I went to University in the NYC area during the late 1990’s.
Amongst my classmates were numerous students who were immigrants from former Yugoslavia, former Warsaw Bloc countries and Soviet Republics.
Amongst their parents, I’d hear dire stories...
ONe was a nuclear physicist and nuclear engineering professor at one of the Soviets closed nuclear cities, he had the 5th to highest civil service clearance and a career salary and pension to match the stature of his positions. By the time the ruble had been devalued again in 1998, his pension would have bought about 3 loaves of bread per month in Moscow, slightly more in the outlying region of the closed city as it was in the Urals breadbasket. He moved to America and worked in a drycleaning store in Brooklyn.
Another friend’s father was a bureacrat in the St. Petersburg regional sea port, put in his entire career there and was equivalent at retirement to a Longshoreman port master. His pension was less than 2 loaves of bread a week after the 1998 ruble devaluation. My friend’s father basically was drinking himself to death in Brooklyn.
Another friend came from a family of Soviet apparatchiks in Tblisi, as a teenager he had to fight in the streets after the Soviets withdrew and Georgia had a small civil war. His family lsot everything, came to NYC with his family and three grandparents, all their pensions that were worthless left a lot of mouths to feed.
A few other guys came from Serbia/Croatia after the civil war, one of them had a family in the import/export business under state monopoly in the days before Milosovich, they lost everything inside Serbia and fled the country with just the accounts receivable bank accounts for the business in various countries abroad.
My father knows a woman who was a neurosurgeon in Moscow, her pension was worthless after the 1998 devaluation. Smart woman who made a new life for herself here.
I don’t see how the pensioners and gov employees and other dependents on the state are not going to see similar suffering here in the United States as the FedRes loses control of the yield curve and inflation and funding crisis after funding crisis roll through the country.