"Both Khrushchëv and his successor Brezhnev asserted that communism around the world outdid the West’s advanced capitalist countries in freedom and welfare. They ignored the point that elections were pointless when a single candidate from one party alone was allowed to stand in them; they glossed over the detention of political, intellectual and religious dissenters in the Gulag. But Soviet leaders were frequently thought to score better on other matters. There was no unemployment in the USSR. Citizens were guaranteed shelter, heating, fuel, schooling, public transport and healthcare at little or no cost. Tourists to the Soviet Union reported that muggings were rare and graffiti scrawls practically unknown; and neon-light advertisements were nowhere to be seen. What is more, Soviet spokesmen castigated racism, imperialism and nationalism. The USSR was a multinational state. Its spokesmen insisted that it had eliminated the iniquities of imperialism, nationalism and racism. Although the European empires dissolved themselves in the 1950s and 1960s, the former colonies continued to face difficulties of economic dependency and under-development. Soviet Azerbaijan was compared favourably with ex-British Nigeria, ex-French Algeria and ex-Dutch Malaysia."