> Can't say the same, my parents were ones of few people making 6 digits in early Russia. Mom working in one of first foreign banks in Russia as a de-facto CTO,

> Can't say the same, my parents were ones of few people making 6 digits in early Russia. Mom working in one of first foreign banks in Russia as a de-facto CTO, and father having a trade company. Opportunities were there, no way to deny that. People who report stories of near starvation genuinely "had to work hard" to get to that near starvation point. Even dockers and labourers in my father's company in Vladivostok had few hundred buck net per month salaries in 1996. Good for them. > Ones who got to that point probably were commies themselves, or were the type of people "sitting around and waiting money to suddenly fall upon then from nowhere just for that, and a nice diploma they had" as they did back in "good ol soviet times"... That sounds like a generalisation with very little empathy. The people I have in mind are not ethnic Russians. They didn't live in Russia. One of them had their parents deported to Siberia by the Soviets. Neither of them were in the Komsomol. One of their children was born in 1990. The only serious employer in their city stopped paying wages for months on end. If/when paid, they received 120€/month (early 1997) - for skilled masters degree work. They simply didn't have any buffer to escape the mess. They were definitely not the only ones...