The reason people of ex soviet countries, when polled, miss the Soviet Union is because life wasn't actually 1984, you could get a Lada, an apartment and summer holidays as a teacher, and all of those were actually quite nice. Ordinary life wasn't actually nkvd. https://twitter.com/komsomoI/status/1254041613992636417

Obviously the counter to this is that it is also a warning: the slippage of democracy isn't actually going to look like "obey or else" posters and such overt change. That's a liberal fantasy concocted to both demonise the USSR and hide their own slippages.