The Soviet Union has transited from a repressive and authoritarian communist regime in which social welfare, full employment, and a secure old age predominated to a savage capitalism in which a small minority of Mafia business thugs, ex-communist bureaucrats, and new rich speculators have pillaged the economy leaving 60 percent of the population in poverty and the vast majority of pensioners penniless. Most observers, apart from the public relations officers of the Western foreign relations department, would characterize Russia's transition to capitalism as catastrophic in terms of its economic performance and social consequences.
Cultural decline is no less striking than the socio-economic decay.
A rigorous study by one of Russia's most reputable scholars professor Bores Ruchkin, head of the Russian Institute of Youth's Research Center illuminates how the Russian transition to capitalism has impacted on the values and norms of the post-communist generation, those who have come of age during the transition. Almost 50 percent of the sample believed it is acceptable to take what you want by force. No doubt President Yeltsin's bombing of the congress in 1991 to consolidate his power grab was an exemplary act, as are the ex-party elites grab of the lucrative oil and gas enterprises. Mafiaism has become a hegemonic ideology, seeping down from the top echelons of power to the new emerging generation. The newfound liberty praised by Western academics includes the freedom to mug your neighbor on your way up the social ladder.