A question like whether things were “good” in a country depends a lot on your perspective. Much like in educational achievement, you can look at things in terms of absolute standards or relative ones.

The absolute standard, much like proficiency-based testing in education, would be to look at the standard of living in a country, and to a certain extent completely ignore the context or how things got to that point. Looking at the quality of food, or housing, or education in a country and directly comparing it to another country (such as the US) would be a good example of this.

This is much like looking at the knowledge and understanding of a poor child in an inner city and directly comparing it to a rich child who attended a prestigious prep school. You will see major differences, but these differences are not necessarily reflective of intelligence, or inherent ability.

Such comparisons are at the same time useful and patently unfair. They are useful because they give you a snapshot of where things stand in a country or a child’s education. But they are also patently unfair because they don’t give you an accurate understanding of which child’s school provided the best value for the money (perhaps if the poor child's school was funded like the rich one, the child would know more than the child from the wealthy prep school) or which country’s system generated the most value for the most people.

By absolute standards, Soviet life was in many ways worse than in the United States- but that was never a fair comparison to begin with. The United States was vastly wealthier at the start of the Soviet system during WW1, and the USSR bore the brunt of two major world wars during its history in the way that those of us living in America could never hope to understand. Millions of Russians were killed in the World Wars, and most of the economic core of Russia (which lay near its western border, and included cities like Stalingrad and St Petersburg) had been reduced to rubble by the end of World War II.

A more fair comparison would be to compare Russia to another war-ravaged country that did not have the benefit of a massive influx of American cash to help rebuild it after WW2 through the Marshall Plan. Unfortunately most such counties lay on Eastern Europe, and ended up under the control of the USSR through the Warsaw Pact after WW2. Even contries as far-flung as the Phillipines and Japan had the benefit of a massive influx of American money to help them rebuild after WW2.

The best comparison then might be countries in Latin America and Africa, that had *access* to US money to rebuild, but often did not receive it due to racist tendencies and the long shadow of Colonialism- and thus had to go it (mostly) for themselves.

Compared to those living in Latin America and Africa, most Russians were relatively well-off by the collapse of the USSR. This is *despite* the fact that Latin American and African nations *actually did* receive some foreign aid from Western countries (and the USSR!) during the post-WW2 era- though NEVER as much as Europe received through the Marshall Plan…

The one, VERY important way Russians were worse off than those living in Latin America is that they lacked political liberty. While dictatorships did abound in Latin America, and many citizens were made to “dissapear” for speaking out against the government or on the wrong side of a heated political issue, this was never quite as universally true as it was in the Soviet Union. Certain Latin American countries allowed their citizens more liberty than others- although this was by no means predicted by whether they took a pro-US or pro-USSR standpoint. The brutal dictator “Papa Doc” Duvalier, for instance, brutally oppressed his people but took a strongly pro-US, anti-Communist standpoint.

The other way of evaluating how well off a county's people are is from a “growth” perspective. Rather than looking at how a country is doing at any particular point, you look at the *long-term* trend of its growth.

This is much like measuring much a student has learned in four years, and comparing it to other students who started at the same point a certain time ago, rather than how much they know at a particular point- and this perspective tends to better account for mitigating factors like an unsupportive/disruptive home environment, the presence of gangs, and a lack of safe study-spaces in inner cities- as it compares against other individuals with a similar starting-point (ideally, other poor innner-city youths with the same level of educational achievement four years ago…)

Note that I said that you need to look at LONG-TERM trends. Much like the education of any student, countries face occasional recessions and periods of stagnation. The US Great Depression (which the US experienced despite *not* having a shelled-out countryside and millions of dead young people, like the rest of Europe did after WW1) and more recent Great Recession of 2008 (which is really part of a much longer-term decline in the fortunes of ordinary Americans- best measured not by unemployment rates but by *underemployment* and the decline of working-class wages- many college graduates are now stuck waiting tables and manning cash registers in low-end retail, as I myself had been forced to do despite having a graduate degree when I had work at all over the past 3 years…)

When you take a GROWTH perspective, the USSR really showed very impressive technological and industrial gains between 1910 and 1970, developing from a third-rate country where much of its population lived under serfdom and abject poverty to a nation that sent the first human to space and made a serious bid to beat the United States to the Moon…

Even so, when comparing countries’ progress it is important you look at the right measures. Many measures of comparing the US and USSR suffered, on the Russian side, from the non-monetization of many critical services in the USSR, such as education, healthcare, and in many cases housing (state-provided housing often charged a nominal fee, based on what Soviet citizens could be expected to afford, but these fees were often not equal to the real market value of that housing. In essence, it was heavily-subsidized housing.) This means the Russian growth in Standard of Living during the Soviet Era was MUCH greater than simple comparison of things like housing rents or hospital revenues (both of which were provided to citizens for little to no charge) might otherwise indicate.

Russian healthcare actually surpassed that in the US by certain measures, such as the Russian understanding of laser-eye surgery (which was later bought from Russian institutions by US doctors and entrepreneurs for pennies-on-the-dollar of its economic value after the USSR fell), and arguably did a better job of providing a safety-net for the Soviet Union’s poorest citizens (there was no such thing as medical-bankruptcy in the USSR, a person could not lose everything they owned due to an unexpected severe illness…) Nevertheless US medicine still enjoyed an enormous lead over medical care and coverage in Russia at the opening of the 20th century, and this gap was not entirely closed by some measures by the fall of the Soviet Union…

The fact that the Soviet Union managed to “catch up” to the United States by so many measures between 1910 (pre-USSR) and 1970 speaks volumes about its success. However planned economies like the USSR’s tend to be vulnerable to changes in leadership, and like any other system experience periods of stagnation and instability- like the USSR did between 1972 and 1992 (by which point, the USSR can be considered to have collapsed entirely).

Whether the USSR was ultimately a system that did a “better” job of providing for the majority of its citizens remains to be seen. If trends in growth and progress between 1945 and 1970 had continued until the present-day the USSR economy might very well have been much more equal to the US’s today than when it collapsed. At the same time, the US is currently experiencing a prolonged period of economic malaise for the bottom 80% or so of its population that is unsustainable and might well lead to the collapse of its own system if Trump’s policies and those of his immediate successor prove unsuccessful over the next 8-16 years…

It is also worth noting that nations do not exist in a vacuum. The US prosperity in the post-WW2 era can in large part be attributed to its dominance of world markets and the fact that every competing major industrial power had more or less been bombed to the ground (just as the current US stagnation is in part attributable to the rise or rebirth of industrial powers like China, Japan, and Vietnam).

The US de-facto ownership of the factories in many of these countries has succeeded in generating immense wealth for the top 20% of the American populace that owns the vast majority of the stock in multinational corporations (middle-class retirement savings only occupy a very small piece of the pie of stock ownership, although upper-class retirement savings are enormous…), but this prosperity is inherently fragile because this income is “unearned”, and most of these overseas factories could easily be seized and nationalized by a sufficiently determined and angry foreign government… (China, for instance, might seize all US assets in China if the US pushes the Tiawan issue too hard and ends up at war with China…)

On the other side of the same coin, the Soviet economy suffered enormously under the US-backed trade-isolation and imposition of the “Iron Curtain” by its own leaders throughout the Cold War. Further, when the US *did* trade with the USSR, it often actively sought to undermine key sectors of the Soviet economy, such as the agricultural sector by flooding the USSR with cheap, often government-subsidized agricultural exports (US agriculture is heavily-subsidized even today for various internal political reasons), and then cutting them off suddenly at inopportune times, helping to drive certain economic crashes much further than they otherwise would have gone on the latter days of the Soviet Union…

Finally, it should be noted that the massive military-industrial complex the USSR was forced to maintain to retain military parity (or at least deterrence from attack) with the US and NATO drained the Soviet economy of massive quantities of resources and brainpower that could otherwise have been used to build up the rest of the Russian economy.

Because the USSR was MUCH, MUCH poorer than the USA and NATO at the close of WW2 this military-industrial complex soaked up a much larger proportion of Russian GDP, allowing for a much smaller proportion to be re-invested in growing the civilian sector after providing for a basic standard-of-living (as substandard as this might have been compared to the Western Standard of Living) for the Soviet citizenry was accounted for. Money makes money, as the saying goes (indeed this, not free markets- which exist in other systems- is the basic premise of capitalism- the relation between capital and labor), and the Russians had proportionally FAR LESS of it to spend on growth after accounting for badic necessities.

So even if their system provided for a greater Return on Investment on the portion of GDP they *did* spend on growth, the Russian system would have experienced a smaller overall rate of GDP growth in the later years than the US despite this, due to the massive burden trying to keep up with the United States’ 1970’s and 80’s military-buildup (and perceived buildup- the US intentionally overrepresented its growth in military power to Russian leaders) placed on the Russian economy…

Ironically, this same excess of military-spending might be slowly choking the US economy. US military spending accounts for only 16 percent of the overall budget, but after “mandatory”, purely-redistributionist measures (those that don’t actually provide a service, but simply redistribute money to the poor or retirees to help them pay for a service- much of this money often goes to profit-margin on healthcare and isn’t actually involved in the real costs of providing that service- compared to the zero-profit healthcare of the USSR…) like Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid are accounted for this balloons to 57% of the United States Discretionary Budget- a factor that is slowly driving up the US national debt and choking the rest of the economy through the taxes required to sustain the military and manpower/brainpower it absorbs…

Still, this is nothing compared to the burden the military placed on the USSR economy. Depite out-spending the USSR by at least 50% (the 1989 Pentagon budget was about 300 billion, compared to about 200 billion USD dollars in that year in the USSR according to Gorbachev’s public figure for that year, which was much lower than expected) the US military budget (currently over $1 Trillion) only accounted for about 6.8 percent of GDP at the height of the Reagan-buildup of the 80’s- compared to about 15-17 percent of GDP (or as much as 30 percent acvording to some spurces) for USSR mid-1980’s military-spending… Today, U.S. military spending only stands at about 4.5 percent of GDP (but this is still driving up the U.S. debt, as taxes do not equal spending in the U.S.), but is likely to increase substantially under Donald Trump…

It’s also worth noting that, during the Cold War and through the present-day, the US has essentially subsidized the defense of Europe- with many Europenan nations chronically under-contributing to NATO, and US manpower and technology acting as the main deterrent against the possibility of Russian military incursions into Europe… This has allowed these nations to invest heavily in science, educational, and social spending that has heavily benefitted not only their own populace, but the United States (a technology developed in France during the Cold War would be spread to the USA, but not the USSR) as well.

In the end, those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it- so it is important to have the right facts to start with in one’s study of history. I do not lament in any way, shape, or form- the fall of the USSR, and the collapse of such a politically-oppressive system and a Cold War fraught with the threat of global thermonuclear war can only be seen as a good thing.

But the United States could learn valuable lessons from the USSR’s demise it is not currently learning- like to limit its military-spending (which need not be any higher than 1-2 percent of GDP), encourage domestic re-investment (the lack of which in the 1980’s helped doom the Soviet economy) even if this requires raising taxes on the rich and distributing business-startup grants, invest heavily in state-funded science and technology education (the triumph of which helped keep the USSR going as long as it did), and NOT engage in foreign trade-wars (which the USSR suffered badly from, both US-led and of its own doing, and contributed heavily to its demise…)