In the USSR, life was boring

I have realized the main problem of the Soviet Union. In the USSR, as it turns out, life was boring. There were no wars with neighboring republics, no separatism, no ethnic cleansing, no raids, no economic crises, no criminal gangs - boredom at its finest.

In the USSR, there was no such thing as riot police as we know it. When the only uprising in the history of the USSR occurred in Novocherkassk, it turned out that there were no special units to disperse demonstrators. There were no water cannons, no tear gas, no rubber bullets or batons - there was literally nothing. The soldiers, who were ordered to disperse the demonstrators, did not know what to do.

In the United States, the bastion of democracy, the situation was a lot different. A riot in New Jersey ended with a few hundred people killed. A riot in Los Angeles in 1992 - 52 were killed. A riot in Baltimore - hundreds of dead bodies. When I do not specify the exact number of the victims, it means that the data on the subject was classified by the most democratic government in the world. There are dozens of other cases.

I'm not talking about those unarmed people, who get killed by police officers in the USA on a daily basis. All this is happening with the support of such democratic tools as water cannons, armor, batons, gas and stun grenades, blinding lasers, rubber bullets and so on.

In the USSR, life was boring. As soon as the USSR broke up, the fun started. The Armenians went to war against the Azerbaijanis for Karabakh, the war in Transnistria occurred, Georgian ethnic cleansing swept across South Ossetia and Abkhazia, Chechen terrorists emerged along with human trafficking and drug trafficking from Central Asia, criminal gangs started multiplying at an exponential rate and so on. That was a lot of fun indeed.

Also read: What was it like to live in the Soviet Union?

As long as no one could make the United States fall apart, the Americans took the situation in their hands and made another nation fall into pieces - Yugoslavia. They bombed Serbia, created a jihadist enclave in Kosovo, invaded a few other countries, killed several millions of people, orchestrated coups in several other states and built as many army bases as possible all over the world. One can even bet their money on which country the United States may wish to invade next. That's a lot of fun!

Can one compare all this fun to free apartments, free education, free healthcare and free tickets to sanatoriums that people could get during the times of the Soviet Union? Nowadays, people have fun raising loans one after another, paying mortgage while making their ends meet, paying health insurance and working at two or three jobs to be able to afford all this fun.

Ukraine was living a boring life after the collapse of the Soviet Union for a long time too. They had some racketeering, clashes between gangsters, but that was boring! The Ukrainians did not have any civil wars, no ethnic cleansing - nothing. People had nothing to talk about in their kitchens at night.

The fun came with Maidan riots. The civil war arrived, the Ukrainians started looking for Putin's spies around every corner, Poroshenko went on his major "Gimme Lots of Cash" world tour (the tour was hugely successful; Poroshenko is planning to extend it). Citizens of Ukraine finally had something to talk about - for example, how many millions Yatsenyuk could steal for the construction of a wall on the border with Russia.

Nowadays, as conflicts in the Middle East are spinning out of control heralding another world war, while millions of Arab refugees inundate Europe, one can't help but have the feeling that life without the USSR has become so much better.

Ivan Solovyov