Cowbee , 27 days ago

There was a drastic drop in life expectancy, housing rates, lots of starvation and excess deaths, and drops in literacy rates and so forth following the collapse of the USSR. The rise of the USSR was a drastic improvement upon Tsarism, and the fall of the USSR was a drastic decrease.

The USSR absolutely had its own set of issues, but the collapse of the USSR in the early 90s represented a massive setback that only recently the Russian Federation has begun to overtake, metric-wise.