Though I believe a normal, functioning federal democracy is in the cards for Russia’s future, Russia has had a VERY different relationship to the State than even populations of other authoritarian countries (like China) do.
It is too hard to explain in a post how a people’s identity can be so wrapped up in their leader. Even as they complain about him...Russia is not North Korea! You might say. (Though its important to note that not only does Putin continue to prop up North Korea, but that the country itself is a Russian creation, as Stalin installed the Kim Il Sung regime in the 1940s.)
A lot of the misunderstanding on the part of Americans of Russia has to do with the disconnect between what the Soviet Union was on paper as a system of economics, without understanding the intellectual, psychological, and spiritual dimensions of how the system operated in the hearts and minds of its people. As a territoirial entity, the system only collapsed 20 some odd years ago...but inside people, the ideal exists.
Do you know how much trauma the Russian people have been through? How Putin has capitalized on his people’s vulnerabilities?
Do you know that 25 percent of Russian MEN don’t live past the age of 55 ?!
Putin (former KGB) and his people blame their sufferings of the past two decades on the *collapse* of the Soviet system, not the evils of the system itself which merely revealed themselves under the glare of freedom. They blame the West and “democracy” for the turbulence faced in the 90s even though the plundering of the country’s resources was done and continues to be done by oligarchs spawned in their own society within webs of corruption already entrenched in the country. Just taking on new forms...
Russians have come to enjoyed some of the fruits of freedom and semi-capitalism, but they still share the desire to avenge of the fall of the Soviet Union (and the Russian Empire) from before that.
Younger people are bit more complicated...but academic indoctrination has made it so to question things like the heroism of Josef Stalin in defeating thr Nazis is quite taboo...
The people there have a very different relationship to their govt than we do...and a different political trajectory and culture due to its complicated history from the tsars onward.
The State overwhelms people’s identities in ways it never has for Americans — to the point where they will compromise their own self-interests and freedoms willingly.
As the great writer Svetlana Alexievich says, complain about their lives though they may, “Vladimir Putin lives inside every Russian.”
If you despise Russia so much what were you doing living there? And for how long?
How nice that every Russian thinks and feels exactly the same way. That all of their experiences and aspirations align so well.
Russians, like Americans, are not monolithic. It is exactly this broad-brushing that makes national cooperation so difficult.