If they lived in the Soviet Union, they probably weren't the ones thrown into a Gulag, tortured by the police, or given a bullet in the back of the head.
In 2003-04 I was deployed to Uzbekistan at Camp Stronghold Freedom, located in an old Soviet air base.
KBR employed young Uzbek women as office staff; attractive, fluent in English and dressed Western style.
But their nostalgia for the USSR which fell when they were still children was unbelievable. When I suggested that our camp could serve as a window to the West, one gal with waist length hair replied, “I want you to know one thing: I admire Josef Stalin!”
“Why, because he killed seventy million people!?”
“You need a strong hand to rule as large a country as the Soviet Union!” (she wished Uzbekistan was still part of something huge).
What else did they miss? Guaranteed employment, abundant food (?), annual Crimean vacation, the whole workers’ paradise. No Russians among them, Central Asians all, though they still spoke Russian.
One defended Alexei Stakhanov and Pavlik Morozov as heroes of the Soviet Union. The local souvenir shop sold mostly hammer-and-sickle stuff.
Go figure.
True, but not the whole story. I have friends who immigrated from communist Hungary during the Cold War. They had friends who also immigrated from Hungary during that time, but willingly went back to live in the Soviet client state. The knowledge that there was a possibility of being unemployed, and thereby impoverished, in the free world stressed them out so much they returned to communism. If you had never known anything but communism, freedom to fail might look unacceptable. Some slaves cherish their chains.