So, in first few decades (if we ignore some elephants in the room, that my grandparents had to survive) living in village meant you belonged to entity, called “колгосп” (collective farmstead may be the best translation), people there didn’t even have USSR passports, just some papers about them belonging to that place. Villagers were paid for their work mainly by being allowed to take home some of the produce they made, and, most interestingly, they were heavily taxed for dumbest shit imaginable - if you, for example, had an apple tree in your backyard - yep, that’s a tax. Few strains of Ukrainian apples got extinct simply because of that. Later it got better, but at first people had to work for food and were perpetually in debt.

Or it could be that life actually was better…