[dgudkov]

>I cannot say that my life in USSR was any kind of bleak or depressing

Of course it wasn't. People didn't know many grim things about the country they lived in because their information intake was carefully designed to exclude anything negative about the USSR and the Communist Party. They believed they live in "the greatest country in the world". The decades-long propaganda has produced so profound and long-lasting impact that many people in post-Soviet countries (especially in Russia) born in the Soviet times still long for that feeling, 30 years after the collapse of the USSR.