It isn’t really useful to compare the Soviet Union in it’s final 1-2 years of total crisis to the USA. You see videos of empty supermarkets, lines and many other problems. But this certainly is not an accurate depiction of normal life during most of the Soviet period. The 70s and early 80s did not have a lot of the problems that arose in 1989.
Soviet Union was rolling downhill starting from 1965, with lines and empty stalls.
"Иван Васильевич меняет профессию[1]" is a 1973 movie and it depicts shortages, scarcity of consumer goods and "having to know people" to get decent service.
> The 70s and early 80s did not have a lot of the problems that arose in 1989.
In late 1980s the systemic problem became a problem everywhere. However, food stamps were already a thing in some regions in mid-1970s.
And the "sausage trains" were a well-known phenomenon since at least early 70s. This was a term for the trains that people would take to buy stuff in larger cities like Moscow that didn't exist in smaller cities like Ryazan or Tver.
Well using the iPhone as a camera on the Mac is pretty awesome. And it’s desk view feature to show what you draw. So there’s no need to take a webcam or camera for better quality with me when I travel for work. Just a mouse, keyboard and clamshelled MacBook hooked up to the hotel TV - still allowing me to make video calls.
Well life in Russia keeps going on as before with cheap food, gas and electricity - basically all basic needs. And the Rubel is the best performing currency this year. That the Russian gov will fall sounds extremely unlikely as someone who spent the last years in Russia. Life still goes on as usual, while in the EU it seems to crumble a bit.
A friend told me how their Adobe licenses got revoked, but the company just imaged the working version and disabled Internet access for anything Adobe related - it works, but it also means no AI tools or further updates for now. I doubt there will be straight out pirated versions of most products, especially because of the rootkits floating around.
Office 365 cancellations are another story. Lots of movement to onprem or relocations of IT abroad are in progress right now. Yandex for example is moving part of it’s operations to Israel.
You can easily buy cash in those small stores with surprisingly good exchange rates. Also I have converted my Rubels to Euros for months now on the stock market and sent them via Swift into an EU bank (in total above 10k€). So no problems there either. But the customs do question you rather aggressively about cash. Although he didn’t seem to believe me that I didn’t have cash with me, he didn’t search me either.
