this post was submitted on 22 Jul 2023
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A lot of eastern Europeans actually miss/look back fondly on the USSR days.... I'm not exactly a fan of them or other "communist" regimes, as they were all basically thinly veiled dictatorships, but standard of living was higher for most of the former block countries.
I really don't get all the china dick riding going on. I gotta think it's driven by bots and Chinese netizens. The west is a little unfair on their views of China, but they grab descenters with secret police and quash any form of opposition to their one party system. People who praise them and act like that's a better system are crazy. Really wish we could build some decent highspeed rail network in America though...
Being from here, I can say that those are are people who either 1. Look back fondly just because they were young back then, and now they're old, or 2. Were connected enough to the party to be privileged.
Grandparents from one side of my family were the latter, and their political views nowadays are strongly pro-Russian these days, while everyone else(whose lives were improved after fall of USSR) is pro-Western. Funny how that works.
From my eastern block friends they are very confused how the USA could have allowed homelessness, they remember the bread lines so it's not all great memories, but they do talk about how everyone at least had a home, a job and some standard of living - where it seems the standard of living is higher in Western countries.
Yeah, looking from the outside, the USA seems like it's in a mess that it needs to fix.
It is easy to look back at worse times in the past with pink glasses of nostalgia... Yes, everyone did have a home, but the standard of living was piss-poor - except for people with connections, who had it much muuuuch better, like my aforementioned grandparents.
I'm from one of the Baltic states, and honestly the standards of living now are much better for the vast majority of people than it was in the USSR, even for minimum wage earners.