Thread by @SlavaMalamud

OK, now that you ask.
Here is the kind of community food shortages and bread lines fostered. I hope you don't mind your answer to be delivered via a profanity-laced thread, making it itself a rather accurate avatar of a Soviet bread line...

https://twitter.com/CarlBeijer/status/1449464678158118913

Some of my earliest memories are of standing in lines. Lines for everything: dairy, produce, socks, school supplies, alcohol (dad had few compunctions about tagging a 3-year-old along when grabbing a brew), lines to return fucking glass bottles for a fucking 10-kopeck refund...

Everything in my town was within walking distance, but when going out to buy anything, you always had to assume you wouldn't be back by nightfall. Lines easily ate up most of your day. Lines were exhausting and dehumanizing. But boy, did they fucking build communities...

For example, being Jewish, I learned all the best racial slurs directed against people who looked like me while standing in line.
Kindly neighbors were always happy to remind a filthy kike where his place in any line was. Early education in life matters is important...

A kid with a severe case of Down syndrome lived in the neighborhood and sometimes, being curious, he wondered out to look at lines.
So, I had a chance to learn all the slurs directed at people with disabilities, as his tiny but stern sister hurried out to usher him back inside...

Standing in lines, I learned that nobody in my country is entitled to respect or high self-esteem, that everything had to be begged for and, whenever possible, squirreled away, pilfered, scratched out of someone's grasp. Nothing disabuses you of notions about yourself like a line

When I was 12, I was punched in the mouth by a heavyset woman hell-bent of cutting in front of me in the line for oranges. She then proceeded to grab the bag of oranges I already had in my hand and rip it apart. Another heavyset woman pushed in front and began fighting her for it

As they roared and clawed at each other, I spat on the ground and walked away, two hours standing in line stricken out of my life.
When I was 16, I spent 3 hours in a line for sausage only to discover it was absolutely inedible.

Later the same year, I had to fight a local tough for my place in a line at the passport agency.
Life in the Soviet Union, being dictated by high demand and artificially manufactured low supply, was a constant battle in lines.
Everyone's dream was to get the fuck away from them.

Not just from sore feet, rain-soaked clothes, foul-smelling drunks and wasted time. But from the feeling of belittled helplessness that set upon everyone in the line and from how it invariably brought out the worst in every single person.

Nobody gave up their place. Not even Great Patriotic War veterans, entitled by law to be spared of lines (yes, it was an actual law), were assured of exercising their right without scorn and abuse.
"Sit home and wait to die, grandpa" was the nicest thing they could hope to hear.

All the myths about people meeting their soulmates and future spouses in lines are bullshit. Perfectly normal young men were far more likely to punch perfectly lovely young women, and be punched by them, then to fall in love. In lines, you quickly learned to hate everybody...

Everybody. Old people who waste valuable goods so close to their graves. Kids who are fucking annoying. The disabled who take too fucking long. Women who are loud. Men in their fucking fur hats. Strong people. Weak people. Smart people. Stupid people. All life forms are enemy...

It's not a coincidence that the most iconic Soviet phrase associated with lines is "Vas zdes' ne stoyalo", its intentionally mangled grammar pointing out the lines' anti-humanist mystique.
"None of you has stood here."
Not "You weren't standing here." That would've been too human

Lines took a piece of your humanity away in exchange for whatever meager and often mysterious reward promised at their end. A far greater price than 20 kopecks, which is what a loaf of white was worth at the time.
Fuck Soviet lines forever. Today's Russia is their legacy, too.

PS. A public service announcement for folks retweeting this. The author is a liberal and has voted for Bernie Sanders.
He is also sophisticated enough to know there is A LOT of daylight between Reaganomics and the Soviet Union, into which sane welfare state can fit comfortably.