I happened to live in the USSR for quite a few decades against my will, and I've seen many westerners with such naive impressions. You don't even understand how

I happened to live in the USSR for quite a few decades against my will, and I've seen many westerners with such naive impressions. You don't even understand how detached from reality you are. It's exactly the opposite of what you believe: people look the same only in the most superficial things that you experience during short trips as a tourist. You will learn that after you try to live a life there for a few years and start to stumble upon situations that would be solved one way in the western world and are solved completely the other way in that world. A major difference from the western world is that Russia never developed a civil society independent from the government. In Europe, America and many other places, people have self-organized into everything from church groups to baseball leagues and gun clubs, run these organizations on their own dime, democratially choose people to lead the organizations and represent their interests, and keep them accountable. It fosters a culture of self-sufficiency and participation that enables democracy on the societal level. It creates the expectation that everyone deserves have their say and be heard, and that leaders are accountable to members and stakeholders and should pursue things that people tell them to pursue. And from these small local groups, large nationwide movements arise that can and do openly steer and challenge the government and its policies. Russia has never had that. Its people have never had a say in how the country should be run, not directly through elections, nor indirectly through social activism. The only tolerated power vertical is the government. Environmental groups, human rights activists, ethnic minority groups, etc all get shut down when they start to have any meaningful impact. You can't even publish your thoughts and distribute them as a newsletter, and most people are completely indifferent to that because they are accustomed to a society that is run from top-down by unelected leaders. The eternal sunshine in the Kremlin tells how the things are, and their role is to take pride in suffering. You can see that attitude spectacularly on display on that Youtube channel that has thousands of hours of interviews with Russian POWs in Ukrainian captivity. One of the most amazing things that keeps repeating from one interview to another is how it never occurred to them that they could just refuse to go when conscripted, refuse to sign papers declaring them volunteers, run away and go into hiding, or oppose in some other way. It never occured to them that they could question what authorities tell them to do. These are people who have been breed over centuries into total, unquestionable submission. Roughly half a million are dead in completely senseless war, and there hasn't been not even a single large anti-war protest. Russia experiences one Vietnam war's worth of American losses every 6 weeks without any pushback from the society. This is totally unimaginable in the western world. Just look at the Gaza protests all over the western world. Nothing comparable exists in the Russian world over their involvement in Ukraine, despite their role as instigator, larger scale and much more horrific results.