Remember reading about the Mc Donald's that opened in Moscow in the 80s, and how people queued all day to visit. Even that young I thought "how pathetic". They have so much, and they queue for hours for a lousy cheeseburger from a country that would quite happily blow them to smitherins with a nuke.
That showed what they actually had, even McDonalds was met as a luxurious restaurant, even though it's really hard to imagine in the U.S., or say in Sweden. Because you probably don't know what lousy food really looks and tastes like if you haven't been to those Soviet dining rooms (столовые); the Russians themselves had made tons of jokes about the quality of food that was served there, and also about the process of having a meal there, that included struggling with cockroaches crawling out of the salad on your plate etc. Those people only had "so much" in someone's lefty idealistic imagination; I remember I was told as it became legal to have foreign currency as your savings, people started to buy bucks on a terrific scale, everyone tried to get rid of those "rubles" that could devalue by like 50-100 % in a week; as imported goods started to show up at local stores, people were ready to virtually pay whatever price to get them, they knew what local goods were worth; etc. etc. etc. Yes, it may seem naive to ones who never experienced that Soviet style life, but nevertheless, I totally understand those people, they had been denied decent quality of life for decades, and they were finally given the opportunity to make choices of their own, and that was priceless.