It sounds simple. They left not to avoid crime, or because they were particularly against the Soviet system as a whole, but because of environmental concerns, living in an area very affected by Chernobyl (we’re not ethnically Ukrainian, all glory to them, I am just glad I don’t have to personally concern myself too much with that! Extended family is in Russia).
I read a poem once about not leaving home unless home is the mouth of a shark. They left a kind of war, too. One you can’t see that tears apart your own cells. Gorbachev admitted that accident was a proximate cause of Soviet collapse.
But before that, my parents were my age. Like me, they attended university and had specialized job training as well. I think my mom and dad were true believers until the reactor exploded.
They were party members, specialists. At 30, they had their own apartment, city was quite walkable and had public transit, but they were still about to receive a car. They had just finished getting a dacha (like a smaller, more rustic version of the cabins I see in my northern US state). My mom had paid maternity leave. There were some minor shortages of food and goods on par with the supply chain issues we’re having now (but also unexpected gluts of stuff), but no one was dealing with the widespread food insecurity of the US. I think it’s one in 6 here today? The wages were enough in the system they worked in, and they often received bonuses/titles for doing more, even though those working hours during shock-work periods was still less than my current 68/week.
There was a real village like in the saying. A real sense of community. Affordable childcare. I can’t speak to how good it was, I was their US born rainbow baby after…have you seen the HBO series? My mom couldn’t watch Lyudmilla Ignatenko and the empty crib scene.
I know about the bad parts of the USSR as well. The gulags, the accident, having to leave, Stalin supporting the scientist who didn’t believe in modern evolution and genetics causing the famine.
But if I, personally, lived there during my parents’ time, or if the reactors had been built better, perhaps there would have been no collapse. I would have been better off under actual communism than I am now. I would have my apartment and possibly a house or dacha, be able to keep them and pass them down to family. I would have free healthcare at point of use. As a specialized worker, I would be guaranteed a stable job that I could pick from a government list. I would be able to live in one of the best areas of the territory. I would have a worker’s committee to go against the boss with. I would actually be more likely to be in STEM fields in the USSR than modern US. I would have more holidays and time off. I would have paid maternity leave and state supported childcare. My mom and dad would have retired earlier, with more secure pensions.
I am not pro-Putin or attempting to defend all of the Soviet practices, in any way. It’s actually hard to say positive things about that system because of how that way of doing things caused such an ecological and human disaster and forced out my family. I’m terrified of what the IAEA will find since the Russians fucked around.
But hey, at least I’m exploited by billionaires with no other aim than to make as much money as they can, while they can, rather than even having to pretend to follow an ethical sort of framework. At least the career Party members had to actually do a few things to take care of working class, and a worker’s union balanced their power. So how is that better than living in a relatively open time in the USSR? Materially, which actually is is not the one you think.
(Please try not to fight in comments, just sharing perspective from my family life).