Enough about the bad, what was GOOD abot the Soviet Union?

[Lydia Leftcoast]

27. Well, I know people who came from there and people who studied there as grad students

There were some very bad things, as others have pointed out. According to those who were in a position to know (emigres), the medical system was free but uneven. You got much better care if you were a high-level Communist Party member or celebrity than if you were an ordinary person or even a rank-and-file Communist Party member.

However:

Everyone had a job.
Everyone had a place to live.
The educational system was really good in math and science and not too shabby in literature, and an effort was made to equalize opportunities across the country. Students who were notably talented in certain subjects (math, science, music, languages) went to specialized schools at no extra charge.
While the arts were censored, they were well supported, and every city of any size had a ballet company, a symphony orchestra, and a live theater company.
The system required conservative societies under their control (the Islamic peoples in Central Asia) to give equal rights to women.

According to what I've heard, the average person had ways of coping with the system. They knew exactly what was forbidden and what was OK and how to get around the restrictions and shortages. For example, many people received part of their pay in whatever product their workplace was involved in and used these things for barter.

The transition in the early 1990s was nothing short of brutal. A country where no one had run a profit-making business for 70 years was told that they had to become capitalists overnight. The only people who had the faintest clue about how to make a profit were the criminals, and the Russian Mafia has flourished since then. Some of the Party officials who had enough money to buy factories just fired all the workers and sold the machinery for scrap or ran their new businesses so badly that they failed. Mass unemployment resulted--and there were no unemployment benefits. At one point, it was reported that people were selling their furniture to survive.

The coping skills that ordinary people had developed over 70 years were suddenly useless.

One of my American friends has acted as a consultant to medical personnel who treat AIDS patients (oh yes, the poverty led to an explosion of drug trafficking and prostitution, which combined to give the former Soviet Union a horrible rate of AIDS infection), and according to her, one of the major problems since the changeover is that medical supplies are now harder to come by. The medical facilities used to get an allotment of supplies that was sometimes inadequate but arrived like clockwork. Now the poorer facilities are chronically short of supplies and are often shortchanged if a wealthier facility decides to pay a higher price.

She also said that the heavily touristed areas of cities like Moscow and St. Petersburg have been spruced up and look great, but if you go a few blocks away, you can end up in some pretty scary-looking slums. And the provincial towns that she has visited? Really run down.

The social safety net is practically non-existent. The only people who can get unemployment benefits are women with children. My friend reported that of the nurses and women doctors she worked with, only a few were married, but they all had a child. One child, presumably as "unemployment insurance."

So the fall of Communism was not an unmixed blessing.

In my opinion, China went about it better--although, of course, it's still repressive and has a lot of problems. They first allowed the farmers to divide up the old communes and own the land outright. This motivated the farmers to work hard for their own prosperity.

Then they allowed small sole proprietorships. This was actually a practical rather than an ideological move. After Deng Xiaoping came to power, he issued an amnesty for all the people who had been exiled to the boonies during the Cultural Revolution, but he knew that there weren't enough jobs for all of them. He figured that allowing people to open businesses would take care of at least some of the returnees. Many Chinese, especially in the southern and coastal areas, have relatives overseas, and the relatives were allowed to help finance these operations.

In other words, China did it gradually and in small steps, and by all accounts, they've adjusted better, although the gap between rich and poor is unbelievably large.