Repeat that for other western countries.
I had a chance to visit oil and gas production town in Siberia slightly north of Northern Polar circle not long ago after USSR collapse. I have to say the work and life conditions there were quite good, I spare you of long anecdote comparing Yugorsk with then contemporary Moscow.
Can I disagree? Having moved to a small town in south France after living in Marseille I can't say I miss the big city that much, on the contrary. Of course, there are some aspects like museums etc. but it's not like I was visiting them every day. The quality of my current apartment is superior to the one I had in the city. Sure, there will be exceptions, but overall I don't think your example holds for Western towns and cities.
You are disagreeing from the place with warm completely-non-continental-climate of southern France, which is exceptionally warm and mild even for France.
Can I see your disagreement as an exception that supports general rule?
Maybe it's not the big city you don't miss, it's just Marseille, because it's a shithole. There are also nicer big cities.
This can mean exceptional efficiency of the system to deliver and distribute.
There were no such things happening in 1950-s, etc, up till late 1980-s.
Yet, the situation was much like "empty shelves, full fridges" all through the USSR time I remember.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guest_from_the_Future
Some products like sourcream and milk were sold into buyers' containers. Which reduced amount of thrash significantly, compared to the "predictable availability" of today's world.
Moscow after the USSR was just a city anyone could go, even the poor. During the USSR you couldn't travel freely, much less go to Moscow and look for a job. Getting a job in Moscow was a serious promotion.
The inertia of lifestyle is such a massive thing, you cannot overturn it overnight, you cannot change it completely even in ten years.
During the USSR era you were able to travel freely. Even more freeer than today - you didn't even needed any passport to travel to huge distances, to Moscow or from it. You need one now.
Most of my childhood friends were children of Moscow newcomers. Their parents went to Moscow, got a job and then got an apartment to live there.
NO! This is a HUGE fallacy (if not a lie). A "kolkhoz people" (kolkhoz stands for "collective farm") had no passports at all till 1974 and they had NO right to leave their living territories without identity documents. Sort of a slavery. As of 1970 the "kolkhoz people" were ≈20% (or ≈50 millions) of the population.
> Most of my childhood friends were children of Moscow newcomers.
This explains. Moscow always was a sort of "another world" than the rest of USSR.
That's not how a math working in a communist country: it doesn't mean that the rest 80% were able to do so freely.
If you think that you was able to move freely from one city to another "because I wish to try luck at a new place", then think about: how can you move to another city if you can't sell/buy apartments as they almost all owned by the state? You only can move if you got a job at a new place. Given that by the law you can't be unemployed (you could even face a criminal case if not), so you can't just go to "somewhere".
If you are usual worker that somehow managed out to get a new job in another city, then you highly likely (not always) will get an apartment from a factory/state for free, but… What was a chance for you to get a something good by being from another city? Provided apartments almost always were tiny, usually no amenities, and overall living conditions were terrible. Often people were getting just rooms in communes. To get a normal apartment you had to "get into a queue" and wait for 10-20 years. Thus in every city was a huge amount of people waiting for their apartment. When in the city a lot of people are waiting their apartments for years, why someone will give something decent to a newcomer? Yeah, highly skilled/experienced managers or scientists were a bit more privileged, so they could expect of getting something good without queueing.
Some people were trying to swap apartments with those who wanted to move into their city. Needless to say about chances of getting something in this way.
International tourism. It was available mainly to party management and leaders. From time to time a best "workers of socialistic labor" were able to visit other "friendly" (from socialistic block) countries as a "reward", but only after party's approval and only in groups. Never individually. Also such tourism had a strict rules for travelers (what you can bring back with you or what you can visit there). Thus more than 90% of people never were abroad.
The only 100% freedom to move was an inner tourism. You was able to visit almost 100% of territory inside the country as a tourist. You also can't travel across the country for a year like modern bloggers because (as I said above) you can't be unemployed.
Is that a freedom as you know it?
The need for passport to travel was introduced well into 90-s because of speculants who bought out tickets of whole trains/planes of popular destinations. I travel by myself from 1988 or so, and did not need any passport until mid '90s.
[1] https://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D0%A1%D0%BF%D0%B8%D1%81%D0%BE... (Russian)
How do they come to such heights if applying to the study in large cities was restricted, is a complete mistery to me.
I'm from Spain, and nobody here would say that Spain society in the 50's is remotely comparable with Spain in the 80's. Lifestyle turned upside down in the late 70's just swapping peacefully from a dictatorship to a democracy and opening to outside information. Our borders were never too tight: we were 100% free to change residence and to go abroad, and we receive a lot of tourism from Europe and the world. I can't start to imagine the change of an USSR that suddenly opened to a world that most of the people never saw.
The most simple search would give you info about the USSR inner passport (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Passport_system_in_the_Soviet_...). You can read that from 1933 to 1991 "According to the 1926 Soviet Census 82% of the population in the Soviet Union lived in rural areas. Kolkhozniks and individual peasants did not have passports and could not move into towns without permission". Also "On 21 October 1953 [...] rural residents could not leave their place of residence for more than thirty days, and even for this leave a permit from a selsoviet (rural council or soviet) was require". You can read also about https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Propiska_in_the_Soviet_Union, "Propiska was both a residency permit and a migration-recording tool, used [...] in the Soviet Union from the 1930s. [...] A propiska was certified via local police (Militsiya) registers and stamped in this internal passports. Undocumented residence anywhere for longer than a few weeks was prohibited." The current inner passports used in Russia are inherited from those years.