The members of the family I was staying with had worked for decades in a Kolkhoz. Private property had been seized during the revolution and redistributed to all -bourgeois or peasants- more of less fairly. Religion had taken on an incredible force because repression had forced people to become reflexive about it, so it carried on from the past, never becoming "liberalised".
In the nineties the rouble collapsed. The state practically gave up and nearly ceased providing services. It became so useless as to be seen by all as irrelevant to their lives. Yet, the solidarity between people was exceptional and (in the countryside) nobody really lacked anything. Indeed people from the countryside supported the urban-dwellers.
In the noughties, neoliberalism broke in. People were eager to learn what confident westerners wanted to teach them about entrepreneurship, to study economics, to enrol in business schools. Everybody wanted a job in the real economy, everybody wanted the hope of a better future. Some had "made it" abroad. Girls left their country only to end up working as prostitutes. Mein Herz brennt.
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