It’s just stupid to think of the Russians civilians as any less wise or decent of any other population in history.

There's no intrinsic difference. But all societies have different cultures, and cultures affect the way individuals - and thus collectives - both think and act. Societies don't differ in kind in their core, human problems. But societies do differ in the scale to which such problems are combated - or exacerbated.

I wouldn't be willing to hazard any guesses as to whether Russian culture is 'more' or 'less' prone to this sort of problem than the median major culture of the modern world, or whether it's circumstance that has screwed them into their reputation for the past 200 years. Russian culture is not my core field of interest. But the argument that there's been a cultural fuckup somewhere is not an inherently incorrect one.

As an American, for example, I can attest to any number of cultural problems of my own nation that I can trace to many of our... exceptionally scaled problems.