The media love to hype Russia as a formidable international foe for lots of reasons (including propping up the Russian Collusion Fantasy they used to attack Trump with and the need to deflect attention from China), but it’s important to remember than, in a lot of ways, Russia is still suffering the debilitating after-effects of 70+ years of communist rule. The United States’ GNP is fourteen times that of Russia, and Russia’s GDP has actually shrunk since 2013, due to an economic crisis and devaluation of the ruble following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and a decline in worldwide oil prices. In many ways, Russia is a very large, very broke third world country that happens to have lots of nuclear weapons.
As a reminder of what Russia can look like outside the big cities, here are some videos from a Twitter thread.
One more video from the Kolyma federal highway in northeastern #Russia:pic.twitter.com/P7EOm4ThVO
— Alex Kokcharov (@AlexKokcharov) July 25, 2021
Kolyma is the far eastern region of Russia where some of the Gulag’s most notorious arctic death camps were located.
Here’s a video from Mutny Materik on the Reka Pechoria in the Komi Republic. It’s just shy of 1,000 miles from Moscow, but still in the same time zone.
This is real Russia, not the facades of Moscow or St Petersburg:pic.twitter.com/hinQ6UWLPD
— Alex Kokcharov (@AlexKokcharov) July 25, 2021
And now, to round out this post, here’s a video compilation of crazy Russian car crashes:
Tags: Communism, Foreign Policy, Gulag, Kolyma, Russia, video
“Significant Portions of Russia Are Still Primitive Crapholes … still suffering the debilitating after-effects of 70+ years of communist rule.”
yeah, just like detroit and boston and oakland, now suffering from the effects of 60 years of welfare and “civil rights’.
[…] Or G7 Nations Among Them BattleSwarm: Something Resembling A Texas Gubernatorial Race? also, Reminder – Significant Parts Of Russia Are Still Primitive Crapholes Behind The Black: Today’s Blacklisted American, also, Russians Detach Pirs Module, […]
Russian leaders have said over and over, they *want* global warming. They welcome it. Siberia thaws, that’s a lot more land and resources, in their mind. I guess defending it from 1.5 billion Chinese in a few decades isn’t something they worry about …
That city, Mutny Materik … how hard would it be to take a spy plane and secretly air drop 1 billion rubles (~ 10 million USD) to the city? With that much (Russian) cash, they could change their own city for the better, rather than hope Moscow or others step in …
I rather imagine that China outside the cites is in pretty much the same shape. China claims to have more paved roads than the USA, as well as almost as much rail mileage. I find both numbers a little difficult to believe.
I recall that in the early 1980s the Soviet Union was described as “Malaysia with missiles” for the reason you noted. Today of course, this would be unfair — Malaysia has advanced quite a bit in four decades.
and when you find out how the soviet union got the technology for missiles and nukes, it clears up a lot of questions about why things are going bad in the u.s.