Why is this age worse than earlier ages?

Why is this age worse than earlier ages?
- Not as you meant it, Anna. In your
Leningrad, people looked askance. Fear
gusted along the queues. Then a great
malevolence came from the west, a grand
circus of cruelty and waste. But Europe
seems weary now of these murderous men
and the blood-orgies you lived through.

Would you have thought this a happier time?
Perhaps, at first. But soon you would see,
by night in the doorways of St Petersburg,
lost children, some of the thirty thousand.
And understand that our great men
are master-thieves who do not stage
bloody performances, but circumspectly
pillage the world’s wealth, while children weep.