Great insights!
It sounds like you've either spent some time there or found some other way to get inside the Russian mind(!).
A good friend of mine spent about a month in the Soviet Union not long before it was no more, and I know a month is just a month, but he brought back some fascinating stories. (Shacked up with a ballerina in Moscow. The bastard.)
His experience was of a vibrant and dynamic society, not at all the dismal, gray place it's sometimes been depicted.
But then again, there was that ballerina. She might have colored his memories.