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Comment by mamonster | Hacker News Reader

Hope in Russia in the 90s:

-Pay a policeman 250 bucks to bury the guy you killed and make up the paperwork

-Oligarchs like Abramovich buying up privatization vouchers from poor grandmothers and factory workers who didn't know what a stock was and were starving.

-Yeltsin being drunk 24/7 and fucking everything up.

-Any big city being filled with gangs made up of disgruntled Afghan/Chechnya veterans.

- The start of the massive HIV epidemic because all the healthcare and tracking went to shit (Russia has about 1-2% of the population that is HIV positive, which is 4-5x of most european countries).Also start of the turbo drug problems in Russia.

99% of the Russian population at the time did not understand what free markets/liberalism/democracy meant. Those that understood are now the guys you see on Forbes lists and in government.

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That's still a failure firmly within russia as a state. That its population was so utterly fucked up after 70 years of hardcore oppression, lacking any kind of critical thinking, self-sufficiency (tell me what to think and who to vote, I prefer drinking more vodka) is not a failure of west.

The expectation that west would baby sit every single step this naive and messed up country would do is dangerously naive, since it wouldn't be possible for numerous reasons. Any direct help offered was promptly stolen without trace (we talk about billions to prevent bankruptcy of the state, IIRC something around 7 billions USD never to be seen again, and state went bankrupt of course).

Not 70 years, not oppression. Oppressed Ukraine had cossacks who even managed to make their own short-lived state in the middle ages. Oppressed Baltics joined EU after the USSR fell. The problem is, russian nation never had a (stable) democracy since the fall of Novgorod (~1500). It always quickly turned into an imperial autocracy where the russians were the titular nation who receives all the benefits.

Again (as elsewhere in this discussion) saiya-jin nails what Russia was, and is.

Communist Russia - the 'glorious' Soviet Union - was the epitomy of oppression for seven decades. It created the stereotype for the idea of 'dystopia' that embedded itself in popular cultures around the world.

That's a staggering achievement - built on human misery and lies. Don't belittle that.

And only now, while the Russian Federation is burning itself up in Ukraine, is this truth trickling through into the Russian consciousness. If Russia can be comprehensively defeated (as it must be), I hope that the full truth utterly guts the population for generations to come, as it did with the descendants of Nazi Germany.

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