If by good you mean not being able to provide food for your family during difficult times, not being able to buy common household appliances even though you and your wife work full-time skilled jobs, not having access to world music or culture because the west is "bad", being randomly stopped and harassed by police until you paid them off, being denied entry to certain schools and universities because of your race and/or religion.
Sure, there might have been people that had it "ok." But my family, all of my relatives, all my Russian friends that immigrated from the USSR/Russia (except for a few die hard Russian patriots that wouldn't admit any fault in Russia even if it put their family to death) all have the same, general opinion of it.
And yes, there were the lazy drunks that loved the fact that they could drink on the job all day, not do a single thing, and never get fired. The incompetent idiots that got jobs in positions they had no clue about, I'm sure they loved their job security. But for the average hardworking people that were trying to create the best life for their families, it was pretty shitty.
On the other hand, my parents and grandparents were engineers who worked hard, had a dacha and a boat, went to music school and went on vacations to Crimea, Moscow, and so on- now my father works several hundred km to support our family while the factory my mother worked at went bankrupt because they cannot compete with third-world labour, but in the process she developed a tumor and other health issues from working with chemicals and she cannot afford to get any training for a different job. Also, unemployment benefits will cease soon.
Keep in mind I said many, not all, but based on the conversations I had with older people in the Czech Republic when I lived there for a year I'm pretty sure it's a real thing.
It's also good to keep in mind that when you get most of your information from people who chose to leave the selection bias is rather high/peculiar.
> This seems to be the thing most Westerners find hard to grasp. For many people communism was good.
This is naive. Please don't pay too much attention to those who weren't there.
It was heaven for Russians, because a nation that has been historically at the bottom of the ladder, got to play in the big leagues. Who cares if your standard of living sucks? It always sucked.
> If you didn't want too much you would get everything you wanted without struggle, which for many was heaven.
If you want to find out how Communism gives "to those according to need and from those according to ability", then I urge you to visit North Korea.
I assure you, that is exactly how communism worked in the past and continues to work today.
> It was heaven for Russians, because a nation that has been historically at the bottom of the ladder, got to play in the big leagues. Who cares if your standard of living sucks? It always sucked.
For anyone interested what Ukrainian nationalists have to do with this, this is an example of their thinking.
Yet Cromwell exterminated a fifth of the Irish population, and Churchill allowed millions of Indians to starve in the '40s while part of the British empire. How come you don't put things in perspective? Nor was Hitler a communist- and the history of American military and economic intervention has left millions more dead. Yet "Holodomor" is an act apparently exclusive to communism, and not only due estimates of death toll vary greatly, but the notion that it was man made or a genocide are heavily disputed.
Put things in perspective? Because other societies and governments are equally horrible, Communism isn't so bad? What kind of argument is this? I can point to a lot more examples.
There are many more of course, too numerous to put here. Mass starvation and death is not the exclusive domain of communism for sure, but communist societies of the past sure seem to have been prone to it. The "Communist" countries today that aren't complete shit-holes (like China and Vietnam) are the ones that have moved away from strict command economies and allowed markets to form.
As for Holodomor, I was just pointing that out because we're talking about Ukraine here. Whether through malicious intent or incompetence and mismanagement, Stalin's regime was still responsible for countless needless deaths.
The point is that these things are faults of leaders, not necessarily ideologies, because you find them in every system. Do you want me to point you to hundreds of wikipedia links for atrocities committed by non-communist governments?
Furthermore, socialism is inevitable. Just look at the world today- distinctly more socialist than it was 100 years ago.
My parents have lived in both communism and capitalism and believe a mixed society is probably the best.
> The point is that these things are faults of leaders
The leaders were driven by the ideology. Their actions were driven by a desire to achieve their vision of a communist utopia. People went along with these plans because the ideology promised them a better life. By your logic, was National Socialism not evil because the Holocaust was the fault of Hitler and his Lieutenants?
> Just look at the world today- distinctly more socialist than it was 100 years ago.
I'm not criticizing socialism, I am specifically criticizing hard-line communism as practiced in the past by the Soviet Union and in the present by nations like North Korea and Cuba. The fact that the Soviet Union collapsed and the People's Republic of China moved away from orthodox communism is an indication of how valid that ideology was.
> My parents have lived in both communism and capitalism and believe a mixed society is probably the best
And that's what we have today in most western countries. In fact, that's what we had in the west even during the Cold War. Again, not saying that any semblance of socialism is inherently bad. I'm saying that orthodox communism has, does, and will always, lead to suffering for the general population.
People who lived and remember holodomor are no longer alive. The people who voted for Yanukovich grew up in the 70's and 80' - at the peak of communism civilization.
This seems to be the thing most Westerners find hard to grasp. For many people communism was good.
If you didn't want too much you would get everything you wanted without struggle, which for many was heaven.