I watched a documentary once about a day in the life of teenagers in different parts of the world.
The Russian contribution was a skin-head. He was saying how he hates them, all these Asians and Indians and foreigners coming to his country, he hates them so much! Then we watched him join a skin-head group, a few older organized-crime looking like guys in the background, and a bunch of other ignorant-as-fuck teenage boys around. They had this ceremony where the mafia-thug-recruiter guy held a German and a Russian WW2 helmet in each hand and the yoots had to kiss each one and repeat some lines about Germans and Russians being brothers driven to fight by jews and lesser beings or something.
A Russian from circa 1940s Stalingrad say, would have let out a hideous yell and proceeded to beat all the people there to a ripped and bloody pulp, and then just kept right on pounding, blood-spattered face flowing with tears all the while.
I reckon Russia was severly attacked by the West once Yeltsin got in, heard a quote once about the rise of the russian moguls and the privatisation of Russias national utilities, "they turned a virgin into a whore" someone said. that's why I'm not so quick to swallow the Western media spin on what happened to... er, that super-rich oil bloke that got arrested and is having his asssets stripped. Russia probably needs abit of a hard-nut like Putin to keep the neo-libs and Washingtons agents from reducing Russia to a half-price special offer deal in Asda or something, but at the same time that place will only progress with less of a need for the old Strongman/oppression vibe. If old 'Birthmark' had had things his way, maybe Russia would be in a better position now, with less fuckwits praising the ideologies and memories of the Nazi scum that killed so many millions as ifg they were rats to be cleared from the liebenstraum of the Greater Reich.