VegatronX

Tourism, sports, social activities ( pioneers doing smth "useful" for society). People read books, listened music, danced and etc. There were a lot of school/university based different activities for teenagers. Adults also drank a lot. Alcohol, especially spirit, clean and usually good quality was available to engineers, medics and somewhere in the army. For men it was quite common to drink a lot ( at least it looks so for me now). People were a lot into tinkering something, because buying many things was impossible. TV was not really an entertainment, since there was close to no content there.

• addition: one more HUGE activity was "dacha" - it was a summer cottage/garden ( more like a garden ), where people grew vegetables, fruits, potatoes. It was very widespread, especially in south regions and central russia, because due to scarcity of food, people REALLY grew a lot of that stuff not for fun or to get "organic" food, but because otherwise you would have close to no access to vegetables in winter. I remember my grandfather had big barrels of pickled/marinated cucumbers, tomatoes, late apples were stored and sometimes lasted until spring. People stored cabbage, potatoes, made jam/juices out of fruits. Mostly vegetables were marinated, fruits turned into jam. There were times, when due to lack of food in shops, stuff, made at "dachas", was very important because it gave some variety. Later, after the fall of USSR people used that, not because of scarcity of food, but because of lack of money. It took a long time for my mother to get used to the fact, that food is no longer a problem, and she turned her "dacha" into a real summer cottage.

• And many kids at summer went to "young pioneer camps" or "dachas" or to their relatives in the village. Activities there were quite usual - bicycle, helping adults, swimming and etc.

• addition #2 - the scale of activities was HUGE: depending on the region, pioneers/young adults had a lot of clubs: radio clubs, electronics, aeromodelling, chess, all kinds of engineering, sports, swimming, reading, theater and etc. Yep, small towns had less, regional centers could offer more activites. It also was dependant on facilities nearby, my school was patronized by the military factory and our school was equipped with high-class CNC machine tools :) Also it was heavily subsidized by the country, you either paid much less, or paid only for some minor part. My mother was into rock-climbing and skiing, and they could buy tours to Carpathians or Elbrus for 1/10-1/3 of it's price. My father was breeding service shepherd dogs and got a lot of help from his club as well. His friend built his own yacht. Basically there were a lot of activities if you are not in the small village/town.

Did you know that people in the rest of USSR, except for major cities and specific region, had much worse conditions compared to Baltic countries ? Did you know that for many people getting to Latvia for example was like a trip to a completely another world ?