It must be said, though. As a society and country that was robbed of its identity and eaten from within by Stalinism, they actually did some pretty amazing things. 100% literacy. Near 100% employment. The first to reach space, and dozens of other major scientific milestones. And for the common person, they never really abandoned hope that their rhetoric would one day be fulfilled. It's like... the Soviet Union was a mess, but at least they were actually kind of trying for utopia. Most regimes, including in the West, weren't and aren't striving for such a high goal. And it's really hard to argue that the post-soviet states are doing better than a continued Union would have; their total populations have dropped, unemployment and crime have risen; only the Baltic countries have really escaped that downwards cycle, and that's only because of integration into a rather different poly-national union system- the EU. If they had stood alone, they'd probably be just as badly off as Turkmenistan and company at this point.
