> Putin is far from perfect and modern Russia has many trends I'm deeply unhappy with. But the fact is that every alternative suggested by the West or its puppe

> Putin is far from perfect and modern Russia has many trends I'm deeply unhappy with. But the fact is that every alternative suggested by the West or its puppets is immeasurably, inconceivably worse. No, it's not a fact - it's a lie that forms the cornerstone of Putinism ("no alternative to Putin"). The struggles you describe were not unique to Russia, but to the entire former USSR and its satellites. The entire Eastern Bloc stood in the same starting position in 1991 and went through the same transformations. Countries like Poland or Estonia succeeded and are now proper first world contries, whereas Russia failed and is rapidly regressing into a stereotypical third world banana republic. A key in Russia's failure is unwillingness to face its history. The USSR was not a beacon of human achievement, but a prison of nations held together only through violence. It disintegrated not because of malicious external scheming, but because of utter internal mismanagement and rotting that led to it being unable to feed its people. Despite immense oil and gas reserves, it suffered fuel shortages and apartment buildings went entire winters unheated in the end. The 1990s were the endgame of stagnation that had set in decades prior. It was a disaster of your own making. And as much as Putin is obsessed with complaining how Gorbachev destroyed the USSR, it's a great irony that with international isolation, sanctions, broken economy and pointless wars (then Afghanistan, now Ukraine), Putin has recreated the conditions that led to the 1990s. Gorbachev inherited the mess and tried to fix it, while Putin created it again from scratch. If you wanted Russia to squander its potential and get stuck in a self-destructive loop as rest of the world steams ahead, you could not have made a better pick than Putin. Imagine where Germany would be if instead of focusing on economic development (Wirtschaftswunder) and cooperation (European Union and its predecessors), they had picked some Gestapo middle manager as their leader by 1960, began justifying suppression of freedoms with disillusionment from the difficulties of post-war years, and launched a massive war against France in a futile attempt to turn back time and restore the Third Reich at its widest extent and get back submarine bases on the Atlantic coast while yelling about the French having some communist resistance figure as their national hero. Certainly not a top economy in the world and a respected partner in international relations with a large circle of influential allies. There is indeed a difference in inputs. For some obscure reason, Russians cannot even imagine their country developing on a normal path like Germany, the Eastern Bloc, and so many others.