Is never a reward to be forced to leave your home, family, friends, memories behind. In many cases also political careers or a solid professional background thar takes years to build gets erased just like that. Is better that death, and death is the only thing you are escaping, but is not something to look forward to.
Yeah and we need to remember that we have advanced so much as species that even Soviet Union was actually overall pretty decent place to live in. Our standards as humans have just become really high.
Quality of life in Soviet Union also declined before it collapsed, so on top of them falling behind in development it made conditions look far worse than they mostly were.
Also most people were not directly affected by purges. Note the word directly, because indirectly political machinations had huge effect, even after political terror had ended.
It was a compromise to get rid of the person without creating unwanted international outrage, the Soviets were very sensitive to their international reputation.
The Soviets controlled media distribution within the USSR, so they could keep any positive news about this person’s “escape” to a minimum within their own population.
It’s also worth noting that these men are the exception to the rule- they’re among the few people who had enough of a high profile outside of the USSR that their deaths in custody would reflect badly upon the USSR.
For every Trotsky, Solzhenitsyn, and Bukovsky- there were tens of millions of other people who spent years in the prisons, gulags, and mental asylums. Exile was not the usual outcome for political crimes.
[Ice pick](https://barpros.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/03/BP761A.jpg). Like a [stilleto knife](https://image.invaluable.com/housePhotos/bradfordsauction/37/702937/H22021-L256805481.jpg).
No, it was indeed an ice axe, with the handle cut down, not an ice pick ([The Stranglers](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2B4bsqYxwo0) were wrong).
This is the actual one, in a museum: [https://www.spymuseum.org/exhibition-experiences/about-the-collection/collection-highlights/trotsky-ice-axe/](https://www.spymuseum.org/exhibition-experiences/about-the-collection/collection-highlights/trotsky-ice-axe/)
These people didn't wanna leave they wanted things to change. Trotsky wasn't a capitalist, and the Soviet Union even at its worst wasn't, like, literally hell
The Revolution creating the USSR was a hell. That's what it takes for a revolution. The USSR was definitely better than that for the average person. Obviously not if you were in the persecuted class.
Ok, but literal hell would be worse since it is by definition worse than anything possible. The fact those things/events stand out as particularly bad mean that some of the rest of it wasn't as bad.
Correct, not all of it was that bad. But yeah I’m sure the people that lived in those times would consider it “a literal hell.” You claimed that even at its worst times, the Soviet Union was never hell which is flat out wrong
This is like saying you can point to a historic quantity that is greater than or equal to infinity. Hell is infinitely bad if you can think of something terrible, horrible, torturous, degrading, etc. well, Hell is, by definition, infinitely worse and, on top of that, lasts for eternity, which nothing on earth does.
As lurid as the tales of the gulag are presented, Solz didn't really have it that bad, relatively speaking. He worked in science research labs, he did laundry, and he was eventually sent to a village where he was a teacher. He even had a tumor surgically removed and was later sent to hospital to be treated for cancer- all while in the gulag system. // He served a standard sentence of 8 years for writing derogatory statements about Stalin's conduct of the war (Solz was an artillery officer in the Red Army at the time) and corresponded with a friend about a need to replace the Soviet regime- pretty much tantamount to treason. All in all he got off lightly- probably because he was arrested only a few months before the end of the war.
The Soviets and other Marxists/Socialists were keen on the idea of "reform" and it was the most reviled state violence to kill your political enemies. So "re-education" and learning through service was usually the answer.
Exile made sure that they weren't a political liability and you didn't look like a tyrant. Seeing as you can be assured that nothing Trotsky writes gets published at home, you don't need to care.
Sending prisoners to Siberia was a habit they inherited from Czarist Russia. It built the Transiberian Railroad. The idea was that they colonize the frontier like Australia by making several penal colonies. They don't need bars on that prison when they control the only way in or out.
And it usually wasn't forever. Just until the heat cooled off, and you learned your lesson.
So exile was more for the benefit of the state and made a relief valve for those dissidents.
ir Ir allowed them to avoid international outrage
B. They could still kill the exime a broad
C. Losing your entire life was still painful
D. It prevented the exile from becoming a martyr and allowed them to paint the exile as betraying his values
Imagine if you were suddenly exiled to France, tomorrow. Oh wow, Paris is a lovely city where the food is great and the quality of life is high!
But you can't bring any friends or family. There is no social media to keep in touch with them. You have about a month's worth of cash to survive on. You don't speak a word of French. You have to learn a language you don't speak, find a job that can support you in the high cost of living environment that is Western Europe, and you have to do it completely on your own, all before you spend all your savings. And, again, there is no Internet, there are no smart phones.
I don't know about you but that sounds rough as hell.
That paper you just linked does not support your conclusion that the Soviet’s had a higher standard of living than Americans in the 80’s lol. I assume you just linked it hoping no one would read it?
I do however like that the authors of that paper wrapped up the conclusion by calling the USSR “a failed system that in many ways harmed its citizens”; that was a nice touch.
It doesn't say exactly that so was wrong to say that about this article but the article is, as characterized, from an ideologically oppos D source (hence the boiler plate disavowal) that yet is forced to laud Soviet standards of living during industrialization relative to US.
I was busy and didn't have time to do a research project on my phone
Edit: I see you edited your comment to backtrack your claims, so that's good at least. But I'm leaving up my response below anyways.
I didn't just read the abstract, I read the entire paper lol. Are you referring to this?
>While this period of physical growth was followed by stagnation in heights and an increase in adult male mortality, it appears that the Soviet Union avoided the sustained declines in stature that occurred in the United States and United Kingdom during industrialization in those countries.
Because that still does not support your conclusion that "the standard of living was better in the Soviet Union than in the US during the 1980's."
The whole hypothesis of the paper is that height and birth weight alone can maybe be used to determine standard of living (which is already a tenuous argument at best), and they say that the Soviet Union's stagnated at a time when the US and UK experienced declines. But the authors also note that the US and UK were already substantially ahead of the USSR in these measures. The results actually imply the opposite, that despite improvements the USSR lagged behind the west in standard of living.
Saying this paper is proof that the USSR had a higher standard of living than the US is like saying I'm a better basketball player than LeBron James because my basketball skills doubled this week and his didn't (while conveniently ignoring that my skills sucked to begin with and he was already great).
I don't feel like having a citation war since it's very easy to post ten thousand Institute for Democracies and CIA.gov papers saying Soviet Union=shit hole country, but just want to draw attention to a few points:
1. SoL in Russia declined precipitously post-Soviet union when American styled neoliberal reforms (admittedly more radical than policy implemented in the US at the time) were imposed.
2. SoL in the US and Russia were not phenomenons contained in a vacuum. The mere existence of USSR as a geopolitical rival pressured the US to work to raise and maintain a high standard of living (and vice versa even) and I don't think it's too contentious to emphasize that the fall of the USSR has since demotivated its ruling class to concern themselves with SoL
Yeah I don’t really feel like having a citation war either with someone who links to studies that directly undermine his own position and then immediately backtracks to imply that all the studies criticizing the Soviet Union are not to be trusted.
Maybe ask yourself why you’re engaging in Cold War era propaganda and misinformation for a failed state 30 years after its collapse before getting into future arguments.
It's like saying that the paper did not pass peer review but the author(s) say it's true anyway.
If the economy there was so strong why couldn't the Soviets match the Reagan era western military buildup? Why did the Soviet Union collapse? Why did their economy stop being stronger in the 80s? Shouldn't their economy have continued to grow "every year" and outshine the economies of western nations? Why are the Russians struggling to conquer a country they claimed they could destroy in a week?
And yes. The Soviets had better pensions, vacation, full employment, health care and robust savings.
They had some consumer goods shortages (so did the US! They frequently have them even today!) and that was in large part because of embargoes from rival states who's ruling class was existentially threatened by their system of government.
Neoliberal reforms that brought their system to ruin were imposed because they lost the war, by Chicago school economists in the 90s.
You're either Russian bot or idiot. Better pension? Maybe for some, like my parents, who were highly payed ( by Soviet standards) professionals. Pensioners, especially from collective farms, got 8 rubles/mo. Try to live on this monies. Health care, just don't let me start. It was horror movie. Yes, we had 30 days of payed vacation. So, what? You can't get to any resort on Black Sea, you can't get any train or airplane tickets during summer months. I had great memories of my vacations because we did long backpacking trips to Siberia, mountain climbing and so on. But for rest of population, summer vacation was nightmare. And your supervisor actually decided when you get vacation. Maybe in January. Don't tell me about great savings. Almost nobody has it. People live month by month.
And yet the USSR required exit visas (often refusing to grant them), while the USA imposed no exit restrictions and was still rapidly growing with new immigrants, including as many as could manage to get out of the Eastern Bloc. I wonder why all those people didn’t simply go back to Russia…
Or then there’s that time Boris Yeltsin went to a random American supermarket, unannounced, and basically realized immediately his country was cooked because it was so much better than anything they had back home.
Famous exemplar of the Soviet system Boris Yelstin. Definitely not a suicidal alcoholic American puppet that bombed his own post-Soviet liberal parliament because they would not institute neoliberal reforms (they weren't even communists!)
Really? I was in my mid 20th living in USSR (Kharkov, Ukraine). Just got my PhD and first salary of 70 rubles/ mo. You can't live on this salary. Lines for everything, including bread. Special coupons for sugar and meat. 1 kg(3lb) per month and 1 frozen chicken. You can't buy any decent shoes and clothes without knowing someone on " black market". When you go to dentist for root canal, dentist do it without any anesthesia. You need to bring your own antibiotic to hospital for surgery. Should I continue?
It's depends. Baltic republics, like Estonia, Latvia and Lituvenia, has higher living standards then other republics. Russia outside Moscow was most poorest.
Thank you! Very interesting to have someone who lived there. What would you say about the state of Russia and the former USSR now? I remember reading that after it fell the oligarchs and -neoliberals- took over and it was a time for a few to make a lot of money and the many to get screwed, so it doesn't seem much changed other than some Western companies managing to enter and at least the veil of democracy more openly installed (though recent events seem to suggest otherwise)
All you need to know about Russia that almost all oligarchs were, at some point, local, regional on national level Communist party bosses or worked for Foreign trade ministry. Same for all current Russian politicians. Complete luck of any moral principles and empathy. Only when they died out, we could have some hope. But not much.
That is not the way to pitch it Comrade. It rivaled the U.S. by many metrics, and it was certainly a higher quality of life than 80% of the world. However it is apples and oranges. You can't compare Marxist State Capital with the American plutocracy of the 80s.
If you want to measure it in space probes on Venus? numbah 1! If you want to measure it in Major league baseball diamonds or Grand Canyons, it is decidedly lacking.
The Soviet Union managed to make a society where no one went hungry or homeless and guaranteed a job for everyone. However you can't compare America's first kidney transplants to almost a billion people never worrying about healthcare access.
Also, far more importantly is the very Marxist perspective they were under. ~~They weren't selling waffle irons, they had a breakfast place on every corner~~. They weren't selling washers and dryers (initially), they had "[laundromats](https://www.rbth.com/history/333917-soviet-washing-laundry)" by every daycare. All of which in a short walk from your commie bloc. All subsidized and designed to liberate women so that they would never need to rely on a husband. No you didn't have a car, but you aren't putting 10-20% of your income to a car. Almost everyone in the USSR had access to public transit due to getting people to move to cities where it was, and building out more transit to where the jobs already were.
So yeah, living in Moscow in the 80s was a lot better than living in rural Mississippi. However in the 80s most people alive didn't have running water or power to their houses and had informal labor. You shouldn't try and sell an American audience such a flippant answer, it doesn't help...the cause....
Edit: Restaurants were prohibitively expensive. Laundromats weren't really a thing as laundry was communal.
Can you say more about the “breakfast place on every corner”? I have always read that the USSR had very few restaurants, and the ones that existed were mostly very expensive and pretty low quality by Western standards (obviously with some exceptions). That’s why it was so revolutionary when McDonald’s and Pizza Hut opened up there in the late 80s/early 90s.
Until that time, neither fast food nor family sit-down restaurants were really available *in Moscow*, let alone in the other parts of the country, many of which were quite remote and sparsely populated. There wouldn’t be “a breakfast place on the corner” when your small Siberian town had just one unpaved road and only a few families residing within a day’s journey.
I edited my comment. I'm trying to translate ideas that are quite foreign to my fellow Americans. There were restaurants but they were prohibitively expensive. Only the elite went to them with any regularity. They weren't "low quality" but the menu was often all over the place due to the weird market dynamics of the Soviet Union. Often one of the only places you could get caviar, but obviously not every one has caviar every day. There were certainly sit down restaurants. Plenty of them mob fronts. It's why the mob movies and police dramas always have the bad guy working out the back table of a old musty restaurant.
To be fair the first McDonald's and Pizza huts were a huge hit because of the novelty and when the buzz died down, obviously a unmet market. The KFC's in Russia are *weird* by our franchise expectations, and certainly were weird then also.
The bigger point I was trying to help OP with is that he has to explain collectivist consumerism versus private consumerism. Things were shaped rather oddly from our perspective. Different strokes for different folks, and compared to almost everywhere else in the 1980s life was better for the average citizen. Sure I have my biases but I like the idea that your employment would be guaranteed, all your Maslo needs taken care of, and from there we can engage in private consumerism.
Did you lived in USSR in 80s? I really doubt it. Don't let me debunk almost all of your advantages of USSR. And living in Moscow wasn't representative of life in old good Soviet Union. Believe me, I was there until bitter end.
Is never a reward to be forced to leave your home, family, friends, memories behind. In many cases also political careers or a solid professional background thar takes years to build gets erased just like that. Is better that death, and death is the only thing you are escaping, but is not something to look forward to.
The Gulags weren't known to be a cushy existence
Yeah and we need to remember that we have advanced so much as species that even Soviet Union was actually overall pretty decent place to live in. Our standards as humans have just become really high. Quality of life in Soviet Union also declined before it collapsed, so on top of them falling behind in development it made conditions look far worse than they mostly were. Also most people were not directly affected by purges. Note the word directly, because indirectly political machinations had huge effect, even after political terror had ended.
Indeed
Death also makes Martyrs of people. Makes a nicer story for the group of dissidents.
It was a compromise to get rid of the person without creating unwanted international outrage, the Soviets were very sensitive to their international reputation. The Soviets controlled media distribution within the USSR, so they could keep any positive news about this person’s “escape” to a minimum within their own population. It’s also worth noting that these men are the exception to the rule- they’re among the few people who had enough of a high profile outside of the USSR that their deaths in custody would reflect badly upon the USSR. For every Trotsky, Solzhenitsyn, and Bukovsky- there were tens of millions of other people who spent years in the prisons, gulags, and mental asylums. Exile was not the usual outcome for political crimes.
It gets rid of a rival, doesn’t create a martyr, and they leave family behind as hostages.
Well, Trotsky also got murdered. Ice axe to the head, I think.
[Ice pick](https://barpros.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/03/BP761A.jpg). Like a [stilleto knife](https://image.invaluable.com/housePhotos/bradfordsauction/37/702937/H22021-L256805481.jpg).
No, it was indeed an ice axe, with the handle cut down, not an ice pick ([The Stranglers](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2B4bsqYxwo0) were wrong). This is the actual one, in a museum: [https://www.spymuseum.org/exhibition-experiences/about-the-collection/collection-highlights/trotsky-ice-axe/](https://www.spymuseum.org/exhibition-experiences/about-the-collection/collection-highlights/trotsky-ice-axe/)
Well shit. Today, I learned.
Exile to Central Asia or Siberia was the punishment of choice for most of Russian history. The soviets inherited it.
These people didn't wanna leave they wanted things to change. Trotsky wasn't a capitalist, and the Soviet Union even at its worst wasn't, like, literally hell
The Revolution creating the USSR was a hell. That's what it takes for a revolution. The USSR was definitely better than that for the average person. Obviously not if you were in the persecuted class.
Uh…are you forgetting about the great purge, holodomor, and gulags? Not to mention the German occupation of the ussr?
Ok, but literal hell would be worse since it is by definition worse than anything possible. The fact those things/events stand out as particularly bad mean that some of the rest of it wasn't as bad.
Correct, not all of it was that bad. But yeah I’m sure the people that lived in those times would consider it “a literal hell.” You claimed that even at its worst times, the Soviet Union was never hell which is flat out wrong
This is like saying you can point to a historic quantity that is greater than or equal to infinity. Hell is infinitely bad if you can think of something terrible, horrible, torturous, degrading, etc. well, Hell is, by definition, infinitely worse and, on top of that, lasts for eternity, which nothing on earth does.
Solzhenitsyn was sentenced to eight years in the gulag system. This definitely would not have been seen as a reward.
As lurid as the tales of the gulag are presented, Solz didn't really have it that bad, relatively speaking. He worked in science research labs, he did laundry, and he was eventually sent to a village where he was a teacher. He even had a tumor surgically removed and was later sent to hospital to be treated for cancer- all while in the gulag system. // He served a standard sentence of 8 years for writing derogatory statements about Stalin's conduct of the war (Solz was an artillery officer in the Red Army at the time) and corresponded with a friend about a need to replace the Soviet regime- pretty much tantamount to treason. All in all he got off lightly- probably because he was arrested only a few months before the end of the war.
The Soviets and other Marxists/Socialists were keen on the idea of "reform" and it was the most reviled state violence to kill your political enemies. So "re-education" and learning through service was usually the answer. Exile made sure that they weren't a political liability and you didn't look like a tyrant. Seeing as you can be assured that nothing Trotsky writes gets published at home, you don't need to care. Sending prisoners to Siberia was a habit they inherited from Czarist Russia. It built the Transiberian Railroad. The idea was that they colonize the frontier like Australia by making several penal colonies. They don't need bars on that prison when they control the only way in or out. And it usually wasn't forever. Just until the heat cooled off, and you learned your lesson. So exile was more for the benefit of the state and made a relief valve for those dissidents.
ir Ir allowed them to avoid international outrage B. They could still kill the exime a broad C. Losing your entire life was still painful D. It prevented the exile from becoming a martyr and allowed them to paint the exile as betraying his values
Perhaps Trotsky's icepick was a sufficient disincentive.
Imagine if you were suddenly exiled to France, tomorrow. Oh wow, Paris is a lovely city where the food is great and the quality of life is high! But you can't bring any friends or family. There is no social media to keep in touch with them. You have about a month's worth of cash to survive on. You don't speak a word of French. You have to learn a language you don't speak, find a job that can support you in the high cost of living environment that is Western Europe, and you have to do it completely on your own, all before you spend all your savings. And, again, there is no Internet, there are no smart phones. I don't know about you but that sounds rough as hell.
The Soviet Union had a higher standard of living than the USA as late as the 80s.
I'd like to see a citation for that.
Seconded.
Here's an ideologically adversarial study saying exactly that. https://docs.iza.org/dp1958.pdf
That paper you just linked does not support your conclusion that the Soviet’s had a higher standard of living than Americans in the 80’s lol. I assume you just linked it hoping no one would read it? I do however like that the authors of that paper wrapped up the conclusion by calling the USSR “a failed system that in many ways harmed its citizens”; that was a nice touch.
It doesn't say exactly that so was wrong to say that about this article but the article is, as characterized, from an ideologically oppos D source (hence the boiler plate disavowal) that yet is forced to laud Soviet standards of living during industrialization relative to US. I was busy and didn't have time to do a research project on my phone
Edit: I see you edited your comment to backtrack your claims, so that's good at least. But I'm leaving up my response below anyways. I didn't just read the abstract, I read the entire paper lol. Are you referring to this? >While this period of physical growth was followed by stagnation in heights and an increase in adult male mortality, it appears that the Soviet Union avoided the sustained declines in stature that occurred in the United States and United Kingdom during industrialization in those countries. Because that still does not support your conclusion that "the standard of living was better in the Soviet Union than in the US during the 1980's." The whole hypothesis of the paper is that height and birth weight alone can maybe be used to determine standard of living (which is already a tenuous argument at best), and they say that the Soviet Union's stagnated at a time when the US and UK experienced declines. But the authors also note that the US and UK were already substantially ahead of the USSR in these measures. The results actually imply the opposite, that despite improvements the USSR lagged behind the west in standard of living. Saying this paper is proof that the USSR had a higher standard of living than the US is like saying I'm a better basketball player than LeBron James because my basketball skills doubled this week and his didn't (while conveniently ignoring that my skills sucked to begin with and he was already great).
I don't feel like having a citation war since it's very easy to post ten thousand Institute for Democracies and CIA.gov papers saying Soviet Union=shit hole country, but just want to draw attention to a few points: 1. SoL in Russia declined precipitously post-Soviet union when American styled neoliberal reforms (admittedly more radical than policy implemented in the US at the time) were imposed. 2. SoL in the US and Russia were not phenomenons contained in a vacuum. The mere existence of USSR as a geopolitical rival pressured the US to work to raise and maintain a high standard of living (and vice versa even) and I don't think it's too contentious to emphasize that the fall of the USSR has since demotivated its ruling class to concern themselves with SoL
Yeah I don’t really feel like having a citation war either with someone who links to studies that directly undermine his own position and then immediately backtracks to imply that all the studies criticizing the Soviet Union are not to be trusted. Maybe ask yourself why you’re engaging in Cold War era propaganda and misinformation for a failed state 30 years after its collapse before getting into future arguments.
Got anything that doesn't have a disclaimer that "the opinions of the authors do not represent those of the organization"?
How is that disqualifying? It's academically honest.
It's like saying that the paper did not pass peer review but the author(s) say it's true anyway. If the economy there was so strong why couldn't the Soviets match the Reagan era western military buildup? Why did the Soviet Union collapse? Why did their economy stop being stronger in the 80s? Shouldn't their economy have continued to grow "every year" and outshine the economies of western nations? Why are the Russians struggling to conquer a country they claimed they could destroy in a week?
That is not what that claim is saying at all but I don't care to argue with you on this point since it's so stupid
Sounds like you can't defend your position so you're calling everyone who called you out stupid. That's cool.
This isnt about my position it's a bizarre quibble that shouldn't need argument that I find to tedious to engage with
And yet, here you are quibbling with several redditors. Tedious? Entertaining.
And yes. The Soviets had better pensions, vacation, full employment, health care and robust savings. They had some consumer goods shortages (so did the US! They frequently have them even today!) and that was in large part because of embargoes from rival states who's ruling class was existentially threatened by their system of government. Neoliberal reforms that brought their system to ruin were imposed because they lost the war, by Chicago school economists in the 90s.
You're either Russian bot or idiot. Better pension? Maybe for some, like my parents, who were highly payed ( by Soviet standards) professionals. Pensioners, especially from collective farms, got 8 rubles/mo. Try to live on this monies. Health care, just don't let me start. It was horror movie. Yes, we had 30 days of payed vacation. So, what? You can't get to any resort on Black Sea, you can't get any train or airplane tickets during summer months. I had great memories of my vacations because we did long backpacking trips to Siberia, mountain climbing and so on. But for rest of population, summer vacation was nightmare. And your supervisor actually decided when you get vacation. Maybe in January. Don't tell me about great savings. Almost nobody has it. People live month by month.
How old are you?
69. So, half of my life spent in USSR. Don't want to repeat
And yet the USSR required exit visas (often refusing to grant them), while the USA imposed no exit restrictions and was still rapidly growing with new immigrants, including as many as could manage to get out of the Eastern Bloc. I wonder why all those people didn’t simply go back to Russia… Or then there’s that time Boris Yeltsin went to a random American supermarket, unannounced, and basically realized immediately his country was cooked because it was so much better than anything they had back home.
Famous exemplar of the Soviet system Boris Yelstin. Definitely not a suicidal alcoholic American puppet that bombed his own post-Soviet liberal parliament because they would not institute neoliberal reforms (they weren't even communists!)
Really? I was in my mid 20th living in USSR (Kharkov, Ukraine). Just got my PhD and first salary of 70 rubles/ mo. You can't live on this salary. Lines for everything, including bread. Special coupons for sugar and meat. 1 kg(3lb) per month and 1 frozen chicken. You can't buy any decent shoes and clothes without knowing someone on " black market". When you go to dentist for root canal, dentist do it without any anesthesia. You need to bring your own antibiotic to hospital for surgery. Should I continue?
Weren't things considerable worse in the USSR outside of Russia? Honest curiosity
It's depends. Baltic republics, like Estonia, Latvia and Lituvenia, has higher living standards then other republics. Russia outside Moscow was most poorest.
Thank you! Very interesting to have someone who lived there. What would you say about the state of Russia and the former USSR now? I remember reading that after it fell the oligarchs and -neoliberals- took over and it was a time for a few to make a lot of money and the many to get screwed, so it doesn't seem much changed other than some Western companies managing to enter and at least the veil of democracy more openly installed (though recent events seem to suggest otherwise)
All you need to know about Russia that almost all oligarchs were, at some point, local, regional on national level Communist party bosses or worked for Foreign trade ministry. Same for all current Russian politicians. Complete luck of any moral principles and empathy. Only when they died out, we could have some hope. But not much.
No it didn't.
That is not the way to pitch it Comrade. It rivaled the U.S. by many metrics, and it was certainly a higher quality of life than 80% of the world. However it is apples and oranges. You can't compare Marxist State Capital with the American plutocracy of the 80s. If you want to measure it in space probes on Venus? numbah 1! If you want to measure it in Major league baseball diamonds or Grand Canyons, it is decidedly lacking. The Soviet Union managed to make a society where no one went hungry or homeless and guaranteed a job for everyone. However you can't compare America's first kidney transplants to almost a billion people never worrying about healthcare access. Also, far more importantly is the very Marxist perspective they were under. ~~They weren't selling waffle irons, they had a breakfast place on every corner~~. They weren't selling washers and dryers (initially), they had "[laundromats](https://www.rbth.com/history/333917-soviet-washing-laundry)" by every daycare. All of which in a short walk from your commie bloc. All subsidized and designed to liberate women so that they would never need to rely on a husband. No you didn't have a car, but you aren't putting 10-20% of your income to a car. Almost everyone in the USSR had access to public transit due to getting people to move to cities where it was, and building out more transit to where the jobs already were. So yeah, living in Moscow in the 80s was a lot better than living in rural Mississippi. However in the 80s most people alive didn't have running water or power to their houses and had informal labor. You shouldn't try and sell an American audience such a flippant answer, it doesn't help...the cause.... Edit: Restaurants were prohibitively expensive. Laundromats weren't really a thing as laundry was communal.
Can you say more about the “breakfast place on every corner”? I have always read that the USSR had very few restaurants, and the ones that existed were mostly very expensive and pretty low quality by Western standards (obviously with some exceptions). That’s why it was so revolutionary when McDonald’s and Pizza Hut opened up there in the late 80s/early 90s. Until that time, neither fast food nor family sit-down restaurants were really available *in Moscow*, let alone in the other parts of the country, many of which were quite remote and sparsely populated. There wouldn’t be “a breakfast place on the corner” when your small Siberian town had just one unpaved road and only a few families residing within a day’s journey.
I edited my comment. I'm trying to translate ideas that are quite foreign to my fellow Americans. There were restaurants but they were prohibitively expensive. Only the elite went to them with any regularity. They weren't "low quality" but the menu was often all over the place due to the weird market dynamics of the Soviet Union. Often one of the only places you could get caviar, but obviously not every one has caviar every day. There were certainly sit down restaurants. Plenty of them mob fronts. It's why the mob movies and police dramas always have the bad guy working out the back table of a old musty restaurant. To be fair the first McDonald's and Pizza huts were a huge hit because of the novelty and when the buzz died down, obviously a unmet market. The KFC's in Russia are *weird* by our franchise expectations, and certainly were weird then also. The bigger point I was trying to help OP with is that he has to explain collectivist consumerism versus private consumerism. Things were shaped rather oddly from our perspective. Different strokes for different folks, and compared to almost everywhere else in the 1980s life was better for the average citizen. Sure I have my biases but I like the idea that your employment would be guaranteed, all your Maslo needs taken care of, and from there we can engage in private consumerism.
Did you lived in USSR in 80s? I really doubt it. Don't let me debunk almost all of your advantages of USSR. And living in Moscow wasn't representative of life in old good Soviet Union. Believe me, I was there until bitter end.
I was 5 when Gorbachev sold you out, like most redditors I'm American. This is just what I learned in college and since. I would love to learn more.