The Soviet Union had a similar system to Chines Hukou, and yeah, it is a massive success to take millions of people out of the ruins of World War 2, and put them, their children, and their grand-children into much better housing. So yeah, I find your framing absurd. It absolutely a massive success to then improve apartment buildings and single family homes decade on decade, which is what happened.
Not everyone had the luxury of having an untouched hemisphere with a massive GI program to build millions of housing units for returning soldiers.
Which is an absurd take. You do realize the country was literally destroyed after World War 2? It was even worse, I am a descendant of Koryo-Saram, a Korean diaspora in Central Asia. My great-grandparents were transferred from the Russian Far East into Central Asia, modern day Uzbekistan. There was literally no housing. So yes, going from shacks into a relatively decent, if inadequate, single family home was an enormous upgrade.
By US standards most European living spaces are woefully inadequate, but I wouldn't consider European homes and apartments to be unlivable.
Perestroika was literally one of the reasons why USSR collapsed. Becaues he deregulated the economy at a bad time, and he also partially deregulated in a way that exacerbated shortages and promoted hoarding.
Gorbachev's mismanagement was certainly bad, but the Soviet economic capacity was certainly not some decrepit elephant unable to make high quality goods. The biggest issue was shortage caused by Gorbachev's mismanagement. Not an inherent stagnancy of the Soviet economy.
The issue with central planning isn't the inability to produce competitive goods. Soviets have made plenty of world-class products in their history, inclduing the 80s. This was not a "stagnant" ot "backwards" society. The issue with central planning is inefficient allocation of resources.
But that's not even why the USSR collapsed anyway.
Perestroika actually decreased the purchasing power of the average Soviet citizen. The adoption of various appliances, availability of clothing, higher quality food, housing stock, etc all increased with time. Perestroika was catastrophic becuase it nearly reversed that trend completely.
Certainly, there were periods that were better and periods that were worse. The reason for Perestroika in the first place was the slowing of economic growth, but nonetheless there was growth and a general improvement to people's lives. By contrast, Perestroika was almost entirely a negative experience for people who lived through that time.
The minor improvements in avaialbility of some goods and services are entirely offset by the huge negative consequences of empty store shelves, which were a result of Perestroika, and not a sudden collapse of Soviet factories to make products.
Perestroika was almost the entire cause of USSR's economic collapse. Prior to 1986 the country wasn't collapsing. It wasn't even in crisis. The economic circumstances were a mere slow down of economic growth (which we don't even know since it's notoriously hard to measure). As late as 1985 motor vechiel production in USSR was still increasing, and it started decreasing as Gorbachev's reforms kicked in.
Anyway, the point is that USSR's economy was mostly "fine" and developing up until Gorbachev's reforms. Gorbachev's reforms hobbled what was otherwise a fairly productive economy, and the horrific politics killed all government legitimacy which resulted in the collapse.
It wasn't because the economy suddenly stopped working or was grossly uncompetitive with the rest of the world. That's just, basically, Western post-91 propaganda.
