What was day to day life like? What were important aspects we might take for granted? I just finished watching Chernobyl, and it almost seems too bleak and... well dystopian. Are these true representations?
Can anyone give me an account of a day or a week? This topic fascinates me, I am old enough and have friends actually born in Ukraine in mid to late 80s, but they were young children by the time it was over. As an American I feel our portrayal may be a little... overreaching. But I don't know, it is the same portrayal I've seen throughout my lifetime.
It's worth keeping in mind that "the Soviet Union" wasn't one single place at one single time, and so asking what life was like there is a bit like asking "what was life like in the United States between 1917 and 1991".
I will point to this previous answer I wrote to explain why life experiences in the USSR varied quite considerably across time and place.
I'll also point to the fact that a lot of people from the former USSR don't look on the 1980s as dystopian, but if anything look on the 1970s and 1980s with a fair amount if nostalgia. But collective memory itself is a malleable thing: Pew did a number of surveys in the past decade on people's feelings about the end of the USSR. A 2009 survey found that 62% of Ukrainian respondents thought that life was worse than it had been under communism, while a 2017 survey (so, after the start of hostilities in eastern Ukraine) found that 34% of Ukrainian respondents said that the dissolution of the USSR was a bad thing.