"...they have not yet lost more than they have gained."

I read a very enjoyable book (at least for a bibliophile) last week - Sixpence House by Paul Collins. One passage seemed to me to be relevant to Russia's situation today (as a former empire, even though Collins was discussing a different former empire) and the situation in which the US might find itself in a few decades:

Americans do not know nostalgia for their country in the ways that Britons do, for they have not yet lost more than they have gained....How many Americans leave America, as opposed to those coming in? Even now, the fraction must be minuscule. And has it ever been much different? How many people willingly left Rome at its height, I wonder? Or London, a hundred years ago? Empires have their own gravitational force, which inescapably pulls all objects toward their core. And then, when their mass is spent, the objects float away.

Someday, when the United States is a has-been, then we too shall know that indescribably British feeling; except that then it will be known as that indescribably American feeling. It is the sensation of being a fat bag of sand with a little hole in the bottom, slowly draining out. It has become impossible to live [in Britain] without being reminded of a past that is palpably gone: it creeps over you in the most ludicrously inconspicuous places.

Is it not impossible to live in Russia today without noticing countless little reminders of the USSR? This is true especially outside of Moscow, where Lenin statues and hammers and sickles were not cleansed with the thoroughness applied on the streets of the capital, or in the Moscow metro.