Thanks for the interesting article.
I am from Russia, and I think that the socialist achievements of the Scandinavian countries are what my country should strive for today.
The average street man in Russia knows almost nothing about Scandinavian socialism.
It was mentioned a little in the USSR. He was usually called “Swedish socialism.” Moreover, it was in quotation marks, because it was implied that this was “fake” socialism.
During the Perestroika, they began to speak respectfully of him and even began to seem that we were moving in this direction. But, as it became clear later, in these years the task of maximally discrediting the existing political and economic systems was being solved and almost anything was used for this — any facts (as well as myths) about better systems.
When the Soviet system collapsed and oligarchic capitalism began to be built, they forgot about “Swedish socialism”. The United States was considered the standard of “developed capitalism”. At this time, Russia almost did not say that the developed capitalist countries are quite different from each other. It was believed (and many now believe) that there simply existed some “normal” countries (as opposed to the “abnormal” USSR and Russia) and there was no point in looking for any differences between the United States, Italy and Norway.