived in communal apartments, shared toilets and kitchens, many of which did not have refrigerators, even in the largest cities. Hardly anyone owned a car. Having a telephone was uncommon depicts very much my own capitalist country Denmark in those same years. Except for the cars, which slowly began to be common - though a car costed two full years of salary for a worker.

[PoindexterOglethorpe]

8. Meh. The economic growth certainly had nothing to do

with what consumers actually experienced. Which means those numbers are essentially bogus.

I'd recommend reading Russia, the People and the Power by Robert Kaiser or The Russians by Hedrick Smith. Both published in the mid 1970s. I read both books shortly before a trip to the Soviet Union in 1976, and the were extremely enlightening.

And are you saying that as late as the 1970s in Denmark people were still living in communal appartments, hardly anyone had a car or a telephone? Really?

It's a lot more than toilet paper shortages. It's a profound lack of most consumer goods at all. There was an enormous gap between the Soviet system and the Western system early on.

Oh, and a car costing two full years of salary for a worker is hardly important. More to the point, they were incredibly common in the U.S. by the end of WWII, perhaps even earlier.

[TomWilm]

9. Good that you accept my documentation

Numbers and statistics is never telling the full story. The Soviet economic growth was then better than in the United States, and their stupid system f*cked up their development anyways. If you reread your books I am sure they tell the same story as the Senate got.

And since you now suddenly want to talk about the 1970ies, OK. Then the economic growth in Denmark got way better than in Soviet Russia, and cars and phones were now common. But as late as the 1970s many people in the big cities were still living in communal apartments with shared toilets in the yard - and so was I. This continued in the 1980ies too, though the remaining houses now shared indoor bathrooms. All those building are now torn down or rebuild.

There were a lot of slum in the United States too...