How the USSR Collapsed on Soviet TV

[Music] greetings comrades and welcome to the soviet union it's 1978 and things are going great we were the first nation to suffocate a dog in geocentric orbit and we also set off the world's largest nuclear weapon but those glory days are somewhat behind us now our vast empire may cover one-sixth of the world's land mass but most of it is an uninhabitable wasteland but hey what the ussr lacks in beauty spots or arable land it makes up for in fully automated luxury communalism i hope nothing ever changes i have a reliable job working in a collective shoe factory all the potatoes i could possibly drink and my first color tv it sure beats the old one that i watched through a magnifying glass i can now clearly see what's happening across our empire of equality and what our especially equal leaders are up to and more importantly what products they deem me worthy of [Music] because everything is created by state-run industry nearly every advert is just letting me know about the local availability of certain products like this funky ski themed number telling me that lemons are here and they're fun for the whole family or how about this one for our only available brand of washing detergent i may never have seen a washing machine before but now i can thanks to my trusty ekran television set and because of our dear leader leonard brezhnev i haven't seen him a lot on my television lately and there's rumors that he's sick but i'm sure he's just busy after all our brave soviet troops are currently fighting extremists in afghanistan who you might know as the good guys from rambo 3 or the bad guys from 9 11. i'm sure there'll be no match for our mighty red army i mean they haven't been stockpiling nuclear weapons and guarding german concrete for nothing right thanks to military overstretch and our barely functional factories we don't have quite as many consumer products as people in the west and the ones that are produced are usually snatched from the factories by corrupt officials before they even reach the shelves so the only place that i see many of these products are on tv like this bizarrely erotic carpet advert that looks like it was filmed next to a load of sewage runoff [Music] in 1982 i see brezhnev on my screen again he's alive and raring to go our annual october revolution march which is confusingly held in november and then we see brezhnev again just three weeks later at his own funeral but before his death was announced the only thing that was on soviet television was this a four-hour loop of tchaikovsky's swan lake it often gets played during times of political instability that way our brave and intelligent leaders make sure that we get the correct information that they want us to hear after brezhnev went up to the great gulag in the sky we were left with a bunch of leaders that looked about as fresh as the ones that we'd embalmed and put on public display in the 1920s first comes yuri andropov a familiar face and plus his hairline was comforting as it was proof that something was recessing worse than our economy he dies 15 months into his leadership and then is replaced by the even older constantine chernenko seen here adopting the t pose to assert dominance but then he keels over just 13 months later by 1985 we needed someone with some fresh blood we were introduced to the new general secretary of the communist party the gremlin in the kremlin mikhail gorbachev at a sprightly 56 gorby is young and his head is covered in ideas maybe this guy can change things if he can get his plans approved by the country's real leaders the kgb kgb stands for committet gostaravanoy bezo they are a highly sophisticated secret police and surveillance network employing over 500 000 people including this handsome kgb agent who's currently stationed in east germany as well as spying on all of us the kgb also has a specific department that's job is to ban western media and foreign influence but culture has a way of getting in through the cracks much of the soviet union's video work and commercials come from the same place the satellite state of estonia and most of the ants that i'm showing you come from the mind of one crazed estonian ad director harry egypt but the thing about estonia is it's the one place in the soviet union where your television can pick up illegal frequencies from finnish television stations meaning that television-owning estonians were some of the few who were able to actually access western media with any kind of ease and harry egypt was clearly one of these people because his commie commercials absolutely reek of the insidious influence of western decadence but when harry wasn't committing blatant plagiarism he was at the local beach picking up models for his increasingly experimental commercials like this one which is inexplicably trying to sell you shoe polish my brave face [Applause] but he's probably best known in the west for this outrageous ear rape sequence which is all about advertising the delicious taste of minced chicken carcass [Music] [Music] leader mikhail gorbachev was watching these commercials when he decided to bring widespread reform to our nation it was already perfect and he was about to improve it the whole of the ussr got a light dusting of democracy as a few party officials were directly elected for the first time they don't have much responsibility but they exist and this empowers ordinary people to feel like that they can actually criticize the current system not me of course i love it gorbachev also allows a few foreign firms to set up business in the soviet union and by 1986 i can even see adverts for that dirty capitalist swill water known as pepsi but i wouldn't buy it even if i could afford it i'd rather just sit back relax and watch russia's longest running animated show well just you wait in which a chain smoking wolf attempts and fails to devour the same big-eyed bunny but he's usually outwitted by our nation's superior manufacturing pro s or our honorable secret police hey what's going on [Music] an official announcement from the council of ministers there has been an accident at the chernobyl atomic power station one of the atomic reactors was damaged the consequences of the accident are being taken care of huh well that was short i'm sure they've got everything under control back to the ads oh come on that one was good three days later we're told that everything's under control and that foreign reports of the death count have been greatly exaggerated see nothing to worry about the lesson here is that you can solve any problem if you throw enough helicopters and human suffering at it the level of the radiation in the area of the power station and the immediately adjacent area still remains dangerous to the health of people the highest priority task right now is to eliminate the consequences of the accident huh you know i'm starting to think these [ __ ] are lying to me the chernobyl disaster really undermined confidence in the soviet union both internally and externally on top of that we're still fighting in afghanistan apparently someone armed those extremists with a bargain bucket of anti-aircraft missiles and now i think about it generally this whole communism thing is starting to look a little creaky i watch commercials for cars and speed boats that i'll never be able to afford i don't really feel like going to work and a lot of people agree with me i'd rather just sit back and watch tv and there i can see that some of my countrymen are being a bit more proactive because i mean if you're not working i guess you might as well be protesting there are strikes and demonstrations across the soviet union especially in the baltic states like estonia but unlike our previous leaders gorby isn't as enthusiastic about transforming protesters into a cloud of pink mist with uprisings going conspicuously uncrushed people are emboldened on tv i even get to see someone directly heckle gorbachev yo [ __ ] 12 [ __ ] the kgb and i'm also seeing a lot more of this guy a barely functional alcoholic known as boris yeltsin who now holds public office in moscow he doesn't have much real power but that's probably a good thing because he's always about two bottles deep but i like what this boris has to say and so do a lot of people including these guys in the same year that the ussr triumphantly retreated from afghanistan it also shrewdly decided to let protesters tear down the berlin wall and we're all pretty much glad to see it go that thing was an eyesore it was also really expensive to run and you know freedom openness blah blah blah whatever after being drip fed capitalism for the better part of a decade we were ready for the all-you-can-eat buffet moscow got its first mcdonald's in 1990 and it drew crowds that we hadn't seen since that morning's breadline but the boys over at the kgb weren't as excited about all these reforms they started seeing their central power getting sapped away and they blamed gorbachev hey and maybe they had a point maybe we were all a little over stimulated from all these new products and to be honest that chicken advert probably didn't help maybe what we all needed was another continuous loop of swan lake this is what is playing on every television in the soviet union as the kgb and the red army do what russia does best a good old-fashioned coup they join forces specifically to take us back to the glory days of gulags and gout when the news returns gorbachev is nowhere to be seen and it's pretty difficult for the news readers to pretend everything is normal when there are hundreds of tanks rolling on red square when our new leaders show themselves they look like a bunch of grey-suited clones they tell us that gorby has come down with a nasty case of coo i mean flu no one takes these people seriously they're anonymous they're nobodies i haven't seen them on my tv before but i have seen this guy on the day of the coup boris yeltsin sobered up for long enough to jump on a tank in red square and give a rousing speech he calls for an open-ended general strike to protest the coup which suited me because i stopped going to work years ago just three days later the coup fails gorbachev is back and he's appearing alongside yeltsin but everything is different now the center cannot hold on christmas day 1991 it's over despite all his reforms mikhail gorbachev resigns from office in disgrace but he does get to live every underappreciated workers dream and set fire to the whole place on his way out he announces the dissolution of the soviet union and the rise of the russian federation the soviet flag is lowered from the kremlin for the last time i watch this ritual on tv and it's strange to outlive the country you were born into like watching the walls of your childhood bedroom dissolve into air surely after this nothing can be the same greetings fellow capitalist pigs welcome to the russian federation it's 1998 and things are going great our currency might be worthless but we're propping up our economy by pumping dinosaur source out of siberia and dumping guns off the coast of liberia i haven't been seeing much of our brave president boris yeltsin on tv recently there's rumors that he's sick but i'm sure he's just busy the last time i saw him he was getting loaded with some american pervert even the kgb got into the capitalist swing of things doing a successful rebrand in the mid-90s they're now known as the fsb and are led by this guy what's his name wait actually he's prime minister now but life moves pretty fast in capitalist russia we've now got more luxury brands than you can shake a stick at only the oligarchs can afford them but at least i can see them on my new japanese tv and i can see commercials for american businesses like pizza hut but i'll admit i do have some nostalgia for the old days but wait wait a minute is that gorby it's you wow life is good what more could i possibly want i hope nothing ever changes thanks for watching this one was really fun to put together i'd also just like to give a quick shout out to all my patrons you guys are the best das vadanya and bye bye

Channel: Ordinary Things

Views: 1,052,820

Rating: 4.887557 out of 5

Keywords: how the soviet union collapsed, how the ussr collapsed, communist commercial, Harry Egipt, fall of the ussr, fall of the soviet union, collapse of communism, minced chicken, ordinary things, Gorbachev, pizza hut, pepsi, pepsi navy, russia, estonia, thicc Putin

Id: BgT-wR29aIU

Length: 13min 46sec (826 seconds)

Published: Fri Jun 19 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/RaabHimself]

What a great way of learning about history.

[u/jl2352]

I'd like to see that carpet advert.

[u/King_Bernie]

Never thought I'd say it, but a synopsis of late Soviet history has been the most entertaining thing I've watched all week.

[u/GoldenJoel]

I Cannot Fucking Wait Until Putin Dies - JPEGMAFIA

[u/Moronoo]

Ordinary Things is an underrated youtube channel, his content is top notch

[u/selectyour]

What a fantastic perspective and presentation style. Loved it

[u/GoldenJoel]

I'm glad to see Ordinary Things pop up in the wild. His videos need more attention.

There's a good documentary about the Soviet collapse in relation to a concept call Hypernormalization. Basically, the idea is that the Soviet people had become so accustomed to blatant corruption and dishonestly, they didn't believe ANYTHING that was happening.

It's very similar to the U.S. right now, I think... The U.S. will probably collapse in a very similar manner.

[u/CivilCJ]

The more condensed ERB version.

[u/Manchu_Fist]

History seems to be rhyming pretty well.