Question: Are The Russian People Living More Under A Capitalist Society Or A Socialist Society?....
Trump's close ties to Putin - seems to be leading us toward something similar to Russian rule. I'd just like to get a feeling as to how the Russian People are coping under Putin - because I sense that we might be heading in that direction.
= new reply since forum marked as read
I loved Snyder's book BLOODLANDS. Next time I'm on Amazon I will order this book!
Private property is a thing, but standards of living are lower than in the US. That means it's harder to buy and own a house, so more buy/own their apts. We'd call them "condos" but they're just apartments without the cachet that "condo" has.
Still, there's a home-owning (upper) middle class that's doing okay, and the working class is doing as the working class does.
Health-care has the some kind of granular stratification. So it's like here a lot, even if a lot of the older folk have transitioned from pure socialist straitjacketed centralized support to something more like OASDI and subsidized housing in the US.
This is in the larger cities.
Note that a lot of practices from Soviet times are just practices and continue because That's How Things Are Done. So large complexes have a central heating unit, like apt. buildings do in the US, but the "complexes" can be multiple buildings with multiple owners or even include several city blocks.
Like in Soviet times, if you have connections or "play ball" with the PTB you do better. That's not required for doing well, but if you do really well then the PTB notice you and either you play ball or you're fouled out. So years ago--still under Putin principles--a publisher anticipated the needs of schools and got really good textbooks. Schools could pick and choose, and he started doing really well. Then the government filed some claims against him because a friend of Putin with a competing publishing house laid some sort of copyright infringement or breach of contract claim against him. Remember, government has cadres of lawyers on the payroll and just the *threat* of charges will often cause a person to be forced into bankruptcy as credit dries up and employers turn away, even if you do nothing wrong and no charges are filed governmental power can destroy a person that's deemed politically expendable, and this is a typical totalitarian tool (often promoted by those envious of how corruption can cement power for the "right thinking"
. So this publisher was put in a position where all his assets were frozen because of an investigation, which meant he had no assets to actually hire a lawyer to defend himself. He had orders, claims were made against him, and in short order his company was ordered sold at auction, and the guy who got the government to sue him bought it up for kopecks on the ruble. Then he withdrew his complaint and the case against the guy, now stripped of assets, vanished. Took 6 months.
In the West, big corporations buy up small successful ones. In Russia, you merely bankrupt them using political connections and government power. Much cheaper that way--you pay below market, except for that whole selling out any kind of principles and morality (then again, that's often overvalued on the open market, it seems).
In the hinterland things are different--still lower standards of living, but more like rural Appalachia in some ways. Some nicer homes but lots of smaller, run down places. This is a hold-over from tsarist and soviet times (not that different, really, in some regards--just a question of who's the master and who's the serf) where all good things flow into the cities, where the education/cultured (or ideologically important) people live.
Politicians cater to their base, and city folk typically frown on the untermenschen in fly-over country.
