I grew up in Moscow, so my perspective might be a bit skewed by that. That said, I really liked my life during the soviet times. People were generally happy, and there wasn’t a lot of stress. Nobody worried about losing their job or not being able to retire. Nobody I knew worked overtime, and people generally had a lot of time off.
The city was very safe, and people let their kids out completely unsupervised and didn’t think twice about it. The neighborhoods were really well planned in my opinion. You’d have a bunch of apartment buildings around a central park with schools, hospitals, and grocery stores all within walking distance. You had everything you needed within walking distance from where you lived. Everybody lived in the same mixed housing, mechanics, plumbers, physicists, etc. all lived together.
Public transit was excellent, subways, trams, and buses were running at all times, and you never even had to think about it. You just go to a stop and something will come by in a 5-10 minutes.
Technology was less advanced. My family had a black and white TV without a remote, we used rotary phones even in the late 80s, and computers were rare. There was no personal computing to speak of, but schools were starting to have them right around the time of the collapse.
My overall memory of the time was of mostly being happy and optimistic about the future. Then the collapse happened and life went to shit real fast. Gorbachev and Yeltsin are motherfuckers.
