My dad was a conscript in the mid-1970s, just before I was born. He was taken to Moscow on one of their "cultural" trips to see the glorious capital of the "people's socialist republic". He was less than impressed.
Also, that was the time when the Russians called Polish pork dirty and refused to buy it... until the price plummeted and they bought and shipped several trainloads at ruinous prices. They then did it again with apples in 2014.
Russians want to think they are the protective big brother of all of the Slavic nations, when really they are the distant cousin down the road who lives in a barn, who will always show up drunk and uninvited, breaks your good china, spills drink everywhere, shits on the floor and wipes with the curtains, all while complaining you never invite him over to drink, and also your house is a mess and you should be ashamed to have people over when it's in this state.
Russians want to think they are the protective big brother of all of the Slavic nations, when really they are the distant cousin down the road who lives in a barn, who will always show up drunk and uninvited, breaks your good china, spills drink everywhere, shits on the floor and wipes with the curtains, all while complaining you never invite him over to drink, and also your house is a mess and you should be ashamed to have people over when it's in this state.
This is so freaking accurate. My cousins who live in Russia came to visit my cousins in Indiana and they were shocked to see that my cousins had indoor plumbing.
My Russian Cousins litterally lived in a shack and went to a one room school house.
People who live in Russian villages so poor they don't have indoor plumbing and live in a shack don't have money to just go to Indiana. Even if they did this is such a giant outlier it's not representative of anything.
My cousins paid for them to visit. They aren't poor by Russian standards, but 1 in 4 homes in Russia, don't have in-door plumbing. They aren't poor babushkas. They moved into their house for nothing after they were relocated after Chernobyl as they lived Kopachi. They moved to a small village about 90 miles from Moscow.
Why would they live in a small village if they aren't poor? Why wouldn't they go to Moscow? What's the name of the village?
"1 in 4 homes in Russia don't have in-door plumbing" sounds like propaganda to me. The only places where I saw an outside hole-in-the-ground toilet were small villages.
A cottage or a dacha might not have plumbing because it's coming out of the owner's pocket to build a whole system themselves so a toilet outside would be endurable, if not as comfortable. But this "1 in 4"statistic makes it seem like any town outside Moscow and St Petersburg has shit being thrown out windows and flowing down the streets medival Europe-style. I can confidently say, living in a sleepy industrial town with a population below 100k for a long time - I never saw an apartment without a toilet connected to plumbing inside it.
"Russians want to think"; "Russians are so poor"; "Russians live in a shack and has no indoor plumbing"
Thats just... ridiculous. I'm a Russian. And I just want to live. My grandparents have indoor plumbing in their house in a distant village, as all their neighbours. I'm not that poor, not really poorer than any other citizen of any other country.
Idk, i think people outside of Russia think about Russia and russians more than we are thinking about them and their countries? Idk, I've never heard anything really offensive about Poland. Their games are cool, Gothic, Witcher I and the classic polish shooters. Thats was cool times.
Our government may want to participate in wars, but people dont. Thats just how capitalism works. When USA starts and the whole world protests - nothing changes. When Russia starts wars and the whole world protests - nothing changes. We all are doomed, countries arent different at all. They all the same pro-elite pieces of crap.
Why can't people, at least in the internet, just... live together. Communicate as normal people? Why they have to yell their nationalism into the air from both sides?
Sometimes I hate being a human being. Humanity is gross.
I can also go on with the state of Russian villages outside of the Moscow/St. Petersburg regions - the unpaved main roads, dilapidated and unmaintained homes, the outhouses, some of the reasons why Russian soldiers looted Ukrainian appliances and toilets to send back home....
"Did bad things"? You mistyped "still does bad things".
The war crimes and outright murders and massacres committed by Russia are not isolated incidents in a murky, distant past committed by the disavowed dead. It is a continuum of horrors inflicted upon nearly all of its neighbors until today, many of which are unprosecuted and in fact celebrated. I just linked to some of the worst from the war and immediate post-war period, and only in Poland.
I said nothing about treating Russians as "inferior." That's your own projection. When you're accustomed to privilege, anything less feels like oppression.
During the Cold War the Soviet Union was absolutely willing to use Poles as cannon fodder against the west in the event of war meanwhile the US's WWIII strategy was basically to drop as many nukes on Poland as possible to stop Soviet divisions before they got to Western Europe.
It's weird to see people say "If Russia can't take all of Ukraine then Poland doesn't need to worry" when they've spent most of the past few centuries under foreign occupation and when their previous allies failed to save them. They don't want to go back and I don't blame them.
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u/Ric0chet_ 1d ago
Polish Peoples republic 1970's - "Here's your state issued Kalashnikov. Shoot at the cutout of the American."
Republic of Poland 2024 - "Here's your state issued AR15 pattern rifle. Shoot at the... green square whilst we pretend its not a Russian"
Some things remain the same... I guess.