Evil tongues say that the citizens of the Soviet Union lived in fear all along. This is partly true: the Soviet people really had phobias, as, in fact, all the inhabitants of the globe. We remember the most feared in the USSR.
Nuclear war
This was the main fear of any Soviet person, periodically exacerbated after the next training alarm. Almost every citizen of the USSR imagined what a "nuclear mushroom" looked like, knew in which direction to fall if a nuclear flash from it occurs on the right side, deftly coped with a gas mask, and was well oriented in a bomb shelter. The fear of a nuclear catastrophe let go of the Soviet people just before the very end of the Soviet Union, when the Americans became named friends.
Militia
If an inexplicable fear of clowns is widespread among Americans, then in the Soviet Union this role of monsters was performed by policemen. “A policeman will come and take you away” - this maternal call to order is familiar to almost every Soviet person. True, it cannot be said that Soviet children were especially afraid of the police: the fear of spontaneous contacts with law enforcement agencies appeared already at a more mature age
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Fear of being recruited by foreign intelligence
Even those people, whose activities would hardly be of interest to the Western intelligence services, feared this. Citizens of foreign states, especially capitalistically, most of the Soviet people feared like plague. First of all, of course, this concerned Soviet citizens who got abroad: almost all the time the person was in suspense, waiting for a catch from the CIA. In addition, the KGB curators, who, as a rule, accompanied all Soviet tourist and business groups, maintained a high level of fear of the traveler.
OBKhSS
This abbreviation, which stands for "Department for Combating theft of Socialist Property", was feared by every trade worker: from the director of a large department store to the seller of a rural store. Employees of the OBKHSS appeared unexpectedly and checked the operation of the scales, the moisture level in the sausage (skillful sellers specially soaked it to increase the weight), the presence of the left product in the warehouse. The fear was further reinforced by the fact that some of the persons involved in high-profile criminal cases on the theft of the Eliseevsky supermarket in Moscow and the Ocean fish store system were sentenced to capital punishment - execution.
State institutions
All kinds of social security, trade union committees and other "notaries". Most of the Soviet citizens went here, as if on the chopping block. Sometimes there was a feeling that some kind of nerve gas was being sprayed within the walls of these institutions: even the most impassable proud and self-centered people here recalled humility and obedience.
Cheating in the store
If Soviet sellers were afraid of OBKHSS, then citizens unrelated to trade were afraid of deception in stores. In the late USSR, precision body kit technologies and other product manipulations flourished. To the calls of dishonest merchants, the Soviet man answered with a steelyard, which he took with him every time he went to a vegetable or grocery store.
Evil eye
This fear was inherited by Soviet people from distant ancestors, and it "worked" regardless of how much the citizen was grounded in Marxism-Leninism, physics and other natural sciences. Therefore, in situations in which some Anglo-Saxon boasted of an impending successful deal, a Soviet person lamented how everything was not going well in his life or how badly he spat over his left shoulder and knocked on wood. The fear of the evil eye successfully migrated to the current citizens of Russia.
