(1) In the 1990s in Lithuania, all the fashions, the music, and the pop culture looked like it was from the late 1980s and/or early 1990s. Big hair, neon colours, acid wash jeans, self-made amateurish eurodance music. That was actually a very common phenomenon across the former Soviet Union and former Soviet satellite states in eastern Europe - it was because there was a flood of throwaway 1980s Western pop culture that entered Lithuanian markets in the early 1990s for dirt cheap prices; as it grew unfashionable in the West, it moved onwards East, where young Lithuanians, crushed behind Soviet iron bars for so long, would do anything to get their hands on Western pop culture. (2) Poverty was bad. Years of Soviet neglect combined with the sudden fracturing of the Union into pieces left Lithuania in an economically bad shape at independence; living conditions grew unbearable throughout the 1990s for many Lithuanians. Many people did not get paid salaries for years - some people were not paid at all at their jobs between 1990 and roughly 2001. Buildings had no money for upkeep, so they started to crumble. Roads and infrastructure were also very poorly maintained despite some people having the newfound money to buy new cars from places like Germany. (3) Russian influence was much stronger culturally. The Russian language was still everywhere until roughly the early 2000s- signage, magazines, pop culture, education system, government documents etc; a direct legacy of how Russian was the sole official language of Lithuania for decades until 1990. More Russians lived in Lithuania - by the late 1990s however most Russians had left the country, suddenly for the first time feeling they were the foreigners, not the Lithuanians around them. (4) Many social issues, previously buried under the carpet or non existent in the Soviet Union, erupted in the 1990s. Prominent problems included the bad conditions at orphanages, rampant prostitution, alcoholism fuelled by depression and unemployment, domestic abuse, the rise of street children due to the breakdown of orphanages and the breakdown of families due to domestic abuse, and the rise of both violent organised crime and violent petty crime; mafia gangs and bandits emerged everywhere in Lithuania and wreaked havoc for a whole decade. This was the biggest social problem of them all at the time.
Freedom of Choice and Freedom to Choose The above are two different concepts. Nobody has true Freedom of Choice and choices are primarily restricted by budget and available time. A plethora of secondary variables entail that nobody will ever have true Freedom of Choice but will have Freedom to Choose from a restricted number of options. Freedom to Choose is choices that are available from a restricted number of options this is not true Freedom of Choice. Equity and Equality are two completely different different concepts. The Western concept of equality for all is a logical contradiction. By definition no two or more people will ever be equal. Random mutation and gene expression via epigenetics entails even clones are not truly equal but only very, very similar. Giving men and women equality in the West has been proven to be a big mistake. Witness the demographic collapse of Western populations and the astronomical level of crime in Western countries and the proliferation of disease within Western populations. A vast transformation of Western society must happen to restructure the Western population to raise the birth rate for Western women and specifically lower the age of a woman when her first child is born. The question is has the threshold of no return been crossed where it is statistically impossible for Western populations to recover from the demographic collapse witnessed throughout the West? ======
at 0:17 minor mistake, Lithuania was not a satellite state as we were incorporated into the USSR, the Warsaw Pact countries (Albania, Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, East Germany, Hungary, Poland and Romania) were satellite states.
Yeah those were pretty wild times. I am glad Lithuania managed to move away from corruption and organized crime being in charge like they still are in a lot of other post Soviet nations. Fun fact most elite counter terrorist units in Europe started after Munich Olympic terrorist attack. While in Lithuania they needed a highly trained and armed unit to arrest very dangerous members of the organized crime. The turning point was when Richard Nixon made a visit and his protection detail became the basis for our current elite units. ruclips.net/video/EWa-GeT3Fj4/видео.html here is a video about it.
Yes, my business opened an office/subsidiary in Vilnius in 1995. It was anarchic in some ways for businesses because you cannot flip a switch to turn a command economy into a free market economy, and the business laws were new and untried. Judges (and many lawyers) had no experience of commercial law. Certainly we were threatened once but I think that was from another foreign business.
I still have no idea how we pulled out of these time. I mostly put blame on firm road to EU integration. It forced political change in country to be accepted. With this came a lot of anti corruption laws and checks.
I was born in 1992 felt most of the things that being said here especially in my teens and when i was young adult which was in 2000s and early 2010s always kept thinking how everything is bad here and whatnot, but right now looking back at things the stuff average person complains about can also simply buy any food and most of electronics, afford a living and even be capable of going on vacations and the quality of living just kept getting up unoticably i suppose. That being said, looking at how countries which start everything from a scrap, Lithuania really skyrocketed from the state 30years prior.
It's most likely you can afford living more or less normal life, unless you have problem with money spending. Food (esp. dine-in places) could be cheaper for minimum to average salary earnier though. My biggest concern is quality of public sector. It includes public infrastructure, public transit, military, and other important aspects. I see gen X and Y are really obsesed with everything U.S., but there are both up sides and down sides with North America. We seem to be copying too many aspects U.S. I think we could be more like Nordic countries and Germany. Not sure about gen Z, but probably gen alpha and beyond will have more left leaning attitudes. This might bring us closer to Scandinavia/Netherlands model, like more interest how to improve state sector, human rights, public transit, cycling possibilities, but there is also risk with come back of some USSR nostalgia for younger generation.
@@_inveterate Contemporary what we call First World suffer from somewhat similar problems, like praising anarcho-capitalist ideas (killing state sector, no taxes, etc.). My conclusion around Lithuanian some exceptional problems is coming from rough 1990s, not later years in EU. I think we feel consequences to this day, e.g. we got fairly rough 2009 crisis too. We might have better country overall if we had better 1990s, similar to Czech Republic, and even Estonia to an extent. I think we are sort of healing from this epoch since around mid 2010s, and covid/Ukraine times are not as rough as we used with previous crises. Now biggest issue might be potential war with Russia. Probably the last frontier that separates us from Scandinavia: rougher geopolitical environment for centuries that didn't allowed us to reach very rich developed country levels.
I remember my mother telling me a story about how safety inspectors would come into a business, take a bunch of employees home and order them to do stuff like fix that, install that there, build this next to this and so on. If retaliated, the inspector would threaten to get the company or factory a lot of violations of human rights lawsuits which would result in the company or factory being shut down entirely. Only after a while these people were called out, kicked out of their job with massive lawsuits. some were even arrested.
I was a little boy in the 90s, but I still remember news reports about explosions, shootouts, kidnapings, murder. Also Chechnya horrors, but that's another topic. Evening news were brutal. Yet I grew up fine. I had been living in a relatively calm city and in late 90s moved to even calmer one. Around 2000s the change strated and our country began to rise up from a hole. It's still in a hole. But surface is not too far.
I would say Lithuania really skyrocketed during those 30 years from the state it has been. There are still rough edges here and there but im certain that this country will one day be an example to the rest of the world with the direction it is going.
😂 thank you. I guess I can say that I appreciate Lithuania a lot more after learning its history and what it has had to endure to get to this point of relative prosperity 😊
My father told me many stories about the wild west Lithuania from when he was younger. Whenever my father went out with his friends to the pub. They would park their cars upclose because there was a rampant situation with people stealing or destroying cars with explosives mid day. Mafia coming to take their share from local business was an ordinary thing. You are taking a haircut, then A big square man comes in and asks for payment and he is provided with it no questions asked. Local gangs basically WERE the police. Scary times those were.
From what I hear the police were quite incompetent during this transitional 90s period, my father remembers some traffic officers would run out into the motorway with their stop paddles and try to get people to pull over while the cars were going at motorway speeds (so around 70mph). But I guess this simple approach to things did come in quite handy sometimes - He also remembers once, during a pursuit with the police, the offending vehicle stopped and the people inside just locked themselves inside and refused to get out. The police got tired of waiting and eventually just called in a tow truck and brought back the car to the police station - While they were still inside the car! There’s a good playlist of shenanigans with the police from a show from this era, I have linked it here: ruclips.net/p/PL06C0CFA8FD9EDE49
I was born in 1989 in Lithuania and lived here all my life. I am glad that now we are a part of European union, have rights, can travel around the world and free from influence of moscow. Our parents and grand parents payed high price for it, so we must respect that and preserve that freedom for our kids. Thanks for reminder.
As a Lithuanian, I searched for this video just because I was born in 2007, wondered what Lithuania was like in the 90s and my parents’ explaining wasn’t enough.
My dad got cars from western europe and sold the in lithuania trough the 90s and the 00s, he specificly got british cars from english auctions and sold the parts for profit, most off his cars came from germany and spain. In germany cars were plentfull and cheap because off emission taxes, wich didnt exist or were very low standart in lithuania.
okay so im lithuanian , but i didnt thought that they can bring guns to lithuania and shoot car or people in my country its just not real but the writing its all real
(1) In the 1990s in Lithuania, all the fashions, the music, and the pop culture looked like it was from the late 1980s and/or early 1990s. Big hair, neon colours, acid wash jeans, self-made amateurish eurodance music. That was actually a very common phenomenon across the former Soviet Union and former Soviet satellite states in eastern Europe - it was because there was a flood of throwaway 1980s Western pop culture that entered Lithuanian markets in the early 1990s for dirt cheap prices; as it grew unfashionable in the West, it moved onwards East, where young Lithuanians, crushed behind Soviet iron bars for so long, would do anything to get their hands on Western pop culture.
(2) Poverty was bad. Years of Soviet neglect combined with the sudden fracturing of the Union into pieces left Lithuania in an economically bad shape at independence; living conditions grew unbearable throughout the 1990s for many Lithuanians. Many people did not get paid salaries for years - some people were not paid at all at their jobs between 1990 and roughly 2001. Buildings had no money for upkeep, so they started to crumble. Roads and infrastructure were also very poorly maintained despite some people having the newfound money to buy new cars from places like Germany.
(3) Russian influence was much stronger culturally. The Russian language was still everywhere until roughly the early 2000s- signage, magazines, pop culture, education system, government documents etc; a direct legacy of how Russian was the sole official language of Lithuania for decades until 1990. More Russians lived in Lithuania - by the late 1990s however most Russians had left the country, suddenly for the first time feeling they were the foreigners, not the Lithuanians around them.
(4) Many social issues, previously buried under the carpet or non existent in the Soviet Union, erupted in the 1990s. Prominent problems included the bad conditions at orphanages, rampant prostitution, alcoholism fuelled by depression and unemployment, domestic abuse, the rise of street children due to the breakdown of orphanages and the breakdown of families due to domestic abuse, and the rise of both violent organised crime and violent petty crime; mafia gangs and bandits emerged everywhere in Lithuania and wreaked havoc for a whole decade. This was the biggest social problem of them all at the time.
And we cleaned it all up (for the most part 😂)! We Lithuanians do not give ourselves enough credit for all that we achieved only in 30 years 😊
Freedom of Choice and Freedom to Choose
The above are two different concepts.
Nobody has true Freedom of Choice and choices are primarily restricted by budget and available time.
A plethora of secondary variables entail that nobody will ever have true Freedom of Choice but will have Freedom to Choose from a restricted number of options.
Freedom to Choose is choices that are available from a restricted number of options this is not true Freedom of Choice.
Equity and Equality are two completely different different concepts.
The Western concept of equality for all is a logical contradiction.
By definition no two or more people will ever be equal.
Random mutation and gene expression via epigenetics entails even clones are not truly equal but only very, very similar.
Giving men and women equality in the West has been proven to be a big mistake.
Witness the demographic collapse of Western populations and the astronomical level of crime in Western countries and the proliferation of disease within Western populations.
A vast transformation of Western society must happen to restructure the Western population to raise the birth rate for Western women and specifically lower the age of a woman when her first child is born.
The question is has the threshold of no return been crossed where it is statistically impossible for Western populations to recover from the demographic collapse witnessed throughout the West?
======
@@ihavegreeneyes14 perfectly said! Respect!❤️
I'm beginning to believe 90s Lithuania would be a perfect GTA setting.
@Candy Corn Again GTA (x): The Curse Of The Vatnik
GTA the battle for Banana
It would work on any post Soviet country.
GTA -1: The Baltic West
@@proxboxgamer69 GTA VII*
at 0:17 minor mistake, Lithuania was not a satellite state as we were incorporated into the USSR, the Warsaw Pact countries (Albania, Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, East Germany, Hungary, Poland and Romania) were satellite states.
Thanks for clarifying. I picked up that phrase from one of my sources but it didn’t occur to me that it was not fully correct!
@@LithuaniaExplained Lithuania was the first USSR occupied state which restated Independence.
Compare the fastest internet in our countries!? 😉
Yeah those were pretty wild times. I am glad Lithuania managed to move away from corruption and organized crime being in charge like they still are in a lot of other post Soviet nations. Fun fact most elite counter terrorist units in Europe started after Munich Olympic terrorist attack. While in Lithuania they needed a highly trained and armed unit to arrest very dangerous members of the organized crime. The turning point was when Richard Nixon made a visit and his protection detail became the basis for our current elite units. ruclips.net/video/EWa-GeT3Fj4/видео.html here is a video about it.
Love your content bro, even tho im Lithuanian im almost always learning new things about my own country.
Yes, my business opened an office/subsidiary in Vilnius in 1995. It was anarchic in some ways for businesses because you cannot flip a switch to turn a command economy into a free market economy, and the business laws were new and untried. Judges (and many lawyers) had no experience of commercial law. Certainly we were threatened once but I think that was from another foreign business.
It was also a mess in Poland by the time. A lot went wrong, a lot could go better.
But getting rid of the soviet crap is priceless nonetheless.
Interesting! I would imagine the post-Soviet experience was also similar across the other Baltic states as well.
I still have no idea how we pulled out of these time. I mostly put blame on firm road to EU integration. It forced political change in country to be accepted. With this came a lot of anti corruption laws and checks.
I was born in 1992 felt most of the things that being said here especially in my teens and when i was young adult which was in 2000s and early 2010s always kept thinking how everything is bad here and whatnot, but right now looking back at things the stuff average person complains about can also simply buy any food and most of electronics, afford a living and even be capable of going on vacations and the quality of living just kept getting up unoticably i suppose. That being said, looking at how countries which start everything from a scrap, Lithuania really skyrocketed from the state 30years prior.
It's most likely you can afford living more or less normal life, unless you have problem with money spending. Food (esp. dine-in places) could be cheaper for minimum to average salary earnier though.
My biggest concern is quality of public sector. It includes public infrastructure, public transit, military, and other important aspects.
I see gen X and Y are really obsesed with everything U.S., but there are both up sides and down sides with North America. We seem to be copying too many aspects U.S.
I think we could be more like Nordic countries and Germany.
Not sure about gen Z, but probably gen alpha and beyond will have more left leaning attitudes. This might bring us closer to Scandinavia/Netherlands model, like more interest how to improve state sector, human rights, public transit, cycling possibilities, but there is also risk with come back of some USSR nostalgia for younger generation.
@@_inveterate Contemporary what we call First World suffer from somewhat similar problems, like praising anarcho-capitalist ideas (killing state sector, no taxes, etc.). My conclusion around Lithuanian some exceptional problems is coming from rough 1990s, not later years in EU. I think we feel consequences to this day, e.g. we got fairly rough 2009 crisis too. We might have better country overall if we had better 1990s, similar to Czech Republic, and even Estonia to an extent. I think we are sort of healing from this epoch since around mid 2010s, and covid/Ukraine times are not as rough as we used with previous crises. Now biggest issue might be potential war with Russia. Probably the last frontier that separates us from Scandinavia: rougher geopolitical environment for centuries that didn't allowed us to reach very rich developed country levels.
Thanks for doing this!
I remember my mother telling me a story about how safety inspectors would come into a business, take a bunch of employees home and order them to do stuff like fix that, install that there, build this next to this and so on. If retaliated, the inspector would threaten to get the company or factory a lot of violations of human rights lawsuits which would result in the company or factory being shut down entirely. Only after a while these people were called out, kicked out of their job with massive lawsuits. some were even arrested.
Thanks for covering this! Great topic
Glad you enjoyed it!
PS - left a (members-only) message for you in the Community tab if you haven't seen it yet!
I was a little boy in the 90s, but I still remember news reports about explosions, shootouts, kidnapings, murder. Also Chechnya horrors, but that's another topic. Evening news were brutal. Yet I grew up fine.
I had been living in a relatively calm city and in late 90s moved to even calmer one. Around 2000s the change strated and our country began to rise up from a hole.
It's still in a hole. But surface is not too far.
I would say Lithuania really skyrocketed during those 30 years from the state it has been. There are still rough edges here and there but im certain that this country will one day be an example to the rest of the world with the direction it is going.
@@_inveterate im certain
You did a good research and know the country well. Do you like Lithuania more or less after knowing everything ?
😂 thank you. I guess I can say that I appreciate Lithuania a lot more after learning its history and what it has had to endure to get to this point of relative prosperity 😊
Not gonna brag but my dad had 2 pineapple’s
😂 high class. 🍍 🍍
The pineapple baron
love your content thank you for showing us interesting aspects of lietuva
My father told me many stories about the wild west Lithuania from when he was younger.
Whenever my father went out with his friends to the pub. They would park their cars upclose because there was a rampant situation with people stealing or destroying cars with explosives mid day.
Mafia coming to take their share from local business was an ordinary thing. You are taking a haircut, then A big square man comes in and asks for payment and he is provided with it no questions asked. Local gangs basically WERE the police. Scary times those were.
One man asked an ex criminal what would happen if you refuse to pay. The answer was - you wouldnt refuse in the first place:D
It was fun when state TV channel could get stolen TV tape of Star Wars from nearest rent store.
From what I hear the police were quite incompetent during this transitional 90s period, my father remembers some traffic officers would run out into the motorway with their stop paddles and try to get people to pull over while the cars were going at motorway speeds (so around 70mph).
But I guess this simple approach to things did come in quite handy sometimes - He also remembers once, during a pursuit with the police, the offending vehicle stopped and the people inside just locked themselves inside and refused to get out. The police got tired of waiting and eventually just called in a tow truck and brought back the car to the police station - While they were still inside the car!
There’s a good playlist of shenanigans with the police from a show from this era, I have linked it here: ruclips.net/p/PL06C0CFA8FD9EDE49
For all post soviet nations, 90s were like dark ages for western europeans, hi from Ukraine 🇺🇦❤️🇱🇹
Eastern?
I was born in 1989 in Lithuania and lived here all my life. I am glad that now we are a part of European union, have rights, can travel around the world and free from influence of moscow. Our parents and grand parents payed high price for it, so we must respect that and preserve that freedom for our kids. Thanks for reminder.
As a Lithuanian, I searched for this video just because I was born in 2007, wondered what Lithuania was like in the 90s and my parents’ explaining wasn’t enough.
Great video
This is pretty interesting to me I'm a collector of Lithuanian Militaria. And its interesting to know how live was like besides Uniforms and Rifles
My dad got cars from western europe and sold the in lithuania trough the 90s and the 00s, he specificly got british cars from english auctions and sold the parts for profit, most off his cars came from germany and spain. In germany cars were plentfull and cheap because off emission taxes, wich didnt exist or were very low standart in lithuania.
okay so im lithuanian , but i didnt thought that they can bring guns to lithuania and shoot car or people in my country its just not real but the writing its all real
Currency changes fucked up lots of people
Great USSR 👍
Yeah. Greatest murderers and criminals in history
@@Asbestos_ US 🇺🇸 A disagree with you.
@@kunaalsharma1039 whatever usa does, it doesn't change the fact that ussr was horrible
The USSR was an empire of evil