you seem mad that you were exposed for being a shill for authoritarians. no need for your kind of language here really.

My grandmother's girlfriend and my dad's boyfriend both tell me that life was better before perestroika.

"There has been worse situations, therefore there's nothing to complain about now!"

Most Russians who lived through the 90s as adults agree that it was better under communism.

Because Russia experienced a catastrophic economic decline during the 90s, coupled with political and social instability.

So yes, when communist Russia was spending at unsustainable levels, people were slightly better off than at the nadir of the following period of delcine - a decline that was triggered by this exact overspending.

Would be interesting to ask Russians who lived through both periods as adults whether they prefer the 80s Soviet Union, or the 2010s Russia.

This post was edited by Black XistenZ on Jul 19 2020 05:36pm

Vladimir Putin is a monster oppressing his people and they hate him because he's destroyed their country and pilfered all their wealth to the oligarchy
Life in Russia has become a living hell under Putin compared to the glory days of the 1990s

Are the numbers in the chart on the left inflation-adjusted? Because if not, then 21k in 1990 is almost certainly better than 26k in 2019.

A few things

1. You definitely need to look into the method, because we both know Russia's oligarchs aren't exactly honest in reporting their numbers.
2. The USSR fell in 1991, so the graphs aren't a meaningful before and after comparison. It's expected that income will fall after a major political upheaval. What's the comparison like before then?

yes, its GDP-PPP
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Purchasing_power_parity



what, was the USSR more known for honest reporting than Russian oligarchs?
The difference between life in Russia today and life in Russia in the 1990s is that you don't deal with rampant corruption and black markets in daily life, there are doctors and white collar workers everywhere in a developed economy and the supermarkets actually have food on their shelves.

Anyone who actually thinks this is a comparison at all has no perspective. I mean ink gets a pass because he thinks Pol Pot's killing fields were just a good start, but anyone with their feet on the earth and eyes not lidlessly fixated on the sun should recognize that the qualify of life in Russia has completely skyrocketed under Putin to become vastly better than the horrors of the USSR or the broken post-collapse society, rapidly developing into a modernized country. Your average Russian growing up today have reasonably close to the same quality of life as someone in Europe or America, instead of standing a line waiting for a handout of borscht while men with guns demand a bribe as their country falls apart. Russia's got its own problems as an exporting petro-economy crippled by competition on the world stage, but the effect on average citizens in Russia is like what the US economy has during a recession, not mass starvation in another Holodomor.

Yep. Note how GDP per capita collapsed when they transitioned from state capitalism to corporate oligarchy?

Keep in mind that GDP per capita is just dividing GDP by the population. It doesn’t take any major factors like distribution of income, standard of living etc. into account. When those at the top do well, it skews the number significantly.

And in Russia, inequality is and has been on the rise.

The poorest half of the population owns less than five percent of the country's net wealth. In other words, Russian wealth stratification is among the worst of any of the major economies in the world.

Next idiot please.

It's worse now than it was under the Tsar.





This post was edited by inkanddagger on Jul 19 2020 06:52pm