I took one class in college and didn't end up really liking Russian - didn't know it was a gendered language beforehand and I really dislike that, mostly because I'm lazy. Before taking the class, Russian cursive seemed absolutely illegible, but I got pretty good at reading and writing it afterwards.
However, I always thought it was weird we were only allowed to write in cursive in the class, where in English or other languages it's more of stylistic option. Our teacher told us everyone wrote like that and it was considered childish to write block letters instead, but she also told us everyone should read Gulag Archipelgo and that Solzhenitsyn was a great author. Was she right about the writing in cursive part though?
(Don't think this is appropriate for language learning since I'm not really asking for the sake of learning the language, so I posted in chat instead)
Don't know about Russian, but in Brazil we are taught cursive first in pre-school and primary school. Then in middle school we are taught block writing specifically for the purpose of filling forms. In practice most people just write a mixed version of cursive and block depending on how quickly they need to write everything.
In Australia, we were taught block, print, then cursive. In engineering we were taught block again.
My teachers were very angry with my writing