Nostalgia for the Soviet Union

[21] Levada Center sociologist Karina Pipiya observed that the economic factors played the most significant role in rising nostalgia for the Soviet Union, as opposed to loss of prestige or national identity.

[22] Pipiya also suggested a secondary factor was that a majority of Russians "regret that there used to be more social justice and that the government worked for the people and that it was better in terms of care for citizens and paternalistic expectations.

"[22] In 2022, Oxford University professors Paul Chaisty and Stephen Whitefield carried out an analysis of polling data which studied continued identification with the Soviet Union among adult Russian citizens.

"[24] In her examination of identities in post-Soviet Ukraine, historian Catherine Wanner concurs that the loss or reduction of social benefits has played a major role in Soviet nostalgia among older residents.

[25] Describing elderly female pensioners who expressed nostalgia for the Soviet era, Wanner writes: They had relied all their lives on the ruling [Communist] Party structure and hierarchy...and with it now absent, they have no recourse of their own...to stave off hardship.

Without the protection of the Soviet state and its roster of cradle-to-grave allotments, in this new social Darwinian post-Soviet world without vital blat connections they are left highly vulnerable to poverty.

[25]An analysis of Soviet nostalgia in the Harvard Political Review found that "the rapid transition from a Soviet-type planned economy to neoliberal capitalism has imposed a high financial burden on the population of these fifteen newly independent post-Soviet states.

It is in terms of a nostalgia for this past security, rather than a desire for national conquests, power, and glory, that Soviet restorationist feeling in Russia should mainly be seen.

"[27] He also added that "Soviet nostalgia is likely to diminish as the older generation dies off and the age structure of society assumes a less top-heavy form.

[27] Ekaterina Kalinina, a researcher on post-Soviet culture and media at the University of Copenhagen, concurred with other findings that Soviet nostalgia is driven primarily by the collapse of the former regime's welfare state.

"[28] Many of the ex-Soviet republics suffered economic collapse upon the dissolution, resulting in lowered living standards, increased mortality rates, devaluation of national currencies, and rising income inequality.

[18][29][30][31][32][33] Chaotic neoliberal market reforms, privatization, and austerity measures urged by Western economic advisers, including Lawrence Summers, and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) were often blamed by the populace of the former Soviet states for exacerbating the problem.

[34] Most of the Soviet state enterprises were acquired and liquidated by Russian business oligarchs as part of the privatization campaign, which rendered large segments of the ex-Soviet workforce unemployed and impoverished.

[34] Capital gains made in post-Soviet Russia during the 1990s were mostly concentrated in the hands of oligarchs who benefited from the acquisition of state assets, while the majority of the population suffered severe economic hardship.

[34] According to Kristen Ghodsee, a researcher on post-communist Eastern Europe: Only by examining how the quotidian aspects of daily life were affected by great social, political and economic changes can we make sense of the desire for this collectively imagined, more egalitarian past.

But nostalgia for communism has become a common language through which ordinary men and women express disappointment with the shortcomings of parliamentary democracy and neoliberal capitalism today.

[38] A related study of working class Kyrgyz women in the same time frame found that most remembered the Soviet era primarily for its low levels of unemployment.

[39] Upon the Soviet dissolution, "rampant inflation within many newly independent states quickly became coupled to the rise of financial oligarchs...[while] uneven transitions to democracy and the institutionalization of organized crime became the norm.

"[39] In Armenia, where the dissolution was followed by the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict with neighboring Azerbaijan, Soviet nostalgia was closely tied to a longing for a return to peace and public order.

Without state subsidies and central planning, Vltchek insisted that these aspects of society disappeared or became severely diminished in the post-Soviet space.

[40] Anthropologist Alexei Yurchak described modern Soviet nostalgia as "a complex post-Soviet construct" based on the "longing for the very real humane values, ethics, friendships, and creative possibilities that the reality of socialism afforded – often in spite of the state's proclaimed goals – and that were as irreducibly part of the everyday life of socialism as were the feelings of dullness and alienation.

[41] According to Ukrainian journalist Oksana Forostyna, positive cultural depictions of Soviet life emphasizing its modernization and progressivism were common until the late 1980s.

[28] Soviet Space Age imagery and art experienced a major resurgence in particular due to nostalgia for that era's perceived optimism and utopian speculations.

[6] Journalist Pamela Druckerman asserts that another aspect of neo-Sovietism is support for the central role of the state in civil society, political life, and the media.

[50] Gennady Zyuganov, leader of the Communist Party of the Russian Federation, is a harsh critic of President Vladimir Putin, but states that his recipes for Russia's future are true to his Soviet roots.

[62] Anna told the Ukrayinska Pravda that she met the soldiers with a Soviet flag not out of sympathy, but because she felt the need to reconcile with them so that they would not "destroy" the village and Ukraine after her house was shelled, but now feels like a "traitor" due to the way her image has been used by Russia.

[64] Putin also drew parallels between the current Ukrainian government and that of Nazi Germany,[65][66][67][68] praising Russia's military, saying that present troops were "fighting for the motherland, for her future, and so that nobody forgets the lessons of World War II".

[69] On August 26, 2022, the Soviet Victory banner was hoisted over the village Pisky, a fortified area just off Donetsk whose capture is strategic for Russia, further pushing Ukrainian forces away from Donbas.