>From: "Alexandre Fenelon" <afenelon at zaz.com.br>
-Not a regime I would like to live under, would you? By contrast, the Japanese colonialism in Korea and Taiwan, brutal as it was, seem to have resulted in some improvements in the economy. The same thing could be said about the Russia empire, where the periphery in some cases had better living standards than the Russians themselves. ---
Russia in fact had lower living standards than all the other Soviet Socialist Republics, and lower than in the Warsaw Pact (except maybe Albania?). Ironically, it now has higher living standards than all the other countries of the CIS, and the only post-Soviet country with higher per capita GDP is Estonia.
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