Because capitalist Russia is pretty shit. The only thing it’s good for is opposing the US hegemony, but even then it’s still pretty cringe with it’s capitalist oligarchy.
Compare modern day Russia with shit like the Soviets sending the first women to space. Seems like they were pretty progressive for the time compared to now?
How the mighty have fallen. You hate to see it.
What you’re talking about with the issues with LGBT is not limited to Russia, but is quite pervasive throughout the Global South who have been victims of Western imperialism over the past century.
No, I am not blaming Western imperialism on every anti-LGBT reaction in the Global South, but the correlation is undeniable.
I will give you one example: Taiwan is in many ways culturally indistinguishable from most of mainland China (for example, in terms of popular culture, Chinese and Taiwanese actors and singers often participate in projects on both sides of the straits, and the famous ones are household names in both China and Taiwan), but Taiwan is still leaps and bounds ahead when it comes to LGBT rights (the first to legalize gay marriage in all of Asia). There is no denying that, and it doesn’t even come close under comparison.
I have given another example the other day that it is no coincidence that the two Global South countries that have made significant progress on LGBT rights recently, Cuba and Vietnam, also happen to be two of the handful of countries that have successfully resisted Western imperialism since the 20th century.
The reason is simple: the vast majority of progressive movements in the Global South had been crushed in the name of anti-communism during the 20th century. The fall of the USSR in the 1990s sealed the fate of most Global South movements in their attempts to attaining economic sovereignty from the globalizing neoliberal order, whose free market ideology forces vulnerable countries (i.e. every country) to “open up” to the intrusion of foreign capital. Right wing governments and bourgeois elites in the Global South collaborate with foreign capital to plunder their own national wealth, leading to even further anti-Western sentiment among the nationalist/patriotic crowd in those countries.
Social progress cannot be isolated from economic progress and national emancipatory projects. Many of the advances on LGBT rights in Western countries occurred only within the past two decades (the struggle is of course much longer than that), and all of them took place under relatively prosperous economic conditions.
So, back to your question, yes, if the USSR could continue to resist Western imperialism, it would have a much better chance of making leaps of progress on social issues. But the opening up to Western liberal ideology destroyed all that, and instead brought poverty and devastation into a country that was on the verge of overtaking the United States as the most prosperous country in the world.
I forget where I read this in regards to Afghanistan, but it was a quote of something like “progress was made in Europe naturally, but in Afghanistan it was brought by gunpoint by outsiders.”
And it’s true, both by the west and the USSR, although the latter’s case is more complicated due to the west’s machinations in the Middle East.
I think this has more weight rather than just economics because China is prospering but still very conservative, and it’s due to historic oppression by the west. In my opinion, Vietnam and Cuba have made progress with LGBT rights is because the US is so focused on China and Russia and the Middle East that they largely leave the two countries alone outside of economic meddling and standard anti communism. They’re able to progress on their own whereas China is paranoid because they’re the focus of a superpower rivalry and everything is thrown at them.
But your point still stands. Imran Khan of Pakistan wanted to normalize relationships with the Taliban. A Vice journalist asked him why he wanted to do this because the Taliban is oppressing girls and women. Khan said, well, look at it now. Afghanistan is isolated from the world and are girls benefitting from it? No. If we start incorporating them into the world stage then they would have no choice but to compromise, even if it’s slightly, to benefit from the world. Almost every isolated country has maintained its powers and ideologies, and it’s no surprise that countries like North Korea and Syria are reactionary since “democracy” is sieging them and they have no global economic connections.
Yes, I agree with you, but it bears reminding that China despite its explosive growth and poverty eradication still has a lot of regional inequalities. The coastal cities with their export manufacturing base have flourished for decades, but the more interior, poorer rural regions are still catching up. Even within the coastal cities, tens of millions of migrant workers (the total number of migrant workers is about 300 million, pretty much the entire population of the US) are still nowhere near approaching the living standards of a middle class household, for example. We’re talking about workers who still in shared bunk beds hostel-like environment.
China is so large and its population so huge that it is very difficult to progress rapidly, though the government is trying.