Yes, it was a great time and there was a great sense of optimism if you were a corrupt oligarch and/or gangster.
Not too sure why you needed to quote me with that response unless it was to insult my lady by insinuating she was a criminal of some sort.
I am not insinuating that at all! I am insinuating that the cynics mentioned in Post #40 knew what they were talking about, and that there was no basis for long-term optimism (even though, granted, we are discussing things with decades of hindsight).
So there were public toilets, but they were dismal:
…and the locals had gotten used to it. What irked me was that they laughed at us when we refused to waddle through ankle deep urinous faeces (no kidding, and I can’t express that more politely) to reach the cubicles. They (the Russians watching at the stop in the road to Nizny Novgorod, if I remember correctly, some remote city only to be reached by a long bus ride anyway – a bus ride about which I could tell a couple more ghastly anecdotes) found it hilarious that we objected to that and to pissing in the open too. Well, I, a man, did so. My wife hid in the bushes (which were quite olfactory daring too). They enjoyed the humiliation: we (the locals) have it bad, but they (that is me and my wife) are here now and are not used to it, so they have it worse. There was much rejoycing.
As you can see, I still resent that over 20 years later.
I am glad for every person who made it out of there, send my greetings to Inna. Good for her!
The cubicles didn’t contain a porcelain toilet, they were just a hole in the ground that you squat over. And most of the doors were broken so you got a great view to go with the smell.
I’ve seen similar toilets in other parts of the world and they work quite well. French motorway rest stops quite often have them.
But the Russians seemed to have much worse aim than the French do. The ankle deep wading is not an exaggeration.
Is that what they mean by shithole country?
We had similar experiences in Italy in 2000, in cities and rural areas. Some of the bogs were terrifying.
JohnT and Inna raise an interesting point about equating economic growth as the basic indicator. There is some work that suggests societies that are more equal are happier, even when the level of prosperity is much lower. Community May be a better indicator of success and happiness than ever-expanding GDP, especially if that growth increases inequality.
So sayeth the Duck of Marx. 
Actually I agree you’re correct. It just sounded funny coming from your iconic duck.
Once you’re not starving or being shot at, a life free from envy or hopelessness improves matters a lot. The fact that extreme inequality almost requires both fat-cat impunity and violence directed at the lower class(es) to maintain, shows how unnatural it really is as a matter of individual preference.
As a collective outcome however it sometimes seems almost inevitable. A matter that, almost as if by physics, the worst of the scum inevitably floats to the top of the pool. Or said another way, that float to the top can only be prevented by active preventative measures originating further down. Democracy, whether from Ancient Greece or the modern world, being one of the first preventative measures.
Well, as the Duck and his pal Freddy put it in The Communist Manifesto, the aim was to replace "the old bourgeois society, with its classes and class antagonisms… with … an association, in which the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all”.