1980s USSR or Brazilian favela: nobody wants to choose

Choosing between the 1980s USSR and a favela: nobody wants to do it

Forced to choose between the USSR of the 1980s and a present-day Brazilian favela, the most common answer is not a destination: it is a refusal. The question, posed as a game of two closed options, has turned into a debate about whether the dilemma makes any sense at all. Nobody would want to live in either place. And yet, almost everyone ends up pointing to one. The bluntest summary the conversation has produced: fright or death.

What was guaranteed in the USSR of the 1980s?

Work, education, healthcare and housing. That is the basic package most people place beyond discussion, and it explains why the country is not perceived as a wasteland. What was scarce was everything else: variety in the supermarket, cars, consumer goods. Queues for certain products were part of the routine, not the exception.

Above that formal equality there was a very real hierarchy. The party nomenklatura had access to better homes, cars and priority healthcare. The unwritten pact boils down to two rules: don't talk about politics and be a good citizen.

Work was compulsory; living off benefits was branded a bourgeois vice. Those who could kept their dacha — sometimes a simple wooden cabin — to fish and spend time in nature. Universities, theatres and sport operated at a level that surprises those who only associate the period with scarcity. And on the margins, a vigorous black market: jeans and trainers traded for roubles, greenbacks changing hands under the counter, and access to vodka and caviar. Soviet fertility hovered around two children per woman that decade, a figure used to dismantle the idea of a society with no private life.

Why would anyone prefer a Brazilian favela?

Because nobody assigns you a place of residence. That is the core of the argument: freedom, even if it comes without security. In one place, your life's itinerary is given to you, and so is your housing; in the other, there is no official deciding where you sleep or what you can buy. The formula that best sums up the trade-off: in the favela you see the boot that steps on you; in the USSR, you don't even notice.

The price of that freedom is high and nobody hides it. Insecurity, the risk of violence and the absence of basic services are part of the same package as the climate and life on the street. The result is an uncomfortable exchange: predictability is traded for autonomy, and each person decides which weighs more when imagining their own life inside it.

There is even a reverse reading, an even more uncomfortable one. Some argue that Western societies are moving towards a more refined model of control, with gradual restrictions on mobility and everyday obstacles that are never announced as such, and that the favela shows the mechanism in its raw state, without makeup.

The false dilemma that is flatly rejected

Part of the responses refuses to play along. The argument: it is a false dilemma, because neither scenario represents a desirable life project and the comparison only serves to make the lesser evil look good. Those who reject the choice do not propose a third destination; they deny that the question is well constructed.

That rejection drags in another comparison that appears several times: that of the late USSR with Francoist Spain before its economic boom. The thesis is that both regimes shared a similar foundation — predictable rules, basic security, stable family life, simple leisure — each with its own black legend. Along the same lines, some argue that decades of cinema and propaganda have demonised Eastern Europe until it is unrecognisable to anyone who only knows it from the screen.

With two options like these, abstention is the most honest answer and also the most frequent. One question remains unresolved: if nobody wants either one, why does almost nobody dare to say so without picking one?