Memes

Yep! Like you said, the death statistics are, even if often manipulated, fairly easy to see. What's far more difficult to elaborate on is the impact of housing, of free healthcare. There's also the quality of life improvements, like free education and mass literacy programs. Literate people take literacy for granted, the sheer way life opens up with the written word is not to be made light of, and sometimes literacy rates multiplied by as much as ten times in some regions of the USSR.