I can only speak for Russia, so my comments below apply only to that country.
--- Doug Henwood <dhenwood at panix.com> wrote:
> In the case of the once heavily subsidized housing
> system of the
> former Soviet states, it is not surprising that 61%
> of respondents in
> these countries say housing is now less affordable.
It was free in the USSR. It couldn't be more affordable now.
I would love to see stats regarding home ownership in Russia. Apartments were privatized in 1992 and given to their residents, so if you haven't sold your apartment, you are probably either still living in it (and not paying rent), or you moved to another place and are renting it out to someone else. However the first post-Soviet generation is coming to adulthood, and I do not know how things stand with them, as presumably they have to find a place to live when/if (a big if) they move away from their parents.
God knows rent has fucking soared in the 7 years I've been in Moscow (an exceptional city, I know). The same place you payed $200 a month for in 2000 will cost you over a thousand now, I shit you not.
>
> Similarly, about half of respondents (49%) tell
> Gallup that
> education, which was free, universal, and
> multilingual under the
> Soviet Union, is currently less affordable.
Interesting comment, since it is a common complaint among non-Russians in the former USSR that education favored Russian and denigrated other languages to "kitchen languages," so that today for instance Kazakh has no words for many scientific concepts and they have to make them up. Anyway education, like basic health care, in Russia is de jure free. In fact, there are something like twice as many people studying in institutions of higher learning today than there were in the late Soviet period (I can dig up statistics on this from the 2002 census if anybody cares). What is not free is education in the field of your choice. Someone who wants to study classical philology is not going to have a problem. Someone who wants to study an in-demand subject -- such as law, business, psychology, advertising, computer science or journalism -- is likely going to have to pay a, ahem, "fee." In other words, when people are talking about "cost of education," they are talking about paying bribes. The same largely goes for health care.
Russian health care does suck in any case. Compounding this is that Russians never, ever seem to see doctors unless it is a life-or-death situation. Check-ups? Don't make me laugh. :)
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