This is a strange topic for me. Where I live, Soviet has a very very bad reputation. Even the communist party, represented in parliament, denies any ties with Soviet, even though they were once part of the Communist International and thus formally led by Joseph Stalin himself.Our commie leader a few years ago even said that he will “stop calling himself a communist” as a reaction to the storm of criticism against the history of his party.
Anyway,in Russia of today there are new tyrannts on the rise. And they play the Soviet card hard. A non-Russian, previously Soviet republic citizen, has repeatadly argued IRL that life was better during Soviet times. The economy was better, crime was less of a problem and they were part of a superpower. He is not old enough to have been more than a child during those days. His father was then, and is still today, a state bureaucrat.
Since this is an old issue, burried before the internet became commercial, but now resurrected again in Russia (and phantastically enough also among select individuals in some Russian ex-colonies), it might be a weaker spot than most here imagine. Where can I find convincing statistics about how aweful living standards were in the late Soviet compared to contemporary western countries?
Please note that this is NOT at all about the mass murders of Lenin and Stalin. This is about the mature stagnated bureaucracy of Brezjnev during the Russian oil boom of the 1970s, and then during the 1980s when oil exports dwindeles and the Soviet union finally collapsed. Tangible force against individuals might not have been much more abundant in Soviet during this time, than it is in most western countries today. So I need mostly economic arguments, at least to prove the point that decades of communism had led to poverty for ordinary people, because this guy doesn’t believe it on face value, and I’m just passified by disbelief. And I do think that this might be the attitude of millions of peoples in the post-Soviet area.