| > Russia was unfortunate that communism had a successful revolution, so they are currently some 30 years behind culturally :-/ That "unfortunate" revolution took Russia from the feudal age into the nuclear age in a single generation, so without it they'd presumably be about 100 years behind the USA. This may explain why your negative opinion of the USSR/communism is not necessarily shared by Russians. The most popular leaders of the 20th century, as voted by Russians, are Brezhnev, Lenin and Stalin, while the most unpopular are Gorbachev and Yeltsin, responsible for the collapse and break up of the USSR. Only a rigged and unfair election prevented the Communist Party leader being elected president by the people of Russia in 1996, after they had experienced the joys of several years of capitalism. In 2016, a quarter of a century after the breakup of the USSR (which happened against the express wishes of the Soviet people), the Communist Party is still the second most popular party in Russia, and most Russians (as demonstrated in repeated polls) would like to see the restoration of the USSR. As for Yandex, the founder started in business in the USSR, and he is not Russian. |
Brezhnev is more responsible for the collapse of the USSR than either Gorbachev or Yeltsin (or anyone else, except maybe Yuri Andropov.) Oh, sure, he was dead and the other two were around when it happened, but it was his intervention in Afghanistan that essentially sealed the fate of the USSR.