I'm from Philadelphia, I've seen plenty of videos of Russian countryside full of decay and their roads being pothole filled hellscapes that will crush your car's suspension system, if they were paved in the first place. But what I see in Philadelphia is far far worse than any Russian city or rural area. Most American cities are decaying so fast that its highly probable that city dweller Russians have an equal standard of living or superior. Whats more, in most Soviet bloc countries the citizenry have a higher percentage of land ownership than Western European and sometimes US states. The measuring stick you and I use to measure "wealth" is vastly different.