this post was submitted on 03 Feb 2026
1362 points (94.8% liked)
A Boring Dystopia
15514 readers
788 users here now
Pictures, Videos, Articles showing just how boring it is to live in a dystopic society, or with signs of a dystopic society.
Rules (Subject to Change)
--Be a Decent Human Being
--Posting news articles: include the source name and exact title from article in your post title
--If a picture is just a screenshot of an article, link the article
--If a video's content isn't clear from title, write a short summary so people know what it's about.
--Posts must have something to do with the topic
--Zero tolerance for Racism/Sexism/Ableism/etc.
--No NSFW content
--Abide by the rules of lemmy.world
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
The USSR had such dorms for students and people in waiting lists for housing, idk if they were technically free but the fee was ridiculous if it existed. Rent, for example, was 3% of the monthly incomes. I do think we should have such social housing, both in flat-form and in dorm-form, for whoever wants to rent a very cheap housing unit.
They also had an incredibly corrupt and repressive society full of black markets and very few people actually spent that little rent due to all the corruption. and just like in capitalist societies, the poor struggled paid most of their income to basic necessities and the rich paid hardly anything. housing in desirable areas and cities are hardly abundant. You wanted off the waiting lists, you had to bribe someone, often repeatedly. Bribery was illegal, but the person getting bribed would just bribe the officials and law officers.
But I mean, yeah if you wanted to be miner in Siberia and live in a shack housing was cheap. Not so much if you wanted to live Moscow or St Petersberg. That's also true of the USA. Plenty of cheap houses in crappy places nobody wants to live where there is little economic opportunity.
I've yet to find any serious study talking of "widespread corruption" in the USSR compared to countries of equal level of development. This is entirely vibes-based.
Income inequality was the lowest in the USSR in the history of the region, by a long shot. Again, you're making stuff up:
Yes, but housing was primarily accessed through the work union. Housing near a factory went to the workers of said factory, people mainly got to live near where they worked.
Again, as if bribes don't happen in capitalism. In capitalism, you don't "bribe" someone to get a house, you're just poor enough not to afford it and you rent for life instead. Waiting lists, while unpleasant, are the more egalitarian solution. How else do you propose distribution of limited housing in a rapidly industrializing country that's moving tens of millions of people from the countryside to cities?
Care to share any of that wonderful data about housing prices in Soviet Leningrad or Moscow? Regardless: your analogy of "being a miner in Siberia" is dumb. Lifestyle in the countryside and in smaller cities was highly subsidized, but that's a good thing. Now hospitals are closed, roads aren't maintained, and schools are left underfunded everywhere outside Moscow and Saint Petersburg, making life especially in non-Slavic regions of Russia much worse than it used to be. It's not that people want to move to Moscow, it's that there are no jobs or infrastructure outside three big cities, and that's really bad for many people. I don't see what you have against living in relatively minor cities like Murmansk, Ulan-Ude or Tomsk, provided there are jobs and infrastructure (which there were).