That's not the type of misery I thinks of when the USSR comes up — the gulags, the secret police, the inability to leave, the propaganda, not the housing.
(Also the pre-war disasters like the Holomodor, as while you did exclude that by saying post-war and Warsaw Pact, the preceding comment said "Soviet").
It also had a certain structure to the misery, which is now replaced by arbitrary brutality both from the state and organized crime.
It is a documented fact that Russian life expectancy dropped immediately after the fall of the USSR. https://link.springer.com/article/10.1057/s41294-021-00169-w ; "Male life expectancy at birth in Russia fell by six years between 1991 and 1994, from an already-low 63.4 years to 57.4 years over that period, an almost unprecedented decrease in life expectancy in three years"
They have a chart on which you can see how the recovery corresponds roughly to how successfully post-Soviet states managed to "westernize". Estonia did well. Ukraine has only just recovered to Soviet levels.
In summary: western life expectancy good, Soviet life expectancy adequate, third state of collapse autocracy/anarchy in the middle very bad.
This is always a hard topic to discuss with those not exposed to any life in former Warsaw pact countries. Because there’s a chance they’ll ignore what you say about the day-to-day life of your average person there (and how it was largely ok if often a bit poorer than much of the west), and assume you’re trying to say “communism and everything that came with it was perfect”.
There's probably a whole field of study in what went wrong with the airdropping of "capitalism" and "democracy" into both post-Soviet states and Afghanistan. It clearly missed a number of elements which were required for those plans to work, mostly around trust and rule of law but also around class and small-l liberalism. Somehow these were more easily overcome the closer (geographically) the country was to core Europe. Then there's the semi-democratic not-very-liberal outcomes of Poland and Hungary thirty years on.
Maybe I look like I'm going to bat for the former regimes in these countries but I promise I'm not. It's a really interesting topic and while I can understand if those who lived during this time wouldn't want to relive it, I also wish it wasn't just lazily dismissed using stereotypes by much of the rest of the world (you're not included in that, you seem to have some interest and knowledge on it)
[0] - yes there was KGB/StB/stasi, suppression of opposition and other brutal things. I was in a former secret police prison just this weekend so I’m keenly aware of that.
I used to work with some Russian insurers maany years ago. What they told me is that they believed life expectancy hasn't changed much, but that the Soviet data was massaged to present a better picture.
Later on, the quality of the data dropped, due to general chaos, so insurers swapped to using the massaged Soviet tables - figuring that the magnitude of massaging is comparable to the improvements in life expectancy since fall of USSR.
I mean, bear in mind that some of that stuff is coming back; note the very high rate of careless opposition politicians and journalists falling out windows, and so on.
[1]: https://www.economist.com/europe/2013/10/19/slave-labour-and...
Not trying to “whatabout” you here but you could construct a similarly dystopian view of most countries by only focusing on the grimmer parts of life there. In the USA this would involve school shootings, lack of affordable healthcare and housing, poor/forgotten areas, increased threat of violence from the police and the far right. If you focussed on those without any of the most positive aspects (freedom of speech as a constitutional right, good healthcare/education once you break into middle class, realistic possibility of becoming relatively well off, freedom of movement, gender and racial equality on paper) you’d think the country was pretty miserable too.
Again, this is not an attempt at a whataboutist change of subject, rather an invitation to reflect on what you’re saying.
Those were absolutely non-issues for anyone but a small minority of people.
Movement limitation, which varied in time, is the only thing that applied to a much larger subset of people. It required quite some bureaucracy to travel.
Gonna give you an example: people that were members of the communist party enjoyed an easier time from this point of view. Everyone could join the party by the way, but it was generally unpopular. In Poland I think, e.g., despite the advantages of being a party member, at its peak only few millions were part of it.