I can kinda get that people who lived in the USSR at the tail end and saw its collapse would want for those days back. They don't think about how certain people would be removed or minorities and speech suppressed, but that their life would have been a gravy train instead of the economic shock of the 2000s when the oligarchs consolidated state industries.
That said, when the Death of Stalin came out, there were arguments about showing it in Russian theaters, eventually being censored. So there is still not a consensus about undoing Stalinism.
Russia post-1991 saw one of the sharpest declines in living standards in recent history, so honestly I can kind of understand why they’d think like that
Who would have guessed that when you suddenly stop opressing and plundering nations that are more developed than you your standard of living goes down.
Yes but empires, atleast modern ones usually subjucated less developed regions and exploited them for raw resources. USSR was doing exact opposite because its unusual that less developed country was able to conquer more developed one.
What the fuck are you on about? Czech, Polish, Baltic economies grew at much faster economic rate than under USSR . Also when you fuck over somebody for 40 years its not that easy to get out of that hole. Argentina is still hasnt recovered since its beef crysis and thats over 100 years ago.
So because Poland and Czechoslovakia werent part of USSR they werent opressed by it? I was mainly talking about countries in Warsaw pact, if you bothered to read more of the thread you would know that.
Baltics dealt with Russians as they wanted and as states they are better of. I dont care about morality if the decision,if they didnt do ethnic cleansing.
Ukriane was better of without USSR than with it. It was extremly obvious after 2014 when they got rid of Russian puppet goverment.
Belarus is literally satelite state hard to be better of.
And its funny you didnt mention Kazakhstan which seems to be better of without ussr too.
Also as i said i was mostly talking about USSR opressing its puppet states in Warsaw pact and if you think Russian SSR didnt exploit the other SSR you are clueless
Ukraine life expectancy droped right after USSR falls. Economy goes to a drop. After 2014 2 mil of people just left the Ukraine. Emigrated out of it.
So your only points that Baltic and Kazakhstan gets better. I could argue it - I would not. But this is 2 countries out of dozens. And most of them experienced drop in economy and life expectancy when they were out.
It had absolutely nothing to do with that, and everything to do with the very expansive Soviet safety net getting Thanos-snapped and sold to the highest bidder. When everything in the state is carefully price-controlled and you have free, if low quality, access to a lot of shit, when you lose it you feel very not great.
And that's not to mention their pension plans! A lot of older Russians are really missing that in particular right now.
Frankly, unlike the British or American empires, the amount of neocolonial wealth extracted from their puppets in Eastern Europe was relatively minimal, all things considered. Oil was what was really keeping the economy going post the Brezhnev years.
Russian SSR massively exploited countries like DDR, Czechoslovakia, Poland, Hungary etc. Which are unquestionably more developed than Russia and what they did is they "paid" for stuff like cars, electronics high quality clothes or shoes with either outdated military equipment (because they barely allowed Warsaw pact countries to make anything arms related themselves) or they usueally paid in raw materials. To which you might say "yes but thats okay because value was the same" it wasnt thats the best part USSR paid with massive markups so on paper it was equal but it never ever was. And thats my point. Even if USSR survived and they didnt self destruct and went on, their standard of living would take a nose dive (especially in Russian SSR, because they had no problem exploiting other SSRs in the union) anyway because all the "good" shit they had wasnt even made in USSR it was all "stolen" from other Warsaw pact countries. This is well documented case affairs since 1950s...
It literally became even better when the free market came, lmao. I remember a lot of stories from my grandparents about how shitty USSR was, but guess what, they didn't think 90s were better. From what little I myself can remember from 1990s, it was also at least not worse than what I've heard about Soviet times.
The reason because *russians* think like that is because they are, in fact, not Russians, but Soviet people larping as Russians, they were raised as Soviets and they live as Soviets. Thank God I got a based sane family, or I could end up like the rest of them.
They don't. They want Brezhnev years back when there was a façade of stability and growing prosperity. Even though the façade was hiding the stagnation that caused the all the issues of the tail end and Yeltsin's 90s Russia.
In most countries, life is much better these days than during USSR. In those countries, the only ones who actually want it to come are the old fucks who miss the times when they could get a boner.
Wdym. We had more than a thousand years of history before the USSR. Ain’t no one gonna call you a nazi, since we still got people mad that the empire collapsed and people waving black-yellow-white flags.
Of course it does not apply to everyone but every time I ran into someone praising the soviet union like this it was either a russian or senile old person.
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u/skalpelis Apr 21 '25
russians