Well, they must have gone downhill since the Yeltsin years. The one I stayed in a few years ago (which wasn't Chris's; his was indeed much nicer) was just awful: tiny, cramped rooms, elevators that barely worked and reeked of piss, definitely not a lot of green space. Mass transit, I'll give you.
We actually have a lot of similar buildings here in Dublin. They are universally agreed to be an experiment that failed and many have been demolished while others are scheduled to be demolished. From what I've seen of the ones in Britain they aren't very nice either.