Thread by @SlavaMalamud

So, the pile-up on Sanders has begun. Because he's secretly an admirer of the evil dictator Mikhail Gorbachev or something.
OK, I've thoughts about that. First off, nobody hates the USSR more than I do. Like, viscerally and, back in the days I was a prominent journalist, famously

The USSR was an ill-conceived, arbitrarily-bordered, unjustly governed nation that threatened the world's security, spread corrupt and unjust governments all over the globe and was rife with racial and ethnic hatred within itself, something it periodically fed on...

(Though in all fairness almost all of this can be applied to the US as well, the qualitative difference between the two nations is obvious, so no whataboutism from me)
BUT... There were some things the USSR did well. Objectively well. And I am not talking about beating Hitler.

First of all, it provided free health care to all its citizens. It wasn't good. It was terrible, sometimes. The doctors were underpaid, were often given bribes, the facilities were squalid.
But it was MUCH, MUCH better than anything in Russia's history...

Imperial Russia was a country whose health care system was basically "Lay down and pray."
And having subpar healthcare available to everyone is much better than having zero healthcare for 99% of the nation.
And, even in that environment, some Soviet doctors were quite good.

Second, the USSR had provided free, universal education to everyone. It was heavily politicized and full of propaganda. It was very old-school and relied on rigid discipline and rote repetition. But in a country that was 99% illiterate before the Revolution, it was huge.

USSR had close to 100% literacy, its STEM education was really very, very good (I teach math in an American school, and ooooh, boy), and it produced some of the world's most brilliant scientists and chess players. Not bad for a country whose average citizen couldn't read in 1917.

And finally, it eliminated the type of poverty that was endemic to imperial Russia. Nobody was rich in the USSR, and there was no "middle class" as such, but nobody died of hunger either. Almost everyone had some kind of shelter and guaranteed (shitty) employment.

Again, to an average American, the conditions I grew up in my Khrushchev-era apartment building would've looked monstrously horrible. But if you judge a country against its own past, the USSR at least made progress on czar's Russia. Small progress, but still...

And yeah, the Moscow metro is the best in the world, but only Muscovites got to enjoy it, so who cares. In fact, the rigid centralization of the state resulting in Moscow having a vastly different standard of living from everywhere else, was one of the USSR's worse qualities.

As for the culture/arts, I really fucking hate ballet, so I won't even go there. Soviet movies were terrible (and Russian movies are still), as arts generally are in a country that is not free.
So, until I hear Bernie praise our actual political system, I am not really bothered.