It made very different people millionaires and billionaires. Some local businessmen (a very American type in stereotypes, something between a conman and a normal mom and pop business owner), some professors with good understanding of mathematics involved, some translators for big people, some red directors who converted their Soviet power into new power.

And in my childhood I thought they are all thieves, my worldview is more nuanced now. Life is complex.

People talk of KGB as of the main important target of all potential lustrations in the future, but Eugene Kaspersky is KGB, and of people meaningful in Russia he's honestly very fine. Some people talk of Yeltsin as someone good, but he was a Politburo member. People who remember general Lebed sometimes think he was killed because he was an honest patriotic politician, and he surely made the impression with that simple Soviet flat with a rug on the wall, that Siberian manner of speech, those pacifist and humanist things he would say in interviews (he managed to say without accusations and conflict that people who are mafia or terrorists or both for one government are friends for another and this is business as usual ; he also managed to say without losing any dignity or surrendering any important point that Russians can't fight more wars after the XX century and that people fight to live in peace, these seem pretty obvious, but some obvious things don't sound good on TV), except when he was made governor of his part of the world, he quickly became, eh, a normal governor - with new realty and a lover in Moscow, with very expensive idiotic PR actions (like that campaign with Alain Delon in the middle of a depressive Soviet junkyard with a Lenin statue endorsing Lebed), and so on, somehow the memory of him omits those few last years of his life, before the helicopter crash.

Now when I think about it, I didn't think they are all thieves, I knew life is complex and that I don't personally know all these people.

So - American billionaires don't want to be trillionaires, I think. They want to be princes. Perhaps patricians. Or maybe mandarins. The issue is that they are blind to how all three things existed, using them as labels for their own dream of power over humans without complications. Princes were subject to God, Pope and their suzerain, multiple such sometimes, like in Brittany or Holsten or ... Patricians obeyed the customs of their republic, whose first citizen usually was a plebeian - the man who was first named "first citizen" notably was, and his cognomen is now used to refer to emperors. Mandarins lived in the kingdom where the only unbreakable law was the mandate of heaven, and weren't considered better people - certainly no more than as far as their emperor had it.

I believe we will endure. I don't know about the USA, but maybe it's for the best that this project goes to version 2.0 .