> what's going on?  poland destroyed the soviet union where basically russians lived for free on the money and goods they stole from their satellite states. why do you think also cz, hu and others tried to get rid of them?  basically the "russians stealing washing machines" meme is way older than people think. the ddr had pretty good industrial capacity and was the "china workforce" of the west for decades, the ddr citizens saw little of that as all the valuable foreign money coming in was stolen by moscow. basically all "cheaper" electronic consumer goods we got to see in german catalogs like "universal" or "quelle" were made in the ddr.  nobody likes them and those countries that "kinda do" today very likely have corrupt leaders that either get financially supported by putler or putler has excellent "komprimat" on them.
Austria