> The slums, not as geographic location, euphemistically called "inner cities", but as areas of extreme poverty. They did not exist in the USSR, on the scale th

> The slums, not as geographic location, euphemistically called "inner cities", but as areas of extreme poverty. They did not exist in the USSR, on the scale they did in US, period. Yes, I accepted that from the outset, and I gave you the reason: Lack of freedom of movement. Poverty in the USSR was spread out further across the countryside. Either way, it's easy to show that, by the soviet states own admission, poverty even in relative terms was greater in the USSR: https://www.nytimes.com/1989/01/29/world/soviet-openness-brings-poverty-out-of-the-shadows.html https://www.nytimes.com/1989/01/29/world/soviet-openness-bri... In absolute terms, the difference is far greater. Living below the poverty line in the US was materially better than in the USSR. > Even today, I live in a big Central Asian city, and I see a lot less despair and disparity than what I saw in Philadelphia and NYC. What you see is not a statistic. If all that despair may be hidden from plain sight, how do you know it doesn't exist? Just because there's few people suffering in the city doesn't mean there aren't people suffering in the countryside. > There was no horrible segregation policies... I beg to differ: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Racism_in_the_Soviet_Union https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Racism_in_the_Soviet_Union > ...women till 1980-s had a lot more rights... Sure, because that happened to be part of the ideology. A particular women in the USSR may have had some rights that a woman in the US may not have had, at that time. Within a communist regime that limited rights in general, of course. > ...there were so many things not to like in the US and some other western countries to counterbalance the abundance of western supermarkets. And yet, of all the people that managed to emigrate to the US, few would return. > While it is true, you could not easily move out of a village into a big city, both my grandparents were from poor rural families, and both got PhDs and lived in major soviet cities. I think that's the crux of it. The soviet system treated you relatively well, brought you "progress". I'm aware that in central asia, support for the Soviet Union was the greatest even at the time of its dissolution, while other more developed countries couldn't wait to leave. However, the USSR dissolved for a good reason: It was, overall, an dysfunctional system. Surely there were people who profited, many peasants were turned into great mathematicians or musicians. I wouldn't deny that. We can compare the US system with the soviet system all day, either has had winners and losers, either has had done certain things better than the other. However, the soviet system is dead and gone, and communist parties in former soviet countries rarely form a democratic majority.