My grandfather ran a company that designed sawmills. During the 70s and 80s, he did a lot of business in the USSR and he has told many stories from that crazy t

My grandfather ran a company that designed sawmills. During the 70s and 80s, he did a lot of business in the USSR and he has told many stories from that crazy time. I don't know if he ever was involved in bribery (he has alzheimer's now so even if I asked him I don't know if I'd get an answer that makes sense, and my grandmother has no idea) but he did however experience the corruption of the communist party first hand. Some of the people he did business with became the oligarchs of modern day Russia, leveraging the power and influence they gained from the forest industry to move in on the energy industry. I'm a bit conflicted about what my grandfather did. As a child and teenager, I always heard the stories as bringing propserity to a poor country, one sawmill could supply tens of thousands of jobs. However, the people he did business with was some of the most dishonest and bad people ever, and my grandfather went into great lengths to make sure that they were never too dependent on the Soviet market and always travelled to Moscow with a lawyer. He never trusted them, and in the 90s and 00s when it surfaced that some of his old clients had become wealthy off the breakup of the Soviet Union, and was now using that wealth to suppress and gouge working people, my grandfather just reacted with "yeah, that sounds like something a shifty guy like him would do". I still don't know how I should view my grandfather's role in this. The deals he made supplied the USSR with jobs which helped the people, but it also empowered really bad people. I think the same way about business in China, on the one hand the billions of Chinese deserve global abundance just like the rest of us, on the other hand fuck the CCP.