It’s hard to say. I was born in the early 90s and my family was just scraping by. The generation that lived through WW2 were generally pro USSR. As long as you were following the party line, supporting everything the communist party was promoting, and didn’t ask any questions, then you were given all of your basic necessities. And, when a country is in a total war where the enemy is trying to indiscriminately capture all of your land and take forceful control of all of the people, then this you need a very strict unified force from your people. But once the war was over, the control didn’t stop. Any attempt by an individual to increase their own wealth was not only discouraged, but actively punished. For example, I remember reading an old children’s book about a little boy that started repairing all of his friends toys, which was good because he was helping the people around him. But then the boy started asking for money from other kids for his work, and the book made it very clear that it was incredibly wrong to do that, and labeled the boy as a “speculator”. Also if you had any criticism of the government, you were considered a trator. Everyone knew about the black cars. If a couple of black cars pull up to your neighbors house, you know that you won’t see them again. And you’d avoid anyone they were related to like the plague, because it was easy to become guilty by association.

So, starting with people born in the 60s, after Stalin’s death, there was more and more animosity towards their government. More and more the dark side of the Union was being publicized. People started to question what was happening around them and I think it’s tied to technology. As music cassettes because easy to make at home, people started sharing music that was no longer made by the established artists that were being directly and openly supported by the USSR. Basically, people at the lower class started to find a voice. As the crackdowns increased, so did the push back. At the same time there were invasions into Eastern Europe, after that there were constant insurgencies in the countries that were occupied, and after that a 10 year war in Afghanistan which had about as much public support as Vietnam had in the US, but if you wrote an equivalent “Fortunate Son” in the USSR you’d be arrested for being an “enemy of the people” and put into a labor camp that was not much different from what the Germans had in the 40s.

With more resources being diverted to the military, the Cold War, and everything else outside of our borders, quality of life kept dropping. And the whole time all of this was much worse for countries other then Soviet Russia. Those countries were basically used as resources to be expanded for the good of the Soviet people. So, after a bunch of uprisings and revolutions Soviets started to lose control of the Russian government. I need to brush up on the details at this point, but since we’re focusing on quality of life, it was continuing to get worse. Infrastructure continued to collapse. Water was getting turned off regularly, roads were in increasingly bad condition, goods were becoming more and more scares and expensive, and eventually this led to the uprising and collapse in '91.

That’s about the time I was born. Since all industry was controlled by the government, and the government was now gone, everything was a mess. There was literally no groceries in stores. Currency was useless. I remember having a bit pile of Soviet coins to play with. People went back to bartering. And during that time, the old politicians, and the mafia, who both controlled what was left of Russian industry used their power to place themselves into the government. Democracy never really happened in Russia. There was a small window in the late 90s and early 2000s where press finally had their freedom, and I remember seeing a lot of content on TV that openly spoke about current events, and people were able to openly talk about any criticisms they had of the government, but that ended after a few years of Putin. I used to watch a lot of TV as a kid and I remember all of the political satire shows disappearing basically overnight. Quality of life never really improved. My parents were divorced, so my mom did the “Russian bride” thing, found an American guy, he moved us to the US sometime around 2005, and I’ve been here since.

So, I don’t know if that answers your question, or if you can read past all of the spelling errors I’ve made a long the way, but I’d argue that there really hasn’t been a “good time”. It’s more about wasted potential. So many decates of people fighting each other for a better life that never came. There was potential for change in the 90s, but that was lost. I hope that Putin dies and people can actually build a Democracy, but the track record is pretty bad.

My love for my homeland has nothing to do with its history. It’s the culture, the food, the old traditions, music, people, art, and beautiful land that miss. But I can’t go back. This comment right here would land me in prison.