alt Hacker NewsI don't think the people in Latvia, Lithuania Estonia, Finnland, Germany, Hungary, Georgia, Ukraine etc pp et al were particularly sad about not being ruled from Moscow anymore. You could even say they grew happier, healthier, taller and had less dental cavities.
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I am a Czech myself, and old enough to remember that period.
We were all happy to escape the Russian yoke, but the transformation was really challenging, not to mention the potential threat of wars as various ancient ethnic hatreds, suppressed by the defunct empire, reappeared.
A lot of people lost their jobs, a lot of currencies collapsed and took people's life savings with them... There was a wave of crime and various oligarchs tried to lift themselves above the law.
And your healthcare quip is way off. In many places further East, basic healthcare structure collapsed, and diseases like tuberculosis or HIV either returned or spread anew massively.
The situation began improving by re-attachment of the newly free countries to another, more benign empire, which was the EU.
In 2011 I spent a month in Latvia and while no one ever outright said that they wished the USSR had not fallen, I heard a lot of stories about how things got a lot worse in the short term and had only recently recovered. They were mostly centered around how Latvia’s economy was very intertwined with things on the east side of the border and trade became much more complicated (and supplying make-work Soviet factories was suddenly not viable).
I suspect the fact that I spent the entire time with ethnic Russians played a role in this, as it sounded like the Latvians had been second-class citizens in their own country.