The social phenomenon of nostalgia for the Soviet Union () can include sentimental attitudes towards its politics, its society, its culture and cultural artifacts, its superpower status, or simply its aesthetics.
Modern cultural expressions of Soviet nostalgia also emphasize the former Soviet Union's scientific and technological achievements, particularly during the Space Age, and value the Soviet past for its futuristic aspirations.
An analysis by the Harvard Political Review found that sociological explanations for Soviet nostalgia vary from "reminiscing about the USSR's global superpower status" to the "loss of financial, political and social stability" which accompanied the Soviet dissolution in many post-Soviet states.
Polling history
Armenia
Azerbaijan
Belarus
Estonia
Georgia
Kazakhstan
Kyrgyzstan
Latvia
Lithuania
Moldova
Russia
Tajikistan
Turkmenistan
Ukraine
Uzbekistan
Sociology and economics
According to the Levada Center's polls, the primary reasons cited for Soviet nostalgia are the advantages of the shared economic union between the Soviet republics, including perceived financial stability. This was referenced by up to 53% of respondents in 2016. At least 43% also lamented the loss of the Soviet Union's global political superpower status. About 31% cited the loss of social trust and capital. The remainder of the respondents cited a mix of reasons ranging from practical travel difficulties to a sense of national displacement. A 2019 poll found that 59% of Russians felt that the Soviet government "took care of ordinary people". When asked to name positive associations with the Soviet Union in 2020, 16% of the Levada Center's respondents pointed to "future stability and confidence", 15% said they associated it with "a good life in the country", and 11% said they associated it with personal memories from their childhood or youth.
Levada Center sociologist Karina Pipiya observed that the economic factors played the most significant role in rising nostalgia for the Soviet Union, as opposed to loss of prestige or national identity. Pipiya also suggested a secondary factor was that a majority of Russians "regret that there used to be more social justice and that the government worked for the people and that it was better in terms of care for citizens and paternalistic expectations."
In 2022, Oxford University professors Paul Chaisty and Stephen Whitefield carried out an analysis of polling data which studied continued identification with the Soviet Union among adult Russian citizens. Chaisty and Whitefield noted that those who identified most with the Soviet Union were likely to be elderly and less affluent. Contributing factors included "nostalgia for Soviet era economic and welfare policies as well as a cultural nostalgia for a particular Soviet 'way of life' and traditional values." Other common reasons Russians cited nostalgia for the Soviet Union included hostility towards Western countries, hostility towards capitalism and the market economy, and a desire to re-assert Russian military and political ascendancy over the former Soviet space.
Gallup observed in its data review that "For many, life has not been easy since the Soviet Union dissolved in December 1991. Residents there have lived through wars, revolutions, coups, territorial disputes, and multiple economic collapses...Older residents...whose safety nets, such as guaranteed pensions and free healthcare, largely disappeared when the union dissolved are more likely to say the breakup harmed their countries."
In her examination of identities in post-Soviet Ukraine, historian Catherine Wanner concurs that the loss or reduction of social benefits has played a major role in Soviet nostalgia among older residents. Describing elderly female pensioners who expressed nostalgia for the Soviet era, Wanner writes:
An analysis of Soviet nostalgia in the Harvard Political Review found that "the rapid transition from a Soviet-type planned economy to neoliberal capitalism has imposed a high financial burden on the population of these fifteen newly independent post-Soviet states. This period brought a sharp decline of living standards, a reduction in social benefits, and a rise in unemployment and poverty rates. The frustration of ordinary citizens only grew, as they witnessed the creation of an oligarchic elite that was getting richer while everyone else was becoming poorer. Under these circumstances, nostalgia for the Soviet Union is a direct consequence of people's disappointment with their countries’ political and economic performance." The following joke illustrates this reason of communist nostalgia: Q: What did capitalism accomplish in one year that communism could not do in seventy years? A: Made communism look good.
While not dismissing explanatory models that emphasize socio-economic factors, the sociologist David Leupold has highlighted the role that collapsing horizons of future expectation in the post-socialist period play in shaping how people retrospectively make sense of state socialism. Leupold stressed in this context in particular the role of the built-environment which induces in residents across the post-Soviet space a sense of inhabiting cities built for a future that did not arrive. In this context, post-Soviet nostalgia must be treated as a distinct form of collective sentiment different from other forms of post-imperial nostalgia (Neo-Ottomanism, nostalgia for the Habsburg or Romanov Empire) in the sense that it contains a future-oriented aspect that transcends the historical experience with state socialism. As a result, Soviet-era materiality does not only instill a passive sense of nostalgia but may likewise form "the material nexus around which narratives of resistance and social change could crystallize".
British journalist Anatol Lieven linked the phenomenon of Soviet nostalgia directly to the age structure of populations in the former Soviet republics. Lieven wrote in 1998 that nostalgia often "takes the form of a deep yearning for stability and order, which is exactly what one would expect from an elderly population. It is in terms of a nostalgia for this past security, rather than a desire for national conquests, power, and glory, that Soviet restorationist feeling in Russia should mainly be seen." He also added that "Soviet nostalgia is likely to diminish as the older generation dies off and the age structure of society assumes a less top-heavy form." Lieven claimed that economic and physical insecurity were the primary drivers of Soviet nostalgia among the elderly, since many believed that "in Soviet days they lived better and more securely", with less crime, ethnic strife, or unemployment. However, he also observed in his research of polling data that there was little enthusiasm for Soviet nostalgia among post-Soviet youth in the late 1990s, and younger people were more drawn to various strains of post-Soviet nationalism in their respective countries.
Ekaterina Kalinina, a researcher on post-Soviet culture and media at the University of Copenhagen, concurred with other findings that Soviet nostalgia is driven primarily by the collapse of the former regime's welfare state. Kalinina pointed out that Soviet nostalgia had the greatest appeal to those "who find themselves in more vulnerable economic and social positions" in the post-Soviet era. Per Kalinina, these individuals are nostalgic for "economic security and social welfare."
Many of the ex-Soviet republics suffered economic collapse upon the dissolution, resulting in lowered living standards, increased mortality rates, devaluation of national currencies, and rising income inequality. Chaotic neoliberal market reforms, privatization, and austerity measures urged by Western economic advisers, including Lawrence Summers, and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) were often blamed by the populace of the former Soviet states for exacerbating the problem. Between 1991 and 1994, a third of Russia's population was plunged into poverty, and between 1994 and 1998 this figure increased to over half the population. Most of the Soviet state enterprises were acquired and liquidated by Russian business oligarchs as part of the privatization campaign, which rendered large segments of the ex-Soviet workforce unemployed and impoverished. Capital gains made in post-Soviet Russia during the 1990s were mostly concentrated in the hands of oligarchs who benefited from the acquisition of state assets, while the majority of the population suffered severe economic hardship.
According to Kristen Ghodsee, a researcher on post-communist Eastern Europe:
Among the working poor, Soviet nostalgia is often directly linked to the guarantee of state employment and regular salaries. The collapse of Soviet state enterprises and contraction of the public sector after the dissolution resulted in widespread unemployment. With the disappearance of the Soviet industrial complex, as much as half the working class of the former USSR lost their jobs during the 1990s. One study of rural Georgians in the early 2000s found that the vast majority yearned for a return to the security of their public sector jobs, even those that did not favor a return to the centrally planned economy. They attributed their poverty to the demise of the Soviet state, which in turn resulted in the widespread association of stability with the Soviet era and lack of confidence in the post-Soviet governments. A related study of working class Kyrgyz women in the same time frame found that most remembered the Soviet era primarily for its low levels of unemployment.
Security historian Matthew Sussex wrote the 1990s were a period of "social and economic malaise experienced across the former USSR". Upon the Soviet dissolution, "rampant inflation within many newly independent states quickly became coupled to the rise of financial oligarchs...[while] uneven transitions to democracy and the institutionalization of organized crime became the norm." Furthermore, Sussex surmised, the post-Soviet space became politically unstable and prone to armed conflict as a result of the dissolution. With the collapse of the Soviet military and security organs, a security vacuum emerged which was quickly filled by extremist political and religious factions as well as organized crime, further exacerbated by tensions between the various post-Soviet states over the ownership of the defunct USSR's energy infrastructure. Sussex claimed that "during its existence the USSR enforced order upon what are today recognized as numerous ethnic, religious, and geostrategic trouble spots," and "although few observers lament the passing of the USSR, even fewer would argue that the area of its former geographical footprint is more secure today than it was under communism." In Armenia, where the dissolution was followed by the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict with neighboring Azerbaijan, Soviet nostalgia was closely tied to a longing for a return to peace and public order.
In a 2020 editorial, Russian-born American journalist Andre Vltchek suggested that Soviet nostalgia may also be closely tied to aspects of Soviet society and public life—for example, he claimed the Soviet Union had an extensive public works program, heavily subsidized public facilities and transportation, high levels of civic engagement, and support for the arts. Without state subsidies and central planning, Vltchek insisted that these aspects of society disappeared or became severely diminished in the post-Soviet space. Vltchek lamented the apparent loss or decay of Soviet-era public amenities and cultural spaces which followed the dissolution.