[The Immortal Goon]

I agree completely.

Just don't want to be guilty of one of the "abuses of power."

Though, if moving a thread to a different forum was as tyrannical as things ever got in Soviet Russia, sign me up.

[Andropov]

Your negative views of the Soviet Union are entirely irrelevant. First of all, the vast majority of former Soviet people regret the collapse of the Soviet Union. This is evident to anyone who has spent any significant amount of time in the former Soviet space.

According to Yale Lecturer Richard Pipes, 74% of Russians surveyed for his 2005 book regret the demise of the Soviet Union and believe life was better under Communism.

78% of respondents in a 2003 survey said that democracy is a facade for a government controlled by rich and powerful cliques. Only 22% expressed a preference for democracy; 53% disliked it.

74% of Russians regret the Soviet Union's passing. Only 12% regard the post-communist regime as "legitimate". In an October 2003 survey they were asked how they would react to a Communist coup: 23% would actively support it, 19 would collaborate, only 10% would actively resist.

Statistics taken from "Flight from Freedom: What Russians Think and Want" by Richard Pipes, published in the May/June 2004 issue of Foreign Affairs

Second of all, your experiences took place during Perestroika, which led to social and economic collapse. Living standards were much higher in the Brezhnev era than during Gorbachev.

[Americanroyalty]

So would the Soviet Union would have been a better place with Lenin at the head? It might have had less purges but without Stalin's forced Industrialism helped It prepare for a War against Germany (though Stalin was a miserable leader during the war).
As for the Op it does seem like Keynes was right that, so far all the "experiments" in communism have failed to actually bring about the communist society that is supposedly their end goals. I think North Korea is an even better example of this then the Soviet Union.

[Andropov]

Communist countries indeed never reached Marxian Communism, a utopian society without money, classes, and the state. However, if you look at what they did manage to achieve, the results are quite remarkable. Mao's China and Stalin's Soviet Union were responsible for some of the greatest and most rapid humanitarian feats the world has ever known- the advancements in literacy, health-care, and education, are unparalleled in human history. Even during the height of the Great Purge and the Cultural Revolution, both Stalin and Mao as well as their political programs were tremendously popular in their respective countries.

[Travesty]

Your negative views of the Soviet Union are entirely irrelevant. First of all, the vast majority of former Soviet people regret the collapse of the Soviet Union

This isn't indicative of anything. The vast majority of the Soviet people are clearly retarded, they keep re-electing Putin and United Russia they elected Yanukovich and Saakashvili, and the rest are ruled by something close to a totalitarian state anyway. The reason the population is retarded is because most of the educated fled the Soviet Union the second it collapsed.

[Andropov]

You don't have a PhD to accurately judge what time period was the happiest and most prosperous. The fact that most regular people prefer the old system means that it was more successful at creating a functioning society than the one in Russia, Ukraine, etc, today.

[ThirdTerm]

What the Soviet Union lacked was computer technologies which had been developed independently in the US and America had a monopoly on information technology, which helped it widen the technological gap with the Communist countries in the 1980s and the Soviets were bullied into renouncing their Communist ideology in exchange for sophisticated Western technologies which the Soviets had no access and the collapse of the Soviet Union was caused by America's strategies of containment aimed at Russia. On the contrary, China has had received preferential treatment from the US since the Nixon administration as it has not been a target of tough sanctions which would have impeded its technological progress and the US has not exerted enough pressure on China to end the CCP's one-party rule.

[Travesty]

Well of course the vast majority prefer the old system, they won't be having a revolution for it though. They miss the welfare, the healthcare, the job security the fact that the government took care of everything. Now that the government stopped catoring to the lumpen proletariat they became alcoholics, drug addicts, cops, whores, and bureaucrats. The educated, those whose opinion actually matters, are mostly working and living in the West.

[Andropov]

There was no lumpen proletariat in the Soviet Union- not working was illegal, and if you read the memoirs of foreigners who visited the USSR, you notice they are struck by how hard-working, selfless, and devoted the people were to their country and their ideology. Soviet people were so moral and uptight that it sometimes irritated Steinbeck and Capa in their travels for the book "A Russian Journal". When people lose their livelihood and see their country plunge into a hellish dystopia, it's not hard to see how alcoholism and depression follows- one of the bums near where my grandmother lives used to be an engineer working for the space program who lost his job after the collapse and was unable to acclimate to the new system, which values money more than talent and ability.

[Travesty]

There was no lumpen proletariat in the Soviet Union- not working was illegal, and if you read the memoirs of foreigners who visited the USSR, you notice they are struck by how hard-working, selfless, and devoted the people were to their country and their ideology. Soviet people were so moral and uptight that it sometimes irritated Steinbeck and Capa in their travels for the book "A Russian Journal".

[Smilin' Dave]

What the Soviet Union lacked was computer technologies which had been developed independently in the US and America had a monopoly on information technology

Not really. The Soviets were certainly behind in terms of computing/hardware but they were typically only a generation or so behind, and in 'strategic' areas this could be offset by allocation of limited resources or import substitution. The significant gap didn't really occur until the 1980s, and that was more likely to have been a symptom of a wider economic stagnation rather than a US monopoly.

the Soviets were bullied into renouncing their Communist ideology in exchange for sophisticated Western technologies

...you do realise the Soviets were trading with the West for decades prior to the collapse of the Soviet Union, including things like computers etc.?

The big ticket trade item ended up being wheat and other agricultural products, rather than technology.

the collapse of the Soviet Union was caused by America's strategies of containment aimed at Russia

The whole concept of containment as a means on defeating the Soviet Union (rather than to just well... keep it behind the lines) requires that you assume that the Soviet Union needed to expand to survive. Yet the Soviet Union did grow etc. without pursuing an expansionist policy through much of its history. A look at its trade balances with 'friendly' nations also highlights that the Soviets were not leeching off them to sustain their economy or something, in fact it was more the other way around.