"There were the worse times ..." What is the difference between modern Russia and the USSR

The opinion of many representatives of the Russian intelligentsia opposed to the Russian authorities was expressed in his blog by journalist Gleb Morev:

“Under Soviet rule, you lived in a kind of“ half of the world ”with your own order and structure. There was hopelessness and sadness in this, but “historical” sadness, as if by right of unfortunate birth “in this part of the globe”.

Today the feeling is different. You feel that you live in a big (“globalized”) world, “the same as everywhere else”. But for some reason you find yourself, conventionally, in a “city captured by bandits”. Do you remember the times when they were not. The same cities, but free from bandits, are available to you. But home is like that.

The feeling from all this, I must say, is almost more disgusting than under Soviet rule. There was a kind of wholeness of hopelessness, a clarity of separation by an iron curtain, decades of lawlessness that went beyond the boundaries of your personal memory. Here - a feeling of some kind of local oversight, lottery failure, unfortunate failure. And against this background you experience your complete powerlessness and humiliation, oddly enough, more acutely than when, it would seem, it was “objectively harder”.

"There were worse times, but there were no meaner", and the truth..."

Morev's associates fully supported his point of view. Thus, political scientist Sergey Medvedev wrote:

“The feeling of longing and a kind of amazement from this new scoop is well formulated. If earlier you, conventionally, were born in Mordor and took it for granted, now this Mordor grew up under your windows in one night, well, ok, for several nights, but it was exactly what grew up before our eyes. You are silent from surprise. And you yourself become part of this nightmare.

That is, it is one thing to be born in unfreedom, and quite another to lose freedom, voluntarily give it up. A feeling of shame is added to everything - because everything happened with your tacit consent, while you were sleeping..."

And the poet and publicist Lev Rubinstein added a few nuances:

“You write everything correctly. But one more thing. In that Soviet reality, we were born and raised, gradually assimilating the strategies and tactics of intellectual and moral resistance. And this atmosphere seemed to us even in a sense natural. And even, oddly enough, comfortable. First of all, we did not feel personal or collective responsibility for IT ALL, precisely because we easily shifted this responsibility onto previous generations. Secondly, we internally prepared to live with THIS ALL until death, and it was, oddly enough, in general, reassuring. For everything that now, we feel (well, I feel) our full responsibility, because all this took place at best with our connivance, and at worst - with our participation..."