[friedturkey]

So long as the people with guns have their bellies full, not much will happen in Russia. Just like as much as the world wants North Korea to change and become more free, most of the people enforcing the law can’t imagine living any other way and they’re happy to maintain the status quo.

Maybe a rapid decline in quality of life will be enough to turn things around in Russia. Or maybe just enough people are so used to struggles there that nothing will change. North Koreans went through decades of wars and invasions—the people there haven’t known that life can be better, so they don’t feel a reason to revolt. People in Russia who were alive during pre-Putin era struggles most likely do really see him as lifting the country to a higher level. The possibility for Russia becoming a new NK-style state isn’t completely impossible.

[snek_case]

The USSR collapsed over 30 years ago. There's a lot of people who were born after that, or who saw their quality of life improve after it happened. I bet you not many of them want to go back to those days.

[Animats]

The death rate in Russia went way up after the fall of the USSR.[1] Democracy and a free market did not deliver a better life for the average Russian. It's important to understand this, because it's part of why Russia ended up with an autocrat.

[1] https://akarlin.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/10/life-expectan...

[dash2]

That death rate is IIRC mostly caused by increased alcoholism, so it may have more specific causes than just “democracy and the free market”.

[giantg2]

Wouldn't despair about their predicament or future lead to alcoholism? Something that could be related to regime change.

[kwhitefoot]

Could you be more specific?

[dash2]

This article is a response to a critique, by the original authors. It should have cites to the debate: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/09668136.2012.6...

[enaaem]

Note that the Russian economy was still organised around a Sovjet planned economy. Just because you change the legal system doesn’t mean you have fixed the economy instantly. For example there were still monotowns, where the whole town was centred around a single factory. These towns are extremely fragile in a market economy.

[brabel]

> who saw their quality of life improve after it happened.

The end of the USSR is widely considered a humanitarian catastrophe because after the economy colapsed, people had no food, no medicines, no order, it was a wild west for several years (my wife was there, she tells me all about it)... where the hell did you "learn" that people's lives improved after the USSR fell??

[watwut]

It really depends where exactly you were. And quite a lot of people did in fact seen their lives being improved in the long term.