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    Many older Russians I've met look very fondly 
    back at the USSR; younger generations have a 
    mixed attitude, many just echoing their 
    parents' sentiments, others enjoying modern 
    Russia.
I have family in the Czech Republic and Slovakia and have often heard that sentiment - that things weren't too bad back then. Hard to say how much of it is due to viewing the past in rose tinted glasses or missing their youth though.



My partner's mother explains it like this; while she's happy with modern Russia, she misses when it was a super power. She recalls having enough month at the end of each month for new outfits, apartment paid for (owned), plenty of food, and a nice vacation every 3 months or so. She also says she likes having a focused and goal oriented leader, and that democracy makes her head spin since it seems like nothing ever gets done.

We (partner and I) haven't pressed much into how much she actually knows about what was happening politically, but that's the perspective that a lot of other older folk echo. The few older people I have seen pressed on it usually just get stubborn about the bad parts of the USSR and don't want to talk about it.


Czechoslovakia was never a super power, and communism was to an extent forced upon it by the soviet union, but still people miss the security of the old system: you would basically never get fired or worry about the basics like clothes and shelter as long as you didn't rock the boat.

This seems to be the main point rather than democracy being hard to comprehend or inefficient.


Someone from Yugoslavia described it to me as "back then, everyone had a little something; not much, but something. Now some people have lots more, and others have nothing."




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