Three out of four Russians (75%) think that the Soviet period was the best time in their country’s history, according to a survey published by the independent Levada Center pollster on Tuesday 24 March.
Thirty years since the counter-revolution in the Soviet Union and East Europe and despite the continuous anti-communist, anti-soviet propaganda by the bourgeois mechanisms, Russians express increasingly positive opinions about the USSR and Joseph Stalin.
In the recent survey, just 18% of the respondents said that they disagree with the idea that the Soviet Union was the best period in the country’s history. Almost 30% of the participants (28%) in the survey expressed the will to “return to the path that the Soviet Union was following”, while just 10% answered that they prefer the “european path of development”.
Approximately 31% of the Russians associate the Soviet period with posistive things, such as “future stability and confidence” (16%) and “a good life in the country” (15%). Eleven percent answered that they associate the USSR with personal memories from their childhood or youth. Just 5% of the participants in the survey linked the Soviet period with negative associations.
Andrei Kolesnikov, a senior associate at the Carnegie Center Moscow think tank told Vedomosti newspaper that “the Soviet era may not be seen as a time of high living standards, but as a time of justice. Today’s state capitalism is viewed as unfair: the injustice is in distribution, access to goods and infrastructure. And this feeling is growing stronger”.
