[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...

[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??