The thing about the Empire, though, is that it constantly alternated between fairly reasonable, modernizing emperors (that had a nasty tendency to get assassinated) and autocratic, unreasonable emperors. The USSR, meanwhile, simply had two main periods: pre-Khrushchev, and post-Stalin. The Pre-Khrushchev USSR was a straight up bad place to be for pretty much everyone involved. If you were a high level CPSU member, you were either constantly jockeying for a position in the Politburo (Lenin era) or you were dead (Stalin era, barring Stalin himself). If you were a regular person, you would be starving if Ukrainian, possibly starving if not, abducted and raped by the organs if modestly attractive and unlucky, imprisoned and executed if you accidentally bothered a vengeful Party member (who in turn would be terrified of being accused of "plotting against Stalin" and getting executed himself), and very, very screwed if you lived anywhere between Brest and Moscow. You were particularly screwed if you lived in an area that changed hands multiple times eg. Kharkov, since the Nazis would kill about half the people for being Communist, the Soviets would kill half the survivors for collaborating, and anyone who survived that would be under suspicion by both sides. If you were a mid level party member you would probably get purged by Yagoda/Yezhov/Beria/Abakumov, if you were a farmer in the ass end of nowhere you would be accused of being a Kulak and executed, and if you were Stalin you would live in constant paranoia of everyone around you plotting your death (and, indeed, he probably was assassinated on Beria's order in '53). All in all, a pretty terrible place to live, generally worse than the Empire had ever been.
The Post-Stalin USSR, meanwhile, wasn't so bad, for what that's worth. You technically didn't have freedom of speech, but you could generally say what you pleased and probably come out fine, you probably had enough food to live off of, but not quite enough to live well, and you could generally live safe in the knowledge that you wouldn't be dragged out of your job for being a wrecker. Your living standards would generally be several steps below that of the Americans or Western Europeans, but above those of people pretty much everywhere else. It was a decidedly banal existence for most, though. Wake up in the morning, read your crappy propaganda newspaper, leave your crappy apartment to take your crappy Lada to your crappy factory job, then return to stand in a crappy bread line for a while (unless you have elderly relatives willing to do so on your behalf) before headed to the neighbourhood smuggler for some crappy luxury goods. Unless you lived in Moscow and were either (A) a very high level CPSU member, in which case it was summertime and the living was easy or (B) you had decent connections to smugglers, in which case you basically lived the life of an upper-middle class American. Or if you lived in a non-USSR Warsaw Pact country, in which case you probably still lived under Stalin-emulating rulers. So, better than the Empire, but probably not better than what a hypothetical White-victory Russia would have ended up.
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Topic: Sheb's European Megathread: Remove Feta! (Read 1749800 times)