In the news

Hmm. Wonder what child mortality & literacy rates are in the post-communist era? Wonder what the gap between the richest and the poorest are in Russia, as compared to 1985?

The state of post-Soviet Russia is entirely a result of the transformation of apparatchiks into kleptocrats. There's no ideology there beyond fucking-over the serfs, so they have gone back to pre-Soviet conditions but with the additional leverage provided by 21st Century technology.

The disastrous Soviet experiment was not only a bad thing in and of itself (remember kids, Stalin murdered more of his citizens than did Nazi Germany, possibly 10 times as many in absolute numbers), but also wasted a whole century when Russia should have been progressing in parallel with the USA, but with the added benefit of actually having some culture.

As it goes, infant mortality has still halved in Russia since the collapse of the Soviet Union, but it has declined by >70% in Czech Republic, whose transition from Communism to Democracy has been more successful. Russian literacy rates have been maintained at the >99% level achieved in late Soviet times.