I found Gregory Feifer’s book depressing. “The vast majority of Russians will continue to endure the grinding bureaucracy… [G]overnment repression, waste, shoddiness and corruption remain prominent.” Between the oligarchs and the vast majority there is a “jarring contrast between extravagance and the heart-wrenching shabbiness of the great unwashed.” Westerners who try to do business through the visible government structure are disappointed because the real power is hidden in traditional cronyism, corruption, and bribery.
Feifer says he is pessimistic that Russia will “Westernize”. He asks: “Have they learned nothing from their painful past?” They don’t seem to; Russia has a “political culture that has shaped the country’s history for centuries.”
Feifer covers tsarist, Soviet, and recent history, including the history of St. Petersburg and Moscow. (Being a Russian peasant has always been a misery.) World War II is still prominent in Russian thinking: while seventy years of Soviet rule killed as many as 20 million people directly through execution and imprisonment, or through state-orchestrated famines; WWII killed 30 million in a few years, including 40% of men aged twenty to forty-nine. Continue reading →