The collapse of the USSR and the 10 years after was a time of great problems and malaise for Russia. There’s essays written about this, but it’s clear that the collapse of the Soviet Union happened too suddenly, there wasn’t a coherent vision of what Russia should be, and the leader who took charge, Boris Yeltsin, was very ineffective. To say it quickly, the USSR was divided into different “Soviet socialist republics” so Ukraine was one, Georgia was one, Russia was one, most of the ‘stans in Central Asia (excluding Afghanistan and Pakistan) were SSRs and each SSR had a president and a “supreme Soviet” that were really just a veneer government, and Yeltsin was the president of the Russian SFSR (another wrinkle was the Soviet federal socialist republic, but I won’t get into that) and he was never really supposed to be anybody but he maneuvered to turn this show position into being president of Russia, and he was a clown, like (again I can’t make this up, this is a literally true story) one time he was in Washington DC on a state visit, and there’s this building called the Blair house, which is on Pennsylvania Avenue a few blocks from the White House and it’s used for visiting dignitaries from major countries, well one night Yeltsin, while avoiding the secret service, got outside the house than the fence and onto the sidewalk in his underwear trying to hail a cab because he was drunk and wanted pizza. The secret service found him before a cab picked him up and returned him. The US government never confirmed whether he got his pizza
Well it’s like Mexicans, when you come from a corrupt society and have the hustle needed go succeed in that type of society and you come somewhere where people are generally honest you get an advantage.