Probably because the Russian soldiers and people, like the Georgians, are extremely poor.
Communism is not an effective system. Unless you can get people to follow it without question and if you can get them to remain loyal to it for eternity, then it will not work. You'll always have a person who wants more than everyone else.
In short: they're looting and robbing because they need money (only their leaders and business moguls have wealth; the bulk of the Russian army consists of kids who grew up on farms and were dirt poor to boot).
I've been hearing on the news about Russian soldiers looting the bodies of dead Georgians, which really isn't anything new. Hell, they've been doing that since the days of the Seleucid Empire.
I can remember, from 1987, we entered this Iraqi trench. It had been cleared out the day before by our choppers, and we were to secure it. Most of the Iraqis had cleared out and ran for their dear lives the instant the choppers came, but the ones who were dead... some of them had some pretty nice stuff on them (gold rings, gold and silver crowns on their teeth, good-luck necklaces with gems in them, you know the deal). I saw several of our guys take things off their bodies, and with that said, you could make quite a bit of money off something as simple as a gold-plated chain to a necklace or bracelet (IF you could get away with selling it).
Now it's not any different with the Russians and the Georgians today. There's money to be made off it. Of course in our case, you couldn't sell them to people on the street for an insane price (all items of material value had to be given to the government to finance the war; failure to comply would be breaking the law), but there are black markets in every military the world over. If you could find a scrounger, you could buy just about anything you could imagine. Of course, most of it was crap, but the point is there's a fortune to be made off the misfortune of others.
War creates its own little economies and businesses.
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