Yep, I went to one of these kindergartens. They were highly functional, rather pedagogically rigourous (compared to American daycare / kindergarten), and kept your children from about 8 AM until about 7 PM. You could start sending your children there at about 2 1/2 and it was provided free by the state. Very convenient and good for all.

EDIT: Some of the most enjoyable moments of my entire life played out there. And I only went until I was 6 1/2 and we left for the US. Now I'm 23. So, the fact that I still remember them should tell the reader something; they were anything but drab in the way that Soviet institutions are sometimes imagined to be.

You can send your children into Ясли before they reach 2 1/2 - just another part of the same kindergarden. I don't remember being there, tho, but I doubt I could remember anything at that age.

I didn't really like kindergarden - I didn't like food and how you was supposed to sleep for a hour near noon. Toys were fine, tho.

It has its ups and downs. But it was engaging enough, socially.

This is one of the biggest cultural differences between Americans and Russians. In the Soviet Union, households in which women also worked arose a lot earlier (1920s), on the back of socialist reform specifically directed to the effect of women's equality. Obviously, certain things had to be done to make this logistically possible.

Meanwhile, Americans, despite their willingness to send their children to school-as-daycare at later ages, are notoriously unwilling to "have the state raise" [their children] at a very young age, and make much of the importance of supervising them prior to school age, in principle, even if they have to resort to expensive and largely useless daycare sometimes.

This approach doesn't prepare the children for the realities of their subsequent abandonment once they reach school age, whatever one thinks of it. In the USSR I remember it was common for 6 or 7 year old children to be latchkey kids, and they were generally deemed self-sufficient and functional, especially when backed by a community in which they certainly knew some neighbours and had somewhere to turn if they needed help. In contrast, the statutes of most US states deem it "child neglect" to leave your child unattended at home until 10 or 12, usually the latter.

I consider the "child neglest" laws to be a major consideration against having children, ever. Unfortunately, they seem to spawn here and there like a plague.

Ditto.