In communism people got sent to prison for completely nothing sometimes. Such as starting in the early years when communism started you got sent to the Gulags for owning a property. During the WW2 you got sent to prison just because in the war the German army had forced you to join their lines and fight on their side, so when the war ended you got sent to prison due to that. If you went to the countryside and for example brought to your place a bag of potato's and sold it to your neighbor, you also got sent to prison. That's the communism system of prisoning people.
I wasn't talking about Stalin's times. I was actually comparing the 90s to the later years of the Soviet Union - the 70s and the first half of the 80s. However bad the those times may have been, at least there were not so much shootings in the streets. The economy was worse, I agree, as was the "freedom" situation, but the organized crime wasn't nearly as powerful as today. Trust me, in today's Russia, unfortunately, the concepts "big businessman" and "mafia boss" are almost the same.
During the Soviet Union times there wasn't any economical freedom, I agree, but in my opinion there isn't any even today, but for other reasons. A honest businessman has no hope to enter the market.
