Are there any good sources about life in Stalinist Russia...

My parents visited Communist East Germany and have described it a lot to me, and we have several cool souvenirs / artifacts they brought back.

But yeah Communist life is extremely dreary and grey and dysfunctional, everything people say it is, it really was. The toilet paper was so stiff and rough it would hurt to wipe. And everyone was in a constant state of cautiousness and paranoia because scummy Communists had everyone watching and tattling on each other for wrongthink.

Well you could ask for good "fuck communism" mobies. Like Zhivago.

Funnily enough, East Germany was pretty much the NICEST part of the Warsaw pact

After war finished my grand-grandfather was shooted by soviets as punishment for being prisoner in nazi camp. Stalin was a paranoidal psicho who thought all prisoners and captives are traitors cause they might talk secrets to nazis. I think Stalin never heard about strong will.

Some parts of Russia are so remote that there was probably villages who didnt even notice the change to communist government

He was probably shot to keep him from mentioning the movie theaters and swimming pools.

russia is a prison, a dungeon no mater 80 years ago or today

Burnt by the Sun

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>my grand-grandfather was shooted by soviets as punishment for being prisoner in nazi camp
Some of ex-prisoners or people who lived under nazis were sent to gulags for collaborationism too.

>secretive and illusive
That's because it was never really defeated.

This. Great movie

>And everyone was in a constant state of cautiousness and paranoia because scummy Communists had everyone watching and tattling on each other for wrongthink.
Wow, you lying shamelessly

Literally people you can talk to? I'm from the old USSR, and well, life was pretty decent after Stalin, basically. Even people that support communism have nightmarish tales about what they suffered under Stalin.
As for communism for the last 20-30 years before the fall, it wasn't so bad. It depends a lot on where you lived and also what you want from life. For example, if you want to be some fancy intellectual or influencer that travels the world to go to events and shit like that, you would probably fucking hate living under it since, since you weren't going to go anywhere.
As an ordinary person, though, life was much, much better than it is today, especially for older people. You never had to worry about housing and everyone had a place to live and a job to go (which you could treat pretty freely). There were a lot of public spaces and, on average, the cities were pretty clean and well-maintained. There was basically no limit to what you could achieve with a willingness to learn since textbooks were free, college was free, and dorm rooms were dirt cheap and even a peasant's son could afford to go to a classy university.
The only real problem was a lack in basic shit. For example, my father has stories of waking up at 3-4 am only to stay in line to get some carbonated water, lmao. And you can forget luxuries like oranges and bananas unless you knew someone that knew someone. At the same time, you wouldn't ever be starving, either.
On the whole, most ex-USSR countries are doing way worse today than they did under late communism. Old people can barely afford anything, young people have left to work abroad en masse, and most things are getting privatized despite being as bad if not worse than when they were socialized.

Thanks for the insight. Fascinating.

Ever heard of the Stasi you moron
>One of its main tasks was spying on the population, mainly through a vast network of citizens turned informants

You can't even debate it, there is literally tons of paperwork documenting the surveillance of the population that were archived and are publicly accessible.

you couldn't talk shit about government even after Stalin tho. There was a massive shooting of protesting workers crows in 1963

>On the whole, most ex-USSR countries are doing way worse today than they did under late communism

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>Are there any good sources about life in one of the most important countries of the last century?
You're a pleb and below /his/, why not save their space and ask on reddit, or google?

East Germany or Estonia SSR

Yes, imagine living under state surveillance 24/7. Imagine knowing that every word of your private correspondence can be inspected by the secret police agent at any time they want.This is insanity!

almost like Obama's america, if true

Stalin was just a russian hitler, so any movies on hitlers germany would echo stalins russia, just with the aesthetic cultural differences

If you want good historical sources of Stalinist Russia you should read any sort of work done by sovietologists or people adjacent to the sociology sciences branch. Anyone who has actually studied both Nazi Germany and Stalinist Russia can tell you that once you get into the nitty gritty of things, the "totalitarian" paradigm goes out the window since the term cannot be applied in any sort of empirical sense. You should be really careful with autobiographies and any sort of work sone by ex-communists, these were weaponised as propaganda during the Cold War. I'm sure the facts told in these biographies were true but you cannot get a good grasp on Stalinist society as a whole going by sensationalist anecdotes alone. These are my reccomendations:

Michael Gayer - Beyond Totalitarianism: Stalinism and Nazism Compared

Sheila Fitzpartick - On Stalin's Team

Sheila Fitzpatrick - Education and Social Mobility in the Soviet Union 1921-1934

Sheila Fitzpatrick - Everyday Stalinism Ordinary Life in Extraordinary Times Soviet Russia in the 1930s

Golfo Alexopoulos & Julie Hessler & Kiril Tomoff - Writing the Stalin Era: Sheila Fitzpatrick and Soviet Historiography

John Arch Getty & Roberta T. Manning - Stalinist Terror: New Perspectives

Simon Ings - Stalin and the Scientists

“Man with a movie camera”
Probably on YouTube by now

Khruschev's era was the height of the Soviet Union. Stalin's time was consumed by famine, purges, war, and then the post-war cleanup, while Brezhnev was a good goy for the most powerful members of the politburo and allowed everything to be run into the ground. Khruschev's time in Russia is looked at the same way that America looks back on Eisenhower's time.

None of these are even russian...

Sovietologists deal with russian sources which they show in the footnotes. Have you ever read an academic work?

i dont know if this post is meant to insinuate that communist spying was ok

>late communism was successful
hmmm

its almost like “late communism” was literally just authoritarian imperialist industrial state capitalism

If you are sugesting on the other hand that in order to be an expert in Stalinsim you need to be russian, you would be surprised to know that that is not always the case. For instance the leading hispanist currently is John H. Elliot.

There are a million decent books about the soviet union, most of them taking a dim view of it if not demonizing it. The Gulag Archipelago is literal fiction

Authoritarian imperialist industrial state capitalism can be succesful, look at China

Tankies are subhumans.

any non biased hollywood movies about russia or communism?

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Gulag Archipelago is not really that accurate to know what happened in Stalinist Russia. Its like pretending to understand the intricacies of the 3rd Reich by reading The Diary of Anne Frank.

El Che

its sucks that a mediocre do-nothing like Brezhnev kicked Khruschev out and stagnated the whole union