One of the big things for me to take away from this article is that the 84% of the people who are actually old enough to remember living in the USSR regret it’s dissolution.
I’m not sure this is meaningful. A lot of people yearn back for the days of Maggie Thatcher and Ronald Raygun as well.
There’re different reasons you can yearn for something tho. What you seek in yearning for it. A stable job for example (and an educational path that guarantees employability). Universally accessible housing. Targeted addressing of local problems, like quick relief efforts after a disaster etc…
As for freedom of the press, you only have one now if you colour within the lines. Just ask Julian Assange.
You have to remember the Soviet parliament was democratically elected by the people and popular after the dissolution too. It had to be literally firebombed out of existence by a U.S puppet.
It’s pretty significant when you look at what happened to things like quality of life and life expectancy in the vast majority of former USSR republics. For example, mortality among Russian men rose by 60% since 1991, four to five times higher than in Europe. Guess what happened in the 90s to cause this.
^This. Nostalgia often fools people.
Yeah, nostalgia for things like guaranteed food, housing, healthcare, and education. Nostalgia for never having to worry about losing your job and ending up on the street, or not being able to retire in dignity. Old people are especially nostalgic for the times when they didn’t have to live under the bridges and scavenge for food in the garbage.
And yet there’s nostalgia for Maggie and Ronnie.
Nostalgia’s a fucked-up thing.
You get that quality of life dropped for vast majority of people after USSR collapsed. People’s living conditions objectively became worse in practically every way.
that’s not very meaningful i’m afraid
say, russia turned out to be like scandinavian countries after the fall of the ussr, russians would have been happy for the fall of the ussr, even though scandinavian countries rely on worker exploitation in third world countries, this only indicates that for a lot of people the quality of life took a plunge after the fall of the ussr
living in russia sucks, welcome to the real world, people are so tired and exhausted that they can’t give a shit, just wanting to live a good quality life, without caring about the consequences of their lifestyle, which is very characteristic of capitalism now that i think about it
Of course this is meaningful. The transition from communism to capitalism in the former USSR is a huge scale experiment. If Russia turned out to be like Scandinavian countries then at least it could be said that capitalism didn’t make things worse for the people. Yet, quality of life dropped significantly across pretty much all the former republics. Millions of people now have direct lived experience under both systems, and they can see which one works best.
but the article talks about russia in particular, which is not enough to draw any meaningful conclusion by itself, we need all other republics for context
and some republics did have a significant quality of life improvement irrc, like lithuania, latvia, estonia
It’s telling that people focus on places like Lithuania or Estonia where the west poured capital to create a bulwark against Russia. Why don’t you take a look at what life is like in places like Georgia or Kazakhstan instead.
but to make this point you considered former soviet republics other than russia, and the consequences/reasons as to why life became worse/better besides the regime change, which is exactly what my suggestion for the article was in the initial comment :)
Quality of life went down in vast majority of former soviet republics, and we know that the reason for that largely lies in privatization. USSR managed to provide a decent quality of life for its citizens without relying on exploitation or subjugation of other countries. So, your original comparison with capitalism does not hold.
The baltics have a collective population smaller than Houston. The entire former USSR is almost 300 million people. They also are unique because they didn’t join the USSR until after WW2, and they are the only ones in NATO and the EU. So this is an extreme case, and none of the other former soviet republics are anything like the baltics.
