1 min readNov 30, 2023
If that's true of America, it's 10x true for Russia. If you want a country without a middle class, it's Russia. Putin has reversed and financialized Tsar Alexander II's 1860 abolition of serfdom.
When I went there four times from 2015-17 I rented rooms in St Petersburg and Moscow from impoverished university profs and retired physicists who needed the income to eat. And these two cities are the richest in Russia. Salaries of $200-300/month in the empire's non-Russian periphery are typical, when there's work. That's why so many unemployed serfs sign up to go to Ukraine as cannon fodder and die at a rate of 1000/day.
This is a good antidote to this Russian power inflation idiocy:
