This feels like an attempt to cash in on modern western antipathy to Russia to win an argument. I would not call Russia especially homogenous, especially danger

This feels like an attempt to cash in on modern western antipathy to Russia to win an argument. I would not call Russia especially homogenous, especially dangerous or especially poor. It has modest crime that is relatively low for its income level (which is globally around the low-middle end of the spectrum). Crime in Russia is higher than China, but lower than Mexico (two countries with similar GDP/capita). Russia is also pretty diverse and it has a long history of being a diverse multi-ethnic empire. Commentators in during the Napoleonic Wars even mentioned how the diversity of the Russian empire was a point of national pride. A huge variety of peoples live within the borders of Russia: Kalmyks, Cossacks, Tartars, Russians, Jews, Baltic/Volga Germans, Belorussians, Ukrainians, Finns/Karelians, Moldovans, Georgians, Chechens, Turkmen, Armenians... The fact that the leadership of the Soviet Union passed from a Jew (Lenin) to a Georgian (Stalin) to a Ukrainian (Kruschev) to a Russified Ukrainian from Siberia (Brezhnev) would suggest that the country has a very different attitude toward ethnicity than who it is construed in the context of America.