That's exactly why I wanted to write this story. It is surreal to think that while we worry about parking spots today, a generation of brilliant minds was working under the barrel of a gun (sometimes literally, as you described). The tension between the 'Red' (political) and the 'Expert' (technical) was a defining tragedy of that era.
I don't disagree with that, but I want to point out that this is one facet of hedonic adaptation. People will always complain about of what they don't have. For instance, most inmates in inhumane prisons would love to have the life you describe if they could enjoy some degree of freedom as a result.
This is where it gets psychologically complex. I’ve often thought that while happiness often comes from having a clear, defined place in a system, freedom is the terrifying opposite—it’s the absence of those boundaries.
My feelings toward 404 are deeply conflicted. It was a cage, yet for a long time, I desperately wanted to go back. As I explore in Part 2, the most tragic part wasn't the strength of the cage, but its fragility. It vanished almost overnight, and when the 'cage' that gave us our identity and social standing disappeared, many of us lost our sense of meaning entirely.
We were free, but we were also 'lost' in a world that no longer had a place for us.
That sounds similar to what some ex-Soviets relate. The system was bad, but by and large had understandable rules that you could use to your advantage, if you had the right standing. Once that system collapsed, they were left to fend for themselves --so even though they had more freedom, they had less certainty in today and tomorrow. Like a 13 year old suddenly becoming an orphan.
Not every implementation of "prisons" in the world is about payback or keeping harmful people out of society, some places focuses on rehabilitation, and more often than not, those prisons are not inhumane at all, because that would defeat the very point of the prison.
Maybe if you consider "Can't walk wherever I want" as inhumane, all of them are, but there is definitely a difference between a prison in Rwanda vs one in Norway, and probably one would feel humane after observing the other.
