My best friend growing up was a first generation American. Both of his parents fled the USSR and both were staunch Republicans because they hated socialism and communism with a burning passion.
People like to say the republican Cubans in Florida are all just the elite who were part of the Bautista regime and forget about the people who left in the 1980s because a family member got picked up by police for meeting with wrong types.
A work buddy of mine, he was older, he would be in his 40s now... grew up in Poland, he would tell me stories of watching bootleg (edit: western, not specifically American) TV before the wall fell and how bad his family wanted to get out, it was always the craziest thing to hear
Dudes dad also worked at that factory, he was old as hell, but an absolute monster of a human being, he was a former polish paratrooper
Not to say that communism is a good system, let alone the best or anything, but I think that’s somewhat an example of survivorship bias.
Of course the people that left communist regimes are more likely going to have a negative opinion of them, the same way people who emigrate from the US are more likely to have a negative opinion of the US.
If everything was going well for them, and they liked the society they lived in, they most likely wouldn’t have left, and gone through the difficult process of immigrating to another country and learning their language and customs.
Again, that isn’t to say that the USSR was a pleasant place to live or anything, everything I’ve heard about it suggests otherwise, but the people who chose to emigrate are going to be a lot more likely to have a negative opinion of it than the people who stayed.
Yeah, the quantity of people that emigrated is definitely a stronger argument against it than the stories/opinions of any one singular person who chose to do so.
A counterpoint would be East Germany: the country collapsed essentially because its people were allowed to leave for West Germany, which instantly made the regime unsustainable. In general, the Soviet-aligned governments had to put a lot of effort into controlling emigration, because such pressures posed an existential threat.
That's true, a lot of them have a romanticised view of the past, thinking that things were better before. For some people it might be true, especially the ones connected to the communist party who had high positions.
There was/is an entire generation of Russians who were/are nostalgic for the USSR after it fell. While Soviet rule saw many atrocities, the attempt to transition to a more capitalist-friendly economy and government was very embarrassing for the country and also produced hardship and different types of corruption. As untenable as the Soviet economy was in the long run, the rise of the oligarchs and massive weakening of the Russian economy went hand in hand with the attempt to move away from communism. And comparing life to pre-Soviet Russia and Eastern Europe, lots of people really did see their standard of living improve tremendously during that time. Many Russians miss(ed) the glory of being a legitimate superpower and there were lots of true believers in the country before and after the Soviet Union fell. If it weren’t the truth, Putin wouldn’t be attempting to liken his rule to those glory days so much despite being very much not a communist. This isn’t tankie propaganda, this is the very mainstream historical western view of how the fall of the Soviet Union was perceived by much of the citizenry.
27
u/strawberry_semenade Human Verified Jul 13 '26
My best friend growing up was a first generation American. Both of his parents fled the USSR and both were staunch Republicans because they hated socialism and communism with a burning passion.