The USSR was a drop in its history and a brief interruption at most.
80 years? I’d hardly call that a drop. Three generations jam packed with industrial, social, and geopolitical change in a region running the length of the world’s largest continent. And this, right next door to another global superstate going through a similar metamorphosis.
You can complain that the Russians have backpeddled a bit from their 1950s/60s heyday. But we’re long past the point of return for the nation. Suggesting this is a “brief interruption” is on par with claiming the USA represents a temporary spat interrupting the millenia-long reign of the continent’s native peoples, rather than an inflection point in the continent’s history.
Unfortunately, due to the way history works, we tend to forget or ignore the amount of changes in previous eras. And the weight of history does create its momentum. The USSR was a radical change from everything before, but unfortunately it failed and now we are seeing a lot of tendencies from the past reeemerge and somehow adapt to the new conditions.
The settler colonizers have been around here for several centuries now, so it is definitely not on par.
