View from Britain: Backing the USSR – Gen Z is falling for the Soviet Union

Soviet flag over Paris. October, 2026
Photo: publics

The USSR is striking back. Nearly forty years after its collapse, there are a growing number of young people in the West who are now avid enthusiasts of the Soviet Union, The Spectator notes.

Curiously, this is a somewhat apolitical phenomenon. Soviet culture and style have become decidedly in vogue, whether that be the resurgence of the Slavic doll look, schoolboys making TikToks to the USSR national anthem, or viral videos of abandoned Communist buildings. Defanged and denuded of its political belief system, Soviet aesthetics are decidedly cool.

It helps that there is a consistency of look. Within a second of looking at a Soviet building, outfit or poster, there can be no doubt as to its provenance. Compare that to the modern West’s hodgepodge of styles. There is minimal sense of a unifying civic identity. As a branding exercise alone, the Soviet Union wins hands down.

Encompassed in this imagery of Soviet decline is a strange dichotomy: its collapse and failure are both present and not present. Sure, a building may be sad and derelict, but its decline is presented as merely physical – the scale of ambition only failed practically, not conceptually. There’s enough of a time gap that few millennials – let alone Gen Z – can remember the hangover of the Soviet Union.

For them, there’s a great “what if?” in which the Soviet project wasn’t traded in for blue jeans and Pizza Hut. Photos of the architecture thriving during the Soviet heyday are often edited in for comparison, and commenters make reference to a lost world of aspiration, where the moon was still in reach and the “pursuit of greatness” wasn’t yet something to be ridiculed. Soviet aesthetics, meanwhile, are reassuringly irony-free.

The embrace of the Soviet is not so different from the growing numbers of young people going to church. If you’ve glutted yourself on consumerist excess, you eventually find yourself thirsting for something simpler, heartier and more substantial. The simplicity of the Soviet Union as presented by pages like “Soviet Visuals” (two million followers) is enticing. For those fatigued by endless ads telling them how to keep their health and appearance in check, it’s a welcome alternative.

It would be easy to call it plain old yearning for a world without phones and the strictures of modern life. The Soviet fantasy is, after all, a particularly convenient one – you get to keep America as the great evil. Yet there is something deeply relatable about the feeling of an empire in twilight, one that really thought it would last. Maybe it’s a bit far to claim the current trend for workwear symbolizes a nation of nascent Stakhanovites (workers in the Soviet Union who were celebrated for their exceptional productivity), but it aligns with a generation of young people who pine for purpose and employment but feel like their governing class have written them off and left them behind.

We still live in the afterglow of the Soviet Union and rely on it as a countervailing force to cling to the myth of continued Western hegemony. The version of the USSR romanticized online is its natural endpoint: tempered and mummified, and put on a pedestal as a fairytale that could never really last.

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