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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]
I already said that Russia may be nice to visit, especially with US income, and Moscow and St Petersburg have a decent standard of living. Speaking of Russia as a whole and as a place to live, it is not a nice place with ever-decreasing opportunities and ever-increasing corruption and government overreach. I can have love for Russia as a Russian, but I have no love for the totalitarian state and the way people are treated when they come into contact with the government corruption. It is easy to think well of Russia when none of the horrors affect you (e.g dark realtors, burial mafia, lack of cancer treatment access, no money for medicine, all good jobs taken up by the clannish connections, gay beatings, rural nurses making 165 dollars a month, regional hospitals and schools closing in the name of efficiency). And we are not comparing Russia and the world (all governments to go around). We are discussing Russia as a lesser, more backwards European country. Russia is European and needs to be compared only to Europe. It pales in comparison even to Poland, the former Soviet bloc country.[/quote]

We'll have to agree to disagree on this.  You don't know what horrors have affected me so let's not go there. Certainly enough people are having a tough time in Russia, but enough people are having a tough time everywhere. I choose to see humanity everywhere and so far, I've been able to do that.  Perfection is not required for love.[/quote]
Again you are having a hard time with comparison. This is not Russia vs. anywhere in the world, but Russia vs Europe because my original premise is that Russians are European in many ways, just poorer, more superstitious, more corrupt, more intolerant, more violent than other Europeans (not the world, we are not talking about anywhere else).[/quote]

You'd have to get more granular with Europe because I can think of some places in Eastern Europe that are just as corrupt, intolerant or violent.  Of course, Russia is a huge country and as such, will have areas that are less or more violent, or less or more intolerant. Incidentally, I think you're missing the mark on tolerance - compared to many European countries, Russia is more diverse both ethnically and religiously.   Certainly, ethnic minorities in Russia fared much better than ethnic Russians in post-USSR republics! It's much nicer to be a Kazakh in Moscow than a Russian in Astana, believe me.

But no matter.  Russia can be all these things, and she's still OK with me.  [/quote]
Which one would that be? Name one European country that was not part of the Russian Empire or USSR that is more violent, corrupt, intolerant, superstitious, poorer - all of that combined - than Russia. Ukraine does not count, it was part of Russia in the 19th and 20th century. I’m talking Europe in a sense of England, Germany, Austria, France, Italy, Switzerland and, to some extent, Poland, Hungary, Romania, former Yugoslavia. The rich and educated Russians aspired to be on par with the wealthiest and most cultured part of Europe, with England, France, Germany and Italy at the core. Other European states, including Russia, were part of that realm. We have Russian composers, and we have Hungarian and Polish composers, as well as the masters like Bach, Beethoven, Mozart and Vivaldi. We have numerous scientists from England and Germany and also Nikola Tesla who was a Serbian and a Russian Mendeleev and Lomonosov. England has the most novelists and writers - Shakespeare, Milton, Austen, Dickens, Thackeray, Trollope, Elliott, and on and on. Russia is known for Chekhov, Dostoyevsky and Tolstoy and, to some extent, Pushkin and Bulgakov. Many Russian novels were written in Europe, as Russian writers loved to vacation there, St Petersburg was built by an Italian architect, opera singers learned from Italian masters. Russia learned the ropes from Europe and added its own layer. Russia had and has smart people, but many were either not valued or succeeded in spite of oppression, like it was with Bulgakov. Russia has a lot of unnecessary suffering and tragedy, the sense of doom built into its psyche because of this.[/quote]

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