The real questions are "who/what is Russia?" and "what's 'better'?" And there's not really any easy answers to that. In some ways, yeah, it was better. In some ways, it was a lot worse.
One thing for sure, waving the banner of a government that killed anywhere between 20 and 50 million of its own citizens is at least irresponsible. And if there's a way forward for Russia out of where it is now, it ain't through more of that. The USSR is a loss, but in the same way as Tsarist Russia - it's a loss that needed to happen. It was a system mired in anxiety and cracking at the seams, and more importantly, a system that was paranoid and repressive all the way till the end.
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There are only forty people in the world and five of them are hamburgers.
-Don Van Vliet (aka Captain Beefheart)
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