Good Soldier Schweik: in my opinion, even thugh the soviet regime had many faults they were all better off under the soviet union

I think you'd be surprised how few people in FSU countries would agree with you these days!

I've spent at least 3 months a year working in Russia for the last 2 years,and will again this year. I speak passable but not yet good Russian. I'm just back from Sakhalin, Moscow and Khabarovsk. My daughter works full-time as a journalist for a Russian news organisation in Moscow. My wife is of Estonian extraction. As well as Russia I've recently worked in Azerbaijan, Turkmenistan and Kazakhstan.

I have local friends in these places....I make a big point of NOT getting very involved with expat "communities" when I work abroad, and try to cultivate local friendships. My best friends in Sakhalin are a charcoal burner, a lawyer and a teacher. And an FSB colonel, but we'll keep quiet about that :-). I know literally NO-ONE in any of the FSU or former east bloc countries I've visited who believes they were better off in the USSR. I *hear* about a few people who are nostalgic for a time when the USSR was seen as "the other big power" but I don't know any personally.

Last time I was in St Petersburg, the queue for the "Mashrutka" (fixed-route minibuses) was huge and moving slowly, and a young lad in the queue said something like "bloody hell, this is slow...it's even worse than in Soviet times". At that point a whole slew of older people in the queue (Russians aren't backward at criticising people in public!) rounded on this guy, telling him in strong terms that he had NO idea what he was talking about,and that it he did, he wouldn't dare to even think such garbage. These were ordinary workers.

There are no queues for basics like bread now, and the vast majority get enough to eat. When I studied in Poland in the summer of 1974, at Mikolai Kopernik University in Torun, the first Polish word I learned was "niema" ("there isn't any"). It was the standard answer to most questions about food or goods. As students (I was the only non-Pole on the course)we were relatively privileged and got more stuff than the general populace, but it was still pitifully limited.