There’s a very interesting post at Russia Matters on whether the member republics of the USSR are better off now than they were before the USSR collapsed. TL;DR version: they’re considerably better off now by practically every measure but by and large the people in those countries believe they were better off then, including in places like Ukraine and Belarus. That suggests that getting the band back together may actually be easier than I thought.
Interestingly, the population in all of those countries is basically flat—not growing but not collapsing, either.
Ahhh,
The good old days.