The West and it's liberties are hopeless

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I grew up when Brezhnev was the Russian leader. Khrushchev was well-known in the US.

I am under the impression that many people have “dachas” in the countryside, where they can grow things, though I also heard that dacha areas are too crowded for people to truly enjoy solitude in Nature.

Dacha's are like the equivalent of a vacation home (I guess? My family didn't have one, but I spend large chunks of time in a full-time farmhouse. In a village, everything is organized there and everyone knows each other. My experience is in "your typical babushka's house" where there are occasional gatherings of neighbors and people alike in the main bedroom. Yes, we did grow things in the yard. And yes, it does get crowded unless you go far away from inhabited villages. -- into the forests where you see your first squirrel... or you have to get wet for walking through a river... you know you are there.

And people cared about making bread and catching fish way more than "liberty".

They cared more about concrete reality than abstractions.

I’ve seen vlogs on YouTube where people wish the Soviet times returned.

Oh, yes, Soviet reality, at least in the cities, was very "concrete".
Sorry, couldn't resist, gray buildings from the period flashed before my eyes

Cool pun

Exactly on both.

I see lots of people who want to go back to the old times. Because hey, back then we didn't have to worry about money, and we will never get fired from our jobs as long as we don't mess up hugely. The government gave each household "one dollar bread money" so they get a certain amount of bread. Same for housing and a lot of other stuff, there is little to be worried about for basic living needs. They see it as a stable lifestyle that is no longer achievable in today's market economy.

@magz: Oh, yes, those buildings made of concrete or bricks, but my municipal government has now painted them pink And my building has bushes growing on the roof too!

Basic Universal Income.Basic Universal Housing and "stuff".

The idea of a "Basic Universal" whatever is being pushed by our left-leaning politicians.  If they could only know what a truly bleak existence it was in the Soviet Union...

^ Was it really bleak? I know it was portrayed that way to me when I was growing up and in school. But now I realized some of that might have been propaganda on our parts (USA.) Solzhenitsyn was romanticized as a freedom writer and surely the gulags were terrible. But maybe life wasn't so bleak for regular people.
I don't know.
I hope our Russian friends will chime in.

"Bleak" or not, it is more personal than an objective word to describe a form of existence. In the same city one day I might consider everything hopelessly bleak, and on another day I might also be super content with this life as it is. Old buildings from the communist era surely look more bleak than modern architecture, but at least for me, more of it depends on personal mood swings.

For regular people, we might describe their feeling as "content"... When I was little, I was taught that the concrete blocky highrises are a symbol of modernity and good life in general. Surely that changed for me after a while, but life was most likely not so bleak for older people who were taught that way for their entire lifetime. They might not be super content since the kitchen are tiny and they do not have shower in their own house, but people adapt fairly well to the environment.

Both sides have equal amounts of propaganda. I was taught that Americans live miserable lives in their cookie cutter neighborhoods because they build their own little houses with wood - that's the lifestyle of the poor and remote areas here! But also we were never told that highrise public housing in American big cities are called "ghetto" LOL

The end of things has been making me stressed. What is worse is that there is nothing we can do about it. I'm convinced now that the "end" times description of the Bible is true and it will be in my lifetime very soon. I hoped it wasn't going to be that way. Even though, I understand many people here are atheist, but I'm still saying it.