I should also add that contemporary Russian culture is deeply egalitarian. (I am of course refering to the population at large, not to the New Russians in their Mercedes on Novy Arbat or the Berezovskys of the world.) There was a national opinion poll a while back in which two-thirds of respondents agreed with the statement "No one should have more than 4 or 5 times as much as anybody else, because it is wrong for some people to have too much." I have no idea whether this attitude is a product of the Soviet Union or have deeper historical roots, though I strongly suspect the latter.
This goes a long way to explaining the mafia-ization of the economy in the early 1990s. Most Russians then thought and still do think that only a moral cretin would go into business. Self-respecting people, with rare exceptions, do not go into business. With the result that the only people who _did_ were scumbags. Most people consider the privatization of goods and services to be a form of stealing, because such things are supposed to belong to the people as a whole.
Chris Doss The Russia Journal ------------------
CB: Not mistaken, but the Russian personality type produced something that was the opposite of anti-Semitism , too: socialist revolution. What do you make of the fact that this Russian personality type was en masse in a population that carried out the main socialist revolution in history ? What in French, English, German, American personality types prevented those masses from having a revolution to join the Russians ?