this post was submitted on 19 Mar 2025
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During the Soviet years, most people were pretty content with the state of things actually. Everybody had guaranteed jobs, housing, healthcare, and education. Nobody worried about being able to retire in dignity either. The period when things were actually bleak was the post USSR period in the early 90s.
Social cohesion stemmed from communist organization of society. Since there was no capitalism there was no path to capital accumulation. There weren't people like Musk or Bezos running around. The way you got ahead was by becoming an artist, a scientist, or an engineer. These were the people who were held in highest regard.
The discontent today is actually fairly low because the economic situation has been steadily improving since the 90s. For example, the World Bank just reclassified Russia as a high income country, and the IMF forecasts that Russian economy is set to grow faster than all the western economies. This is why Putin's government has very high approval right now, people remember how bad things got in the 90s, and they've seen their lives steadily improve since then.
Yes, Russia is the worlds 4th largest economy, even the IMF agrees.
The reality is that Russia isn't really affected by sanctions at this point because they've redirected their trade towards the global south over the past three years. The real problem is that people in the west don't seem to understand what their own governments are doing, and the fact that Ukraine is being cynically used as a proxy to fight a war with Russia. Now that the proxy war is failing, we're seeing the US starting to look for ways to end it.
It's not a theory, Marco Rubio has openly admitted that it's a proxy war already https://thehill.com/homenews/5179806-russia-us-proxy-war-ukraine/