Lukyanov argues, interestingly, that nostalgia for the Soviet past persists in Russia because no credible ideological alternative has presented itself. And the lived reality of Russian “democracy” is often as bad or worse than the Soviet past.

Sorrow over the end of the Soviet Union primarily reflects the absence of a conceptual replacement for the former socio-political formation. The ideological anti-communist revolution of the early 1990s, designed to discredit the Soviet model to the world once and for all, quickly came to a halt.

Source: Russia in Global Affairs