>There appears to have been something in the air in 19th century Russia that lent itself to the formation of socialist and anarchic activity. I’m not sure what

>There appears to have been something in the air in 19th century Russia that lent itself to the formation of socialist and anarchic activity. I’m not sure what it was, but it appears to have subsided. That something in the air would probably have to do with a decrepit monarchy and deeply corrupt church working together to utterly screw over the people and deplete the country's wealth. Pre-USSR Russia is almost a poster child for the harms of the state. The revolutionaries that followed[0] didn't actually care about abolishing the state, though. They[1] were just better at keeping people angry at things other than themselves. After all, they had a benchmark to compare against - as long as they weren't any worse than before, they could still claim to be continuing "the revolution", whatever that meant. This even extended past the fall of Communism. There was a brief period of genuine interest in a free market, which was almost immediately followed by the country getting fleeced by fraudulent Ponzi schemes, and then a network of kleptocrats taking power. [0] Once the revolutionaries genuinely interested in progress had been unpersoned and replaced with authoritarians willing to parrot Stalinist slogans. Auth-left loves to do this to the rest of the left wing. [1] Or the de-Stalinized bureaucratic mess that followed.