re: #255 wheat-dogghazi

Life in Russia for the common people has not really changed much from the days of serfdom in tsarist times. New bosses are just like the old bosses. Putin’s striving for Russia’s greater glory (mostly his), not to make his people’s lives better.

Things have improved, but not at a level comparable with Western Europe.

Older folks look back fondly on the heyday under Brezhnev when Russia was able to use oil revenues to import tons of consumer goods to keep the masses happy, but outside the major urban centers, progress has been slow to negligible.