Why did the Russian people live under communism for 70 years without revolting?

Well at the beginning it was simply mass murder. If Joe suspected a group of ANYTHING he had them wiped out and also their families and anyone they knew. I mean he had ALL of his senior officer corp killed because someone suspected someone in their ranks might, MIGHT be seditious. At the beginning as you can suspect it was all about fear. But then it was the secret police in all their iterations. Like all good dictatorships he got kids to squeal on parents and parents to squeal on grandparents. AND he pretty much kept them all hungry. Not much you can do planning wise if you and yours are hungry. But you said a truth. Seventy years is many generations and folks there like folks everywhere just wanted to be allowed to live and let live so I guess they just got used to it. It became easier to go along than to be killed or sent to some horrible place to be worked to death. Hmm, keep your mouth shut or be killed. . .give me a sec. . .uh, OK I choose to keep my mouth shut. But as the senior management aged and were replaced, cooler if not brighter heads started thinking. Still as in all totalitarian organizations it, those born into wealth and power, ended up as a mini fraction where haves got more and wanted more and the mass were have-not's who pretty much got nada. And eventually since everybody was afraid for so long, weirdly fear stopped being an issue. I mean you can only die once and since they, the aristocrats (politically) had so little care for the lives of their people then the people started slowly to stop having care for them and started slowly but surely to become resentful of them, the haves. Got that!? It took many years but as in Rome the rot became more and more total. Greed and "you can't touch this" mentality took over at the top but eventually lots of them got touched in a big way. Eventually all totalitarian organizations fall. Mostly because the main guy and his folks originating the madness with their Rasputin like zeal eventually die off and that zeal is watered down over generations. The son of the son of the son of the original bad guy one day finds out he just isn't interested in hating anymore and the die is cast toward change. Sometimes the change is for the worse. But eventually folks want something better. And one way or another they get it.

Actually it was John Foster Dulles who convinced Harry Truman that if we were willing to spend the money we could eventually spend the Soviet Union into extinction. Every president after Truman picked up that baton and ran with it Reagan just happened to be lucky enough to the last president to run with the baton that Truman handed off But since the Cons are so hard -up for heroes they unfairly gave Reagan all of the credit for winning the Cold War

Because (surprise, surprise!) "communism" really isn't all that bad for average and below average achievers, they actually come out quite well....it's only the "driven achievers" that get prevented from pursuing their dreams and realizing their true potential under a communist regime....if you could take ANY nation (even the US) and instantly impose communism on it, MOST folks would actually be happier & better off for about two or three decades (until it all fell apart).

In Russia, it took that long to develop a "critical mass" of unhappy over-achievers....compare that with the US, where it has taken 200 years to develop a critical mass of "under-achievers" (the "TEA party"), and you can see that the US system is preferable...

The Russians have always been revolting.

Because it was much better than the feudal system it replaced. They went from being serfs with horse-drawn plows to being the second most powerful nation in the world. But lack of consumer goods did them in. If they had listened to their citizens and made the same market reforms the Chinese have enacted, they would still be communist.

fear.

Same drive that makes US citizen lose constitutionally given civil rights on a daily basis for the fear of "terrorism"....

Fear is a very very strong drive - and manipulated properly by Governments - all over the world - it freezes people and prevents them from revolting.

I see some good answers already.

My contribution is "fear".. it wasn't communism under the likes of Stalin, it was a dictatorship. The word communism has been widely misunderstood to mean the same thing. Its not. The concept of sharing wealth for the greater good of society has some merit.

There were plenty of revolts. You didn't hear about them because they were hushed up and dealt with severely.

They had no 2nd Amendment. The Commie Govt. had all the guns and a massive military.

And to the 1st answerer, they were poor BECAUSE of Communism. They were not Communist because they were poor.

They didn't want to get tortured or rot in a Soviet prison.