Except for its lowered life expectancy and insanely high rates of drug abuse and alcoholism.
Also, the legions of those forcibly confined to “mental hospitals,” as well as those still in internal exile after serving prison sentences, weren’t counted in that total.
Yeah, alcoholism picked up in the 1980s with perestroika. They deregulated alcohol and the prices fell, leading to higher alcohol consumption. One more reason why ‘freedom’ is fairly unpopular in Russia.
I’m sure Soviet prohibition worked wonders just like America’s dabbling in the 1920s…
One thing to keep in mind is that its pretty freaking difficult to establish a stable democracy. It’s quite common for democracies to fail. And most of the stable democracies we have came about under very different circumstances. Well, we can probably group some democracies together as to historical development (like maybe NZ, Australia and Canada), but many democracies underwent unique historical developments before they achieved stability.
I tend to take the view that stable democracies require certain institutions to be in place, but even then, it’s difficult to come up with some universal list of institutions (and there’s a lot of disagreement about what should be in the list).
So, Russia’s turbulent history is, in my view, pretty easy to comprehend. Democracy is hard. Stable governments are hard. Now, if we want to explore Russia’s history and current institutions and try to figure out a path to get them to a stable democracy, that might be an interesting (if probably, futile) exercise. But the fact that they haven’t really ever had a stable democracy is just the basic human condition.
I do think that the Russians followed a lot of unfortunate economic advice after Yeltsin took power, which certainly didn’t help matters.
BrightNShiny Good point. And it’s important to note that democracy is a pretty new innovation in human history. It remains to be seen how long it will last anywhere. If sometime this century we run out of cheap energy and a major worldwide depression ensues, I suspect a lot of ‘stable democracies’ will turn out not so stable.
Not all that new, actually. Many of the ancient Greek city-states were democracies. The Althing of Iceland has met continuously for a thousand years. Also, in the 19th-century American West and other places that were out of the reach of the law, the de facto communities that sprang up became rough-hewn democracies, suggesting to me, at least, that democracy is a more “natural” form of human self-governance than it might first appear. (Add to that Plains Indian tribes, which could have been autocracies but instead were democratic.)