• duderium [he/him]
    ·
    9 months ago

    Why is it that people living in former Soviet states overwhelmingly wish that the USSR was still around?

      • ThereRisesARedStar [she/her, they/them]
        ·
        edit-2
        9 months ago

        Have you considered there are other reasons besides nostalgia? Like the massive life expectancy and qol collapse under capitalism?

        https://hexbear.net/pictrs/image/32fb41e8-a5d4-41c0-9001-b3103bb43898.png

          • ThereRisesARedStar [she/her, they/them]
            ·
            9 months ago

            Life expectancy https://link.springer.com/article/10.1057/s41294-021-00169-w

            Oh yea, like if you are religious you are a threat to the state and therefore you are unfit for basically any leading role, or your property might be confiscated and you might be sent of to Siberia ?

            Anti religion is needlessly antagonistic but also wasn't enforced like you are suggesting: https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/stalin/works/1920/11/13.htm

            Lines for food namely bread and if the stars aligned meat.

            According to the anti-communist cia their nutrition was in many ways better

            https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&rct=j&opi=89978449&url=https://www.cia.gov/readingroom/docs/CIA-RDP85M00363R000601440024-5.pdf&ved=2ahUKEwijl7ChsciBAxXug4kEHS2ZCCAQFnoECBgQAQ&usg=AOvVaw06QRMVGCOurHDUtg96SRq0

            Also breadlines are common under capitalism.

            Big amount of corruption ?

            Yes, theft from the public has definitely decreased since the the collapse. /s

            Mandatory conscription to the military (and the corruption there too) ?

            There are plenty of countries that do that after they lose around 20 percent of their population in a brutal war. Like Vietnam, for example.

            Iron curtain ?

            You mean the one the west put up? https://news.stanford.edu/2019/12/26/stalin-not-want-iron-curtain-descend/

            Free speech and freedom of expression ?

            Western countries have more sophisticated censorship and media apparatuses I give you that. Speak out in a real way though and look what happens to people like Fred Hampton.

          • GenderIsOpSec [she/her]
            ·
            9 months ago

            Lines for food

            yeah i stood in one of these a few days ago, the fucky thing is that i had to pay for the food after i reached the end of the line kitty-cri-screm

            concerning life expectancy and quality of life and corruption, funnily enough

            But behind the self destructive behaviour, the authors say, are economic factors, including rising poverty rates, unemployment, financial insecurity, and corruption. Whereas only 4%of the population of the region had incomes equivalent to $4 (£2.50) a day or less in 1988, that figure had climbed to 32%by 1994. In addition, the transition to a market economy has been accompanied by lower living standards (including poorer diets), a deterioration in social services, and major cutbacks in health spending.

            “What we are arguing,” said Omar Noman, an economist for the development fund and one of the report’s contributors, “is that the transition to market economies [in the region] is the biggest … killer we have seen in the 20th century, if you take out famines and wars. The sudden shock and what it did to the system … has effectively meant that five million [Russian men’s] lives have been lost in the 1990s.” Using Britain and Japan with their ratio of 96 men to every 100 women as the base population, the report’s authors have calculated that there are now some 9.6 million “missing men” in the former communist bloc. “The typical patterns are that a man loses his job and develops a drinking problem,” said Mr Noman. “The women then leave and the men die, first emotionally and then physically.”

            Overall, the Russian death rate from accidents most of them involving alcohol has risen 83% since 1991. source

      • MF_COOM [he/him]
        ·
        9 months ago

        In order to have been a worker for at least 5 years in both systems and therefore have an informed opinion of the difference, you'd need to have been at least 25 by the collapse.

        Tack 30 years into that and yeah, at youngest the people with the most informed opinion on which system they preferred are going to be old.

        And if you think you had a better system that in the past and it got destroyed, feeling nostalgic isn't weird it's the most normal emotion possible.