Ehh, did you live there let's say in between 1960 - 1990? Just for the record - no, it wasn't a pile of rust by 1990. It had free universal healthcare, free hig

Ehh, did you live there let's say in between 1960 - 1990? Just for the record - no, it wasn't a pile of rust by 1990. It had free universal healthcare, free higher education, no need for mortgage, abundance of jobs. And in my family there was a history of persecution during Stalin time, surviving Holodomor, so I know these things first hand. I don't need lecturing on what went wrong from Westerners. And what about immense suffering after 1991? - Ethic conflicts, absolutely atrocious poverty, would have been much worse if not for some remnants of socialist safety net (de-facto free healthcare). The new capitalist society was not exactly a much of improvement on many areas. For example in 1993 Boris Eltsin (president of Russia) ordered shelling of Parliament by tanks. And that was fine with the West. Somehow.