Nah it's legit history. The Soviets had more commercial gas shortages than the rest of the world and ended up using a easier to produce distillate, petroleum benzine, which was lower octane and also more toxic. It was very Soviet and very nonsense, because before the 90s or so they were a massive crude producer but they weren't really good at cracking chambers or other forms of distillation at scale so for light vehicles and personal vehicles their gas was fundamentally different.
Like West German cars couldn't run on East German gas for a while and they had to add an additive to run vehicles on East German pumps.
It's still used over there, but regular higher octane gasoline is also available and prevalent nowadays, but since gas was generally called benzine and that was the colloquial word for what you put in your car, that's the word that stuck.
In Sweden you can drive for 4.5 hours and not leave Gällivare Municipality (pop. 17 000). Our subdivisions get huge up north where nobody lives. Compare that to the smallest municipality which you can cross in 15 minutes (Sundbyberg, pop. 57 000).
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u/Chingizhan1312 19h ago
In Russia, after driving for 8 hours, you will still be in Omsk.