I've always been a lover of Russian culture, and indeed studied the language for several years back in my high school days. At my best I managed to read Lermontov's "Hero of Our Time" ("Geroi Nashovo Vremini") and Pushkin's "Bronze Horseman" ("Myedniy V'sadnik") in the original Russkiy. Da, konyechno. And in the apogee of the Brezhnev years I spent ten days or so in the USSR, traveling from Moscow to what was then called Leningrad, and also to Kiev, now an independent capital but then part of the Soviet Union, which in 1991 disintegrated into a dozen shards, many of which are no better, and some decidedly worse, than the old CCCP. No need to mourn it too much, but reading this review of a new film, "My Perestroika," did evoke one indisputable advantage, especially to one who, like me, has lost every job he has ever had, some through incompetence, most through the fire-at-will culture of the southern U.S.: Olga Durikova is a single mother in the film who expresses a certain nostalgia for the old Soviet system: "in those days, she insists, life was less stressful. You held a job for a lifetime and received a steady pension when you retired at 60." Sounds good to me. 

Not being able to travel or read what one wanted, and the specter of the Gulag, sound less good. But you can't have an omelette without breaking eggs--or do I mean legs? (Old Stalin joke. Quite a wag, was old Stalin.) Or waggish, at least, for a mass murderer.