The USSR was indeed the most reading country in the world.
Soviet citizens spent approx. 11 hours a week reading books, newspapers and journals on average, which was twice more as the British, North Americans and French people did. It was the findings of the world study of 1966.
Not a good metric for producing scientific talent, and it doesn't distinguish reading fiction from actually educating yourself. For the purposes of producing scientific talent, reading fiction helps you as much as watching TV.
I don’t know any definition of actually educating yourself that would exclude reading fiction. And why are you focused on the purpose of producing scientific talent?
Right... tell me you didn't read the article, am I right. That's why I didn't bother replying. I often feel the impulse to reply to "show everyone that this guy is talking nonsense" but if that's obvious other people will see it too, so I say nothing.
Yes, people had a lot of time for hobbies. Reading, writing poems, electronics.
Sometimes I watch old interviews of people on the streets and compare with the interviews they do on the streets now. It's night and day. Even people, like working class, drunk in a bar in the end of 80's collapse were more well spoken and intelligent then the people now. Either it's Putin, emigration or capitalism or whatever but there is a serious degradation in the populace.
I've noticed this aspect in general of revolutionary societies. What I'm personally quite selfishly interested in is whether this is unique to leftist revolutionary societies - were Germans or Italians in 1936 having spirited debates about fascism and how best to serve the Fatherland? I have no idea, from what I've read so far it sounds like no.
Meanwhile, for example in Spain in the same time period, there was a remarkably broad activation of the population in revolutionary activism and political engagement, which allegedly doubled productivity and dramatically increased agricultural yields, which to me indicates that the anarchists were basically everywhere (how else did they syndicalize such wide swaths of the economy?).
Similarly there's the whole French Revolution cafe / salon culture.
I think you’re missing a lot of historical context. If by “intellectual” you mean cosmopolitan university professors and government administrators then yes. This also closely associated with internalization, relativism, and Jewish culture.
If by “intellectual” you mean learning, reading, thinking, then no.
According to Zoya, Birkins, boob jobs, and Jaguars are the current topics of conversation? (that said, museums did see an uptick of entries when they offered reduced rates for patrons wearing Louboutins)
No, that movie is about a subset of society that always existed in different forms, even in the 50's. I don't think it was showing the first shoots of degradation.
[I'm guessing unlikely, due to the censorship? Yes, Белое солнце пустыни (1970) actually has a villain and even an on-screen shootout, but the underlying vibes are still a far cry from Брат (1997)]
FWIW, Lavrov still seems to wax poetic from time to time (although I haven't read anything of his since «Нет, ничто в этом мире не ново...»).
Shnur obviously has something to say (although in the last few years* he seems to be saying it less clearly and more cryptically), but he's not any more the man in the street than Lavrov.
Also, I'm not sure (a) how serious you were about this thesis, nor (b) if the degradation to which you allude significantly overlaps with what I might assume to have been degradation...
* which produced their own emigration wave? looking at israel these days I wonder if much of that has become "out of the fire, into the frying pan"?
