Why is Russia such a terrible place?
It's really fucking cold, which totally just kills people. Beyond that they had a shitty repressive Tzar with actual peasants and stuff up until a hundred years ago and had a massive civil war or two when he went down. The Nazis then exploded the shit out of their most profitable farmland and cities for
years just a couple generations ago, while killing millions of working-age men, and unlike Germany they got no western money to rebuild with at all. The Germans were surprised as fuck that Russia was able to become an industrialised nation
during the course of the WWII, it was quite a feat, and ludicrously costly in terms of future potential in that it mostly went on weapons.
Their post-war leader murdered millions more for basically no reason at all, or no better one than roads made of dead people make less mouths to feed while also helping open up oil and precious metal reserves to keep the new industry and soviet-block trade network on track. Trying to match the cold war production of military gear of the entire western world for a generation made for ludicrous amounts of wasted capital from their scarce and difficult to draw down resource pool.
Eventually the command economy turned itself to shit, as they do, and the place got functionally taken over by the Mafia-like groups that had run the black markets under it (they're your "Russian billionaires"). The former army generals and KGB officers decided to pick teams amongst the chaos and the KGB won. Putin is the old KGB head, they run Russia now, politically if not economically. Elections are fair, but they just strait up murder popular opponents of government and critical members of the press, so it doesn't help. With endless propaganda about enemies at the gates, fake wars that kill real people, and other typical spy bullshit, people essentially don't trust government and the press at all, and religious extremists who mindlessly block vote have some say as a result.
Russia's exports are raw materials. Wood, metal ore, gas, coal. You can't be a rich country doing that, and so they're not. The government cannot provide shit for people because their tax rate is tiny (Mafia own everything, so proposing more tax is a death sentence). They have a lot of police because they have a lot of crime (Mafia, high murder rate and so on). There's also a high incarceration rate (over half the US rate, which leads the world by far).
And yes, you can't run gay pride parades any more, but it's a small fine and no one in Russia actually cares because they weren't doing that anyway. Bigger problems.
Meanwhile, also quite good at science and technology and have the best space program on the planet, and do still sell quite a lot of guns to people. That's the cold war legacy in action, shame they weren't as into things that would make them rich instead.
PC, SJW, anti-fascist, not being a dick, or working on it, he/him.