> QoL impact on the average Russian

What is the "average" Russian exactly? Moscow and St. Petersburg is only ~10% of the population.

~20% is completely rural (Boratesque) and the remainder (from what I've seen from vloggers) is _extremely_ depressing isolated small cities.

You’re absolutely right, I definitely abused “average” there. Really I meant the middle classes and up.

I mean the places which matter, big cities like Moscow, St Petersburg, Rostov-on-Don.

The Boratesque villagers won’t be the ones who might overthrow the government, but the city-dwellers could.

Iran, Venezuela and Cuba had/have a decent middle class too, if you ignore the rural peasants and people in other places that "don't matter".

This surprised me, so I checked. Moscow + St. Petersburg metro areas are 25+ million. They're actually 17% of the population, which is still pretty low considering their importance; Moscow's GDP alone is listed as $1 trillion, while Russia as a whole is $1.48 trillion. So the 20 million people in Moscow hold a lot more power, relatively, than the far-scattered 120 million