While the apartments aren't huge by comparison to most houses in the US, they are pretty comfortable, though the quality will vary depending on the particular building and region you live in. Most of the buildings appear to be the same that were built during the USSR, it's just the internals were remodeled with more modern amenities.
It can take a little getting used to, living in somewhat cramped quarters, but for me anyways, I've always had fairly small places to live growing up, whether it was living in a 3 bedroom with 6 people in college, my cheapo first apartment, I guess it's more just something you get used to. Even now, my partner and I live with her mom/aunt in a 3 bedroom apartment in SPB and, aside from occasionally stumbling across each other in the kitchen and funny battles for the bathroom, we get by just fine.
funny battles for the bathroom
From what I've read about Soviet housing in the Krushchev era, though, you were very lucky if you got a cramped two bedroom. Not sure about the 70s and 80s.
Christianity and some other religions also promise some utopia in the future.
Once Upon a Time, we Westerners looked at Communism and laughed. We justified our system (democracy for the state, capitalism for the economy) by pointing out all the obvious material benefits we reaped from it:
* High economic growth
* Cheap, varied, available, high-quality consumer goods
* High and climbing wages
* A class structure that looked more like a Gaussian curve than an exponential distribution, with greater actually-existing, de-facto equality than the Communist countries
* Workers' rights and the free formation of unions
* Public infrastructure, parks, and transit
* Cheap, acceptable housing for families, leading to widespread owner-occupancy becoming the norm, something rarely seen in civilized human history
* Ever-climbing life expectancies at birth, thanks to rigorous public health, sanitation, and disease control measures
In contrast, the Eastern Bloc promised that Real Soon Now, actually-existing socialism would be transformed into Full Communism, and people could have nice things. All they had to do was make a few sacrifices today to defeat the fascist capitalists and experience great rewards tomorrow!
They promised "jam tomorrow" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jam_tomorrow), but we had jam today.
Whereas nowadays, the spectrum of jam-promises has shifted. Nowadays, the capitalist West promises its people, "Jam tomorrow, for the deserving", while most of the Second and Third World have switched to promising, "Jam never, it was always a lie meant to lead you away from God and Putin."
We can still kinda say we've got the cheap, widespread consumer goods, but not so much the rest of it.
Communism seemed to have higher growth rates for a while.