Best time of the USSR

The Bhreznev-Andropov-Chernenko era sounds like the one which would be most agreeable to live in.

To those who voted for the Stalin era: does that mean that if hypothetically someone with a time machine offered you the opportunity to go and live in any of these eras, that you would pick the Stalin years?

(Even if you managed to keep on the right side of the authorities in that era, life sounds like it would have been pretty hard.)

I chose the Brezhnev-Andropov-Chernenko period. It was the time when most of the difficulties and injustices of previous periods were overcome, and where the new difficulties and injustices that arose (such as alcoholism and bureaucratic corruption) could have been overcome relatively easily if the leadership simply continued on the path of a modernized Marxist-Leninist socialist platform. The historical wounds of the First World War, the Civil War, famines, the purges and the Second World War had largely healed, except in memory, and the country had successfully developed into a modern industrial society, with some powerful prospects for the future.

I think that what separates the Brezhnev era from the others in a negative sense is that there was less of a sense of social excitement -somewhat less romantic idealism about the future (though certain areas like the medium of space fantasy developed to greater and greater heights as new achievements in space exploration continued to be made). The Lenin, Khrushchev and Gorbachev periods might have seemed like more interesting times to live for the intelligentsia, the first for its grand hopes for what socialism might bring, the second and third for what appeared to be the 'air of freedom' in social discourse. The Stalin period might also appear interesting in the sense that one could observe rapid social development, industrialization, collectivization, and the fantastical spread of education; in other words modernity. This period positively affected many more ordinary people including poor workers and backward peasants, who could see things changing for the better before their own eyes, although in the 1930s a great many Western and Soviet intellectuals were also fascinated by the USSR's progress in the midst of a global capitalist crisis. Observing the way Stalinists characterize the Stalin period there's also the supposed greater ideological orthodoxy, although personally I don't subscribe to this view, given Stalin's quirks on various issues and that I don't believe a substantial ideological shift occurred after his death. Of course with these advances came tremendous costs, some of which were within the regime's ability to control and some not. Social conflict, famine, the hundreds of thousands (minimum) of innocent victims of repression, the difficulties of daily life, the social atmosphere of fear that intensified between 1937-38; then there were the losses of the Second World War and the tremendous exertion required to rebuild from it. Personally I do not think many among us would be personally capable of repeating the feats people carried out at this time, nor would we be happy with the tiny material rewards or the inability to speak without fear about political and social issues.

One thing which this poll has reminded me of is how amazingly the USSR changed in 20 year blocks of time. Just compare the USSR's socioeconomic development between 1920 to 1940 to 1960 to 1980, and you'll see just how much changed over each period. The problem with the elite of the Soviet intelligentsia in the late 1980s was largely that instead of looking at their own country's past and comparing how much better life had become, they looked at the West with rose-tinted glasses and asked why they could not live like Americans or Western Europeans. The tragedy of my generation of Soviet children is that we never got to see how the country might have looked in 2000. We never got to experience the feeling of pride of living in a country that proposed an alternative modernity.

Loz wrote:

But if we compare for example Gorby's USSR which, i think most will agree, was a time of massive moral decay (corruption,treachery and so on...) with the times of,for example, Lenin or Stalin we can clearly see which one was more reactionary and antisocialist.
Dunno.

I agree with Loz. It was precisely during perestroika that the country began losing its sense of socialist morality, and the consequences for the Soviet Union and the contemporary post-Soviet space have been devastating. When morality was abandoned, the inundation of trash culture filled with violence and pornography worked to shift young peoples' life ambitions to things like prostitution and crime, while drug addiction, alcoholism and suicide destroyed entire generations of people.

Morality's virtues under capitalism are fundamentally different from socialist morality, the former based primarily on the protection of personal property, while the latter is based primarily on the principle of social justice. In most of the former USSR, this ingrained sense of social justice has been so strong that many Russian sociologists conclude that the contemporary post-Soviet space has been ill-suited toward adapting the principles of bourgeois democracy and liberal economics precisely because of the 'Sovietized consciousness' prevalent ingrained within the vast majority of people. In the case of the East Slavs and some other peoples, this moralistic principle of social justice goes back even before the October Revolution -to the old village commune principles of social organization. Hence the attempt to rip out the moral constructs which have served the people and the country well (with some exceptions) for so many centuries is one of the biggest crimes committed against Russia by the architects of perestroika.

Ultimately I think Marxist leftists of all stripes should continue to advance the scientific principles upon which their ideals are based, but not forget that for many people socialism is appealing precisely because it is more moral than capitalism, as Loz noted.