The main argument in support of this take is difference in scale of resource investments and cultural development of Russian heartland against national republic constituents on periphery, where latter always prevailed. No other empire undertook such a program of "inverted exploitation" (that’s how, by the way, modern Ukraine got the gross majority of its infrastructure and high, by benchmarks of Soviet era, technology). Hence sharp demographical and socioeconomical crises in Russia proper, outside Moscow or St Petersburg, which started already in 1970s and had been recently supercharged by military draft campaign.