Russia is persecuting dissenters by taking away their children

> Or can that be filed under "whatabaoutism" and ignored?

One does not imply the other. It can be "whataboutism" in that it doesn't respond to the Russian topic in this thread. And we needn't ignore it. Write an article about the misdeeds of the Western governments and we'll discuss them in that thread. But US war crimes and bombings don't excuse Russia's current invasion of Ukraine.

> People are oppressed into being hopeless.

The way I look at it is, life is just way harder for most people than it is for people lucky enough to be born in the west, and it is difficult for westerners to comprehend.

When you say oppressed, it implies an oppressor, in reality, to not have "oppression" takes centuries of bloodshed and tradition.

The reason the country I'm moving from is a shithole is because we have not paid the blood price to not be a shithole, like Europe has paid. And I don't want to be around to pay that blood price, I'm too much of a coward, and I can see it coming, it is palpable, you know it is a matter of years before there is civil war and blood in the streets, there is no other way, there is just so far to fall before life is worthless, and I can see things falling every day there. I know it is just a matter of time before my parents get murdered in a civil war, but I'm powerless to stop it, and they know it also, but they pretend it does not matter. So you just have to do everything you can to ignore it, and do your best to keep gambling, hoping you win the lottery out of the shithole.

And again, I'm not Russian, Russians have it 1000x times worse than me, I thank the god I don't believe in every day that I don't have it as hard as they do.

Well, that was the whole premise of the question though.

Of course there are many millions of Russians who oppose the war and who still stay in Russia. And some of them are not staying quiet.

As Russian who left the country on February 25th 2022 I can strongly recommend following substack for those who curios about economical and political situation inside the country:

https://ironcurtain.substack.com/

Author is Sergey Aleksashenko who is economist and former government official. He now live in US and actively support Ukraine, but he have really neutral and realistic view on events.

Little to do with culture, everything to do with infrastructure, geography and for the 20th century and onwards messy politics. Russias geography is... rather paradoxical.

It's a country with pretty much some of the biggest landmass on earth, but very few of that landmass has been exploitable for resources. For most of history this has largely been due to its climate being rather hostile to humans - Russias more navigable areas are up north, which isn't great if you want to use it for things like farmland and other basic needs. The southern part of the country is on the other hand rather mountainous, which is also hard to grow resources on.

All of that has resulted in a country where most people congregate in big cities and an infrastructure that outside of those cities is just... barely existent.

The result is that anyone wanting to lead Russia will invariably end up gravitating towards concentrated leadership; the individual cities where most Russian citizens live don't have the resources around them to entirely sustain themselves independently, so all of them need to stay together. Combine that with a poor infrastructure and anyone looking for a power grab in the capital has an easy opportunity to do so if a vacuum ever arises[0].

[0]: The tsar was basically a monarch, which historically has been in general how countries operate. Lenin was specifically send to Russia by the Germans to attempt and disrupt the Russian front during WW1 (and Stalin can be summarized as "Lenin but worse"). The between leaders after Stalin were trying to uphold the same beliefs as him. Putin's powergrab is the result of him taking advantage of the fact that Yeltsin screwed up the de-sovietization process and just dumped Russia into anarcho-capitalism overnight (there was basically no transition process between the Soviet model and neoliberalism, which resulted in anarcho-capitalism).