China is helping Russia evade Western sanctions and likely providing Moscow with military and dual-use technology for use in Ukraine, according to an unclassified U.S. intelligence report released on Thursday.
Actually it did change. The life expectancy plummeted dramatically during the 90s after the collapse of the USSR and is still recovering, and the whole ideology of the government has shifted. It is a completely different country to what it was when the KGB was a thing.
Do you live there? If not, then you only know what information is fed to the public. The thing is, the information we have, is curated to appear better than it actually is.