Here to add that the Soviet Union created massive environmental damage and resource exploitation. The idea that it would some how be gentler on the climate when they were wiping out forests and forcing industrial farming and dumping unrestrained waste into water ways is another way so many in the west just don't know shit about the USSR and the shit show it was.
Fine, dream of your socialist utopia if you need to, I mean we need to imagine something other than what we're doing, but for the love of all and the planet stop getting hard to any mention of the USSR. It was bad and it was broken and should never ever be a model for anything meant as an improvement on the present situation.
The shortage aren't even the bad part. You can deal with limited consumer options and lack of useless junk. The problem is that even talking about the shortages where someone could over hear you could land you in an interrogation room.
My mom talked to an American once who came to an art exhibition when the USSR was still a thing, he asked to buy her husband's illustration.
That night KGB were at her fucking door. They questioned her all night and for years after every letter they sent was screened and read and they'd pull them in anytime they thought there was something even remotely sus about it.
One time she and her friends were coming back from the beach and a cop stopped them and arrested them because the guys hadn't tucked their shirts in and looked too "American"
This is the shit people don't realize or think is easy to just get over because you never think it'll be that bad or that it will get you or yours. And don't realize the math of it. If a million cuts and restrictions that seems minor but are used to beat you down and beat any hope and imagination out of you.
And this is only as bad as it got because my grandmother, her mother, was well respected and high ranking in the military administration.
Didn't help though when Chernobyl blew and the state didn't tell anyone outside the area for days anything had happened, including my grandmother.
Too many younger western leftists don't understand that basic needs met only gets you so far. They imagine a world where housing is affordable and they can still be who they are and live their lives and that would be amazing but that is NOT what the USSR was.
It's cute to joke about collaborating, while conveniently forgetting that collaborators were some of the first to end up vanished, in gulags or dead.
That my grandmother's generation lived in a psychological duality where things were known and everyone lived as if they weren't known and you didn't know which of your neighbours could report something that will get you disappeared without as much as a chance to defend yourself. I know this because my grandmother was that neighbour and the lives she ruined haunted her into her late life.
That after those repressions subsided, everyone had to go back to pretending their family members didn't disappear without a trace and that it wasn't their own friends, family or neighbours who caused it. You don't think it's a big deal, but the absence of closure, or acknowledgement of constantly living in anxiety while also pretending everything is fine, not knowing who or what to trust, never seeing anyone punished, impacts generations.
And that's for people who were lucky enough not to be part of larger groups targetted for displacement, removal, or reeducation or painted as a threat purely based on faith, language, skin, sexuality.
For them it was far far more violent, painful and unforgiving and never, not once, has anyone had to answer for what happened.
And when those of us who lived under this try to mark these losses, try to grieve this pain, to tear down the monuments and symbols of those nightmares, some western leftists or tankies think they get to make jokes, reclaim symbols they didn't suffer under, and make jokes about collaborators and how all the loss of life and all the suffering only happened to those who deserves it and have the audacity to joke about doing the same, oblivious to the freedom they have to even make these jokes, without fear of a knock on their door, and then get upset when we try to correct them.
They conveniently forget, also, that high ranking party members lived like kings, untouched by scarcity. That class didn't go anywhere, it just became illegal to talk about it still being alive and well. That people still experienced poverty, hunger, isolation. That power and the hunger for it, and social conservatism, and demands for homogeneity and conformity were rife among those in charge at every level.
So yeah. None of the problems we are facing now were or would be solved by the USSR or it's magical return. Not one. Not a single thing would be better now. We'd all just be very good at pretending it was to survive the way it very much wouldn't be.
