> Is the quality of life for the ordinary Russians better today?

Maybe today it is better, but that didn't help the millions of Russians who drank themselves to an early grave since the 90s:

http://www.aei.org/publication/russias-demographic-disaster/

> Russia witnessed 6.6 million more deaths in this fifteen-year period than would have occurred if the country had merely sustained the mortality schedules from two decades before.

http://www.nybooks.com/daily/2014/09/02/dying-russians/

> By the mid-1990s, the average St. Petersburg man lived for seven fewer years than he did at the end of the Communist period; in Moscow, the dip was even greater, with death coming nearly eight years sooner.

Sadly, the poor, rural, white parts of America are going through a similar demographic crisis right now, while the rest of the country is busy vilifying them as racists.

Systems collapses have very negative consequences for those who depended on the old system.

Sorry, you're conflating the collapse of empires (loss of a high level of political organisation) with the collapse of civilisations (loss of most levels of social and economic organisation, from top to bottom). Although sometimes coincident, they are not at all the same thing.

Then, isn't that what the Roman Empire underwent as well? Language stayed, territory diminished, religion only gradually changed, most technologies and societal structures only gradually changed (just like in USSR or British Empire). The biggest differences were the changes in institutions and governance (although that also happened gradually).

I don't have the source handy (one of Norman Cantor's less nutty books, perhaps), but IIRC, historians know considerably more about life and society in the late Roman empire than about early medieval life and society, in spite of the fact that the two are temporally and spatially contiguous and the latter is up to 500 years more recent.

When the USSR collapsed, people in the Eastern Bloc didn't stop writing stuff down.

Those are nations, not civilizations. Civilization in the 20th century and some significant time before that was global and ever increasingly so.

The USSR and British "collapse" were the loss of empires, not a collapse of civilization. The systems of society were shuffled but not destroyed.

They had as much (or rather as little) to do with ‘nations’ as the Roman Empire. Vast conquered areas, spanning several religions, languages, and etnicities.

The commonwealth was a civilization as much as the roman empire were.

The Commonwealth, as a civilization, still exists unchanged. Unless the Australians actually have lost the skill of writing and reverted to their previous tribal structures.

The commonwealth is nowhere where it used to be and Britannia do not rule the world like they did.

It's a perfect example of the fall of an empire and civilization without any collapse.