Quote:
Originally Posted by Pointman
Before war, her opinion wasn't that far off. Russian's "lack of freedom" was quite exaggerated and overall quality of life significantly underplayed. My cousin was born in New York and my wife spend more than a year in USA and we have seriously considered immigration so we gathered a lot of info and I have visited some countries, including Canada, to see it firsthand. So, I have a bit of an idea about English-speaking world and I confident that before war Moscow was a very good city to live in and Russia was nowhere near a totalitarian caricature state some western media made it out to be. Now of course this horrible awful war has changed everything. But that woman probably didn't pay much attention to the war itself, so she is still living in the past a bit.
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I also think people in the West tend to misjudge the trajectory of the standard of living in Russia over time. I think people seem to assume that it was low and stagnant at the end of the Soviet Union and then rose in the '90s with the introduction of capitalism. When in fact, it was the opposite. GDP per capita cratered starting in 1990, dropping by about half by 1998 (in terms of constant dollars) and took until 2007 to hit its 1989 level. Since its 1998 nadir (roughly when Putin came to power), GDP per capita has more than doubled. And this showed up in terms of health, as male life expectancy in Russia dropped into the 50s in the mid-'90s. People really underestimate the absolute catastrophe that was 1990s Russia and how that has shaped what has happened since (and solidified Putin's popularity). The rapid privatization and liberalization of the Russian economy by Yelstin (and his Western advisers) is what created the oligarchy.
It's also important to recognize the differences between different regions. While Russia overall has a fairly low level of wealth/income, there are big differences throughout the country. The GDP per capita (adjusted for Purchasing Power Parity) for residents of Moscow is roughly on par with Western European countries, whereas in Smolensk it's on par with Jamaica or Iran.