What everyday life looked like in the Soviet Union

A New York Times feature from 1989 reveals quite a bit about the Soviet attitude regarding the poor and the homeless in the last few years of the USSR. One Western diplomat is quoted as saying that Soviet officials stopped gathering statistics on poverty "because they insisted it simply did not exist."When presented with the idea of combating the issue with American-style "soup kitchens," one Soviet official said: ''We are opposed to this system ... where poor people get free dinner. Psychologically, it's a strange idea to us. We will not consider such a variant." In 1989, it took a Soviet worker 10 times longer to earn a pound of meat than it did the average American.