Also, it seems to me, Chris is just confusing present-day attitudes to the Stalin, or Brezhnev eras, with the attitudes that people had at the time.
In 1984 the sociological institute of the Soviet Academy of Sciences published a survey showing that just 34 per cent of workers in their twenties thought their standard of living was good.
Today, disappointment with market reforms might make it seem as if the past was not so bad. But even here I think Chris is confused. The votes for former communists and communists in the eastern bloc and the FSU do not necessarily represent a real desire to return to the past, as much as a protest at the decline in living standards since. We need to know whether the Communists in Moldova are actually putting a programme of suspending the operation of the free market.
I agree with Chris that the Yeltsin takeover was a coup, and that the Gorbachov reforms were not popular. But the point is that the old guard were incapable of mobilising popular support in their defence. Not surprisingly, because they were failures.
Chris completely ignores the failures of the soviet economy and talks as if all of the official growth figures were kosher. But as we have dicovered since, what was accounted as growth turned out to be mostly a crock. Overwhelmingly the goods produced were just substandard, or even unusable.
Soviet industry as a whole absorbed vast amounts of labour without increasing its output, because the greater part of that labour was squandered. Without either an effective planning mechanism, or a market mechanism, the economy tended towards inertia.
That's why the labour market behaved so differently from the west: there were labour shortages, not surpluses, because soviet enterprises soaked up more and more labour, to no great effect.
Chris compares the USSR with South Korea, but what soviet goods did anyone ever want? I have one Sekonda watch - for laughs - which weighs a ton and doesn't go. Hillel Ticktin used to parody the official announcement: 'Soviet microchip: world's biggest microchip!'
I agree that in the west there is a caricature of Russia that sees it as a society permanently on the brink of starvation and criminality. But we don't have to descend into nostalgia for the crapulously inefficent 'soviet' Union to understand that the market has its shortcomings.