[GoldenState_Rose]

Larisa says she teaches her students one lesson about the Gulag, in which she typically divides the blackboard into two parts. On one side she puts the “military and industrial achievements” of the Stalin period, and on the other, the “unfortunate side-effects”, and lets the students decide for themselves whether the repression was justified.

This is exactly how people described their academic encounter with Stalin era to me as well.

Gulag's been whitewashed and waterdown. Victims memories sacrificed on the altar of the Cult of Victory.

[NorseViking]

You should take into account that in 1915 there were dirt streets with pigs diving into puddles and shacks a block away from Kremlin. Only maybe a third of population were somehow literate and life expectancy was around 40 years.
A perception of Imperial Russia is heavily distorted by nobility who emigrated to the West. In their mind they lost a paradise but for the rest it was a bit different. 9 in 10 people didn’t have access to running water or electricity, let alone medicine.

Saint-Peterburg was a single Westernized city in the country, the rest was a kind of modern day India at best.

By the day of Stalin’s death it was radically different in terms of development. They simply went from oxacart to nuclear technology and space program in three decades. It has affected overall quality of life big time as well.