Why nearly 60 percent of Russians 'deeply regret' the USSR's demise

anticapitalist:

For Westerners, who grew up regarding Communism as a burden to its subjects and a menace to the world, it’s a perplexing mystery at best. It’s a perennial embarrassment for the Kremlin, which spends vast sums on international PR efforts aimed at making Russia look like a democratic, capitalist, and modern place.

An annual poll to be released on Dec. 25, the day the final Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev resigned, suggests that a durable majority of Russians continue to “deeply regret” the demise of the USSR and wish that the collapse had been avoided.

The survey, conducted by the independent Levada Center in Moscow, found that nearly 60 percent of Russians are stuck in that nostalgic frame of mind, down from a high of 75 percent in 2000, but still a potentially potent political fact.

[…]

Older Russians invariably recall the Soviet era as a time of stability and social security, if not prosperity, and feel they have suffered unfairly from the social turmoil and repeated economic crises of the past two decades.

“You could buy a loaf of bread for 16 kopeks (cents), and that was a stable price for many, many years,” says Alevtina Dimitrieva, a Moscow pensioner. “Now the price is different every day. The authorities promise to raise our pensions, but even when that happens, rising prices gobble up the increase immediately.”

Lack of money has blocked most pensioners from taking advantage of the expansion of personal freedoms, economic opportunity, and social mobility
that many younger Russians began to enjoy in the wake of the Soviet collapse.

This is very interesting, even though I do not support soviet russia.

I don’t support state “communism,” but I’m not surprised by these results. The Russians I spoke to said that the most noticeable change in Russia with the end of the U.S.S.R. was that ice cream became more expensive.

Now they’re getting the “benefits” of capitalism on a large scale. It’s not hard to imagine why this would be a negative thing. Glasnost was a big change but a lot of the negatives from the U.S.S.R. are still around. Combined with capitalism, it’s bound to cause more scarcity.

Hell, the only reason the U.S. got away with all its scarcity for so long without the white masses noticing is that the U.S. has a very white-centric paradigm. As soon as the problems that affect everyone else started affecting white people too, everyone took notice. “Recession!” “Possible depression!”

The U.S. and Russia both need very significant changes.