Simple question which I lack an answer to. Gorby seemed to be moving the USSR in a more-or-less positive direction.
Are the Russian (et al) better off since the fall of the USSR? What about the rest of the world? Because, I am having a hard time telling.
AIUI, materially mostly urban Russians are better off in terms of what’s available to them and how they can afford to live. The state doesn’t exert a totalitarian control in detail over where you go, at home or abroad, or what you may or may not say or publish.
But if you want to be a significant player in any sort of public life, particularly where it touches the political, you have to be careful not to get on the wrong side of whoever has power and influence - otherwise life can get very nasty, or at least tiresomely bureaucratic until you know how to placate the right people.
But materially things may be more difficult in depopulating rural areas and where there are declining “rust belt” industries.
Think Peron’s Argentina rather than Stalin’s or even Brezhnev’s USSR.
And things are very different in the more or less independent Central Asian “stans”, where some seem to be run by old-fashioned megalomaniac totalitarians. Chechnya seems to be much the same: nominally part of Russia, but its regime is allowed a free hand as long as no trouble is caused for Putin.