Eurasian leaders, including Russian president Vladimir Putin, third from right, met at a summit in Minsk, Belarus, in October 2013. Sasha Mordovets/Getty

After more than two decades of wars, revolutions and economic collapses, residents of states formerly part of the Soviet Union are more than twice as likely to say the split from Russia harmed their countries than benefitted them, according to Gallup poll results released Thursday. Gallup asked more than a thousand citizens of 11 former Soviet states to reflect on the dissolution of the Soviet Union, which happened 22 years ago next week, and found a nostalgic, Russophilic streak among seven of the 11 countries it surveyed – even Ukraine, where hundreds of thousands have taken to the streets of Kiev to protest Russian President Vladimir Putin’s influence in their country. Russians, too, appear to lament the USSR dissolution, with 55 percent saying it harmed Russia and only 19 percent reporting benefit. Analysts say they are not surprised by the poll, which might be dissonant with the prevailing American perception of communist USSR as an oppressive regime from which most people should be grateful to break free. “Most people see more harm than good that came out of the collapse of the integrated larger state,” said Fiona Hill, a Russia specialist and Senior Fellow at the Brookings Institute. “I don’t think anyone's really bemoaning the loss of communism – no one’s saying ‘bring back the 5-year plans' – but I don’t know anyone who feels they reaped massive personal benefit from the collapse.” The two states most skewed toward a “harmful” assessment of Soviet dissolution – Armenia and Kyrgyzstan – both lost subsidies due to the sudden breakup and were plunged into poverty, from which they have yet to recover. “You had the massive disintegration of an integrated economic entity,” Hill said. “Those two countries were both really jolted by the collapse. They were very much propped up by Moscow.” Conversely, the oil-producing nations of Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, and Turkmenistan were the only three states to assess the breakup as mostly beneficial.

Division and disappointment

The 1991 dissolution of the USSR, which occurred after several republics had already declared their independence, was not universally popular in the Union's other republics. A March 1991 government-run referendum found that a majority of the republics overwhelmingly supported preserving the USSR, perhaps as reflected in the Gallup poll. The poll also reveals generational gaps, whereby those too young to remember life in the USSR actually have more positive views of the breakup, possibly because young people were less affected by the societal and personal impact. Not all splits that resulted from the breakup fell along clear ethnic lines – in many cases, ethnic groups were marginalized or isolated in pockets of new independent states. Sometimes mixed marriages were torn apart. The ethnic Kyrgyz majority and Uzbek minority, notably, have periodically clashed in Kyrgyzstan. Many ex-Soviet citizens have also been let down by their post-Soviet rulers and indicate that hoped-for freedoms – deprived under the authoritarian USSR – have not materialized. Tajikistan suffered under a bloody five-year civil war in the mid-1990s, in which nearly 100,000 died, but the war ended with Tajik president Emomalii Rahmon clinging to power. He still rules the authoritarian state to this day. Unsurprisingly, Tajik respondents to the Gallup poll were likely to say that “most or many” people in the country were afraid to express political views, and that they had overwhelmingly negative perceptions of the breakup.

Soviet nostalgia