Was watching a bald and bankrupt video or five last night and I kept hearing the older men and women always say that things were better before the fall of communism…is this a case of just weird nostalgia or is it rooted in something deeper? My gut feeling is that he’s talking to people who more or less were left behind when capitalism came to town but I cannot tell for sure. Someone who’s way more versed than me would know. Were times better under communism, or just the perception?
Some background info: a significant majority of Russians regret the breakup of the USSR - the percentage is highest among older Russians (55+), but not exclusively them - it's a phenomenon across all age groups, as the Levada Center reported this year. It's not just Russia though - at least in a 2013 study, majorities in Russia, Armenia, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan and Ukraine (I'd be interested to see what the numbers are now) thought the breakup did more harm than good, and pluralities answered the same in Moldova and Belarus. Georgia was pretty split, and pluralities thought it did more good than harm in Azerbaijan and Kazakhstan, with only Turkmenistan returning a plurality saying it did more good than harm. These last three have earned massive amounts of money from hydrocarbons exports since 1991, although that has also sharpened economic inequalities and corruption issues.
So why is this Soviet nostalgia there?
Well, first I think it needs pointing out that Soviet nostalgia focuses on different parts of the Soviet era than what Westerners think of. While Westerners think of Stalin (gulags and famine) or Lenin (revolution and civil war), Soviet nostalgia is much more focused on the later Khrushchev and Brezhnev years, roughly something like 1960 to 1985, when Soviet society was relatively stable, and more prosperous than what came before (or in many cases after). People could expect to move into single family apartments which were being built en masse (khrushchevki), could expect fairly stable employment with some kind of benefits. Part of this is definitely seeing the past through rose-tinted glasses - this was the "Era of Stagnation" as well, when a lot of what made society function did so through the "economy of favors" or the outright black market, and when things like corruption and alcoholism began to really take off as societal problems.
But the 1990s were really that much worse.
One reason is that geopolitically neither Russia nor its successor states alone or together command anything like the superpower status that the Soviet Union did, as I explain here. It's a massive blow to national pride. And furthermore, it's worth remembering that in the common Soviet understanding, the USSR had gained this superpower status after 1945 through literal blood (26 million dead) fighting in the Second World War to defeat Nazi Germany. Control of Eastern Europe was then given up for...not really anything, in the popular understanding. It was a one-sided deal many regretted, and that's not even getting into the fact that a significant number of Russians think Russia should have an empire.
Most post-Soviet countries saw a drastic decline in life expectancies in the 1990s, as I explain here. This has led to the populations of these countries declining: only Azerbaijan and the Central Asian states have higher populations than they did in 1991, and even with Kazakhstan this is a relatively recent turnaround.
The collapse of the USSR was accompanied by a collapse in a Union-wide economy, as I explain here. This was accompanied by issues like inflation and price rises, and nonpayment of wages or benefits. The back of the envelope estimate I've heard is that the economic collapse of the 1990s in the former Soviet Union was twice as bad as the Great Depression was for the US. Countries like Ukraine and Russia technically lost 50-60% of their 1990 GDP, as I discuss here, and didn't climb their way back to 1990 levels until the middle of the 2000s, if ever (Ukraine never has).
And that's not even getting into the massive political instability and crime wave.
So while I have to be respectful of the 20 year rule, I'd ask - was the late Soviet period better than things are now? In most cases not really, but there are exceptions (and this really depends on where you live in a country, how old you are, your nationality/ethnicity, and how much money you have). But even for those who are living at or above the levels they would have been in 1990 or so, the 1990s in particular were incredibly turbulent and filled with privation for most people. In the 1990s between a third to a quarter of Russians were living below the national poverty line, and this only fell to the low teens in the mid 2000s, where it's roughly stayed the same. Even for Russians who are doing better now, they still feel very poor and at risk because of the traumas of transition.