That's kind of misleading, given how the average USSR citizen had more food on their plate than even in the US https://nintil.com/the-soviet-union-food/
...are you thinking of the pre-WW2 famines?
Utterly ridiculous nonsense. USSR's stats were fudged from the lowest state farm levels up to the highest corridors of the Kremlin. That's where the HBO Chernobyl series shines - it's a great example of how the whole system became detached from reality, fudging had become so widespread that nobody knew the truth anymore nor could tell facts apart from "propaganda numbers". Official statistics are a total trash and I see no way to reconstruct actual figures so long after the fact.
Anyway, better ask someone who lived in the USSR how they felt when they first visited a standard supermarket in the West. I know a woman who had a mental breakdown on her first trip to Stockholm because she thought that stores stocked full of food were a CIA propaganda, and couldn't believe that she had been lied to all her life.
Maybe we should ask some of these slum inhabitants if they'd prefer to be allocated a menial job, be deported, or keep living their lives in the slum.
No, you weren't.
101-st km was applicable only to Olympic games of 1980.
This is exactly what happened in the Soviet Union, the system prevented people from the countryside to move into the city on their own accord, unless they happened to fit within some quota for laborers.
None of this is propaganda, it is historical fact that you seem to conveniently choose to ignore.
While it is true, you could not easily move out of a village into a big city, both my grandparents were from poor rural families, and both got PhDs and lived in major Soviet cities.
Yes, I accepted that from the outset, and I gave you the reason: Lack of freedom of movement. Poverty in the USSR was spread out further across the countryside.
Either way, it's easy to show that, by the soviet states own admission, poverty even in relative terms was greater in the USSR:
https://www.nytimes.com/1989/01/29/world/soviet-openness-bri...
In absolute terms, the difference is far greater. Living below the poverty line in the US was materially better than in the USSR.
> Even today, I live in a big Central Asian city, and I see a lot less despair and disparity than what I saw in Philadelphia and NYC.
What you see is not a statistic. If all that despair may be hidden from plain sight, how do you know it doesn't exist? Just because there's few people suffering in the city doesn't mean there aren't people suffering in the countryside.
> There was no horrible segregation policies...
I beg to differ:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Racism_in_the_Soviet_Union
> ...women till 1980-s had a lot more rights...
Sure, because that happened to be part of the ideology. A particular women in the USSR may have had some rights that a woman in the US may not have had, at that time. Within a communist regime that limited rights in general, of course.
> ...there were so many things not to like in the US and some other western countries to counterbalance the abundance of western supermarkets.
And yet, of all the people that managed to emigrate to the US, few would return.
> While it is true, you could not easily move out of a village into a big city, both my grandparents were from poor rural families, and both got PhDs and lived in major soviet cities.
I think that's the crux of it. The soviet system treated you relatively well, brought you "progress". I'm aware that in central asia, support for the Soviet Union was the greatest even at the time of its dissolution, while other more developed countries couldn't wait to leave.
However, the USSR dissolved for a good reason: It was, overall, an dysfunctional system. Surely there were people who profited, many peasants were turned into great mathematicians or musicians. I wouldn't deny that.
We can compare the US system with the soviet system all day, either has had winners and losers, either has had done certain things better than the other. However, the soviet system is dead and gone, and communist parties in former soviet countries rarely form a democratic majority.
Someone wants to move to the big city from flyover country in 1980[2].
In the US: Unless they're rich, they first get a job in the big city, then run a credit check and pay deposit and get an apartment and open bank accounts, etc. If they are hustling and have friends in the city they crash with them while looking for a job.
In the USSR: Unless they're rich, they first get a job in the big city, then change their propiska and get an apartment and open bank accounts, etc. If they are hustling and have friends in the city they crash with them while looking for a job.
[1] My wife lived with me for years but never bothered updating her papers until we married, at which point we were doing the paperwork anyway. No one cared.
One advantage of the registration is that here, just as it is illegal to be homeless, it is illegal for one's registered domicile not to provide housing. The law cuts both ways. (Similar symmetry occurs with health insurance: it's illegal to not carry insurance, but it's also illegal for an insurance company to deny anyone coverage.)
The en.wikipedia article suggests the USSR had similar advantages:
> "On the other hand, the propiska underlined the mechanism of the constitutional obligation of the state to provide everyone a dwelling: no one could refuse or be stripped of the propiska at one location without substitution with another permanent propiska location.
> All employers were strictly forbidden to give jobs to anybody without a local "propiska". To provide themselves an extra labour force, the largest enterprises had to build housing for their workers beforehand."
[2] Peter Norman got all sorts of grief for his role in "politicising the games" but the latter seems not to have been a major talking point in 1980.
> Was Soviet caloric intake higher than the US'?
No. In saying this, I'm saying the FAO is wrong, and that Robert Allen, who based his calculations in FAO data (and used their multipliers), didn't notice. To say this, I had to go through a full literature review, and I come to this opinion. Before reading my post, you were totally justified in believing that caloric intake was higher.
Indeed, starving people don't make for good builders.
Instead, the starving people were the peasants who had their produce expropriated, which was sold to acquire the imported materials and machinery that the soviets could not yet produce themselves.
> ...and it's humiliating to the amazing architects and builders of these buildings to nullify their achievements like this.
It isn't, unless they had any say in the matter and a view of the big picture, which they didn't, but if they did, all humiliation would be justified.