It has now been exactly a year since I returned to Russia.
One of the questions I get asked the most from Russians and foreigners alike is whether I enjoy living here, or whether I am disappointed. My answer is that it fell within my “range of expectations”. I like to think that this is a function of my perception of Russia prior to 2017 having been reasonably accurate, and considering I was blogging as “Da Russophile” on Russia matters until 2014, that’s pretty much an accolade. In my experience, the typical response of visiting foreigners and expats to life in Russia is one of pleasant surprise, no wonder since Russia might as well be “Equatorial Guinea with hackers” so far as the Western media today is concerned. However, I banally didn’t have anything to be particularly surprised about, pleasantly or otherwise.
Even so, there are areas where Russia shines, as well as some where it doesn’t (that’s for an upcoming just published post on 10 Ways Life in America is Better than in Russia).
First, the good points – where Russia performs better than the United States.
Train station in Saint-Petersburg.
1. Everything’s So Cheap
I don’t have the foggiest how Moscow ever acquired its reputation as one of the world’s most expensive cities. Probably idiots and Intellectuals Yet Idiots dumb enough to buy the $5 bottled water at Sheremetyevo Airport before taking one of the shady, overpriced Caucasian gypsy cabs down to their five star hotels in central Moscow.
In reality, food, rent, utilities, property, hotels, travel, restaurants, museums, transport, healthcare, and education are all far cheaper than in major cities in the United States.
The basic staples – carbs, meat, eggs, vegetables, seafood, most alcohol – are all approximately twice cheaper. Boneless, skinless cuts of turkey are less than 300 rubles ($5)/kg at my local market, which is run by Armenians. Wild salmon, at 500 rubles ($9)/kg are actually cheaper than farmed salmon from Norway, though in another of Russia’s strange inversions, farmed salmon is more prestigious, unlike in the West. It is actually easier to list expensive exceptions. Vodka is still somewhat cheaper than in the United States, but only by a factor of perhaps 1.5x, instead of more like 10x some fifteen years ago; this is a good thing.
The Big Mac, a classic item international price comparisons, costs 130 rubles in the Moscow suburbs, which is twice cheaper than in Britain and the USA. A similar relationship holds as you move to more upscale restaurants, at least after you adjust for the requirement to pay tips in the USA.
For obvious reasons, anything that’s imported is similar to US/EU prices. To the extent this affects me, that’s only Tabasco sauce and some Indian spices. Prices are also comparable for domestically produced Russian wines, whose quality has been improving by leaps and bounds even in the one year that I’ve been here, helped along by sanctions and my personal demand. Probably the single item that I miss most due to the sanctions is feta cheese; there is an East European equivalent called brynza, but it’s not really comparable. Otherwise, local Russian producers have developed competitive alternatives to many popular West European cheeses, at least to the extent that I, a non-connoisseur, am unable to distinguish them from European imports (the local blue-veined cheeses I have found to be especially impressive). Unless you really can’t do without your little Gorgonzola and your little Gruyère and your particular brand of prosciutto, you should be just fine here.
Property and rent are both approximately thrice cheaper in Moscow than in comparable locales in London. However, in one of the few positive aspects of the post-Soviet privatizations, almost 90% of Russians own their own homes.
Most utilities are so cheap that they might as well be free. In the past year, I paid $8 (500R) per month for 72Mbps Internet versus $80 for 15Mbps downloads and 5Mbps uploads with Comcast in California, and $45 for 10Mbps downloads and 0.5Mbps (!) uploads in London. Similar numbers with mobile plans, and what’s better, unlike in the United States, there are no multi-year contracts which are next to impossible to get out of. In both cases, Russian prices are held down by vigorous competition, whereas in the United States many ISPs have de facto monopolies over any particular region. This might surprise some people, but much of Russia’s information infrastructure is more modern than in the USA – for instance, one click money transfers with national state-owned banking giant Sberbank have long been standard, whereas I received an email from Wells Fargo announcing this as a new functionality just a few months ago.
Road and rail transport is approximately 5x cheaper. A 100km rail journey from Moscow to Kolomna or Volokolamsk on an elektrichka costs no more than $5 (300R); in the UK, a similar journey from London to Portsmouth will cost at least £25. I paid about $75 for a high speed Sapsan to go from Moscow to Saint-Petersburg, though I could have gotten there for as cheap as $25 on platskart shared accommodation. In contrast, my American round-trip cost me $700 with Amtrak – and I sat the entire route (not something I would have the stamina for nowadays). In Saint-Petersburg, there were several three star hotels in the center offering accommodations for as low as $50 a night; a similar location in Washington D.C. would have set me back by at least $200 a night.
It’s not exactly a secret that the astronomical cost of American healthcare and higher education is the stuff of horror stories in Europe, and Russia is no exception. $4,500 endoscopies are very much an #OnlyInAmerica type of thing, even if you use private healthcare in Russia. One of my acquaintances did a one year Master’s program in International Relations at LSE last year, which cost $50,000; one year on a PhD program that you can do at one institution of the Academy of Sciences can cost $1,000, if not entirely free. Vets are also far cheaper. For instance, one of my acquaintances found a stray puppy several months ago, which required complex spinal work to fix her hind legs; this ended up costing an incredible $200.
The converse of all this is, of course, that Russian salaries are 4-5x lower than in the US. Adjusting for twice lower prices, the average Russian lives 2x poorer than the average American, and this gap is much larger for healthcare professionals and researchers. For example, while $10,000 per month is common for American anesthesiologists, his Russian equivalent would be lucky to take home $1,000.
On the other hand, this is paradise for anyone with a dollar-denominated income stream.
Rural field.
2. Better Food
One possible cause of the massive rise in American obesity in the past generation is that the nutrients to calories of American crops has plummeted due to commercialized agriculture and the infiltration of corn and soy into every conceivable category of foodstuff. Russia is only at the start of this process, so the food you can buy at the local markets here tends to be organic and grass fed by default – and without the associated markup that you get in the West.
Speaking of the local markets, although it has much declined relative to the 1990s and the Soviet period, every so often you still meet a trader willing to barter and haggle. Although time-consuming, I would argue that it is also more “authentic” to the human experience; bargaining at local markets has long been an integral part of post-agricultural life, and perhaps many moderns miss it, as attested to by the inclusion of this mechanism in almost every video game RPG.
Apart from being healthier, many common foods are simply “better” than their equivalents in the West. Perhaps the two most striking examples are cucumbers and watermelons. The most common (and cheapest) cucumbers are small, prickly things, which are far less watery than the long, smooth ones you will encounter in a standard American or British supermarket. The watermelons of the Caspian region are bigger and far sweeter than the slurpy spheres that are standard in the West.
Russian cuisine doesn’t have a reputation for being exactly healthy. But it depends on what parts of it you adopt, really. Like the French, there is a culture of eating animals “from head to tail” in Russia, so it is easy to find organ meats and bones for making broth at the markets. I would also note the popularity of aspics here, which is known as kholodets; it is the paleo/ketogenic to the max. In my opinion, Russia also has some of the world’s best soups – my personal favorite is sorrel soup. All this shows up in waistlines – there are almost no obese young women.
In some categories, the variety on offer is substandard to what you can expect in the West – cheeses, spices, and wines are the obvious ones. In others, it is better – pickles come to mind, in both variety and quality (pickles in Russia are genuinely fermented, instead of being bathed in vinegar). Even though I live in a “prole” area of Moscow, my local tea shop has about thirty sorts of Chinese teas on sale, some of them remarkably rare, but all of them at rather reasonable prices. In London, you’d probably have to go to something like the venerable Algerian Coffee Store to find a similar Chinese tea collection.
Knyazich restaurant, Kolomna.
3. Nicer Service
Yes, you read that right. Shop assistants and waiters now tend to be at least as, if not more, courteous than their equivalents in the United States. Contra Matt Forney’s experience in Eastern Europe, I find that the stereotype of sullen sovok service is about as outdated as the hammer and sickle. Nor does this just apply to Moscow. Russia’s regional cities have also been rediscovering that the stale Soviet stolovaya had been preceded by service a la russe in Tsarist times.
One partial and amusing exception: Georgian restaurants, especially those with a long pedigree for supposed “excellence.” My theory is that in the USSR, Georgian cuisine was considered to be the most exotic cuisine accessible, at least to people outside the high nomenklatura, so those establishments continued to be patronized by Soviet people, with their less demanding requirements. Since people with the Soviet mentality primarily went to restaurants to network and to show off how rich they are, as opposed to just having a good time, you tend to get much less enjoyment for the ruble at those places.
The variety of restaurants one can choose from is almost as great as in the great Western metropolises. You don’t have near the same variety in Chinese and especially Indian restaurants that countries with huge diasporas from those two countries can boast, but those are substituted for by Central Asian and Caucasian cuisine. I am not a fan of Caucasian cuisine: Georgian cuisine is too pretentious, while Dagestani/Chechen cuisine is possibly the most primitive on the planet – their signature dish is dough and meat boiled in water, which I suppose is “honest” but hardly something to go out of your way for. However, I have gained considerable respect for Uzbek food (the Uryuk chain is recommended).
However, the center of Moscow has been crafted into an SWPL paradise, so there is no shortage of cuisines from American-style burger joints with craft beers and lettuce leaf burgers (no, really) to Vietnamese pho bars (I especially like the Viet Cafe chain).
Finally, unlike most of Europe – Moscow is a 24/7 city, like America. Most supermarkets and restaurants are open late into the night, or 24/7. Life here is convenient. Only major restriction: Shops can’t sell booze past 11pm.
Moscow Metro in 2033.
4. Public Transport
Moscow, Saint-Petersburg, and all the cities with around one million people have well-developed metro systems. Contrast this with the US, where the concept of “public transport” – at least outside the north-eastern seaboard, the Bay Area, and Seattle – is pretty much non-existent.
In fairness, the Moscow Metro closes at 1am (Saint-Petersburg at 12pm), whereas the New York subway works 24 hours a day – if with frequent stoppages. However, Moscow’s reputation for having the most aesthetic metro system in the world is well-deserved, even though I have a soft spot for Chicago’s old-style wooden platforms and Washington D.C.’s bunker-like concrete grottoes.
One problem in the old days was that Moscow’s metro stations were far apart, especially once you head out into the suburbs. But this is no longer relevant with the rise of the ride-sharing revolution. It is now trivial to get an Uber (or more frequently a Yandex Taxi) ride on the cheap to any part of Moscow.
“Afroshop” near my other ghetto apartment. Still an exception, not the rule. But for how long?
5. Still Recognizably European
Many Russians complain about the flood of Central Asian Gastarbeiters. However, even Moscow – which remains about 85% Slavic, even adjusting for unofficial residents – feels like a veritable Whitopia after spending time in Latino-majority California and Londonistan. Moreover, Uzbeks and Tajiks are far preferable to many minorities in the West, such as US Blacks with their absurd crime rates, or the sea of black niqabs that you encounter in many areas of London.
Meanwhile, vast swathes of provincial Russia – including its central demographic heartlands – are as uniformly Slavic as the countries of Visegrad Europe. Even if they have their own, rather serious problems, such as poverty, corruption, and alcoholism. If you happen to value the quality of being amongst one’s own, then Russia does better than virtually any other white country outside Poland, Czechia, and the Baltics. Moscow is the last and only megacity in the world where Europeans remain a solid majority.
I don’t know if this will last. All major political factions in 1960’s Germany also expected their Gastarbeiters to eventually go home – didn’t work out like that. And there is as yet demographically tiny but nonetheless ideologically distinct and high IQ cluster of pro-“tolerance” and sundry “anti-racist” characters shilling for open borders. And they have a ready audience amongst Moscow’s blue-haired yuppies. I give it 15 years.
Lake by our dacha.
6. The Outdoors
About 50% of Muscovites own a dacha outside the city, including people of modest means. This is much rarer in the United States and Western Europe, where only the upper-middle class has such opportunities.
Personally I don’t have much interest in this – the Internet is too slow, and there are too many biting insects – but people less autistic than myself will likely appreciate this.
Typical Moscow sleeper suburb.
7. Freedoms
This might surprise people who associate Russia with reams of red tape, but while there’s no shortage of that, there are also any number of domains with few or no regulations.
Getting almost any drug is a simple matter of going down to the pharmacy and checking up if they have it in stock; if not, they can usually order it. While you need doctor’s prescriptions for some of the most elementary drugs in the United States, in Russia that is the exception, not the rule. They are also typically generic and cost much less than their equivalents in the United States, though there are far more counterfeits. Ergo for contact lenses – you just state your specifications and they order them; no eye tests required. Setting up a trading account is also much easier. Instead of filling out countless forms promising that yes, you do indeed have 5 years intimate experience with collateralized debt obligations, in Russia it’s pay to play. If you can bring money to the table, you’re good to go.
In effect, with the notable exception of gun rights, there is much less of the “nanny state” and more of what American conservatives call “personal responsibility” in Russia.
Russia is one of the world’s great pirate havens. No Internet provider is ever going to send you angry cease and desist letters for torrenting Game of Thrones. It is theoretically possible, but you can count the number of such cases on the fingers of your hand. (However, business-scale piracy has been cracked down upon and is much less prevalent than it was back in 2010). It is therefore no surprise that the world’s largest depositories of pirated books and scientific articles are Russian enterprises. The only things that most Russians don’t massively pirate is video games. Steam prices are 3-4x lower in the Eurasia region, making GabeN’s offerings even more of a cornucopia.
This freewheeling world, a legacy of the 1990s – a heaven for the intelligent and far-sighted, a potential hell for the duller and lower future time orientated (I have second-hand knowledge of some people who lost their apartments on currency speculation) – is being slowly but steadily constrained by more and more laws and regulations. The world is not long for the old Russia of limitless parking opportunities and playgrounds not yet despoiled by tomes of health and safety regulations. More worryingly, whereas the Russian Internet was genuinely free as little as half a decade ago, censorship on grounds of “extremism” is accelerating at an exponential pace. Even so, at least for now, many aspects of life are surprisingly freer and more accessible than in the putative “Free World.”
8. Less Faggotry
Did that trigger you, snowflake?
Nobody in Russia cares, LOL.
Even though I don’t particularly care for hardcore homophobia, I consider the right to call things and people you don’t like “gay” as one of the most important freedoms there are. Happened all the time at school, but since I graduated in 2006, liberal faggots have all but criminalized this. Russia remains free of this cultural totalitarianism; here, you can still call a spade a spade and a gender non-fluid helicopterkin a faggot (пидор) without any particular worries for your professional career and social status.
I don’t think this will last so enjoy (or suffer) it while you still can.
Zaryadye Park, Moscow.
9. Intellectual Ferment
Most of Russia is one large West Virginia so far as this goes. However, Moscow and to a lesser extent SPB are glaring and indeed cardinal exceptions.
Many new startups, including in exciting new fields like machine learning, quantified self, personal genomics. The city is buzzing with entrepreneurial energy.
Specific personal example: Back in the Bay Area, I liked involving myself in the futurist/transhumanist community. I can’t say that Moscow can compete with it, but it’s probably no worse than London in this respect, the foremost West European H+ cluster. There’s a LessWrong meetup group, a “techno-commercial” transhumanist group (Russia 2045), and an active community of radical life extension advocates, which overlaps into the cliodynamics community (the daughter of the guy who runs Kriorus, Russia’s Alcor, is also a cliodynamicist).
Even the nationalists are more interesting, more intellectual than their American or West European equivalents, as I observed in Saint-Petersburg. I suspect this is a function of Eastern Europe being less advanced on the path of Cultural Marxist rot, thanks to Communism effectively “freezing” social attitudes; the human capital hasn’t yet been fully monopolized by neoliberalism.txt. There is no real equivalent to the intellectual caliber of Sputnik and Pogrom in the United States.
As in Eastern Europe, my impression is that the historical recreation movement – perhaps as an implicit stand of white identity as any – is if anything stronger in Russia than in the United States.
Dmitry Chistoprudov: Cloudy Moscow 7.
10. More Technologically Advanced
On coming to the Bay Area, the technological heart of the United States, tech writer Alina Tolmacheva struggled to hide her disappointment: “No flying hoverboards, food isn’t delivered by drones, and parking fees are paid with coins, whereas in Moscow everyone had long since switched to mobile apps.”
This is somewhat tongue in cheek, but the general point stands.
As she further points out, monopolies dominate transport, banking, telephones, and the Internet. The Caltrain from San Francisco Airport to Mountain View takes 1.5 hours. The highest building is 12 storeys of concrete in the style of Le Corbusier. “Rent is paid with checks. It is necessary to take a piece of paper, fill in the details, and send it by mail. The owner then goes to a bank branch and cashes it out. Technology older than VHS and cassette players.” In Moscow, even aged grandmothers have been collecting rent money through mobile apps for years.
Contactless payments are not yet prevalent in Moscow, like they are in London. But this is a minor issue. On the other hand, the Moscow Metro has already had free WiFi for several years, which is now in the last stages of becoming integrated into the wider Moscow transport system, including buses and trams. This is hugely convenient, since many commuters spend around an hour traveling in the Metro on working days. Neither London, nor BART in the SF Bay Area, nor any other American underground system that I know of has gotten round to installing free WiFI.
Moscow is more developed as a “technopolis” than any other major city in the Anglosphere.
Addendum
If you enjoyed this post, you may also enjoy my comprehensive comparison of life in Russia, America and the United Kingdom that I wrote in 2011: http://akarlin.com/tag/national-comparisons/ .
More later but I would say that contactless in Saratov matches the UK, maybe slightly better because grocery stores take them, not inevitable in the UK.
I agree with almost everything here. But you’d better speak Russian and it’s a highly-inflected language (the words change their forms according to their meaning in the sentence and their relationship to other words) and some words change with the addition of prefixes, which makes a dictionary search fruitless unless you can recognize the root. It is a difficult language for a brain wired for English and the older that brain gets, the more difficult the process becomes. It’s hard to appreciate a country when you’re constantly wondering what is going on and have no idea what people are saying to you.
Unz much, much, much better
Interesting.
I can, apparently, expect most of these recent (last 5 years or so) Russian immigrants to move back into that better place.
No Russian talk when walking along the beach anymore, I suppose.
Let’s wait and see.
Thanks, but Unz.com isn’t a nationalist resource, strictly speaking – though it might well be the closest thing to SiP in the West.
SiP’s analogues in the West:
* Radix – Never as good, and now kaput anyway
* AltRight.com – with all due respect to Greg Hood and Vincent Law, its two star writers, otherwise a duller version of Radix
* Counter-Currents, Occidental Observer – good essays, but 1) have a fraction of SiP’s visitorship, despite censorship against SiP; 2) more whimsical/philosophical than SiP, which I think is more “grounded” in the real world; 3) can’t compete on design.
* Daily Stormer – only resource that competes on viewership number, funnier, but 10x stupider.
I am assuming that “Afroshop” is a front to sell drugs. On that topic have you ever had a frank conversation with the average man on the street regarding the future non white world? How aware are they of mass immigration into the post Western world, if they are aware do they think this is a significant event, is there anyone who is aware of the sheer numbers that Africa will be producing, do they envisage Moscow becoming like Paris or London?
I also must add that I also live in land where nobody really cares about pirating stuff, I am curious if the people that do this watch Game of Thrones in Russian or English.
The one thing that has always annoyed me about nationalists is how much time they waste on mystical
rubbish like Evola, Spengler, Nietzsche etc. It has come to such a point that I’ve seen fans of such people insult other nationalists for caring about actual, empirical data like HBD (e.g. I saw someone call Jared Taylor a ‘spiritual autist’ in a tweet the other day). The co-hosts of Spencer’s podcast are the absolute worst in this regard.
Why this affinity exists I have no idea, I would have expected the opposite given that so many people are made nationalists by looking at facts.
Richard Spencer’s wife, Nina Kouprianova: “Excluding actual academics studying psychometrics, the so-called HBD (IQ studies and the like) is for nerds with Asperger’s. Like Ayn Rand and Libertarianism, HBD can only interest any self-respecting person for no more than six months–in their teens and early twenties–moving onto bigger and better things. Like crime-stat studies, this area will never win any culture and civilization wars.”
https://twitter.com/ninabyzantina/status/876621429676093441
Okay, I don’t really care what she passively-aggressively says about me. Still, I can’t help but wonder about the relationship dynamics here, considering that IQ/crime quantitative data is one of the central planks of Spencer’s Alt Right (and the main thing that makes them better than most European nationalist movements).
Farmed salmon is fattier than the wild version. If you try to follow a paleo/keto style diet, it’s better. Otherwise a question of taste, both are good for what they are.
No, I try to be a normie in everyday life. I don’t back away from my views if the conversation drifts there, but I don’t seek to actively raise it either.
Russian mass media actually loves to talk about Western Europe’s immigration apocalypse. Cologne was comprehensively covered.
Still, this is done as a sort of “fuck you” to the West, not out of any concern for unbiased news or even the future of the white race. 🙂
Yes, there’s a lot of concern about Moscow becoming far less Russian at the level of common people (though this isn’t something that officials except nationalists and the occasional based commie talk about).
Dubbed over in Russian, for the most part.
Incidentally, this is another case of Russia’s strange “inversions.” It is actually the liberals here who are more against pirating – you have the whining about it being “stealing,” that it’s not like how “the West does things,” etc, etc. Whereas in the West it is precisely the liberals as opposed to the conservatards with their worship of “sanctity of property rights” who don’t have any moral qualms about piracy.
Russian “vatniks” pirate everything (except occasionally video games). Libcucks pay Western corporations.
You didn’t mention Occidental Dissent, the organ of Brad Griffin ( AKA Hunter Wallace ). Whilst most of the articles relate to news stories, I have found Mr Griffin’s historical articles about Southern Nationalism and its background in the British Caribbean to be outstanding.
Whilst your own articles about Russian Nationalism have been highly illuminating and informative, and would be difficult to find anywhere else in the Anglosphere, Mr Griffin’s are even better. He’s overturned many of my views about the American South – and for the better.
The co-hosts of Spencer’s podcast are the absolute worst in this regard.
You’re damned right about that. If I hear the word “Faustian” again, I’m going to lose it.
I am in the middle. Humans have a deep-seated need for some spirituality, and Nietzsche and Spengler are occasionally obscure enough to be some kind of substitute for this. I personally don’t like Evola as much as these two. Nietzsche is sometimes more poetry than philosophy, but his philosophy was also usually quite smart. Even Spengler’s prose is also enjoyable, and he is often perceptive. (Like regarding his having voted for the Nazis: “We wanted to abolish the parties; now only one remains, the very worst one.”) I will also try to read Heidegger again, though apparently his main work is almost impossible to decipher. (Would therefore be an ideal holy book of a new religion!) His other writings are better, and he really was some kind of Nazi.
Regardless, of course you need HBD, not only because it’s a useful description of reality, but also because it’s interesting, as is most science. I wonder if the anti-HBD nationalists think that anyone interested in science is an autistic nerd?
By the way it’s similar to re-litigating history. History is very interesting in and of itself, but it’s not enough to deal with history. Also, you cannot totally re-litigate history anyway, unfortunately. Hitler wasn’t Satan, but he wasn’t a decent white nationalist either. Heck, his main goals included mass murdering tens of millions of whites. What can be re-litigated needs to be re-litigated, because it also weakens the narrative, and also because why leave them any undeserved spoils? Why let them get away with worshiping Che Guevara, while they viciously attack anyone who even mentions any 1933-45 German in a positive light?
So I think both approaches are needed, and if you don’t like one, do the other, and ignore what you don’t like. Nobody can force you to read Nietzsche or Spengler anyway. Neither is HBD forced down your throat.
It’s a spectrum, Mr Karlin. Spencer’s Alt-Right ideas are far more materialist and eugenicist than more the mystical and cultural nationalism of others but he’s still nowhere near as interested in stats and DNA as the HBD gang. He does have that WASP love of abortion for other people babies but that’s likely something he picked up in the air around him.
Why? Faustian is a good expression describing something real. Why use another word? Or, you can of course listen to other podcasts. Or no podcasts at all. I prefer reading anyway.
Charlatanry like that described in 9 ought to count very heavily against any place where it is practiced.
Excellent soup, yes, but the true showstoppers are solyanka and kefir okroshka. On that note, Borodinsky bread also deserves a place in the food canon.
As you noted before, Russians tend to treat the HBD stuff with suspicion. That’s because in the past Russians were often designated as dumb Untermenschen by various Western proto-HBD experts. Many Russians of the nationalist kind remember and resent this. The are others who agree, though. Your HBD arguments might fare better with them.
These freedoms + slowing rising SJWism + creeping Internet regulation (under the familiar banners of fighting piracy and terrorism) is pretty much my experience of Kiev, though Kiev is distinctly weaker than Moscow on points 9 and 10. The intellectual life is a weird mishmash of pre-20th century beliefs and contemporary Western BS, and I would not be surprised if they reached full poz years before Moscow. If my business acquaintances are to be believed, the foreign wannapreneur also faces far more bureaucracy and more blatant “fuck you, pay me” type of corruption than in Russia.
Can someone explain how Belarus fares on 1-10?
I get there is some kind of schadenfreude, but a brown Western Europe that consists of regimes with ideologies such as BLM types tearing every white statue down, brown SJW types such as Sadiq Khan and “affirmative action kremlinology” (that you have mocked here before), is going to create huge problems for Russia, profoundly more dangerous than how things are now. One can argue such regimes will not be able muster strong economies and armies because of their degraded populations, but having such hostile populations right next door is going to cause big pain to Russia, that the media is so callous to this future is almost depressing.
It, in the Spenglerian sense, is too vague and is used as a substitute for proper analysis. I suppose that it means something like ‘The tendency of (Western) Europeans towards the new and unknown’.
It is true that Europeans have discovered, invented and expanded far more than any other civilisation. If that’s all that’s meant by describing it as Faustian, then it’s true but trivial and the term is obfuscatory. Perhaps what’s meant is that European civilisation is, for some reason, predisposed towards such discovery and expansion. In that case, then actual analysis is needed to show why (for cultural/genetic reasons, as I believed Duchesne does), and simply tagging it as ‘Faustian’ and leaving that as the explanation (as very often happens) is just a vapid substitute.
Spencer’s friends in particular also tend to use it normatively as an argument (e.g. we should colonise the moon because it’s an expression of western man’s Faustian soul). This is just a non-argument of associating a positive word with something, which stated otherwise would be rather less convincing (we should colonise space because our civilisation have in the past tended to explore new places).
True, if this were just a few people or just a hobby then I would be unreasonable to complain. What worries me though is that the broader tendency to mysticism
1. Pushes nationalists away from persuasive discussion topics (HBC etc.) to far less persuasive ones
2. Leads to a worse understanding of the world (if it’s taken seriously) which leads to worse decisions
Canada?
It’s refreshing to have Anatoly Karlin’s personal, detailed and informative take on matters Russian, along with that of Israel Shamir, especially given how some years back, the alt-media sphere re Russia was rather too shaped by the often oily and offensively demeaning scribbles of Matt Taibbi, Mark Ames and Yasha Levine of ‘The Exile’ (apparently still around as ‘ExiledOnline’)
There is a maturity in Anatoly Karlin’s writing beyond his apparent youth, as if continuing a discourse begun in a previous lifetime
Regarding appealing places to live or sojourn in the Slavic East (none flaw-free, of course, but so it always goes), I will just say one word here: Croatia
Long ago I studied Russian at university and can read it easily, but speak it very badly. I would love to go there for an extended vacation. My wife and I are Kiwis and New Zealand is the only English-speaking countries to maintain half-way good relations with Russia. Obtaining a visa of some sort might not therefore be completely impossible. After many years living in the rural South Island, we both now find large cities physically repulsive.
Where would you recommend?
Fascinating, thanks.
Statistical and anecdotal data indicates that Belorussia is considerably less corrupt than Russia, which is modestly less corrupt than the Ukraine.
Internet restrictions are similar to Russia’s. Russia was once freer, but has since converged to Belorussia’s level.
However, Belorussians are significantly more socially liberal than Russians, though more religious, too. Also higher levels of trust.
Powerful Westernizing forces (“The Cathedral”) are free to roam in the Ukraine, so it is indeed becoming more liberal than Russia on certain matters close to their heart, e.g. support for gay marriage (even though the Ukraine is innately more conservative than Russia, according to opinion polls).
The man likes his country. Fine. Nothing is wrong with that.
But this is silly. The flow of Russians to the US (vs. in the other direction) is very one-directional.
The strongest point is ‘less faggotry’.
The weakest is ‘things are cheaper’. Yeah? What is the average household income. Perhaps acquaint yourself with the concept of ‘Purchase Power Parity’.
There is an intermediate level of “approved pirates” who seem to supply good stuff at not quite basement prices. I do wonder if they are actually fronts for the major software publishers.
They put the word “Faustian” on everything, like ketchup.
Are you and Anatoly both conceding that Ukrainians make a better borshch than Russians? I’ve tasted most all Slavic style soups and none match the majesty and specialness of a great red borschch. Make a large pot and eat it for a week, it gets better day by day. Meaty (with fat too) pork ribs, beets, tomatoes potatoes, carrots, cabbage, beans. and dill. Bring out the sour cream, cleaned garlic cloves, Borodinsky bread and some fantastic Nemirov Honey Pepper vodka and you’ve just entered heaven. By day four, you might want to bring out a bottle of Siracha sauce, or better yet Pepper Garlic paste (made by the same company that originated making siracha, the one with the little rooster on the bottle; Anatoly you lived in California and should know what I’m talking about). Ukrainians in North America will accept no substitute for the King of Soups:
https://youtu.be/MWVeMTBOnck
Very interesting. Thanks.
On teas:
A few years ago I had a contract with a taxi company. One of their drivers was an old guy who, in his younger days, managed a tea plantation in Assam. According to him, at the leaf auctions the best price for the top quality leaf was always paid by Russian buyers.
Mother England’s giant companies were content with the sweepings from the floor…
How are the subway dogs faring? Are they only in Moscow, or also in SPB? The dogs may seem crudely materialist, but I see them as Evolian nobility based on the videos I’ve seen on youtube. Berlin should be the natural home of the subway dog, but the Prussian remnant there remains too orderly and they also may have anti-canine Turks running the subway.
{Farmed salmon is fattier than the wild version.}
Junk fat.
Farmed salmon are fed pelletized food and other processed junk.
Also, due to being confined in large numbers in very tight spaces and susceptible to various diseases due to crowding, they are pumped full of antibiotics, similar to factory-farms of beef.
Antibiotics and other contaminants mostly accumulate in the fat of the fish.
Agree to all of this. But you mentioned the watermelons but not the strawberries – so much better than the comparatively tasteless bloated ones in the USA. You also didn’t mention the women.
HBD ideas in Russia is almost completely unknown. The idea of hereditary differences in behavior between different people – this idea in Russia is quite common. Such views appear periodically in scientific work and are common place for the common people. But the Western HBD research in Russia almost completely unknown, IQ is perceived as a fun curiosity.
Ideas which are absolutely unacceptable for the absolute majority of Russian – Nazism and neo-Nazism (in any form). For this reason, “Sputnik and Pogrom” which have a stigma of neo-Nazism site, will never have real success in Russia
“On that topic have you ever had a frank conversation with the average man on the street regarding the future non white world?”
I have, albeit through my wife (Russian). I’ve been over there a few times, and apart from the atrocious peasant food it was very pleasant. More non-whites than in Kiev, but definitely better than London, Paris or the like.
Anyhow, I’ve had varying reactions. Most of the women that I talked to were well aware of the disappearance of whites. They lamented that white people would be extinct soon. Many were extremely hostile to Uzbeks and the like, and they tend to dislike Chinese intensely. My wife, for instance, scowls at both Uzbeks and Chinese when they are seen in Russia.
Never had a bad reaction in bringing that up, but then I am an obvious foreigner who doesn’t speak the language so they might write me off as a crazy person.
The last time I did so was on an overnight train out of a smaller city and into Moscow. The guy in our sleeping quad was headed to London. He asked my wife if I was British, and she said ‘yes, by descent… but he refuses to go on account of the fact that it has been taken over by Pakistanis’. He looked surprised, as he obviously thought it was still an English city. Joke is on him. I muttered a few words about purging them all and went to sleep.
A beautiful article.
Life in Russia is so good I wanna immigrate there immediately.
Problem is that I already live in Russia.
And I can’t really enjoy all the listed benefits.
Farmed salmon is cheaper?
Yay! Great Russian WIN!
Too bad I can’t afford it.
And I feel soooo good that I can buy beetroots and rumex 2 times cheaper than those capitalist.
To bad my earnings are 10 times lower than theirs.
Service and public transportation sections of the article also have little in common with Russian reality.
As well as FREEDOM. Damn you can get a jail sentence for a repost. And don’t forget hordes of mad chechens. The etnical mafia that rules this so-called WHITOPIA. Common Russian can’t say a damn against them.
Please, MISTER Karlin. Invite me to your wondrous fairy Russia. I’m kinda tired of living in the real one.
Yes, definitely. About the influx of migrants to Europe in Russia know well. Migrants are perceived as a definite threat to Europe (which often causes gloating). There is a similar concern for Russia, and there are very common antiimmigrant views. These views, however, are not racial but cultural in nature (migrants evil, not because of race but because of their alien culture)
That’s cute
However, I believe you wouldn’t be that optimistic if you’d actually lived in Russia, though.
Of course, many goods in Russia might be cheap, but wages are also horrendously low. Let’s consider me as an example: I’m working at the scientific university right now and my usual wage is around 150 dollars. Per month. The only thing that saves me is that my parents are helping me out a lot. In other case I would be starving. And of course any goods that are not produced locally, such as any electronic devices are very, very expensive, almost unbearable for common folk.
I’m not trying to accuse you in lie, but your opinion about Russia is heavily based on your experience as an outsider. Again, you wouldn’t be that optimistic if you’d actually lived in Russia.
Not buying that.
That was always the case. White or not, Russophobia has been an issue in the West for a long time.
Isn’t that place overrun by tourists? We’re seeing a trend of wealthy (and often older) Westerners moving en masse to poorer and much more demographically European countries. I know the Portuguese are complaining a lot about property prices (and even more so rent) in their major cities becoming completely unaffordable due to a massive influx of Western expats and pensioners.
Portugal is still quite demographically European and it is cheap. I’m guessing we’ll see the same wrt Croatia, if we aren’t already. It’s a reasonable well-off country, has good climate and is demographically quite homogenous and safe. That in of itself makes it less safe for the zerg rush of Westerners seeking a 2nd home, driving up all the prices and driving down the ideological free climate. EU free movement should end.
I am hearing the same things from my Czech brothers. Prague is like a foreign city to them now, at least the central parts. And it isn’t just in the tourist season. Even in March(!) there are full of tourists and given the Chinese New Year being in the early months of the year, that effect is true in February and end of January as well.
The only good thing about Warsaw being destroyed – and as a consequence being much uglier today than before the war, when it was referred to as the ‘Paris of the East’ – is that it has far lower attraction for tourism. Krakow is not as safe, though, and Krakow is the best city infrastructure-wise in Poland.
The only EE country that has somewhat escaped the hordes is Slovakia and I expect that to remain true for the overseeing future. The Baltics do well as well, at least Latvia and Lithuania. Estonia is rising on this map, too. I think the somewhat colder climate is paradoxically ‘helping’ the Balts here.
We have to stop the Asians pouring in and pushing every increasing urban sprawl here…
He does live in Russia. I think what you – and “Sad Guy” above – are referring to is that he doesn’t earn as a Russian. So that’s why he enjoys the cheap public goods and services but he does so with a much better income stream than the average Russian, which probably skews his perspective at least to some extent.
You need a balance between empiricism and spirituality/philosophy. You can’t base a nation purely on race, even though it is a significant factor.
BTW Anatoly, you sound thoroughly blackpilled. At most of those points, you sort of undermine yourself by turning around and proclaiming that it’s already being undone now anyway. I’m thinking specifically on the internet censorship, cultural SJW:ism and the like.
Though as your thread on when “alt right was banal centrism” showed, you can have overwhelmingly public opposition to poz, but as long as there is a critical mass among elites, it may not matter.
On that topic, I did find it interesting to note that Sweden’s finance minister came out today – and she’s part of the social democratic party – and said that mass migration isn’t working for the country. She didn’t say it in the way Merkel did in 2010 when Merkel slammed multiculturalism. Merkel did it in the context of a debate on the topic and tried to gain political favour from it. This woman did it unchallenged.
That’s also why I think they are trying to push migrants on CEE. They want to spread the disease around, so they can conceal it better from their electorates and as such stay in power longer. If it gets concentrated, then the bad effects of mass third world migration will be much harder to wave away and claim it’s all “right-wing myths”.
From a Russian PoV, if this happens, then it will help in the debate over Russia’s own creeping third worldisation. The West will no longer be able to deflect. The next few years will be critical. If CEE gives in, it will buy them at least a decade or more. If CEE doesn’t give in, not only will the EU see serious strain – potentially fatal – but it will also help in the Russian debate. Though perhaps I am underestimating the sheer extent that Russian liberals are worshipping the West and the length to which they are willing to go to nourish their delusions.
Culture comes from the cult, which is what is considered sacred in a society. Without a sense of the sacred, no discourse can exist through which the understanding of the underlying biological reality can be integrated into the consciousness of the people. In other words, you need the ‘social construct’ to perpetuate the racial substrate and vice versa.
‘What is more convincing’ is yet another optics war. What is actually convincing is the dissemination of our talking points from the commanding heights of the the modern narrative economy. Thus, our task is to produce cadres who can access the levers of power and adjust them according to our analysis of the world .
Polish Perspective, what blackpills me about Poland is nationalists who don’t seem to realize what NATO represents.
You two just happen to post almost at the same time?
$150 dollars? Isn’t the average wage like 700 dollars even after the devaluation (much higher in Moscow). That 150 dollars is totally ridiculous, way below the minimum wage (which should be purely theoretical as well).
Did you actually even read the article? Quote: “The converse of all this is, of course, that Russian salaries are 4-5x lower than in the US. Adjusting for twice lower prices, the average Russian lives 2x poorer than the average American…”
10 times lower my ass. The PPP GDP per capita is 25K, with a very high HDI. Maybe you should read his other articles and wait for part 2 (things that are better in the US).
How many hours do you work per month?
“any electronic devices” – computers, iPhones, iPads? In this case, your statement is just a lie
I think the difference in healthcare access and affordability can’t be over-stated. I had my chest sawed open in a Moscow suburb hospital. Stayed at the hospital for a week recovering. Total cost, including surgery, room and board: about $100 — and that’s because I was a completely uninsured foreigner. Sure, the facilities aren’t sparkling and new, but who cares? American healthcare is such a monumental scam. It’s mind-melting.
Are you a Kiwi?
I couldn’t agree more. Central Otago is not as big as it seems and the narrow valleys where habitation is possible can easily be filled up with houses, but still the South Island only has a population of one million and half of them live in and around Christchurch. I live on the border between Central Otago and Southland and we’re pretty isolated. The nearest town of any size is Invercagill and that is two hours away.
I was hoping Anatoly Karlin would use his local knowledge to recommend a small town/city in Russia where we could spend a few months, but he didn’t reply to my post.
Even worse is what the EU represents.
The cities of the Golden Ring, north of Moscow, are especially lovely in summer: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golden_Ring. They would have been large city states in the middle ages, but are of quite modest size by modern standards. A reasonable thing to look for is a medium sized city near which is an old colony of dachas, where you can rent a house for the summer. That way you can enjoy country life while still having the advantages of a modern town (in particular, access to good groceries, which you can even have delivered). melanf can perhaps comment on small cities near St. Petersburg.
Thank you.
A bazillion other expats already have. 🙂
I am sorry to hear that. Each country has its rich and poor. The Russian average is about 50% that of the average Westerner, as I pointed out (in PPP terms). Some will find themselves far above that level, some below it. However, the trend is positive.
http://ic.pics.livejournal.com/uspehrussia/78398531/438900/438900_900.jpg
As I pointed out, that no longer applies to the Internet.
In fact, few have written more about it in English: http://www.unz.com/akarlin/country-282/
Again, not something that I’m unaware of, or have ever shied from covering. Still doesn’t compare to the sea of niqabs in London (from an aesthetic perspective), nor to the state-sanctioned rape by Pakistani grooming gangs of thousands of British girls (from the more important legal/crime perspective).
I question whether you and Sad Guy actually read my post.
Two salient points:
Most or all of both of your criticisms are actually mentioned in my post.
Anyhow, in response to your points:
I do indeed live in Russia, and have made it explicit that I don’t earn a “Russian” wage.
However, the data I provide is fact-based. If it isn’t, feel free to point out any mistakes, and I will correct it accordingly.
Yes, I explicitly mentioned that wages are low (though buffered by lower prices). I also mentioned that not just here but in many other posts that the discrepancy is particularly large for some categories of workers, such as medical personnel and researchers.
That said, as melanf (a “real” Russian) points out I have trouble believing you earn $150 as a full-time researcher at an accredited institution. From what I know of academia, and I know a lot of people in this sphere, it sounds like you are doing this either very much part-time, or that it is your stipend as a graduate student.
Just a note that I don’t like Russia wasting its money on boondoggles like stadiums and the bridge to Sakhalin and again have said as much over the course of my blogging. I consider the current level of research funding criminally low and would like to see it at least quadrupled. I am not a shill for Putin by any stretch of the imagination, least of all on this question. Ask any longtime reader here – they can confirm.
First, yes, I explicitly said that imported products cost as much as they do overseas. But some things (e.g. some services) are much cheaper than 2x relative to the US (e.g. Internet, education). The PPP adjustment is the average across the product basket. If you dislike their methods, then I am not the person to take it up with, but with people like Rosstat and the IMF.
Second, as melanf again points out, Russia produces plenty of electronics of its own. My electric kettle and power drill/other DIY instruments are Russian made. Even the flat screen TV I got for a relative is Russian made and works as well as a Samsung while being 50% cheaper. The main exceptions are cell phones (though you can nowadays get very competitive Chinese handsets for a tiny fraction of the price of iShit), laptops, and computer components.
I don’t exactly think we need more examples – as I told I think German_reader in another thread, the Russian government is quite happy serving them up themselves on federal TV.
If immigration policy in Russia was to be decided by popular opinion, or at least by politicians not beholden to oligarch (cheap labor) or “geopolitical interests” (we must stabilize Central Asia so that they don’t radicalize/we must not allow the Americans to get Kyrgyzstan – no, seriously, here’s Israel Shamir on this), then we would become like Poland or Hungary in this respect in a matter of weeks. Sure, the Echo of Moscow degenerates will be very, very sad about it, but they are demographically almost irrelevant.
I left borscht out since it’s Ukrainian, but yes, it’s a real treat. (The joke runs that people believe that borscht is Russian, when it’s actually Ukrainian, and that chicken Kiev is Ukrainian, when it was actually invented by a french chef in Saint Petersburg.) I’m glad to hear you eat yours with rye bread. In Kiev, it’s always served with garlic pampushki, which is clearly inferior.
I really love Yaroslavl, though with 800,000 people it might still be too big for you.
Problem is that Russian cities tend to get worse the smaller they get, at least so far as civility, creature comforts, etc. go.
Couple of exceptions that I know of:
Kolomna (150,000) is pretty decent, and only around 120 km from Moscow; has a historic and lovingly preserved city center, and a Kremlin. But like many cities in this class it looks distinctly run down.
Suzdal, with just 10,000 people, is extremely good, modern, etc.; but as one of the key centers of medieval Russia, it is almost entirely tourist-y.
Shop assistants and waiters now tend to be at least as, if not more, courteous than their equivalents in the United States.
Hope some of the dames give you their number.
In Saratov, the minimum wage assessment is about 11,000 Roubles. I pay my remaining staff 25,000 Roubles, about £400 last month. This is very high. They are not tempted to look elsewhere. $150/month for a low level University post doesn’t seem impossibly low.
Kaluga is a fashionable smallish town outside Moscow.
True for a long time. The British drink very strong tea.
Not Kaluga, a moment of inattention there, Tarusa!
I will observe that small business owners were, until 2014, visibly better off than their equivalents in the UK. There are fewer SMEs so the ones that are up and running do well. That said, retail, especially groceries, is consolidating. Big new malls don’t help. Travel agencies have had a tough time too, of course. Builders have had a great time. Car mechanics is very fragmented. New regulations will consolidate back garage operations around registered, qualified mechanics.
One way of splitting GDP is household income, business profits and government revenue. The collapse in GDP after 2014 was mostly at the expense of the government. So far this has been ameliorated by the sovereign wealth funds. However cut backs, e.g. defence, are taking place. Household income will not decline. Russia has a rapidly declining workforce. Labour is short supply so short that either stagnation Japanese style in overall GDP or large scale immigration is inevitable. (Keeping women housebound as mother’s in a booming labour market will be a challenge). Shifting low added value work to China by importing won’t help much as the Chinese face the same problem on an even bigger scale. Hello Vietnam.
I think you should start worry about things to closer to home, as the impending article 7 is used to control Poland, the floodgates into Poland will be opened. Unlike Russia that is getting people from the stans in Central Asia (strictly speaking they are part of the second world immigrants), Poland is going to be getting the true third world, MENA, sub Saharan Africa and the Indian subcontinent.
I would also add, based on my own visit there for a few months in 2015:
-much more high culture, and cheaper to attend (also more traditional folk culture, too). This one was especially noticeable for me, but I guess people who don’t especially care about culture won’t care.
-good grocery shops usually within under-5-minute walking distance (can buy fresh food daily if you want). Don’t need a car to grocery shop.
-apartment houses don’t have connected air ducts (so you’re not forced to smell your neighbour’s cigarettes). They generally do in Canada.
-people are less standoffish, easier to get along with (at least for me)
-kids still commonly play outdoors unattended, like it’s the 1970s
Always the same nonsense, can’t have people earning more, so the only solution is to import millions from the third world and pretend that this does not undermine the nation. I am curious what the end game to all of this is though, so far I have never gotten a response, say Britain has a population of 300 million or so, is the solution still to import ever more people to solve your “wage and pension problem”.
What are the priority when choosing a town, and what time of year you want in the town to live?
Around St. Petersburg as comfortable as possible places are resort towns to the North such as Zelenogorsk
http://yct.spb.ru/wp-content/uploads/2016/03/%D1%84%D0%BE%D0%BD-1.jpg
http://walkday.ru/wp-content/uploads/2015/05/lindulovskaya_08.jpg
http://www.fiesta.city/uploads/slider_image/image/49182/v880_dxthfhfgh.jpg
This settlement on the shore of Finnish Bay, surrounded by forests and lakes, a 40-minute drive from the centre of Saint-Petersburg (regularly train). But of course to New Zealand local nature hopelessly inferior.
But if you want to plunge into the life of the Russian provinces, and to spend a little money – you can choose Novgorod
https://grandgames.net/puzzle/full/velikiy_novgorod.jpg
and Pskov
https://ic.pics.livejournal.com/tivir/70658698/415908/415908_900.jpg
. This is a small historic town not far from St. Petersburg (3 and 6 hours train trip). Life in these towns is poor and cheap
“But of course to New Zealand local nature hopelessly inferior.”
This is a joke, right?
Excellent point – possible to get tickets for as low as $50 at the Bolshoi and $30 at the Mariinsky.
As I recall, I paid $200 to watch Chicago at one of the Broadway theaters.
The folk culture I alluded to in my observation that historical recreation seems to be more prevalent.
One major issue with that: Japan is already fully developed, Russia (and other Eastern European countries ) as well as China are not, so aging population shouldn’t be that huge of a problem for economic growth before (more or less) full convergence.
Apparently poorly expressed thought. I meant – In comparison with New Zealand the nature of the North-West of Russia is hopelessly inferior.
Poland needs these people because not enough are born in Poland and for the sake of making Poland a more normal EUropean country.
Russian productivity growth is deeply unimpressive. Without capital to invest and foreign investment to transfer technology it is likely to stay low.
I was talking specifically about Russian liberals, though. You know them better than I do, but I have a feeling that they don’t take what’s on Federal TV very seriously and probably treat it with contempt, at least if they are like the Polish liberals, and as such would view any such media coverage as “right-wing nonsense” and “corrupt government propaganda”.
You can still visit many European cities, especially in Scandinavia, where you don’t even see all that much diversity. That which exists tends to be very segregated and cordoned off. If the current migration pattern continues for 10 years or so, that won’t be the case. So when Russian liberals will travel abroad in such a scenario, they won’t be able explain it away on “Putinist propaganda” or “right-wing nonsense”. It will be undeniable. Remember that people like you or me are much more sensitised to these issues. They will only (maybe) get it when it’s really long beyond the point of cognition for most.
If CEE gives in to the pressure and accepts being the dumping ground for the Western European immigration policies, they’ll be able to indulge themselves in such talking points for much longer as the impact won’t be shown as quickly, which will hurt you.
True, but the same can be said of the US or Sweden – or at least 20-30 years ago before they were subjected to a heavy and sustained barrage of media propaganda. Key lesson of the West is: the elites matter and not always public opinion. The same lesson was present in your last “when alt right was banal centrism”. Overwhelming public opposition to miscegenation was overcome through an elite consensus.
The supporters of mass migration in the West are not just leftists but also capitalists and the geopolitical types, and the same seems to be true in Russia. Smart fractions matter.
I chuckled, though I know what you mean 😉
I remember ~10 dollar tickets to the Bolshoi when I spent the winter of 1999-2000 there. Eifman’s “Red Giselle” was the best ballet I ever saw.
I could have settled in Moscow in the mid 2000s but was looking at a monthly salary of $250 at a state hospital which meant essentially living off my wife’s rental property which was over ten times that. Have always been envious of those expats who found a way to stay, though most of those seem to be businessmen.
Do people actually believe this nonsense? Art 7 has no realistic binding power in the current political environment because it requires unanimous consent and Hungary has said since forever that they will block any attempt to take away Poland’s voting rights. It’s a toothless tiger.
In fact, to even get to a vote to take away our voting rights, you’d need 22 EU countries agreeing on it first. And even that is now looking unlikely as more and more CEE nations know that they will be next since the EU is no longer pretending that the “one-off” quota is one-off but in fact the first step to permanent relocation. So I fully expect 2018 to be fireworks between CEE and Brussels and this time, it won’t just be Poland or Hungary. Czechia has joined the fight by allowing themselves to be sued and more countries will follow.
I would humbly ask posters to please read up on the geopolitics of the EU before posting nonsense that “EU will doom you” or the usual claptrap that we must exit NATO at once for reasons which are – I assume – totally unrelated to Russia’s geostrategic interests, apparently. Who are you fooling? From where I stand, only yourselves and those who believe in the nonsense already.
BTW Look at the Pew projections of muslims in Europe by 2050. Norway and Switzerland are not part of the EU yet both have more muslims as a percentage of the population than many EU countries. This is projected to stay true by 2050.
Just because Hungary says so it does not mean they will also block it.
Orban can be pressured to support it.
Like Poland, Norway and Switzerland are part of the Shengen “Freedom of Movement” area.
They are wealthier, hence more immigrants, but that is changing.
Я хочу жить в стране не фагготая. Русии мало гогы, впрочем.
Russian productivity performance has been unimpressive because of three reasons. First, the neoliberal looting of the 1990s was an utter disaster in Russia. It was far worse than what any other EE country faced with the possible exception of Ukraine. This meant that a lot of time was spent either just preventing the decline and later catching up to where they started.
The second reason is that Russia has so many natural resources (oil and gas are the most known but it is also true of wheat, timber, iron ore and even fresh water) that it hasn’t needed to rely on industry nearly to the same extent that Visegrad Europe – much poorer in natural resources – have had up until now.
Finally, Russian IQ did suffer as a result of the 1990s, not just because diet took a turn for the worse but also because of emigration. Both of those are now normalising. Fundamentally the way to think about Russia is that this is a country with a (nominal) per capita GDP of around 10,000 USD but has an IQ of around 99 for its native population with potential to go up possibly higher to 100 or even 101. Most such societies have a nominal per capita GDP of 30,000 and up. Thus, Russia should see a steady convergence even after the oil&gas sector loses its importance.
Finally, on aging, it’s important to bust some neoliberal myths on this topic. There’s a great MIT paper which came out on this topic this past year. Even if you are not an economist, as long as you are reasonably intelligent you should be able to understand it. It’s well-worth reading (or at least skimming) to truly get away from the nonsense myth that perpetual population growth is a necessity. There’s in fact quite weak empirical evidence for it.
http://economics.mit.edu/files/12536
Pampushki are good, and I prefer the meat filled ones,but rye bread is what I grew up with in my home when eating borshch. You seem to know some culinary history, so please explain to me why there seemss to be an arbitrary ‘t’ at the end of its spelling? In Ukrainian, Russian or Polish, where it’s eaten the most (thanks for confirming its Ukrainian origins), in the native languages, there’s no ‘t’ on the end? It sounds just plain goofy when prononunced ‘borscht‘.
So, you mean, life as usual!
If things were moving in the wrong direction, you wouldn’t see Czechia join us and allow themselves to be sued by refusing to partake in the relocation. As I said, more will join in 2018 as the EU discards the previous propaganda that it was just a one-off and now explicitly states that they will try for a permanent relocation mechanism. This means all those CEE states which were hiding behind the shoulders of Poland and Hungary will be faced with a choice sooner or later. Czechia understands this too and they made their choice to join us. They won’t be the last.
Finland is also part of Schengen and unlike those two, it is also part of the EU and the eurozone as well. So Finland has achieved maximum integration that you can possibly do. Yet it is more homogenous than Norway. It has less than half of a non-white percentage of the population.
So if we follow your crude logic, namely more EU = more diversity, how does that explain it? And Iceland is also part of Schengen yet it is 99% white. It’s not because it is cold. Average temperatures in their capital is not far off from what you’d get in Oslo. Iceland’s nominal GDP per capita is catching up fast with Norway, too. And has lower unemployment. They just have a stricter immigration policy.
I repeat, it’d be helpful if people with little to no knowledge of the EU refrain from talking nonsense. It would help us all in the long run. The reputation of those who say foolish things and the time and convenience of those who have to read it.
If so, then you were very unlucky in life with the ballet
If you keep hearing it, its because it isn’t nonsense.
Its fundamental to the entire setup of “pay later” pensions and setups, which require an undefined future population to pay for the past. I saw it myself when I spent time in the Nordic states, which have an immense welfare network and despite the notions of it being utopia, essentially ran into this exact same problem of wage structure stagnation. Either immigration(to pay for past obligations), business exodus(businesses exit to cheaper production) or straight up stagnation(to prevent both, increasing government agencies to consume even more resources to block this) is ultimately the result.
Its not wrong to argue that its rather ridiculous to ask for effectively infinitely increasingly population, but its built on the fundamental notion of infinitely increasing obligations of the state(which in a democratic society, will continue to spiral, as its the legal way to “buy votes.”)
Finland is poorer than Norway and one of the most peripheral EU countries.
Iceland is more peripheral than both.
To each his own I guess. I saw it when it was AFAIK new, at the millennium. I watched a ballet about Napoleon in the Kremlin that year. The young soldiers in the audience were impressive – I couldn’t imagine a bunch of American GIs taking their dates to the ballet.
It’s well-worth reading (or at least skimming) to truly get away from the nonsense myth that perpetual population growth is a necessity.
Perpetual population growth is not a necessity. The problem arises when you have 1 grandchild charged with the task of looking after 4 elderly grandparents. Reproduction at replacement rates, wherein succeeding age cohorts are of roughly similar dimensions at birth, is what’s needed (more or less).
Just looked it up – it was from 1997, so not completely new when I saw it. But perhaps it is now stale? My wife was very impressed by it also.
Great article, thank you.
I think you should ask yourself if trying to use the rules of EU to save you matters, the goal is clear, mass immigration into Europe, the EU has broken many rules to get what it wants, I fail to see why it would stop doing so now. It is simply naive for you to think that someone like Merkel is seriously going to abide by rules or voting rights.
And I am not Russian btw.
please explain to me why there seemss to be an arbitrary ‘t’ at the end of its spelling? In Ukrainian, Russian or Polish, where it’s eaten the most (thanks for confirming its Ukrainian origins), in the native languages, there’s no ‘t’ on the end? It sounds just plain goofy when prononunced ‘borscht‘.
It’s from the Yiddish pronunciation, I believe (באָרשט).
You are an idiot with an inferiority complex toward Westerners. Like many Russians. Which is why they walk all over you – in everything from politics, to economic sanctions, to threats of war, to demonizing in media, to Olympic bans.
Aren’t they the ones that gave the world Manischewitz Borscht? YECH! 🙁
I’m by no means an expert on these things, but I remember reading somewhere that the Swedish transcription of щ, sjtj, reflects the old Russian pronunciation. I would guess that this is also true of the English transcription, only that English transcribed it as scht in the past and has retained that spelling in some common words. So:
щи = shchi (eng.) = sjtji (swe.)
борщ = borscht (eng.) = borsjtj (swe.)
Here’s Wikipedia throwing some more light on the matter:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shcha
“I meant – In comparison with New Zealand the nature of the North-West of Russia is
hopelessly inferior”
So, it’s not a joke, after all.
A word of advice, if I may: please, do not ever use words like “inferior” not to mention “hopelessly inferior” when describing your home.
It reveals a deep seated “inferiority complex”.
Just take a look at the Middle East where various people fight “tooth and nail” over a far more “inferior” landscapes so that they can just call it home.
I think Karlin should include more articles of the travelogue variety to his blog, and cut down on the ‘futuristic IQ racist’ ones. He seems to get a far better response to articles such as this one, and definitely shows an impressive writing flair in this arena too. I’d rate this as one of his more sumptuous posts!
Up to a point. In the last few years the hordes have started to show up in Bratislava. They come on day-trip boats from Vienna, and on endless cheap buses run by Balkan ‘entrepreneurs’. As always a big issue are also the local business people who will greedily sell anything, future be damned. One can see the Asian ‘tourists‘ literally casing the surroundings for any opportunity to move in. Hungry eyes, desperate faces, looking for a way out of their Third World misery.
Prague went through this 15-20 years ago. But outside of big cities, the traditional European life goes on. Except in a few spa and mountain resort towns. But my guess would be 50-50 which way this is going in the next 10-20 years (in other words, I don’t know :)…
South Asia and sub-Saharan Africa both have over a billion desperate people ready to move – Merkel, Macron and Juncker say they need ‘new homes’ in EU. And they know better than some mere mortals.
Belarus is partially less corrupt because of its better demographics.
But, not liking ‘bryndza’ is a faux pas that I cannot forgive. Fresh bryndza cheese (with ‘n’ in the middle) is substantially better than most feta cheeses. And a lot more healthy. Where does Russia get its bryndza now with sanctions on EU food? To make quality bryndza one needs tall mountains and wet meadows, so it could be a geography issue. Or, maybe Russia has a shortage of loving bryndza-producing ‘bacas’.
You really have nailed this ****. He should be sent back to The Economist where he belongs.
Red beets are a relative newcomer to diets of Russia, Ukraine and Poland. Various chards related to beets were known but red beets as root vegetables were introduces in 18-19 century. BORSCHT is a wider category of soups and stews that not necessarily included red beets. In Poland there is white borscht soup that is made form fermented wheat flour which is similar to zurek that is made from fermented rye flour. There is a wide family of weeds heracleum sphondylium (cow parsnip) that used to be a part of diet in central Europe before more roots vegetables and potatoes (as well as topinambour) were introduced. Some of those weeds had common folk names from which the word BORSCHT or BARSZCZ in Polish is derived. Thus the connotation that BORSCHT should be red because it contains red beets is relatively recent (19 c.).
What Ukrainians, Russians and Poles ate before the discovery of America: no potatoes, no zucchini (kabachki), no sun flowers, no peppers, no tomatoes, no pumpkins, no melons (except water melon) and no beans? Yes, there was no beans in Europe. The only legumes were peas, lentils, chick peas, lupine beans and fava beans.
I think that you have complexes. North of Petersburg is a great wild lands, but (unlike New Zealand) there is no subtropical climate, evergreen forests, warm ocean, mountains, volcanoes, hot springs, geysers, unique chicken fauna, etc. For this, as a resort, the shore of Finnish Bay loses to New Zealand shores
My assertions are incorrect?
By the way, the wild around St. Petersburg hopelessly inferior to the wild of Tanzania (Serengeti). Tell me doctor, I have an inferiority complex to African blacks?
On the other hand with regard to palaces, cathedrals and museums, New Zealand is hopelessly inferior to Saint Petersburg. I have an superiority complex ?
In Russia there are places where nature is not less interesting than in New Zealand. This Is Kamchatka
https://imgur.com/a/p1MeX
https://sdelanounas.ru/blogs/89168/
Kuril Islands
http://novayagazeta-vlad.ru/uploads/news/2015/08/14/e7ce460d3dcfce7602267aa5183a501f.jpg
http://www.surfholidays.ru/upload/medialibrary/d9f/surfing_russia_kuril_iturup_©taniaelisarieva_33.jpg
Wrangel Island
http://ic.pics.livejournal.com/danaviira/73963546/21784/21784_900.jpg
http://meros.org/uploads/gallery/c2/d6/3d/c29d633d79932a490d5aebf20ebc3bdd.jpeg
etc. But not the coast of Finnish Gulf
Answered in the message 104. If in this case, the problem in some features of the language then sorry. English I know badly
Also, a question about everyday economics, both to Anatoly Karlin and to the other Russian locals who’ve commented…
The last time I visited, I got the impression that although many things (except perhaps food) were comparatively more expensive considering local salaries, by two or more times, the BIG cost-items (rent/mortgage+ utilities, healthcare) were MUCH cheaper than they were in Canada. So in the end, perhaps it balances out? In Toronto, for example, standard monthly rent is $900 at least, for the smallest studio apartment, and it’s usually more.
When the USSR collapsed everybody fully owned the places where they happened to be living, so no mortgages or rent. Of course, that was almost 30 years ago. People who don’t inherit places to live from parents or grandparents have to buy or rent of course. Prior to 2014 events, Moscow real estate was very expensive.
You can readily get bryndza in Ukraine. Milk, be it from sheep, goats and increasingly more from cows is first procesed into what is known as budz. The budz is consumed much like farmers cheeze in the West. Budz is layered into wooden barrels, salted and then aged until it becomes bryndza. It’s very popular throughout Eastern Europe and is its equivalent for feta cheeze – I don’t really understand the differences? One difference that you can’t avoid noticing is that bryndza is a much more pungent smelling cheeze than feta…
In Saint Petersburg rent of one-room apartment is about 20 000 rubles per month. The median salary -38 000 rubles.
I think sheep bryndza is by far the best. There is also a seasonal element to it, late spring bryndza has the most pungent taste. Bryndza is smoother than feta, creamier, and has a wide variety of tastes. In Slovak mountains people put it on everything, they even drink the watery residue (‘zincica’) as a health drink.
Bryndza is very perishable, I think feta people have figured out how to preserve it better. With bryndza some producers load it up with salt to preserve it and that ruins it. As with most food items, bryndza is by far the best when totally fresh.
In post-devaluation Moscow, an apartment studio in an unprestigious suburb is around 25,000 rubles ($400) and around 60,000 rubles ($1,000) in the most prestigious central parts.
Healthcare is indeed cheap, but the main problem is that you get what you pay for – many complex, very expensive procedures are simply unavailable to ordinary people.
This makes sense, obviously I only have access to the supermarket versions of bryndza.
Thank you.
Thank you
That’s because you are, having a luxury to live in Moscow rent-free (thanks to the legacy of the USSR), lacking basic awareness of the situation in the housing market.
The moment you have to pay for a two bedroom that does not require over one hour commute, you’d realize that, proportionally to the median income, Moscow is as expensive as S-F Bay area.
Not even close. $120K a year would be somewhere in the bottom 5%. Anesthesiologists are well-paid, more than most doctors. $250K median would be much closer to reality. (Of course, they also bear higher burden of insurance policies).
@ak:
having the usual holiday debates, the following accusations versus russia got thrown around: “its a putin dictatorship without free elections, without free media (i.e. all media is controlled by putin, tv shows only pro putin viewpoints) and where any opponent of putin is directly put in jail or eliminated”
what is your take on this?
False. Pickles in Russia are not fermented. True that they don’t have as much vinegar. It’s just that the acid is being substituted for salt as a preservative. E.g., both cucumbers and mushrooms (соленые огурцы/грибы).
In 2009 I lived for a time in a small (3000 people) village in the far northwest. The internet there was substantially faster and cheaper than what I previously had living in New Orleans, presumably because it was much newer.
Anatoly, concerning freedom in the area of weapons, how are things concerning your acquirement of a shotgun? For those not in the know, when one is a citizen, this is quite easy with most paperwork being done electronically.
I regularly get boneless, skinless cuts of chicken in СПБ for 200 rubles/kg. Such expensive turkey must be for rich москалей)).
No way it is true. What you are citing is % of owners of any land outside the city. Which is in most cases just a vegetable patch. Among those, the dachas with a livable house are about 25% and no more than 10% are suitable for all-season living.
You really have a very skewed impression of who Muscovites are.
God bless Russia for my 20+GB library of stolen books.
I am disappointed that the author considers Internet piracy a good. Not long ago, using my modest savings, I founded a one-person music production company and produced an album, at a cost of tens of thousands of dollars. Only a few weeks ago, a Russian musician advised me not to offer an MP3 download of the album for sale, on the grounds that it will be readily posted online. I find the author’s remarks in reply to a comment, such as ‘you have the whining about it being “stealing” [sic],’ ‘Libcucks pay Western corporations,’ and ‘ worship of “sanctity of property rights”,‘ worthy of utter contempt.
Regarding why Moscow was rated as “expensive”, one common reason for misleading ratings is that they are based on an identical basket of goods normally consumed by travellers—those snacks at Sheremetyevo, cabs, hotels, &c.
One interesting discrepancy happened with Paris. In one survey, a cab from Charles de Gaulle airport cost 100+ EUR, but the airport also has a subway station and you can commute for only a few euros if you choose that option.
When I first bought my tiny cottage in the Bay Area, an Estonian couple lived in one of the other cottages. They were heavy partiers and always had a lot of Estonian expats around. Their female friends were just gorgeous. During one of the parties, I asked an Estonian guy, “Do you ever get used to the stunning beauty of your women?”
“No, he replied. That is why we all want to go back to Estonia”.
i am a kiwi.
Our elites plan to turn us into Singapore – a multicultural Asian nation with an authoritarian government (to manage Diversity) utterly controlled on the one hand by global oligarchs and on the other by far left scum who want to destroy ever last shred of what used to make us who we are.
shut up you poncing moralfag
or working less (industrial revolution, home appliances revolution)
PS I’m not saying this is desirable, only that every time “they” said that soon people won’t know what to do with all the free time they have, it was eaten up by something else
It seems that you are using the term “liberal” in two ways. For the West, you seem to use the term “liberal” to mean leftist; for Russia, you seem to use the term “liberal” to mean Thatcherite. So, there really is no paradox.
In the UK this is what you get if you click on: http://gen.lib.rus.ec/
“Access to the websites listed on this page has been blocked pursuant to orders of the high court.
More information can be found at http://www.ukispcourtorders.co.uk “
Where I live nature provides us a connection to Wrangel Island; this is where the Snow Geese of Wrangel Island come to winter. Along the coast of Puget Sound, about 50 to 70 miles (100 or so km) northwest of Seattle, Concentrating on Fir Island, an island of the delta of the Skagit River where it empties into the Sound.
Amazingly, the snow geese seem not to care about Russiaphobia, Putin, or human politics in general.
pfft, typical anatids.
/s
I think you’re being harsh. I don’t think melanf has an inferiority complex towards Westerners in general, just New Zealanders which is natural and normal.
When Australians talk about New Zealand, the cultural cringe is just embarrassing.
When asked abut Kiwis living in Australia, out prime minister wisely said that he supported it as it raises the IQ of both nations.
Yes, the language barrier would probably prove insurmountable for me, at my age. I’d love to live in Russia for a year or so, for the experience, though.
Those hostile populations you mention can’t even exist without being heavily subsidized. as long as Russia never pays the invaders to come in, they will never become a problem.
“oily and offensively demeaning scribbles of Matt Taibbi, Mark Ames and Yasha Levine of ‘The Exile’ (apparently still around as ‘ExiledOnline’)”
What a group of ninnies. I live in hope of seeing Matt get his ass whipped someday.
All good points about “farmed” salmon. I recently learned that the sewage raised salmon has to be dyed orange, because the flesh is actually gray, due to the fact that the fish don’t feed on shrimp and other naturally preferred food sources that they would eat in the wild.
The article gives examples with links
http://russia-insider.com/en/press-freedom-russia-putin-dog/ri21544
So true
In comparison with New Zealand the nature near Saint Petersburg loses
http://reserves-park.ru/images/stories/parki5/egmont.jpg
http://yuriy-photo.narod.ru/karelskiyperesheek2002/target/01_pukhtolovagora/2002_05_26-125236.jpg
On the other hand with regard to palaces, cathedrals and museums, New Zealand loses to Saint Petersburg.
http://st.gde-fon.com/wallpapers_original/634985_auckland_new-zealand_gorod_3781x2288_www.Gde-Fon.com.jpg
http://files2.ostagram.ru/uploads/content/image/1125278/img_c1820314bf.jpg
I did live in Russia for a little over a year. It is, in many ways, quite a nice place–Anatoly’s right. But the language is difficult, unless you have prior experience with it, or are just naturally gifted. I found that I was making such slow progress that I gave up after about a year (I’m 63). We learned most ex-pats last 2 or 3 years tops in Russia.
The Moscow climate is also surprisingly dreary. Not bitterly cold, usually, but lots of overcast days with some rain or snow. Southern Russia might be different.
Sorry, that was my bad attempt at humour. I am a massive Russophile and have been ever since I took the Transsiberian Railway back in 1987. Even when held back by communism, Russia had a huge amount to offer and I would really like to go back and spend a reasonable amount of time there.
(also replying to melanf and Anatoly Karlin)
Hm, so in other words, sucks to be you if you actually have to pay for rent, but most people own their own places, and therefore that’s only an issue for a minority of mostly “newcomers”?
Any idea how large that minority is? What about the majority of people who own their own places, how much do they have to pay each month in household-related costs (utilities, maintenance)?
I was talking to somebody in Voronezh when I was there, and remember being astonished at how little he paid for household-related costs as a percentage of his income. (unfortunately, I’ve forgotten the figures now… though I might find them somewhere if I look hard enough)
That’s a completely false understanding of Russia’s media landscape. The people who told you that have no first hand experience – it sounds like they still think it’s the Stalin era there.
What they forget is that THAT version of propaganda failed BADLY (remember, how the USSR collapsed?). Russia’s leaders KNOW that it failed badly. Therefore, they’re now trying a rather different approach. Mainly: giving lots of air time to the opposing viewpoints. Pro-US, pro-EU and pro-Ukrainian speakers are allowed on air every evening on the Russian talk shows. A few articles about how it works:
http://russia-insider.com/en/politics/demonizing-russian-media/ri17802
https://thesaker.is/re-visiting-russian-counter-propaganda-methods/
All the Russian state media has to do is to translate for Russians the offensive nonsense that is said about their country in the West (and such nonsense isn’t hard to find, because most Western Russia analysts are paid to say bullsh*t about Russia to people who have no first-hand experience to call them out on it). The more they do that, the more Russians start to dislike and distrust the West. That’s what sites like Inosmi have been doing. That’s why even the local pro-West anti-Putin people are now begging the Westerners to dial it down a little.
There is still a significant minority that receives money for renting apartments. Because this business is for the most part is hidden (so as not to pay taxes), accurate data is difficult to call.
I pay about 6 000 rubles (per month) for a three bedroom apartment (Saint Petersburg)
Actually, even that is on the lower end. A large healthcare system with which I am intimately familiar pays $250K per year for part-time anesthesiologists. Full-time, call-taking ones are paid $300-450K per year. For those in pain management, sky is the limit ($500K and up) unless the payer mix is bad (high Medicare/Medicaid patients), in which case the compensation will be quite poor and may even be a net loss for the facility.
And these are employee-physicians. In the “good old days” when physicians owned their own practices as partners or shareholders, income was even higher for well-run practices situated in lucrative markets (affluent areas with good payer mixes). Of course, those days are long gone for most young doctors.
Anesthesia used to incur extremely high liability costs, it being just about the only specialty in which one could kill a healthy patient within minutes, perhaps even seconds. But anesthesia as a discipline has engaged in aggressive risk management practices (“defensive medicine”) in the past 10 years, and the liability costs have tumbled down dramatically.
“Moscow Metro in 2033” – no, its from a Russian Game, called “METRO 2033”
To an extent, but not really.
Intelligent, progressively minded people in general tend to disparage copyright law in the West, but respect it in Russia.
Get a VPN.
UK is weak on Internet rights too.
The New Zealanders that I’ve known didn’t seem to be that near-divine at all. In fact they were quite pedestrian sorts.
Nice try at some Christmas humor though!
… hmmmm …
Get away from supermarkets. Take a trip to Tatras and enjoy the local bryndza – late spring is the best time.
This would probably be a very good read as well (although some points are outdated, but still):
http://www.unz.com/akarlin/top-50-russophobe-myths/
The “pro-Western liberals” (and journalists) have probably always been safer per capita than the general population and their actual popularity and influence is very low. They are not the actual “main” opposition or challenge to the Russian establishment and most so-called “Putin critics” are very much alive.
Your friends/family (?) are some real experts on Russia (/s). Sad!
I have just happened to be reading Russophobia by Shafarevich which I strongly recommend. It is not dated.
I don’t see any need to apologize. You might have chosen “the quality of natural landscapes”, for example, instead of your simple “nature”, just for those of slow comprehension (many monolingual English speakers) but the meaning of your phrase was crystal clear to me from the beginning. I have no idea what those two are nitpicking about and would advise to totally ignore them.
On the other hand, I have been to both the Gulf of Finland north of SPB and to Patagonia (very similar to South NZ) and yes, I get your point and agree with it.
I can make myself understood in Russian. The inflections are not as bad at the stress that moves around all over the place. Take the word golovA meaning ‘head’. The declension is just sadistic.
Nominative golovA
Accusative gOlovu
Genitive golovY
Dative golovE
Instrumental golovOI
Locative golovE
In the plural gOlovy gOlovy golOv golovAm golovAmi golovAkh
In an act of pure sadism to foreign learners , they also insist on inflecting numerals.
I find Bulgaria is a great place to learn Russian. The older generation often speaks it well and they tend to speak more slowly and clearly than Russians and in full sentences. Also they avoid the incredible crude slang some Russians use.
Now that the real experts have spoken, I’ll offer two humble suggestions that, in my view, should appeal to someone who is happy living in the South of NZ but note that, unfortunately, I still have not been to any of them.
Somewhere around Sochi, possibly some small resort on the coast to its North. You get a combination of warm sea, forests and the Caucasus Mountains with the conveniences of a big city nearby.
Barnaul. Medium size city in the most human-friendly part of Siberia (plenty of agricultural activity). Close to the breath-taking Altai Mountains and to the vast Siberian expanses of forests and lakes. Not far from Mongolia and China through the spectacular Chuya Highway.
What’s “hmmmm”?
For comparison the cost of renting a prestigious place in Beijing is higher. In the centrally located Sanlitun neighborhood which has the main bar street in the city, a studio apartment costs about 8000-9000 RMB ($1216-1368).
I find Bulgaria is a great place to learn Russian.
How can they speak good Russian if Bulgarian language has no declension? Perhaps it is the only Slavic language w/o a declension.
OT:
Not up on all the nitpickery of Constitutional Law but shouldn’t counsel have been appointed before he/she surrendered? So he/she could consider his/her options? How can we be sure the so-called surrender was knowing and voluntary?
Thank Allah we have Feral Judges willing to stand up to Trump, else we would literally be living in Nazi Germany.
It’s OK – most native Russian speakers these days can’t properly inflect numerals either. In fact, chances are good that even Anatoly frequently makes mistakes in the more complex cases. Things like “пятью тысячами восьмистами шестьюдесятью тремя” are becoming a forgotten art to say.
I took it to mean, “hmmm, i wonder if it’s too late for me to switch fields….”
I know I was thinking, “maybe I’ll encourage our kids to study that if they have the aptitude. Part-time?? What a wonderful life.”
“Perhaps it is the only Slavic language w/o a declension.”
No, it’s not.
Exactly. Europe needs 2-3 fertility rate. 1 or 1.5 is too little.
And of course no one is saying we need 7 kids like Africa.
“No, it’s not” that Bulgarian has declension or “No, it’s not” that other Slavic language than Bulgarian has no declension?
It’s not the only Slavic language without declension.
Read Polish Perspective’s link again. The study argues that such imbalances, historically (1990-2015), may have been offset by greater investments in automation. They find a mild positive correlation between aging populations and GDP growth and a strong positive correlation between aging populations and the adoption of automation.
http://economics.mit.edu/files/12536
Indeed, but the solution here is to tackle the source problem, not to import millions of low-productivity workers.
You may well be right, but I’m with Polish Perspective on this one. I get the sense that Europe’s elites have started to budge on this question, partly out of fear of right-wing movements and partly because immigration problems are discussed far more openly than in the past. In Sweden, for instance, even left-wing politicians have started addressing the fact that antisemitism and extreme expressions of misogyny are mostly found among immigrants. This would have been unheard of even three years ago.
I also believe that the countries of eastern Europe stand a good chance of winning the dispute over the migrant quotas. From what I hear, they seem to have EU law on their side — so long as they keep each other’s backs — and they enjoy broad support from common people in other EU countries, which would put even more pressure on the elites. The presence of Trump may also help their cause.
Serbia.
Based on my childhood memories – very nice place is the town of Alupka in Crimea. This town is between mountains and the sea appeared around the most beautiful castle in Russia.
http://ruotpusk.ru/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/2-43.jpg
http://crimeaplus.ru/wp-content/uploads/2014/09/wpid-voroncovskiy-dvorec-v-alupke_i_2.jpg
http://travelliving.ru/_bd/5/72179996.jpg
http://70.r.photoshare.ru/00705/006ba3fe41c70f83cd5d6ad04ee2156384e53156.jpg
And Crimea is a place where many natural and architectural attractions are concentrated close to each other, they can be viewed during a short break from Alupka
The study argues that such imbalances, historically (1990-2015), may have been offset by greater investments in automation.
I’ve heard libertarian technophiles talk like that. I doubt one of them has ever encountered real eldercare issues. There is no substitute for your children.
I had a four-day hospital stay in Los Angeles nearly a year ago. No surgery, no experimental or unusual drugs or treatments. The bill was over forty two thousand dollars.
My employer provided medical insurance ended up covering almost all of it, after a modest deductible.
BUT:
(1) a large and I think increasing number of people don’t have employers provided medical insurance (admittedly, some millions of US residents don’t have it because they are here illegally and/or because they work off the books (and don’t pay taxes, another problem), but tens of millions of people work full-time and don’t have it through their work)
(2) although the Med insurance covered almost everything, the absurdly high bill leads directly to higher premiums for our family and everyone else on our plan;
(3) the huge amount paid to the hospital did very little to provide jobs for actual core Americans, yes meaning European-Americans, as almost all of the orderlies / aides / LPNs and even the RNs and MDs were foreigners. One of the two MDs was a white American and the other was a disinterested Indian prick who obviously didn’t care and checked his phone while speaking with me for two minutes and then billing bigtime. One RN was a white American, one Vietnamese. One aide was a typically surly black American, and the other staff with whom I had contact were two Nigerians and a bunch of filipinas.
The Nigerian guy I saw the most was quite friendly and funny and we enjoyed ourselves, but the point is that every one of these jobs could and should have gone to Americans born and raised here to parents and grandparents born and raised here. EuropeanAmericans ought to be training for these needed jobs rather than all believing that they can be lawyers, actors or singers, video game animators or coders, social quote workers and diversity officers and HR directors and other bureaucrats, and other fields that result in people working at starbucks and retail stores and bitching about the unfair system and capitalism. Asshole quote guidance counselors and unrealistic parents ae doing these young people a disservice. They should and readily could be making a living doing all the jobs that this SWARM of foreigners did at the hospital where I stayed.
This medical system is sick and also contributing to our impoverishment and our demographic replacement. These people never should have gotten H1Bs to come here. Pay enough and Americans will do the jobs. (Deport millions of illegal aliens and their broods, and stop making taxpayers cover the care of noncitizens legal or illegal, and we’d have plenty of money to pay salaries high enough to attract EuropeanAmericans aka Americans.)
the stresses are also somewhat ambiguous. is it кра́лась or крала́сь (she crept), звоня́т or зво́нят (they ring)? both variants feel correct, but only one is. I think many people wouldn’t know without looking it up (it’s the first.) there’s nothing compared to that mess for example in German.
to be clear, I’m not saying this is incompetence or whatever. I think ambiguities like this are usually indicative of some historical process of language change (maybe change from stress to length) that we just happen to be in the middle of.
…which would also mean it may be happening in other Slavic languages and whatsmore each language is in a different phase of it (some where it just started, some where it’s near completion.) In the latter case it would be amusing to identify it because that’s how Russian might sound once, too.
This is surprisingly common. Probably even above 50% among Indians and Pakistani. They just don’t give a damn so much of the time. I say “surprisingly” because the rates are very obviously lower in MDs of other ethnicities. Doctor-wise, most of the time you’d be better off with a Latino than Indian. Although, alas, blacks are the worst on average simply because so many of them are relatively incompetent.
Good points, USSR Andy. The question is, if you stress a word differently, does it change its meaning? I don’t know Russian, but I know Serbian, where similar issues exist. In most cases, if you change how you stress a word it may sound funny, but people will understand you.
Also when I say “sound funny”, it doesn’t necessarily mean wrong. Different regions have different accents, so what sounds funny to a big city speaker may sound perfectly normal to a speaker from a more distant province; that’s just how they speak in that province.
There are not that many words, in relative terms, where changing the stress would change the meaning altogether, so remembering those specifically isn’t that much of a burden.
I agree with most others here that, if you come from a language without grammatical cases (падежи, also referred to as “declensions” and “inflections” on this thread), it is hard to get to the stage where using them becomes natural. I tried learning Russian a bit (in the U.S. where I live), and while grammatical cases come natural to me, the extremely confusing part was that Russian dative ends like a Serbian genitive, and Russian genitive ends like a Serbian dative (speaking from memory, don’t quote me), and I could never get that right. When something is so similar to make it look easy, but just different enough to throw you off, it makes it difficult to master. It felt easier learning Italian or Spanish, no prior knowledge to mislead me.
Your doubt is understandable, but healthcare is one area where automation promises to be particularly effective (in most advanced economies, nurses and other healthcare professionals are burdened with large amounts of repetitive administrative tasks). The technology is already in place, so expect to see huge improvements on this front in the coming years.
Thanks – not surprised, after the devaluation and continued price growth in China.
I remember the good old days (half a decade ago?) when it was $500 in Beijing/Shanghai and $200 in the “smaller” (<5 million) regional cities.
There are words that change meaning, and not too few either. Some may just change case and number but remain the same basic word. I could think offhand only of больши́е (big ones) – бо́льшие (bigger ones), but there are more: http://accentonline.ru/homograph.html
though many are a tad artificial and can’t be a source of confusion even if stressed on the wrong syllable, for example because they’re different parts of speech (a noun and a verb.) A funny one:
бе́лки (squirrels) – белки́ (eggwhites/proteins)
Also many issues due to the letter ё not being a “first-class citizen”, but this is a problem only in written language.
The one thing that has always annoyed me about nationalists..
Nationalism has been a recurring facet of civilizations since ancient times, though the modern sense of national political autonomy and self-determination was formalized in the late 18th century.
My take in ‘Nationalism’ is that you love your country, and want your country to remain so, enjoying what your nation (country) has created or become throughout its history. No a day when you profess such feelings, you are called names, and anti some one or something.
Every man who loves peace, every man who loves his country, every man who loves liberty, ought to have it ever before his eyes, that he may cherish in his heart a due attachment to the Union of America, and be able to set a due value on the means of preserving it.
(in most advanced economies, nurses and other healthcare professionals are burdened with large amounts of repetitive administrative tasks).
They weren’t in 1950. The repetitive administrative tasks are a consequence of compliance people having taken over the world.
It’s not the only Slavic language without declension.
Which Slavic languages have no declension?
New Zealand is so isolated, limited, and generally boring after gazing at the natural beauty. Wonderful place to visit, and thank God that there are still some places that are relatively uncrowded, quiet, and unspoiled. (With mass immigration, we are importing noise, air pollution, crowds, and generally a less healthy, less peaceful way of life.)
But for our purposes, despite the admittedly major factor of the bitter cold, someplace more affordable near Moscow or Saint Petersburg would Be way more enjoyable. Some of the finest symphony orchestras, choirs, ballet, professional hockey, and architecture in the world.
Moreover, to our minds, Maori “culture” is only briefly interesting for the sake of novelty and seeing a different corner of the world, and has little to recommend it. About 15-16%percent of the NZ population is Maori, and they enrich the community with their drastically higher rates of violent crime and property crime, gang membership, lower intelligence, abandonment of their children and children’s mothers, uncivilized behavior, repulsive appearance, and slothfulness. They are the Africans of NZ. At such a substantial portion of the population, Maoris alone give Russia the edge.
They look beautiful. But how many months are brutal winter?
I’d like more of both types of article from Anatoly. One of my writers on unz or anywhere. And I’d be glad to catch dinner with him when I finally take the family to Moscow and SPB someday.
Please, have four kids each and send one per family to join us here in the USA. We need them.
Some great points. But I seriously doubt that the average person in Germany supports common sense and the right of any European people to maintain their countries and their cultures. Other euro countries, maybe.
Exactly right. European peoples everywhere need to have many more children, and there is no substitute for our own children economically, culturally, spiritually, emotionally, or morally.
Novgorod, Pskov and St. Petersburg all have milder winters than, e.g., Chicago. Not as hot during summers, too.
As some one who actually lives in New Zealand, I have to admit there is some truth in what you say.
However, I would add:
1). Maori are responsible for a hugely disproportional amount of crime, but there are large areas of the country where there are not that many of them and the people who claim to be Maori are barely so. The places you want to avoid are East Cape, Porirua, South Auckland and Gisborne. There all on the North Island and I rarely go there.
One or two small towns like Kaingaroa and Dannevirke up north also have a bad reputation. Taupo, on the other hand, is close to paradise.
The only places of the South Island I would definitely avoid are Mataura and a part of Timaru.
Also they may be the African-Americans of New Zealand, but they are usually a great deal better than the equivalent minorities in a lot of other societies. I have walked through these areas at night. I wouldn’t do that in England.
2). In sports and science, New Zealand massively punches above its weight. It has a high smart fraction with almost as many gifted people as Brazil.
New Zealand leads the world in several areas of research such as geothermal energy and often comes top in the per-capital medals table in the Olympics (ie it’s not just rugby)
3). For a small country in the middle of nowhere, it actually has a good cultural life. Maori culture lacks the depth of the Russian opera, but there is plenty of European culture available to those who want it.
Virtually nowhere else on earth has the cultural life of Moscow or St. Petersburg.
4). I have PhD in Asian history and a degree in geology. I am educated to a fault, but I do not find life in a very isolated town to be boring. The education system here has been ruined by PC, but rural New Zealand has very, very good PISA scores.
In so far as it really impacts the quality of life here, I would list the following.
1). Foul language. Some people use the f-word like commas and full stops.
2). Pressure to conform. This can lead to pressure to conform down and behave like the worst elements in society. Kiwis recognise this failing in themselves and fall it the Tall Poppy Syndrome.
3). Aircraft noise. A lot of people like to fly small aircraft. It really ruins some of the county’s best scenery.
4). Binge-drinking.
I have a shopping bag in my house with the logo:
от любов към българия (Ot liubov km Bulgaria)
It means “for the love of Bulgaria” and is practically the same as Russian except that the preposition ot requires a following noun to be in the genitive. Hence, liubov becomes libvi. Km (k in Russian) requires a following noun to be in the dative. So Bulgaria becomes Bulgarii. These noun declensions no longer exist in Bulgarian, but Bulgarian students of Russian do not find hem too difficult to learn.
Bulgarian verbs are just as heavily inflected as Russian ones. Also, in common with Greek, Bulgarian lacks an infinitive, so every verb has to have an ending.
When Simpleguest says thet Bulgarian is the not the only Slavic language to have dropped its noun endings, I think he is referring to Macedonian.
Macedonian and Bulgarian are almost the same language.
Precisely, But, you could say the same for all Slavic languages.
That they are almost the same, that is.
Thank you for the additional info and honest assessment. The strong sense of envy and resentment of achievement or eccentricity, would be rankling to me. That’s also more present in my country, the USA, more than it used to be, but perhaps not as much as NZ, Sweden, and the like.
Hey, I love my USA, and its trajectory before the recent engineered Third World transformation, was impressive and promising overall. But now it is dysfunctional and annoying in many ways too, in our core white population and more so in several of its other populations.
And I’d love to spend more time in your country and hope you aren’t offended. My tentative preference for the best parts of Russia doesn’t mean that your homeland doesn’t have much to offer for residents and for potential retirees from elsewhere.
NZ would presumably compare favorably to much of Russia and to much of the increasingly Mexican, poor, uneducated, dirty, depressing, unfriendly USA.
I do not blame you guys for the Maoris except to the extent that you should have gradually winnowed down their population long ago. And should be employing voluntary sterilization to reduce their procreation. And should encourage both armed citizen response and the death penalty to eliminate their most aggressive and violent members.
Similar criticism applies to our failure to take much more forceful individual and collective defensive & retributive measures against Africans here in America. (Better if nobody had engaged in the evil of slavery in North America and had never brought their ancestors here in the first place, a big difference from the maoris, who were already there.)
In any event, I hope to have the privilege of a return trip to NZ, and several trips to Russia with my wife and children, before I shuffle off this mortal coil. Merry Christmas to our Kiwi cousins and Russian cousins alike.
Moscow’s dreary climate is one reason why someone
I know indirectly decided to move to Warsaw. She is
about 20, was born and raised in Moscow but has some
Polish ancestry. Between Moscow and St. Petersburg she
prefers the latter. Here are some of the reasons why she
(and her brother) moved to Poland:
in Moscow. One look at the nearly vertical isotherms and
one can see why the climate in Europe generally deteriorates
as one goes east. Thus France has a better climate than Germany,
Germany better than Poland, and Poland better than Russia;
She says people in Moscow are sad and overworked. She is
a good-looking and spirited girl, and says this was beginning
to affect her;
Moscow is far from the great centers of the European
civilization. She likes to visit Italy or France on the spur
of the moment, and this is much easier from Poland than
from Russia;
She is vegetarian, a runner, and likes to be close to nature. In
Moscow due to its enormous size she says she was always surrounded
by asphalt and concrete, whereas in Warsaw you’re never far
from nature (due to the population ratio: 3 million in Warsaw vs
12 million in Moscow).
She’s a university student, and so far seems very happy.
As a Russian speaker she says she found Polish very easy
to learn. Her parents are still in Moscow. I don’t know
what they think of their daughter’s “crazy” idea
In a truly great city such as Moscow (or even Chicago) climate doesn’t matter much. Theaters, concerts, museums, etc. make the weather somewhat irrelevant, an inconvenience at worst.
Also, Moscow is a lot sunnier than Warsaw in summer, and only slightly less sunny in winter. Overall Moscow has more annual hours of sunshine than central Europe (Germany, Czechoslovakia, etc.):
https://www.currentresults.com/Weather/Europe/Cities/sunshine-annual-average.php
Moscow has a continental climate, like the interior USA, with hotter summers and colder winters (as well as lower humidity) than in a city of similar latitude in western Europe. Which one is “better” is a matter of taste. If you like summers hot enough for women to wear short skirts and winters cold enough to enjoy consistent cross-country skiing, ice sculptures, etc. Moscow might be better.
One reason this Russian speaker found the Polish
language fairly easy to learn was because, unlike
in Russian (or Czech), the stress almost invariably
falls on the penultimate syllable. There are minor
exceptions, esp. in foreign words e.g., matemAtyka
1). Foul language. Some people use the f-word like commas and full stops.
Irish influence? (according to Wikipedia the Irish “diaspora” in NZ is around 600,000)
I was amazed at its prevalence in Ireland when I lived there in the 1990s, and in particular that women used it no less frequently than men.
Irish influence?
No, just general vulgarity. As recently as 1970 in the U.S. (to take one example), sexual and scatalogical profanity was something you heard in stag settings only, the ample population of ethnic Irish notwithstanding. Ireland is one of those countries (Quebec and the Netherlands are other examples) which has had a cultural ecosystem flip and has ended up corrupt and disgusting in ways in which societies which were less intently virtuous cannot manage.
http://assets.nydailynews.com/polopoly_fs/1.1432882.1377110821!/img/httpImage/image.jpg_gen/derivatives/landscape_1200/slanegirl22n-1-web.jpg
About 15-16%percent of the NZ population is Maori, and they enrich the community with their drastically higher rates of violent crime and property crime, gang membership
New Zealand’s homicide rate is 0.9 per 100,000, actually slightly lower than the west European mean. The homicide rate in New Guinea averages about 10 per 100,000. That in the small insular societies of the Pacific averages 3 per 100,000. Polynesia isn’t Latin America.
domestic bryndza is good enough. What really not good yet – it’s Parmesan. Currently it’s from Argentina and it’s not good.
Let’s start with examples. I had a choice to live in rural Russian city with huge military plant, earning about 40k rubles (I checked with my former colleagues just recently; it’s IT) and pay about 6k rubles monthly maintenance of 4-room flat I own, or live in Moscow, pay 28k for 1-room flat somewhere on Voykovskaya (so I commute like a human), but earn 200k.
Basically, almost everybody have hereditary home, which cost peanuts to maintain, but if you can make it bigger (I mean job), you rent. People who rent property in Moscow and live off 40k are literally insane (and I know such people). With 200k+ in Russia question of money is rarely even pop in your mind (and it’s normal wage in senior IT/coders crowd)
Staying in the UK quite a long time ago, when my aquitances say “Russian is too difficult to study” – I always was saying – “the distance between Russian and English is equal in both directions”.
And if many of us can use English at least on understandable level – I see no reason for english talking people not to do the same. I think there is only one cause – lack of desire to do that. Well, it really needs to work hard.
Great point about Poland being a comparatively quick trip to Italy, France, and other classic European cities. But from what i have been hearing and reading, Rome and Paris and the like are fast becoming unpleasant places to visit, especially for women. I wonder what her personal impressions and experiences in those place should has been recently?
I have an American acquaintance who took a job in Krakow about ten years ago, learned Polish, fell in love with a Polish girl, and never left. They have a baby and plan to have another, and they walk without harassment or stress day or night, unlike MANY cities in the USA I’ve lived in and visited. Can’t say it’s hard to understand his decision.
Dude, Moscow Tourism Board should hire you! I already wanted to visit Moscow, and now I’m wondering how soon we can go 😉
For vacation, I’d even go there during wintertime, precisely to see ice sculptures, go ice skating (ineptly, in the case of me and my tropically-raised wife), and simply to experience each of the four seasons as the locals do.
Our young children, however, have been raised in Southern California. If we want to give them a good impression of a place, we had better take them first in warmer weather, and only later during winter.
I cannot count how many times people here in Los Angeles have cursed in front of our children, including during their infancy and toddlerhood. Including women, and here of course I do not say “ladies.” When we ask them please not to do it, a few have directly told us to f— off. I am not small and not yet old, but not a fitness buff anymore by any means and getting too old to “get into it” on the streets over such slights. Yet another indignity that we have to learn to live with on a regular basis in some many US cities. (In my experience, Vancouver/Richmond, BC was better than here in that regard, though the white kids from the burbs were especially vulgar and disrespectful at times.)
I have the impression that people in Russia and much of Eastern Europe haven’t developed this particular brand of rudeness, coarseness, and ugliness yet in their public conduct.
Thank you for the information. Good to hear it. I stand corrected to that extent. The other Kiwi commenter above further advised us that Maoris are concentrated in certain locales and can largely be avoided.
And yeah, Latin America and African enclaves most everywhere seem to be in a class of their own.
Elsewhere I note the difficulty of “selling” our Los Angeles-raised children on places that get as cold and snowy as Russia, even for a vacation. But your comment contains the solution, at least for my son: wait till he is a teenager, take them in the summer, and let him see the Russian girls in those skirts. Somehow I think a return trip in wintertime won’t be such a horrible prospect for him 😉
Moscow is magical around New Year’s – the place is lit up so beautifully. If the kids can handle the cold (they might find the snow exotic and fun) it might make a stronger impression. There is a great circus and puppet theater for the kids.
It can get hot and dusty in summer, if you don’t have a dacha in the forest to escape to.
Provincial Russia can be real bad with respect to vulgarity. The Russian language can have an ebonics-like capacity for vulgarity:
Here is a classic and extremely vulgar 90s song demonstrating it:
Poland and western Ukraine are very clean, however.
I’ve lived both in Ireland and in Poland and the very generous Irish usage of the F-word doesn’t come anywhere close to the Polish usage of the K-word, among many others of the same variety.
If by the K-word you mean “kurwa,” the word is not considered
terribly vulgar. It simply means a whore. However, some
people substitute “kurcze” or (jokingly) “kurcze pieczone” ( fried
chicken) as the word “kurcze” is related to “chicken.” Even Barbara
Streisand is known to use the expression “she’s a little kurva.”
But, true, Polish, like Russian, abounds in true vulgarities such
as “Huju jebany!” or “zapierdalaj” (NSFW)
Like most young women she loves loves
Italy and France. For her it’s all about the
cuisine, couture, and the palm trees. So far
she only visited Northern Italy, which isn’t
so bad yet in terms of the migrants.
By the way, in Russian she uses the words
“blin” and “vot” a lot, and is very self-conscious
about it
Kurwa means “Whore.” It’s sort of a tribute to Poland’s cleanliness that the main swear word is “whore”, rather than crude words for genitals or sex acts.
There is a reason why Russia, Scandinavia, Canada,
and Alaska are severely underpopulated. Most people
find living that far north very dispiriting. Moscow at
56°N is much farther north than Warsaw (52°N). Warsaw
is much farther north than Boston (42°N) but for
Europe that’s reasonable. And due to Global Warming
the winters in Warsaw have become relatively mild.
By the way, Warsaw, Berlin, and London all have the
same latitude. One great thing about Poland is that
if you want to, say, go skiing in Austria or Italy, you
just hop in the car and drive. If you want to see great
museums, you drive to Berlin. All those places are
very close.
Conversely, the elites in the U.S. (i.e., people whose philosophy
of life is: nothing but the best for me) will always prefer
California or the Northeast. California, with its Mediterranean
climate, is now at 40 million, and short of a major earthquake,
is likely to reach 50-60 million soon (producing thousands of the
homeless).
Well, me I find a lot of common ground between whores and sex acts.
Besides, as Anon 2 has correctly explained, kurwa is just the main course that gets seasoned in everyday language by all kinds of spices, some of them very hot.
Suffice to say that I’ve seen several cases of foreign ex-pats in Poland switching from cursing in their own language to regularly cursing in Polish (I may have done so myself in the past).
Correct. Saying that winters in Chicago are more “brutal” than in Saint Petersburg, apart from being very dubious from a mean temperature perspective, leaves aside the fact that Chicago is at the same latitude as Turkey, while SPB is at the same latitude as Alaska. This means more cloudiness, very short days in winter, minimal sunshine and thus very little chance of snow and ice melting. In summary, very cold, sad weather during month after month.
I agree with you, but my personal example is probably less common compared to most people who read this blog.
I am a native Serbian speaker, but have been learning English since childhood and have been living in the U.S. for the second half of my life so far. Other languages I learned (or tired learning) as an adult. Italian was pretty easy – phonetic writing, easy pronunciation rules, verbs have declensions (first/second/third person, singular/plural) just as Slavic languages, the only hard part is the irregular verbs, you just have to memorize them.
Russian probably wouldn’t be too hard for me if I were immersed in it, i.e. if I tried learning it in Russia. However I tried learning in in the U.S. with no opportunity to practice with anyone except my tutor. I understand about half of spoken Russian, depending on the topic and who is speaking, even though Russian and Serbian aren’t that close. We have one more падеж (vocative), which you guys don’t. We use падежи the same way, but the endings can be different which is confusing at first, and perhaps for a while. Russian has generally “softer” pronunciation compared to Serbian, when you compare same or similar words.
Speaking of other Slavic languages, for me Bulgarian is easy to understand, about the same as Macedonian, as is Slovak. Czech is a little harder than Slovak but still pretty easy. Polish is the hardest by far. Slovenian is not that easy, even though they aren’t that far geographically and we lived in the same country. Russian is somewhere between Czech and Polish in terms of my ability to understand it based on my Serbian knowledge. I haven’t heard enough Ukrainian or Belorussian to be able to tell them apart from Russian. All these estimates are based on my travels in those countries and trying to get by while speaking Serbian and listening to whatever local language was, without using English as a go-between.
This is not a song. It’s Russian “chastushki”. Something that has >200 years tradition. Just like, say, limericks.
“Exactly right. European peoples everywhere need to have many more children, and there is no substitute for our own children economically, culturally, spiritually, emotionally, or morally.”
Indeed, there is no substitute for having children. But European and non-European peoples do not “need” to have more children, it is a matter of “wanting” to have children. For some whites, they cannot bear children, so they adopt. Which is noble on their part. And for other whites, they married outside of their race and also had kids, which, is “exactly right”.
Of the cohort of Maori inmates he has seen, there are some familiar themes.
“The majority have problems with literacy and numeracy. The majority of offenders have some kind of drug or alcohol abuse problem, which is immediately attached to their offending behaviour. The majority of offenders will come from a dysfunctional family,” Campbell says. “By dysfunctional, I mean there will be generational unemployment. Generational substance and alcohol abuse histories. Generational problems with lack of education. Generational problems of being disconnected from wider whanau [family] or support networks. Problems with adoption. Problems being raised in social welfare families.
“They all have a history and a whakapapa [ancestry] of offending that goes right back to a very young age, and in a lot of instances, before they were born. Hence the generational problem.”
Campbell is quick to point out that understanding and analysing these factors is not to offer an excuse for their behaviour, but it does put their actions in some kind of context.
“A lot of the time, impulsivity is just connected to survival. It doesn’t give an excuse for offending behaviour because, at the end of the day, everyone has still got choices. But if you begin to examine those things, you very quickly start to realise that people’s choice pools are at varying depths.”
http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/features/2016/05/maori-zealand-prisons-160525094450239.html
In Europe, the weather is determined by the Gulf stream for this winter warmer in Bergen than in Ankara, and palms grow in the circumpolar Scotland
https://ic.pics.livejournal.com/alex_ender/18248624/12597/12597_original.jpg
For this reason, for example the Jewish Autonomous region (which is located at the latitude of Paris, but in Far East) is a wild, undeveloped region
https://shkolazhizni.ru/img/content/i101/101273_or.jpg
Well, I see, it’s a different case. Native english speaking people have absolutely different concept of a language and for them it’s much more difficult to learn grammar and pronunciation. Actually I never met anyone speaking clear enough, but some speak understandable russian.
My son last summer visited the former Yugoslavia (Montenegro, Bosnia, Serbia…), he was travelling with his girlfriend by buses, walk, bycicles … Got home happy enough, said that in Serbia he understood almost nothing from spoken language, but everybody having known that he’s Russian poured him rakia (serbian vodka) and it was difficult to refuse.
Ukranian actually is not a language, it’s a southern dialect which novadays was expanded with artificial words from polish, some words were invented just not to be like russian word.
For example for helicopter ( вертолет ) they invented gvintokryl (гвинтокрыл -) etc.
All this is German-Austian project at beginning of 20th century which appered to be successful at last.
And this is a reason for about 80% of so called Ukranians to speak Russian. Even the most nationalistic oriented nazy in majority do speak russian. And swearwords are from Russsian on 100%, I’m afraid -)).
But even that spoiled Russian which they named as Ukranian mova any native russian understands for about 50-60%.
I used to live in Ukraine from my 5 to 16 years old, so i know that subject very well.
Well, part-time in this case means 40 hours per week with no paid vacations, no sick days, no benefits except liability insurance, barebones insurance*, and a tiny stipend for professional expenses. Full-time means 60+ hours per week, call (working overnight at the hospital) every 4 days, and one call weekend (working at the hospital the whole weekend) once a month. As you can imagine, most of the part-time anesthesiologists in this particular healthcare system is made up of women with children.
And you get to have this wonderful life (full of regulations and stress) on top of pre-med undergrad for four years, four years of medical school, one year of internship, and three-to-four years of residency, during which time you might rack up $300,000 in debt. Now you start, at age 30 or so and begin your career in earnest.
In the mean time, your friends with similar cognitive profiles (i.e. smart enough to get high SAT and MCAT scores and dedicated enough to pass organic chemistry in college) will have entered law, investment banking or IT years earlier and will have been making six-figure salaries all along, and probably already married with children, a house, and a dog.
*One sad aspect of all this is that most healthcare systems/hospitals are quite chintzy and provide very barebones health insurance for their employees – frequently much worse than what the patients they treat have (if those patients have normal professional jobs).
Don’t get me wrong. $250-500K a year is nothing to sneeze at, but for most high-IQ/high-drive people, there are easier ways to make that kind of money, with much nicer quality of life.
Virgin English Speaker vs. Russian Speaking Chad
https://twitter.com/InnaShidlovskay/status/921699467673374722
What percentage of places like Canada, Russia, (or even Australia)
are “uninhabitable” (hope thats the right word).
In Russia – approximately 80% of the territory is almost uninhabited. For example, the Putorana plateau (the size of great Britain)
https://nikonpro.ru/sites/default/files/uploaded/plato-putorana_14747-panorama-120-60.jpg
is completely devoid of the population
Russian mythology. Nothing “artificial” about Polish loanwords in Ukrainian – Ukraine was part of Poland for 400 years and had many Polish settlers during this time. It’s like saying English is an artificial German dialect with a lot of French words.
Ukrainian was originally called Little Russian and standardized as such in the 19th century. The Austrians just made this language, developed in eastern/central Ukraine and brought to Austria by exiles from the Russian Empire, the language for Galician Ukrainians in their schools.
Here is Eneida, written in Little Russian/Ukrainian in the 1780s. Pretty much the same as modern literary Ukrainian, closer to it than Shakespearian English is to modern English:
http://lib.ru/SU/UKRAINA/KOTLYAREVS_KIJ/eneida.txt
Literary Russian is the “artificial language,” full of inserted Church Slavonic and French words.
Before Donbas and Crimea left it was about 45%-50%:
http://www.kiis.com.ua/materials/articles_HVE/16_linguaethnical.pdf
Basically 95% of the population in regions that were annexed after 1939 (20% of Ukraine’s total population) plus rural areas, small towns/rayon centers, in all central and parts of southern or eastern Ukraine (another 20%-25% of the population) are Ukrainian speaking.
Depending on where and with whom you lived, your impression might be very skewed.
well, u, of course, know better, probably from books.
No, it was 80 to 20%. now it’s sligtly changed. But absolute majority of so called Ukranians speak Russian when at home.
Regular visits to various parts of Ukraine, and family living there.
Maybe in your world 99% to 1%?
I posted results from a study with 10,000s of participants. It showed 40% Ukrainian-speaking, 45% Russian-speaking, the rest completely indifferent.
You are just making up numbers.
Your made up numbers just make no sense moreover. The parts of Ukraine that joined in 1939 are 20% of the population. These parts are perhaps 5% Russian-speaking. If indeed Ukraine was only 20% Ukrainian-speaking, nobody outside those parts would be speaking Ukrainian. This would of course be an absurd claim. 10% of Kiev is Ukrainian-speaking. Go to markets in Kiev with villagers selling food and you will see that they are Ukrainian-speaking. I have a lot of relatives in a village 2 hours form Kiev – all Ukrainian-speaking. When I lived in Moscow I visited a hospital – a doctor I met there spoke half-decent Ukrainian. He spent all of his childhood summers with grandparents in a Ukrainian-speaking village in Kharkiv oblast. Etc.
Half of my family is Ukrainian living in the Ukraine. False precision aside, 50:50 sounds about right. Of course, of that Ukrainian-speaking ~ 50%, about 1/3 to 1/4 speaks fluent Russian even if that’s not what they do at home most of the time.
Correct. Outside Galicia, and even in Galicia, most Ukrainian-speakers also speak fluent Russian. but also, many Russian-speakers (such as in Kiev) can switch to fluent Ukrainian.
The more I was reading the first part, the more I was becoming outraged by such overpositive naivety until I finally got to this quite honest remark:
Which, of course, the most crucial and must have been said at the very beginning. And even in that case you underestimate.
The median monthly wage in Yaroslavl, which you are fond of and which is quite representative for 90% of Russia, in 2015 was 23,000 rubles which translates (considering the exchange rate 60 rubles for $1) into roughly $380. Which translates into 276,000 rubles or $4,600 per year. Or 145 rubles or $2.5 per work hour (considering 1900 work hours per year).
At the same time in the USA the median hourly wage was $17.81 or, let’s round, $18. Or $34,200 per year or $2,850 per month (but the latter may be a bit higher, because Americans may work more and have shorter holidays which may be as well unpaid).
Which means, if you have not forgotten your school maths, the 7.2 times difference. But considering the fluctuating exchange rates and other factors, my rule of thumb is the factor 10. That is an American gets 10 times more than a Russian. Which may imply that for Russians to live equally with Americans the prices in Russia must be 10 times lower. However, the prices, as you have testified yourself, are just 2 to 5 times lower. Which means Russians live 2 to 5 times poorer than Americans at best. They simply overpay as much as 5 times for even the basic necessities such as food.
My another rule of thumb which may be not very mathematical, but quite realistic, is $1 = 10 rubles. That is for an American to pay $1 in the USA is like for a Russian to pay 10 rubles in Russia, or vice versa. So when you compare prices that way, they become not so impressive. Except, when you are very rich and belong to the top 1%-10%.
Which leads me to another remark. Like I said in one of my earlier comments, you’ve been certainty spoiled by California or London. You are accustomed that people there get $3,000 per month at least, many get many more, or that the rent costs $2,000 per month at least. Then you got to the country where everything is cheaper at least twice, but you expect the same level of income. If you can afford such a level of income in Russia (“I need $2,000 for a decent living” as you once said to you potential donators – but that makes you the top 1% in Russia), it is alright by me, live as you want if you can. But do not expect that your opinion about life in Russia, particularly about the prices, would be met at face value. On the contrary. You belong to the top 1% (or the top 10% at least) and play a role of another simple Russian guy. Which is laughable. Next time tell us how everything is cheap in Russia, when you will live on $300-$400 per month.
That said, it does not mean I disagree with your other points. In many ways life in Russia does indeed look more attractive than in America (better food, if not the best but affordable medicine, less SJW madness, etc.).
Thanks for your comments. Nice to hear your son and his gf had great time in the former YU. People there, all ethnicities, generally like Russians and would sure offer ракија (fruit brandy, usually from plums but can also be from pears, apricots, apples, quinces, cherries, grapes, etc.) at just about any occasion.
I would have thought your son would have been able to understand a little more spoken Serbian, but I can’t assume the ability to understand is the same in both directions (R > S and S > R). Or maybe I have had more practice; when I watch Russian videos (news, speeches, etc.) I read English subtitles but also listen to spoken language and try to match Russian words to the English text I’m reading.
Re: гвинтокрыл – without any prior knowledge, I would have thought it’s some kind of screw-wing or thread-wing, which makes sense for a helicopter. I guessed that on the basis of Serbian having many loan words from German for all kinds of tools and machine parts. Gvint/гвинт is what plumbers call thread of a screw or pipe. There is a Serbian word (навој) but many craftsmen use German words by default, probably because they learned the trade in Germany or from German tradesmen.
Croats also invented many words to make it different from Serbian. In some cases it maybe makes sense, they went trough the effort of trying to come up with a “domestic” word rather than simply borrowing from German/English/French, but in many cases they just went too far, IMO.
Yurivku is just writing nonsense about Ukraine as usual. “Гвинтокрыл” is not some kind of new Ukrainian word for helicoptor, it is this thing:
https://uk.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D0%93%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%BD%D1%82%D0%BE%D0%BA%D1%80%D0%B8%D0%BB
The Russian word for this thing is vintokryl.
Level of nonsense written about Ukraine by Russian nationalists is epic in scale.
While one occasionally sees a helicopter labeled as a Гвинтокрил, Ukrainians generally use either “vertolit” or “helicoptor” for helicoptor ) google shows 215,000 results for Вертоліт and only 19,500 for Гвинтокрил). Some Russian saw a helicopter labeled as a Гвинтокрил, decided Ukrainians renamed the word helicopter, and other Russians believed the nonsense and spread it on the internet.
What Avery said, plus they are given a chemical to make them ‘salmon’ colored. (They would otherwise be grey due to being raised in confined pens.) The chemical has been shown harmful to human eyesight.
It’s the nanny state that got to me. This American moved to Asia with that in high regard. I remember growing up in the seventies having much more personal freedom than today, and then see it, little by little, dwindle into a Police State, and nobody else around me seemed to notice or care.
People(Americans) seem to have the mentality that “there is no other way to live” than to have every personal aspect of their crummy little lives controlled by the State.
Freedumb!
Serbian having many loan words from German for all kinds of tools and machine parts
This is true for many Slavic languages. The technology was flowing form the West, i.e., Germany often via German settlers. Attempts to reverse the process of “Germanization” of local Slavic languages were made during the rebirth of nationalisms in 19 century and then after WWI were independent ethnic countries were created. Then various Slavic sounding words were invented to replace words of Germanic origins.
Ive been to Ukraine(2009) and the first thing I noticed was the amazing, and absolutely delicious variety of non-GMO fruits and vegetables there. I couldn’t get enough knowing it was only temporary. Now that the American Coup has dragged its clepto corrupted corporations into the place it will never be the same. Monsanto is going to destroy it all.
Food in Ukraine was great this summer.
Americans don’t seem to understand or care how monopolies effect their lives. It’s almost impossible to list all the ways, but crappy service for the money spent is dead on target. It’s also just as difficult to compile a list of all the monopolies that there are in America. Healthcare, Internet, Hardware, software, fuel, drugs, etc…..
I can counter all that with 2 words. Russian winter.
I forgot the biggest craptiod monopoly of them all – “The Media”
If people are sad in Moscow, they’d be better off if they’d drink less, exercise more, and stop trying to work with a hangover.
I can counter that with two words. Winter sports.
My favorite time of year.
Interesting stuff, Anatoly, to this American reader who once semi-seriously thought of emigrating from the land of the stuffed shirt and home of the empty suit. Looking forward to the 10 ways America is better than Russia.
FWIW-The German-born American woman I know sums up her thoughts about emigrating from Europe, which she did with her parents back in the 1950s. America offers a generalized feeling of freedom to the new immigrant, at the price of “social lysis”—your onetime social position in your home country is pretty much dissolved. (We still have very occasional local obituaries of folks who’d been physicians, field grade military officers, small businessmen and so on back in Whereverstan, but worked as butchers or draftsmen here in the States.)
The “Copyright Clause” of the U.S. Constitution gives Congress the power to enact legislation “to promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries.”
The Founding Fathers would have interpreted “limited times” as periods in the range of 5 – 15 years from the time of invention/creation.
Current U.S. copyright continues throughout the author’s life, and for 70 years thereafter. Copyright created for a company can remain effective for 120 years. Clearly, particular interests (film studios, news media) have more pull in DC than the ordinary Jane.
For ukranian being not a language but dialect, it lacks alot of words, especialy technical and scientific, so they trying to invent those, invent the way to be different from Russian.
@AP will argue, but now when I know him being from Ukraine it’s understandable. But really except very western part of U absolute majority speaks Russian as a native language.
It’s what I saw when was living there, here
http://news.gallup.com/poll/109228/Russian-Language-Enjoying-Boost-PostSoviet-States.aspx?version=print
the results from Gallup – 83% jf Ukranian have Russian as native language.
Croats and Serbs is a slightly different case – you initially had the same language. Ukranian had a dialect which is a mix of Russian, Polish an Belorussian, but it covered only main ideas of peasant life.
Nationalists with help of Germans an Austians throw the idea tha U is not a part of Russia, but a separate nation. The result we can see now, when US added fuel to nazy bonfire..
well, it’s explains everything. It would be silly from me to argue in this case.
Just will give you the results of the Gallup’s surway:
http://news.gallup.com/poll/109228/Russian-Language-Enjoying-Boost-PostSoviet-States.aspx?version=print
according to it 83% of U consider the Russian theirs native language.
I’m afraid winter is no good this time in western part of Russia. For example now in Moscow +5 degrees of C. Global warming.
But there are still some cold places. For example in Magadan and Yakutia it’s about -50 C -))
I already answered to u. It’s silly to argue with ukranian, so i won’t. But
U probally badly know Russian. Rusian word is вертолет ( vertolet ). But in U they currently use two words vertolIt (spoiled russian word) and gvintokryl (theirs invention).
I find the use of “blin” by women rather cute, but I know some old fuddy duddies who take offense.
He brought me some rakia (the plum one), well it’s good -)
And we have alot of nice picturess of small villages and nice small towns from there. May be I’ll try to go there.
Actually we a little angry for a NATO association of Montenegro etc. I just can’t understand how it’s possible after a cruel bombing and killing people there … Of cource we Russians feeling bad not to help Servia and Montenegro that time, but every Russian remember it and will never forgive and never forget it.
I see. Considering Ukraine is only can manufacture those Gvintokryly now just like those super tanks I was watching on YouTube ťhat looks like the very first British tank from ww1. Seems like good food is the only thing left. Third world country it is. Far cry from Ukraine I was born in. Considering your age and lack of first hand knowledge of what Ukraine used to be you can enjoy your food but nothing else.
At this point in time, I’ve lived almost exactly half my life in the US and half in Russia, so I could probably write a book (that nobody would want to read) on the topic of this post, and the one that will have to do with why life in America is better. Briefly, I’d add to Anatoly’s list the following:
1) Human interaction – Russians are simply more sincere and honest. This is often misinterpreted by Westerners as rudeness, crudeness or aggression. But I feel much more freedom in Russia to express my honest opinions without being judged.
Being in the US is stifling in this respect, with so many unspoken rules about what can and cannot be said. For example, Russians will have no problem noticing that you’ve lost or gained weight, and will say so. Of course, I’m not a political activist or public figure, for whom the rules are different, so I understand Anatoly’s points about Article 282.
2) Never a dull moment – Life in Russia is a rollercoaster ride. Yes, I understand that most people, the long suffering Russians especially, crave stability. But that’s not how I envision the human condition, and I think the decades, centuries even, of stability in the US has made its citizens soft.
3) Skiing – Considering all the factors that make for a positive skiing experience (terrain, vertical drop, snow quality and quantity, climate, crowds, and a few others) it just doesn’t get much better than Sochi.
For sure, but it’s not like Russia doesn’t have its own signature faggotry, even in the public domain. All those звезды эстрады, like Kerkorov, Moiseev, Mikhaliov – that’s some Liberace-level faggotry. And, I mean, c’mon, the banya, where sweaty naked men slap each other with birch branches? So gay.
Good food currently also left in the past in Ukraine. Currently quality and quantity of it decreased greatly. And majority of people just have no money to buy something really good.
But ukranian will never confirm it if he/she still living there. As we can see they argue even for absolutely clear things like history and language origin.
Yes they dig Black sea and invented submarine and many other things, but probably now the art was lost. Now they can only try to sell Russophobia for hard currency.
As for @AP he probable lives not in U and can send some money to family. But it’s not the case for those who just live there.
Can I ask which part of your life was in Russia? It will make your statements more clear.
I basically agree with you and Anatoly, but I can easily count 10 opposite reasons . It does not mean I’m try to left Russia, not at all, but to change it a little will be good.
I used to stay in the UK for 6 month in 90th, but I understood that it’s absolutely alien country and society and I missed home.
I’m not a fan of peterAUS, but he’s right when he says that the best provement of good life will be stopping the emigration from Russia.
The proof is in the pudding. Last time I was in Ukraine it was January 1992. The only thing Ukrainian branch of Russian people managed to do is destroy. I still wonder how it all became possible. It is tragedy after all. Eventually this situation will have to be addressed but not before situation there gets much worse so that even completely brainwashed guys like AP lose all illusions and actually see the truth. Regarding subs invented by Ukraine it is from old Soviet joke submarines in grasslands of Ukraine. If I remember correctly the first drawing of a sub was by Leonardo da vinci. Must have been Ukrainian too.
Gallup = 1,000 sample size in country of 44 million.
KIIS survey = sample size of 10,000s:
http://www.kiis.com.ua/materials/articles_HVE/16_linguaethnical.pdf
40% Ukrainian, 45% Russian.
Thanks for demonstrating your poor knowledge about Ukraine.
As I wrote –
The parts of Ukraine that joined in 1939 are 20% of the population. These parts are perhaps 5% Russian-speaking. If indeed Ukraine was only 20% Ukrainian-speaking, nobody outside those parts would be speaking Ukrainian. This would of course be an absurd claim. 10% of Kiev is Ukrainian-speaking. Go to markets in Kiev with villagers selling food and you will see that they are Ukrainian-speaking. I have a lot of relatives in a village 2 hours form Kiev – all Ukrainian-speaking. When I lived in Moscow I visited a hospital – a doctor I met there spoke half-decent Ukrainian. He spent all of his childhood summers with grandparents in a Ukrainian-speaking village in Kharkiv oblast. Etc.
Only someone who has never visited different parts of Ukraine would believe your nonsense about 20%.
Same as your nonsens about Gvintokryly.
I’ve enjoyed this article and most of the comments over the fascinating Russian culture and society.
Your comment, though, is a thuggish attack on an otherwise very interesting conversation among civilized people. melanf is genuinely trying to inform, whilst being friendly.
… Then, you, a virtual thug, come and hit him with insults. This is the main tool of trolls, insults, and you showed the manners and flair of a total… idiot.
You disrupted a very enjoyable conversation with the idiotic, intruding tone of a moron, so that’s what you are, no doubt.
You added nothing to the conversation but real hate speech… Bravo, moron!
And, saying that one place in my country is inferior to similar places in other countries does not mean that I have an inferiority complex, it means I am objective and realistic. Are you stupid or what?! That you can’t grasp simple things?
You can insult me back. I know you probably will, given your trolling tendencies. A troll is nothing but a virtual thug, like you.
… By the way, my insulting you is not meant as an insult. I’m just stating a fact: whether you get money trolling or not, you are an idiot.
It’s just very annoying, that this site doesn’t have moderators who will delete unjustified personal attacks, and all other forms of trolling.
The site will lose relevance if this is not corrected.
No, you probably don’t know Russian very well.
Do you know what this is:
https://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D0%92%D0%B8%D0%BD%D1%82%D0%BE%D0%BA%D1%80%D1%8B%D0%BB
The Ukrainian word for this thing is Гвинтокрил. The Russian word is Винтокрыл.
I’m happy that I taught you some Russian. 🙂
I wonder, do you see those improvements possible within current framework and economic political system in Russia? I actually hope I once have spare means to buy ourselves some place in Russia. Btw, I have been reading Anatolii Vasserman recently. I wonder what is his standing among serious people in Russia beyond his stint as what, where , when star?
Ukraine was much more dreary and ugly then than it is now. It is good that this Sovok ugliness was destroyed.
You will be waiting a long time because situation has stabilized and is now improving. Foreign reserves now higher than they had been before the revolution, 2 years of economic growth, income growth, etc.
Russians like you think and hope it is always 2015 in Ukraine.
Y. probably believes it, like he believes nonsense about gvynokryl or 20%.
Gallup = 1,000 sample size in country of 44 million.
KIIS survey = sample size of 10,000s:
http://www.kiis.com.ua/materials/articles_HVE/16_linguaethnical.pdf
40% Ukrainian, 45% Russian.
Thanks for demonstrating your poor knowledge about Ukraine.
Western part is 20% of the population. It is about 95% Ukrainian-speaking. So for gallup to be correct nobody outside western part must speak Ukrainian in Ukraine. That is obvious nonsense.
Unfortunately majority of them have a brain completely washed. I lost all my classmates, some got to nazy ideas, some just afraid of communication with Russia. Yes, it’s a tragedy, but now they should get the course of DEnazification. This generation is lost.
As for AP he probably is living in Russia which not prevent him to write disgusting stuff here about Russia. There are a lot of such Ukranians with a fig in a pocket living in Russia.
Story about ukranian subs it’s a joke of course, but they seriosly do a lot of similar statements. it’s a sorry sight to see how they exchanged great past to nothing. Hopefully this fake state will not live long.
Ukraine is a country of 44 million now and it is very optimistic numbers. I have read it is more likely less than 40 mill in now. Last time I was there in 1992 it was the country of 52-54 million. Disappearing act. So, how were those 30 silver coins? What does Ukraine have now but that surzhik you are talking about? Population gone? Science gone. Industries gone. Third world country rolling to her grave.
From a military forum, why Ukraine wont start any major attacks in 2018:
Ukrops will try to keep conflict frozen for at least several years. Their “Grom” tactical complex is going to start testing in 2018, it’s very important to finish it, Kiev counts on it as on weapon of strategic level which will make Ukraine pretty much untouchable state in military way, maybe not by Russia (since when does Russia care), but other neighbors will consider twice before going to conflict with Ukraine after they have at least one brigade of those missiles. Javelins and Barrets are good, but this is a political signal, changing nothing on military level and Ukraine knows it. Those Javelins are needed for inner politics, signaling that America supports them, nothing more. What can 35 Javelins change?
On other hand, a battery of those will change much on battlefield
https://youtu.be/X-vndWkFk6o
They did last factory tests of “Olkha” missiles (modernized 9K58 Smerch 9M55 missiles) before starting state military testing in 2018.
Those missiles have GPS navigation in combination with inertial guidance system which is based on gyroscopes that were used on Iskander-M older versions, making it almost as accurate as cruise or ballistic missiles. If you look closely, missile starts it’s thurst vectoring (flight path correction) with gas dynamic rudders right after leaving container, just like Chinese 300mm+ corrected MLRS systems, such as “Polonez” (which Belorussia produces in cooperation with China).
But keep dreaming, Krieger 🙂
Really? 🙂
Orwellian/Freudian bullshit!!
It reveals a description, nothing else. What are you up to? Making Russia look bad? It’s not working. And, is Simpleguest another variation of ‘anon’? = Troll!
What all this means is that, in spite of Putin and the gangsters behind him, in spite of the American soothsayers preaching “Eurasian” pipedreams, in spite of American attempts to drive a wedge between Russia and the rest of Europe, Russia is becoming a modern European country, which simply means that it is returning to the place it occupied before 1917. That corresponds entirely to the impression I’ve got from young Russians that I’ve met and contradicts American claims as to Putin’s supposedly vast popularity. So much for the people who think they can “make their own reality”!
44 million or so at time of gallup survey. Pay attention when reading.
With Russian help. It is good that Russia took those parts, they were the worst ones.
Industrial production up in 2017.
GDP PPP per capita in Ukraine is now as it was in Belarus in 2005-2006. Which was probably similar for provincial Russia of that time. Was Belarus a 3rd world country 11 years ago?
one more thing – AP in post #261 opposes survey made in Ukraine to one made by Gallup. It’s just funny.
Ukraine probably the only place where number of fake news more than in US ))
Too much U TV makes one a cabbidge. pity.
Please provide examples of anything I wrote disgusting about Russia.
We have established that you are hopelessly ignorant about Ukraine. Now it looks like you are dishonest, also.
So your claim about Russophbia is projection?
Gallup sample size 1,000. Research based in Moscow.
Ukrainian survey sample size 10,000s from throughout the country. It is conducted by this man:
https://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D0%A5%D0%BC%D0%B5%D0%BB%D1%8C%D0%BA%D0%BE,_%D0%92%D0%B0%D0%BB%D0%B5%D1%80%D0%B8%D0%B9_%D0%95%D0%B2%D0%B3%D0%B5%D0%BD%D1%8C%D0%B5%D0%B2%D0%B8%D1%87
Thanks for proving your ignorance again.
The second half.
So can I, many more even, and so can Anatoly, which is why he’s planning a separate post on that topic.
Sure, but Russia’s already changed more than a little, in the past 15 years especially, and mostly for the better. I look at the level of social cohesion now, compare it with the nineties, and can’t help but still be shocked at the improvements, not to mention the fortitude that was necessary just to survive what happened back then.
Anatoly has written about this previously (perhaps he could post a link), but emigration has been at the level of a developed country like Germany for almost a full decade. One of the problems with пора валить these days is that there’s nowhere really that much better to go in terms of opportunity.
Are you living not in Russia Sergei?
Yes, there are great infrastructure changes in Moscow region. In provinces changes are too, but much less then in Moscow.
As for politics – there are not significant changes, i’m afraid. Absolute majority of people support Putin in international policy (especially Crimea), but in domestic policy we have a lot of claims to him.
Liberal 5th column still exist and have a great power. Corruption too high. Economy too low. And it’s not clear why such situation exists.
May be Putin consider that it’s too early to fight or he stays on theirs side of a road. We’ll see.
And yes, we now more and more hate the West, especially US. But it’s not us to blame for that.
No. Ukraine is dying. Patient seems more dead than alive. I wonder if you ever heard about quiere before storm.
Glad to hear that. Means that you write it seeing current situation.
yes, it did. But still – too many poor people, skewed structure of economy (that gets better, thanks for sanctions), corruption, demografic problems (link to poverty)…
I’m russian patriot in a best meaning of the word, and of course I wish my country to improve.
Your kind have been saying this since the 1990s.
Russia isn’t creating homeless tent cities. In the US, exceptionalism (militarism) required alchemy. Turn rotting 60 year old houses into gold and push everyone else into an ever more expensive housing Siberia.
Russia, lauded by conservatives, forces them to readjust their propaganda over private property. The state of housing in Russia is a result of the Communist era, when the gall and tyrannical audacity of Government overreach decided that every citizen should be housed. Eventually, they could keep what was theirs anyway.
I am in Canada since 1996. We were stationed in Tashkent since 1975. My dad was Zam Nachalnika TVOKU po uchebnoj chasti 3-4 kursov and was with SA since 1952. We had no place to move in Russia when all fall to pieces. It is good I managed to get out in time. I have friends there who stuck in there for good. Kvartirnyj vopros is always important. My wife is from Ozersk. We want to go visit relatives in 1-2 years.
Frog in slowly boiling water. You do not feel until your are well done. Can you draw trend lines?
Already “boiling” for more than 26 years.
Demographic problems is a very serious issue and I believe those are not resolvable within current system. It looks like we took a wrong turn back in 80’s. Everywhere where this liberal capitalistic system is, locals are just dying off. The whole issue of immigrants is caused by poor procreation of locals and having a kid is very very expensive. I have got two.
Oh, I see. it’s a pity, it was a horrible times, 90th. Thanks not forgeting the Motherland and good luck in everything.
What do you expect? It is a big frog. Inheritance from soviet times had been great help and so had been Russian assistance.
@Corvinus
You sound like a EU bureaucrat. But you always sound ‘politically correct’ = aligned with the globalists.
Dead wrong. White Europeans need to have more children with other White Europeans, and also they need to stand up and force the criminal politicians to stop the invasion of browns and blacks from Africa and Middle East.
You make it sound like all is ok in Europe, when the very existence of White Europeans is at big risk. You don’t care about this very serious problem, so you’re the same as a Jew.
Thank you Yuri. Never forget and hope once to come back. All my friends are there.
Welcome. BTW talking to AP makes not a much of a sense. It’s not possible to prove them anything.
Even those who work in Russia, getting a money here still pouring mud to Russia.
But the process of boiling seems to be near the end. I hope very much that we will not try to save this nazy reservation as always.
They betrated everything even theirs ancestors fighting in WWII. It’s a pity to have such sneacky relative.
PS: But it’s funny for us to speak in US site in English. Is not it?
PPS: Hopefully your childern speak Russian. My daughter already 20 years live in Holland, her husband is dutch, and my grandson (2 y.o.) so is half Russian. She spend a lot of time teaching him Russian, I think he will be twolingual. This fanny too, I mean havind a dutch grandson. But the world appears to be not so big…
But son is here and I think always will be here.
“You sound like a EU bureaucrat. But you always sound ‘politically correct’ = aligned with the globalists.”
The globalist menace is a figment of your (wild) imagination.
“White Europeans need to have more children with other White Europeans.”
No, White Europeans may CHOOSE to have more children. It is their decision to make. How many white offspring do you have in your brood? Better be more than six or you are woefully behind.
“and also they need to stand up and force the criminal politicians to stop the invasion of browns and blacks from Africa and Middle East.”
So how are you standing up to the “criminal politicians”?
Seriously, that’s you who don’t understand Russian very well. Vertolet and Vintokril while similar are not the same. If you bother to read wiki entry you provided, and discussion of it, you would knew the difference.
The more I read you, the more irritating you get and make me despise real Ukrops like you (while usually I just indifferent)
and I’ll give you a good resource (blogger from Crimea). I think that will help you to follow the news of ours:
http://colonelcassad.livejournal.com/
Do you realize that Ukraine declined in everything and went from richest/most industrialized USSR republic to poorest shitfest with no nothing? All graphs go down
Mr. Anatoly.
“Wow!” is all I can say.
Well, I just lied, I can also say, Your writing style is among the most enjoyable and agreeable, even when engaging controversial subjects, of Unz.com’s writers.
To Mr. Unz ….. You’re just the best for providing this forum for top notch international authors. Thank You!
Actually AP is light version of ukrop. The hard ones u can find in comments to materials which reside in resource i posted above.
Conservatives have difficulty adjusting their private property propaganda to describe superior housing in Russia. 90% “ownership” is the direct result of previous Government planning during the more oblique communist era. That horrible period when some tyrannical apparatchiks decided that citizens should be housed. In other words, the people were given what they already owned.
In the United States, housing and finance serve two main purposes: provide a laundry system to internationally fund an ever more expensive military and the continous development of odious debt. The growing millions on the receiving end of the scam still need some kind of roof over their heads, so Wall Street’s growth industries include vast Siberia-like areas of declining affordabilty. The most important hedge fund externality includes the world reknowned tent city that accompanies the municipal kill zones of poverty and violence. Shipping containers, small sheds and converted prostitute motels are growth for the free enterprise sympathizers.
That is exactly what I was saying.
Ukrainian vertolit and gvyntokryl are also not the same.
I wonder how long before yurivku figures this out.
You really love your Sovok mythology.
Soviet Ukraine was the poorest of the Slavic Republics and was much less industrialized than Russia.
In 1990 Ukrianian SSR’s nominal per capita GDP was $1,570 and Russia’s was $3,485.
Actually they went down in the 90s and then went up. They just didn’t go up nearly as much in Ukrane as they did in Russia.
Here is Ukraine’s nominal GDP per capita:
http://www.multpl.com/chart/ukraine-gdp-per-capita-e1d7f49ca1efa10d.png
I have never been in Russia. I become absolutely terrified for life, hearing rumors about Russian toilets.
But I did have a close friend who went to Russia.
He told me that he did sell everything what he could even socks for good money.
It was in the late fifties.
But than things change.
Still the US is the most dynamic society in the world. US is the spearhead of development of humanity And US will hold this position for a very long time.
It is always easier and cheaper to copy. And that is what Russians do now, when they become free market economy.
So good for them.
This is a ridiculous statement. The forces free to roam Ukraine are ultra-nationalist neo-Nazi – every other force, even the most benign, is suppressed. Well, perhaps, this could also be called “Westernizing”, since the West is moving in the same direction, but I am sure that’s not what the author meant.
Everything else, like the beloved “gay marriage”, is nothing but a comedy played by the Kiev rulers to please their Western masters. The word “liberal” in any imaginable sense cannot possibly apply to Ukraine of today.
In the age of free information flow, copyright is a death reinvented anew for the digital world. By the usual (((moneychangers))) at that.
Sometimes I eat wild salmon and ling cod caught at 1 in the afternoon off a small boat or kayak in the Pacific Ocean and served at 7 pm.
Sometimes I eat farm salmon from Costco, trader joe’s and when it’s on sale at the cheaper supermarkets.
I can’t tell the difference.
And so might be yours. The South-Eastern and Central Ukraine, at least, the cities, were almost entirely Russian-speaking. One had to go as far as Lvov to hear Ukrainian actually spoken on the streets. I am not even talking about Crimea or Donbass, but in Kiev Ukrainian was not spoken then, and even now it is spoken largely b y newcomers from the Western Ukraine.
So Mr. Turchinov is the best Ukrainian you could come up with?
https://nsnbc.me/2014/05/09/house-grilled-nuland-us-cooperation-neo-nazis-ukraine/
“House grilled Nuland over US’ Cooperation with Neo-Nazis in Ukraine”
https://www.counterpunch.org/2014/02/26/the-crisis-in-ukraine-2/
“Christian Zionists, Neo-Nazis, & Jewish Banderas: A Ukrainian Mazel Tov?” https://richardedmondson.net/2014/04/27/christian-zionists-neo-nazis-jewish-banderas-a-ukrainian-mazel-tov/
Correct. But even an hour from Kiev you will encounter Ukrainian-speaking villages. Villages and rayon centers in central Ukraine are Ukrainian-speaking, even oblast capitals such as Zhytomir are at least half Ukrainian-speaking.
Roughly, the western 20% of Ukraine is almost all Ukrainian-speaking, the rest of Ukraine is about 30% Ukrainian-speaking, mostly in villages and small towns. The only large Ukrainian-speaking city is Lviv, all the other large cities in Ukraine are Russian-speaking.
Probably 1 in 10 people in Kiev speak Ukrainian. Some are former Westerners, but many are also people who moved in from villages or small towns.
Oh, surely you’ve never tried a Serbian food in Moscow?
https://tinyurl.com/serbianrestaurantmoscow
Most of the public busses, trams & trolleybusses in Belgrade have got a free internet, in the last 3-4 years.
Your opinion is that Putin and crew are not at all responsible for improvements in Russia, and that Russia is merely improving to where it would have been absent the horror of the USSR.
Then you say that this opinion “contradicts American claims as to Putin’s supposedly vast popularity.”
That is a pure non sequitur.
Your opinion on Putin or on the alleged inevitability of Russia’s improvement, does not tell us anything one way or another about Putin’s popularity with the Russian people.
Can you produce opinion polls tending to support your apparent view that Putin is not that popular with the Russian people?
By the way, who are these young Russians you’re speaking with in great numbers? I’m really asking. Do you live or have you recently lived in Russia? Do you visit Russia for work? Thank you –
To be courteous, your comments are wishful thinking and not well-informed about Ukraine’s population. It is a rapidly disappearing nation. I’m not happy about this AT ALL, but let’s face the grim facts.
In the year 2016 alone, Ukraine lost 170,000 people net.
Every year since 1991, Ukraine has had more deaths than births.
They now have 1.5 deaths for every birth.
Births in Ukraine in the past three full years for which records are available:
466,000 in 2014
412,000 in 2015
365,000 in 2016
This is not from a Russian source, but from a recently anti-Russian source, the “mainstream” magazine Newsweek:
http://www.newsweek.com/nolan-peterson-why-ukraine-population-shrinking-559697
It seems likely that Ukraine will have lost at least another 170,000 people net in 2017.
No reason to project more optimistically for 2018, either.
In just ten years, Ukraine could easily have two MILLION fewer people than it does now. And that doesn’t count the possibility of even more dramatic flight of young Ukrainians to other countries.
The following comment is not directed at to you, JL. norm is it directed at people of any nationality who are just trying to get a realistic assessment of different countries’ situations and likely near-future prospects.
I’d ask the harsher critics of Russia, where exactly would normal non-bigwig Russians flee for both economic opportunity and a civilized “western” or “white” or “European” or “Christian” society? Where would they be confident of finding a reasonably safe, peaceful daily life?
Germany, France, Sweden, Netherlands, England, Belgium, and Italy? There the governments eagerly invite in more Muslims and Africans every year, often now without any checking (or often, ability to check) the invaders’ criminal history, communicable diseases, mental illness, knowledge of the host countries’ language, marketable job skills and education, attitude, etc.
Should Russians flee to or admire Ireland, where the people try their hardest to out-pussy the Germans and kiss the ass of anti-white colonizers at any cost?
“Great” Britain and western to central Europe all compete to see who can submit to muslim intimidation, violence, and sharia the quickest? Where their wives and daughters will be “fair game” for Muslims and African muggers, rapists, and gropers, who know that the native European “men” will do nothing about it?
Should Russians flee to the USA, which is rapidly giving up its territory, resources, and culture to TENS of millions of Mexicans (not even counting the tens of millions of savage African-“Americans” and assorted other poorly-assimilated, non-loyal Third Worlders)?
Should Russians flee to Canada, which is doing much the same with ungrateful and non-loyal Chinese, Indian, and Muslims colonizing their land?
With all of Russia’s serious problems, they would soon be experiencing a flood of people asking to move there from “the West” were it not for the perception (right or wrong) that Russia is a particularly cold country with a relatively difficult language.
In fact, as Europe especially becomes an ugly, poor, frightening place to live, we may see many millions of white Western/Central Europeans and even North Americans applying for residency in Russia notwithstanding the weather and language deterrents. Strange turn of events, and not one I had ever anticipated being plausible. But it is.
I pray that Russia will turn around on its own Muslim and Central Asian problem, and that Poland, Hungary, Belarus, Ukraine, etc. will turn back the hordes that the EU and USA would impose on them.
Many of us may need somewhere to run. It looks like “our” governments won’t help us put up a fight for our land and way of life here in the USA and “the West”, and in fact “our” governments will use brutal force on the side of those colonizing us.
Yes, many things in Russia are on par or even better than in the States. Yes, there is a lot more plurality of opinion. This is especially striking on TV: whereas in the US all networks essentially read from the same script, in Russia you can hear all sorts of opinions on prime time TV. Yes, there is a lot less “political correctness”: you can call a spade a spade freely, whereas in the US certain subjects and groups of people are supposed to be discussed only in a manner approved by political correctness Politburo. Yes, everything (banking, bill paying, etc) is done via mobile phone in Russia, whereas in the States you need at least an internet-connected computer to do the same things.
However, from personal experience I would like to point out one thing that is still better in the States: science. In early 1991 I had a choice: either drop research and do something else for a living, or move out of the USSR and do research. I chose the second option. Professionally, it was a smart choice. Today I have better name recognition in my field, as well as publication and citation record than most members of the Russian Academy of Sciences. I can’t complain about other things, either: I have an endowed chair in one of the top-15 US Universities, sufficient NIH funding to have seven post-docs and a couple of grad students, etc. Unfortunately, the US Congress is doing everything humanely possible to ruin the science in the US: the money is channeled to Pentagon and the like, to end up in the pockets of those greedy and shameless fat cats that finance political campaigns. The whole thing would be called corruption, a criminal offense punishable by jail time, anywhere else, but it is perfectly legal in the States. China is taking advantage of the opportunity, luring many Chinese (and non-Chinese) scientists. I do believe that to have a hope for bright future, Russia should invest into developing serious research. It should abandon bureaucratic fantasies like Skolkovo (you cannot have the peak without the mountain) and develop real mass research, academic as well as translational.
Absolutely correct on all points.
Russian science massive lags the United States, and I am skeptical that Putin is capable of solving this, since he and his clique are more interested in stadiums and sundry white elephants (e.g. bridges to Sakhalin).
I have a 4,000 word article ready for publication on this, will probably release it around February.
Different ways to do the counting.
For instance, this web page gives an estimate of $1,472 (Russia PPP-adjusted) and $3,300 (USA) for average net international monthly wage which seems to broadly back up my 2-2.5x estimate.
Also don’t know if 2015 is the best year to be making comparisons, when Russia was at the trough of the recession.
Looking forward to it. Putin is using the success of his sane foreign policy (or, rather, much saner response to Western suicidal insanity in this area) to preside over the disintegration of science in Russia. The Academy was bad in the USSR, got worse in post-Soviet Russia, but a few years ago even the remainder was destroyed by “reforms” separating science from all material assets. There is no attempt to introduce merit-based grant system, where Russia could use the diaspora, i.e., the people who do not feed from the same trough and therefore can give independent opinions. In the US I know a lot of very successful scientists from Russia and the rest of the former Soviet Union. In fact, four out of ~20 people at the NIH study section I participated in this November were originally from Russia. This is a huge resource that the government does not even think of using. These people can do objective reviewing of grants and papers, can train younger people, help them develop into good scientists, help them write in proper English, compete for international grants, etc. What’s more, this resource will disappear in the next 20 years.
an 11–23 December 2015 study by the Razumkov Centre taken in all regions of Ukraine other than Russian-annexed Crimea, and separatist controlled Donetsk, and Luhansk, a majority considered Ukrainian their native language (60%), followed by Russian (15%), while 22% used both languages equally.
“Українці стали частіше розмовляти українською”. Українська правда.
“КОНСОЛІДАЦІЯ УКРАЇНСЬКОГО СУСПІЛЬСТВА : ШЛЯХИ, ВИКЛИКИ, ПЕРСПЕКТИВИ : Інформаційно-аналітичні матеріали”
The study polled 10,071 individuals and held a 1% margin of error
(you guys are linking older studies I think).
Eastern Europe and fertility rates have become a problem.
Actually the Russian fertility rate dropped to
Not sure what happened there..
Russia 1960s had 2 children
by 1992 it was 1.5
now its 1.7
Poland 1965 had 2.5 children
1992 it was 2
now it is 1.35 (one of the lowest in world).
doubt
My son is 6, he speaks Russia and already reads and writes in russian. Already regular books without division into slogi. Daughter is just 2 months old. i am old dad. Will turn 50 this summer. Basically we teach Russian first as we are Russians and Russian is far harder to learn than English. He started learning English at 4. He and the daughter will be bilingual. I hope to live to become grandfather.
I offered him to connect peaks on that graph to see the trend line into oblivion. I wonder if he knows what trend line is and what trend represents.
This is not what Google’s fairly recent tricky non-question (in what language do you want your questionnaire?) showed: more than two thirds of Ukrainian residents asked for it in Russian. This is likely an overestimation, though: people using the internet, as well as generally educated people, tend to speak Russian, whereas people in villages and smaller towns speak Ukrainian (or an awful mix of these two languages). An important issue that you chose to ignore is that there is no such thing as a single Ukrainian language. There is the Ukrainian of Poltava region, which is considered standard or literary, there are several quite distinct Western Ukrainian dialects (I happen to speak both literary Ukrainian and the dialect spoken near Lvov/Lviv/Lwow better than most “patriots”), then there is a mix of the two languages spoken in Kharkov region, and a somewhat different mixes spoken in Donbass, Nikolaev region, etc. Not to mention Crimean Tatar (which became one of the official languages in Crimea only after it joined Russia), Romanian and Hungarian spoken by large fractions of the population in trans-Carpathian region, as well as Bulgarian spoken by some in the southwestern Ukraine. Stable viable states make all languages official (Switzerland has four, so does Singapore, Belgium has three, etc). If the Ukrainian governments (all of them since 1991) cared about the country, rather than about lining their pockets, they would have promoted things that unite people, not things that divide them. They would have made all of these languages official. After all, in California you can deal with the state in more than 20 languages, and the people there live much better than in Ukraine. But Ukraine was ruled by greedy shortsighted thieves since inception, and that is why things are what they are today. No enemy could have done more damage to Ukraine than its governments, current one included.
Do not forget they also gave superior free education to those who charge new students 300 000 rubles per year in Moscow university. How come that tyrannical government was giving so much for free with decent retirement as a spice and now people have to work until they drop. I get it my father in law is lucky one due to being senior engineer for some 35 years with 25000 rubles per month but I know not everyone is that lucky and even that amount is more or less enough because mother in law also has 15000. Still, they got free apartment from Soviet time but utilities and maintenance are not like used to be under those damned communiyaki
right so putin is bad
but who is the good guy ?
You can always run to Idaho. Big parts of Alaska, too.
p.s. You’re not welcome in Eastern Europe, given your pro-Russia stance, just to let you know.
Anatoly:
Which is better for the biological/medical sciences?
I know. I wrote actually that I do not believe solution is possible under current socio economic arrangement. Ukraine is however is in free fall. One only has to look at every country which embraced capitalism and so called liberalism and connect dots. Population of every one of those dying off and locals are being substituted by immigrants. Russia got on same train. Basically, it is too expensive to have kids when everything has to be paid for and there is no confidence in the future.
So much nonsense in one sentence. Where to start.
First, it’s good to know that you can speak for the peoples of Eastern Europe.
Second, how exactly would the government to which we would be applying discern my alleged “pro-Russia” stance? Are you going to warn all the Eastern European governments, “hey, look out for this Putin operative called RadicalCenter” in case he applies for residency?
Second, I’m pretty sure that proof of my Slovak ancestry wouldn’t hurt in Slovakia. We also have friends living in Warsaw and Krakow, native Poles and their spouses, including one who works for the national gov’t of Poland, so that might be helpful as well.
Third, I have serious issues with Russian government and what I take to be the whole characteristically Russian way of thinking and living. I’m not a Russian but an American, and it shows. Adjusting to life there would be very frustrating, even angering in some respects.
I don’t refer to people like me possibly fleeing to Russia because I want to live in a more authoritarian society, or because I favor Russian culture over my own traditional Anglo/Euro-American culture. I don’t.
It’s just that “my” culture is being systematically attacked and replaced by an odd combination of alien cultures here in the USA (and as well as Canada and the UK, which otherwise would be the first places I’d think to re-settle my family if it comes to that). If “my” culture were on track to remain in the USA, I’d never dream of leaving. (As it is, I might just stay and fight, even as an old guy by then, if need be. But I haven’t decided that yet. Nor would I necessarily make that same decision for our children.)
Moreover, consider what it usually means for a Westerner to be called “pro-Russian” by the likes of you here on unz. We are generally discussing the Crimea/Donbass and Syrian conflicts, where the information and perspectives that I have learned lead me to “take Russia’s side”, at least so far.
My wife and I also appreciate the very limited measures that the Russian government has taken against homosexual propagandizing of minors and the adoption of children by homosexual “couples.” Such measures run counter to the strengthening movement in the USA (and other countries I’d more naturally consider) to normalize and glorify homosexuality and homosexual-led “families.”
We’d prefer a normal western USA or Canada or UK (not likely to return) over western Europe.
Next choice, we’d prefer to settle in something like the former Western Europe (which is never coming back) over Eastern Europe.
Third choice, we’d prefer Eastern Europe (if it resists the Third World / Islamic invasion a la western Europe) over Russia.
Fourth choice, we’d prefer to settle in Russia merely as an alternative to Africa, China, and other non-Western non-Christian parts of the world, only as necessary.
Clear enough for you?
Thales of Mites,
that is not a fair question
Don’t be confident that any part of the USA will escape the deliberate settlement of fundamentally different, hostile, unassimilable, and dangerous peoples.
Did we ever even imagine we’d hear a phrase like “a Minnesota man of Somali heritage” or “the growing Somali community in such-and-such, Maine”?
Are you aware of hundreds of thousands of Mexicans in once-heartland places like Kansas and Nebraska? I’ve been there, and my wife lived in such a place, and we’ve seen the notices posted IN FREEKING SPANISH about how to apply for food stamps, Medicaid, and Head Start.
Idaho and even Alaska will be colonized if the elites want them to be, perhaps not far into the future. What is Trump actually doing concretely to slow, let alone stop, the Third World invasion? What will prevent the next Dem President with a Dem Congress from instituting a program to direct “refugees” and other “sympathetic immigrants” from Africa and the Muslim world to Boise, Idaho Falls, Pocatello, Fairbanks, Juneau, etc.? Terrible to contemplate, but I would no longer be surprised to see those places changed beyond recognition too, in my lifetime.
But thanks, again, for the advice. I doubt you are more familiar with the various corners of my beloved America than I am.
The decline of traditional religious faith would seem to be a major factor in the loss of hope for the future, don’t you think? Even in terrible times of war or poverty, Russians and Poles and Germans etc. — OUR PEOPLES — used to take that risk, do the very hard work of struggling to raise children and perpetuate their families and their nations.
Also, I don’t think the problem in the USA or Eastern Europe / Russia is that people can’t have children merely because “everything has to be paid for.” A HUGE problem is that we are being forced to pay, not just for our own children, but for many millions of children sired by the alien peoples who have been allowed to settle in our midst (hello, Mexicans, I mean you most of all, lo siento).
Sorry, I didn’t edit in time, Sergey.
Speaking NOT for Eastern Europe and Russia, but for the USA: our problem is not that we have to pay for our own children’s needs, but that we are forced to pay for everyone else’s children.
Historically, the biggest burden has been the dead weight of many millions of Africans who make no serious effort at contraception (forget about monogamy or fidelity), and who then increasingly make little serious effort to support the many, many children who are conceived as a result.
In more recent years, the sheer numbers of the tens of millions of generally poorly educated, lower-skill Mexican and Latin American immigrants have made their broods as big a burden as the Africans’ anonymous-father offspring. Plenty are lazy, ungrateful bastards, not the archetypical sainted gardener or construction worker or farm worker sweating in the hot sun. And of the many hard-working ones, millions have too many children relative to their low incomes, to pay ANY federal income tax, let alone to make up for most of what their families cost us in schooling, medical care, food stamps, and the criminal-justice system.
My parents were able to support their children, and I would be able to support mine. What we increasingly cannot afford is providing for our children, plus the food stamps of the Mexican family in front of us at the grocery store (once-again-pregnant wife in tow), plus the food stamps of the glaring African-“Americans” behind us in line.
……………….
Western Europe is starting to get a taste of this onerous burden due to their importation of parasitical and/or criminal Africans and Muslims, and the burden is growing quickly.
So, before the burden of the Mexican and Third world invasion became so massive, we in the USA (and to a lesser extent western Europe) were able to raise normal-sized families, mostly with a good standard of living, and grow our nations under less socialistic systems.
Why can’t Eastern Europeans and Russians “afford” to have at least two children per couple now? Is it really because they’re not socialistic enough? Or are they demoralized, impoverished by deep corruption, and now also distracted and confused and perverted by the incoming modern “Western” depravity and consumerism?
Cato, Forbes, Heritage and the usual neoliberals idolize Russia’s flat tax. Now that the groundwork for our own tax free kleptocracy is underway, perhaps we should form one country where both cultures wither in conservative faggotry while the rest of the world looks on in astonishment from outer space.
I’m learning a lot from your comment here and elsewhere, thank you 🙂
As an American living for some years in California, however, our society has NOT been improved by offering government services, ballots, and handouts in foreign languages, i.e. languages other than English. It has diminished the incentive to learn English well and to assimilate fully.
That, in turn, has diminished the incentive and likelihood of raising a next generation who feel greater loyalty to and affection for the core people and culture of this country than to their parents’ and grandparents’ home country.
Having more than one official language can work in some places in some contexts. It is not “working” here in California or in the formerly much more cohesive and unified USA generally.
Interesting, too, that Switzerland, Singapore, and Belgium are all tiny places in terms of land mass and population, compared to the USA, where “English as the only official language” was working and would work just fine.
Yes, I will speak for Ukraine and the Baltics (Intermarium) and we don’t want Western migrants. I don’t mean just you personally but that profile of a Westerne (and neither the liberal types). Anyone who is on the Russian side in the Ukrainian-Russian conflict shouldn’t be allowed residence. I wonder, Raficalcenter, if you’ve told your Polish “government acquaintances” that you are ok with Russian meddling in Ukraine and the “partition” of Ukraine that Lavrov has threatened with? Why don’t you be open about that to them.
I’m not going to delve into deep explanations here. And, yes, we will start notifying our government (and media and the public at large) – didn’t think we’d ever have to do this but observing this now for 3 or so years, it is clear that our governments need to adopt a more discerning policy of who should be allowed residence permits – including those coming from the West. Btw, your own government does that, too.
Very selective (a few businessmen or some German farmers, fine). And I know you guys here will laugh saying “who wants to move there” from the West but guess what – they are already moving.
So the free movement of citizens within the EU needs to be abolished. Eastern Europeans do not want large numbers of Westerners settling in their countries – some friendly EU citizens, fine, but not masses, like you seem to imply. No, we don’t want 10s of thousands of Germanics, etc. As I said, a few hard working types, but that’s it. And certainly not American duginists! lol
Belorussian / Litvin programmers welcome, too! Instead of the Hindus! lol
As to the US, I am perfectly aware of the race / immigration problems that you list (they are dire). But there are little whitopias out there. The whites seem to live in smaller towns. The country is huge. Idaho is practically empty (btw, Idaho will be the safest place in case of a nuclear attack). Same goes for Russia – huge country with lots of free space. Build a couple of more (mini) Moscows (the Kazakhs built Astana on an empty ground) here and there, or ideally smaller towns, close the door to the migrants, and that’s it! Live happily.
The US will probably have more problems, it’s hard to see how a change in elites is possible given how many in the population are invested in the system.
The reason for low fertility in Eastern Europe was the instability of relationships (pair bonding). That has slightly improved, and so has the fertility.
P.S. Unlike the foolish modern USA, the three officially multi-lingual countries you mentioned have not tried to add the more serious complicating factor of different major races and cultures.
Belgium merely combined two peoples who are, in the scheme of the world, extremely closely related genetically, and somewhat related linguistically as well. Belgium has been a polity and society of French and Dutch people, period, not whites and Mexicans and Africans and Vietnamese and Pakistanis etc. And even in Belgium, the cultural and linguistic differences don’t seem to have ever subsided sufficiently. Many in Wallonia would go their own way, though admittedly not only because of language.
Same point about Switzerland. The Swiss have been a polity and society of peoples who are, in the scheme of the very closely related genetically — the Germans and French — and to a lesser extent the still related Italians. Switzerland hasn’t previously tried to combine many millions of white Europeans with many millions of Mexicans, Africans, Vietnamese, Pakistanis, etc.
Singapore is a bit more complicated, but still not a comparable example or lesson for the USA or California. Notwithstanding the official use and widespread popular knowledge of English, Singapore is heavily Chinese in terms of race and culture. Something like 75-80% of Singapore’s residents are Chinese, reportedly more among citizens (who comprise only 2/3 of the population). That degree of racial/cultural dominance characterized the USA and even California not long ago, but has been deliberately swept aside here.
Bottom line, offering rather than discouraging widespread use of multiple languages may work well enough in Singapore, Switzerland, and Belgium, but it doesn’t work in the USA and there was little reason to think that it would.
Glad to hear that the TFR has improved.
Is national TFR at or near replacement (2.1 or so) in a single Eastern European country?
If not, then the native populations of every one of these countries will inevitably continue to decline.
In every case I’ve looked at recently, including Poland, we can probably expect the decline to become more drastic as the number of women of childbearing age declines further.
I didn’t say they have reached the needed levels. In fact, those levels in many cases weren’t there even in the 70s. I was just talking about the reason why it went from let’s say 2-1.8 to 1.2 after the fall of the USSR. The society has had some healing. The number of quality males has increased which is better for relationship stability. This seems to be the same across the board in all of ex-USSR.
Are you aware that the TFR for white women in the US is just 1.7?
Our Polish friends / acquaintances know exactly what I think about Russia’s position in current foreign controversies. Generally, they advise me not to naively trust Russia and Russians (I don’t), and they want a stronger military to deter possible Russian expansionism (which makes sense). But most of them fear that the US is ginning up a needless war with Russia that may land on their heads.
They aren’t concerned with Russia RE-taking Crimea by itself, but are VERY concerned that Russia won’t stop there. They are all afraid whenever the subject of further Russian military activity in the Donbass comes up. Likewise they are very anxious when I bring up, on occasion, the large if declining Russian population that the USSR “planted” in the Baltics, another area that interests me. There you go.
Appreciate your detailed comment and agree with some of your observations, too.
I’m not saying that flight to Idaho or Alaska or wherever isn’t a better option than staying put in much of decaying, splintering, browning America. I’m saying it’s probably only a temporary option, even with the land mass of our country, because mass immigration is, well, massive, and there’s no end in sight.
How exactly will we “close the door to the migrants” in small “whitopias” if the federal government declares that we shall not be allowed to do so? The fed gov as constituted would leap at the chance to use all necessary force to REQUIRE us to let in whoever they say must come in.
Perhaps if the situation deteriorates so much that the fed gov loses its ability to project force effectively in parts of the country. But that is a frightening scenario as well, because of what must have happened to reach that point (like an economic collapse, including but not limited to the dollar’s loss of its reserve currency status and perhaps hyperinflation). That is not something to wish for in most respects.
Hey, whichever Moscow I’m settled in when 2040 rolls around, Idaho or the other one — if God keeps me around that long — stop by and I’ll buy you a beer 😉
Of course, for that reason and many others, I am likewise pessimistic about the future of Western civilization, and white and part-white people, in the USA as well. No argument there.
really? I prefer Russia to Ukraine at the moment on the world stage. (because they are stronger and I want a multipolar world).
you think its a law that in Central-East Europe you have to hate Russia?
because fact is that there are people who want to improve relations with Russia,
lots in Hungary, Czechia, Slovakia, Austria, Germany. Even half of Poland wants to improve economic relations.
lots of Poles do not like the Bandera guys running around. about the same as the Soviet commies running around.
the last states I support in East Europe are Baltic states. they are tiny and irrelevant.
I see the Russian threat as minimal at best. Only countries which should worry about Russia
are Ukraine and Estonia/Latvia. Not countries like Poland or Romania.
Ok, I get it. Well, I should be open then – I used to post here as Latvian woman, so I know a lot about these sentiments. Yes, the Western media in some cases is hysteric. But there is also a situation on the ground. In fact, in the last year or so I have understood that Ukraine means more to me than I previously thought. I even casually started learning Ukrainian (and, no, it’s not a dialect of Russian). I have a great connection with the US, but I understand if Americans and Western Europeans don’t want to stand up for Ukraine, but I would rather give up NATO, than Ukraine at this point.
Do you want hundreds of thousands of Westerners moving into Poland? Like Radicalcenter was suggesting here? I don’t want that for the Baltic states and Ukraine, sorry. Especially not American duginists and the like.
I never said anything about hating Russia in EE / Central Europe. What I said, was that those who are cheering on Russia in the Ukrainian-Russian conflict, should not be allowed permanent residence in Ukraine and in the Baltics.
“Russian meddling in Ukraine”
— Can’t stop promoting the StateDept line? Don’t you like your Kaganat of Nuland, with neo-Nazi cherry on the pile?
“…cheering on Russia in the Ukrainian-Russian conflict”
— Are you an idiot? Who in his/her mind would cheer for the possibility of another world war? – Perhaps, the Kagans clan…
“Do you want hundreds of thousands of Westerners moving into Poland?”
— You need to check the current rate of emigration from Ukraine, Poland, and Baltic States to Western Europe.
I’m talking about the next 30-50 years, you dumbass.
Sounds like a good plan, Sergei. And I can “relate” in several ways. I am also an older father, having gotten married late. Our children are learning German from age two, as I’m able to help them with it (though I am definitely not a native speaker in german as you are in Russian, and I’m not even fluent any more).
Just as you are having the kids learn Russian young because it’s generally harder than English, we are having our kids learn Mandarin from age five because it’s harder than all of our languages. We are told by many Chinese people that the need to master the “tones”and “sound Chinese”, makes it more important to learn Chinese very young, than it would be for English, Spanish, or German.
(The longer we stay in California, the more likely we will be to have the kids learn Spanish. Sadly. Just being practical. But they can start Spanish in sixth grade (“junior high school” a/k/a “middle school”) and come out sounding just fine, almost like natives if they continue a long time. They can even wait until ninth grade (high school), because eight years of Spanish from high school through college will put them in good stead, with a very good accent if they work at it.)
Do you think they can be excellent Russian speakers if they don’t start till ninth grade, age fourteen? Assuming that they have a knack / talent for languages, that is, which we don’t fully know yet.
To clarify, I wasn’t suggesting that the Poles, Hungarians, Russians, etc., will make western migrants eligible for citizenship.
In fairness, they definitely should NOT let any of us (e.g. Americans, Germans, French) become citizens, especially if they eventually admit a large number of us.
Permanent residency is the most that I’d seek and hope for, not citizenship. No way should many people of different nationalities, cultures, and languages be given the right to vote in the Slavic countries. Maintain control of political power in your countries, for sure.
I can even understand the Slavic countries prohibiting non-natives from owning any part of critical national assets, including any sizable agricultural land or any sizable waters.
The “American duginist” slur, though, is a bit childish and over-the-top snark. And not warranted.
Norse Censor,
Why not?
Ah okay, thanks for explanation. Well I wish that Russia-Ukraine conflict stops asap..
I think the Catholic-Orthodox improving relations can be part of that. (hope other parties keep out).
I can accept Europeans Westerners but only if they learn the Polish language (its the toughest language in Slavic), and they respect the native Polish culture.
You’re gonna make me look them up? 😉
Good points, and you know way more about the medical field than I do. Thanks 🙂
As for lawyers, though, quite a low percentage of lawyers in the US ever earn $250,000 or even $200,000.
With not many exceptions, only the largest law firms in the biggest cities routinely pay that kind of money to associates (non-partners), and most lawyers never work at those firms. If they do work at those firms, they usually don’t make partner and don’t stay on as associates long term, either; they switch to government employment, go to smaller firms that typically pay less (unless they make partner there), or in many cases leave the private practice of law entirely.
I know numerous lawyers with 20-plus years of experience who earn well less than $200,000 in the private sector, or less than $150,000 in State / county / local government. Those who were, say, in the bottom half of their law school class and/or want to work short hours can earn less than $150,000 private or $100-110,000 government even after long experience.
Yes, I have friends who earn hundreds thousand per year as lawyers, but they are (1) in-house counsel, high level, lots of responsibility and lots of travel away from home, in LA and SF areas, (2) a miserable person who worked absurd hours in nyc law firm, never getting married or having children, now in her late 40s, and (3) well-adjusted people with families and a life and a sense of humor, at large law firms in northern NJ, but with high taxes and cost of living and again bad hours for a looooong time. And they are the minority in their earning patterns, distinctly.
That plateau and “Akbar” Britain will soon have the same number of white people.
As for PC being stifling in the USA, you’re right, of course, and not getting better, I think.
But it’s still a much more natural, freer, unworried conversation away from big cities and the coasts, generally.
PS my best guess is that if we’re born and raised in a country that borders or is near Russia, I’d never lose the background fear of Russia. And that doesn’t strike me as irrational at all, in light of that little fact called the USSR. I’d want a strong military, probably stronger than what the EE countries have, to deter Russia just in case.
You forgot feminism.
American men have been wondering for more than a generation what a woman would be like, theoretically, if she grew up.
Russian men don’t have to wonder.
I didn’t mean to come on too strongly, I quite admire Americans, but there is an infowar going on and those I care about are being hurt, so I will stand by them. The Baltic states are doing very well right now and it should stay that way — we don’t want migrants from anywhere, the little that we do need can be filled by return emigres from the UK and Ireland or potentially Ukraine (if they’re ok with it).
On the topic of the American dream, though, — you mentioned you were from California. Do you know of any interesting, cool, “livable” whitopian towns in Northern California?
“The Baltics do well as well”…
LOL.
If having world’s fastest depopulation rates counts as “doing well”, then full extinction will probably be called an “ultimate success”. It’s not too far away, so might as well start spinning it right now.
All in all, this must be some kind of corky Polish humor that escapes me.
Well, actually situation is improving. Putin started a project of helping to young mothers and families.
Now is about 5 years as mothers got help on 2nd and next children (материнский капитал), and from 2018 they will pay some money for the 1st baby also.
This is, no douht, steps in right direction.
Currently we are falling into demographic pit, due to problems with birth rate in 90th.
Crimea and refugees from Ukraine (which is about 2 millions) slightly improved the situation.
The proportion of natives has risen.
I totally support increasing military expenditures — just for the sake of it, lol. As a nice side effect, the number of quality men goes up (more fit, guaranteed salary). From a Latvian perspective, you and I, Radicalcenter, are kind of similar these days — I’ve been saying this for years now — for the first time in our history an English speaking person is worried about his survival, his dominance in his own home, and for the first time there are larger forces that threaten this English speaking Westerner — globalization, the Chinese, migrants from Latin America. I had this conversation with the State Dept people in Riga years ago, where they were exalting bilingualism (defending Russophones) and I told them “Just you wait” (and I’m multilingual myself). “See what happens when half your population insists on speaking Spanish” (still to come). They got very offended and thought I was some kind of a bigot. And here we are (it’s what you describe). Of course, these individuals isolate themselves with money from all the negatives of multi-culturalism. I don’t wish it upon anybody.
Unless I missed it in the article I would like to learn about the region that Putin allegedly opened up for free ownership to American expats. Your impressions? I’m a retired lawyer n novelist who did graduate work in Russia when it was still the Soviet Union. My Russian language is still pretty good. I prefer cool weather, woods, n no big cities.
it’s not possible without dividing U on several parts. Nazy which currently in power are not compatible with russia-oriented ukranians who currenly hiding themselves. After desintegration of U its eastern parts will join Russia or organize new Ukrain (Malorossia).
Now the blood is between those two parts of people and at least two generations required to cure that.
A good list, pleasantly surprising. I was glad to see ‘Recognizably European’ on the list. This being the key point to me. Diversity squalor has turned where I live into something that is too awful to properly name. ‘ Less Faggotry’ is good but no faggotry would be better. I the west every weird sexual freak if elevated to some sort of national hero to be put in control of society. Bring on the conquest!
Thanks, that’s good to hear. It’s quite true that most of my time in the States has been spent in the big cities and on the coasts. I’ve travelled though a lot of the country, but have never lived in those places, or been there long enough to get a feel for everyday life.
I am aware of (материнский капитал) program. I am mostly in touch when it comes new form Russia reading and watching daily plus relatives.
We got similar programs here but all this assistance is a mere fraction of what it takes to keep children in kindergarten and after school program. I would say it takes 3 times more to keep daughter in kindergarten after she is one year old than assistance for 2 kids.,. If to add after school for elder kid it would be at least 4 times more. Kids get sick a lot. No sick days for mother here. Sick kids are brought into day care and make other kids sick because no sick days for mothers. Then it gets to complications.
My wife sister is in Yekaterinburg. They bought one bed room apartment using sold Soviet era apartment as down payment and still her salary is only enough to pay mortgage/ ипотека, her husband is making a bit less , so it was big scare when he was out of work for 3 months. Thankfully grandparents form both sides were able to assist during that period. But they doubtfully can afford second kid.
While this mother assistance is a good step, still it is not holistic approach which was in place in Soviet times. The good part is that mothers still get sick days to stay with sick kids.
Considering demographic catastrophe that happened in 90-00’s. Russia needs to have average of 3 kids per family for a long time to overcome those pits. 2 kids must be an absolute minimum unless health issues. It is strategic issue.
“the historical recreation movement – perhaps as an implicit stand of white identity as any”
Not in my experience – in the UK our local re-enactors are very middle-class liberal types who pride themselves on being on first-name terms with the proprietors of their local Indian and Chinese restaurants – which strangely is the maximum extent of their interaction with diversity. It’s just a coincidence that when their area starts to attract an increasingly visible Pakistani population (and clusters of their weed-smoking youth on street corners), that they sell up and move to an all-white part of town.
Same with the folk-music scene (some crossover, many re-enactors are folkies). The grand old man of the UK folk scene, Martin Carthy, actually left one band in the 70s because they were playing too much Irish (as opposed to English) stuff. Now he and his family are involved in projects like this
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Imagined_Village
You’ll hear plenty of 20th-century Irish rebel songs in English folk clubs, but nary a Loyalist one.
Lol. I used to be fluent in Mandarin both oral and written. I would say modern Potong Hua grammar is rather easy to master. Pronunciation on the other hand… is really hard to master. As Chinese said ni de kou yin hen zhong. And I knew this. So yes. Pronunciation wise the earlier one learns the better but there is exclusions. We had girl student who won Mandarin competition in Beijing for local radio hosts.she was really good. I wonder why Mandarin?
https://www.kp.ru/daily/26571.7/3586720/
If you don’t like source, we have nothing more to discuss, really. You live in your very own personal historical bubble and have your very own personal historical and economical data.
One your prediction about Ukraine soon returning to pre Yanukovich state is so hilarious it explain quality of your ‘knowledge’
Russia is the place I have dreamed about all my life, beautiful women walk the streets commonplace, if you talk to them they smile and talk back, beautiful soft long hair, delicate and thin femininity. The last place in the world where white people can roam freely.
This is why Russia is the best place in the world sick societys like America can not compare, who cares if Burger King is cheaper.
These numbers are plainly ridiculous. If you were living in the West I still could understand your naivety, but you are living in Russia and must understand that $1500 is plainly wrong. That PPP is bull (and [citation needed]). Exchange rates are bull as well. I’ve explained you the correct way to compare wages and prices: how many hours you must work to buy such and such thing. In most cases Russians must work at least twice as long to get the same basic thing (like food) as Americans. For “additional” (but still necessary in modern word) items this is more so. E.g. a PC which may cost $1000 is not the same for Americans as for Russians. A Russian must give away two to three entire monthly wages while an American just a third. I can’t give the link, but in Twitter there was a table which showed the share of the monthly wage to pay for an iPhone. Russia was on the top, near such countries as India.
You seem like you are hanging out only among oligarchs and never among average people. Living in Butovo (or wherever, I do not remember) hasn’t helped you much to realize how people are living.
Forgot to comment yesterday, nevertheless.
I will not deny the pathetic state of the American infrastructure, but, considering the above calculation, $80 is just 3-4 work hours in America. And your “cheap as free” $8 are nearly the same 3-4 work hours in Russia. So who pays more? Draw. Definitely, the Russian infrastructure is better and the speed is much higher, but that because Russia started later. America started earlier and the state of its infrastructure has frozen around 2000. I believe they may still use copper cables. So it is not about overpaying, it is about physical limitations. The American ISP may well have offered a better speed for the same price, but only if they could. But obviously they cannot, when they still live in 2000.
The lack of monopoly in Russia is not strictly correct. In our city we have just 5 ISP, and in practice you can choose only between two or three, who are happened to be connected to your house. Many still have no such opportunity and have to use overpriced 3G (but it’s becoming cheaper and more affordable, I must admit).
There are too many commenters calling themselves Anon. I am Anon from TN, so I will start my comments with this statement.
I think you mix the use of multiple languages with uncontrolled immigration. I strongly believe that no language should be pushed down people’s throats, as this only makes them hate that language. This was one of the reasons Crimea wanted to escape Ukraine (actually, it tried to do so many times since 1991, but only in 2014 Russia accepted them, or, as Crimean people put it, “did not betray them”). English is my third language (the first two being Russian and Ukrainian), or maybe even fourth, as I grew up near Lvov/Lviv/Lwow, and spoke local Western Ukrainian dialect with my playmates until I was ~5 years old. I had no problem switching to it when I last visited Lvov ~30 years ago, but I am not sure that would work now, after 26 years in the US. I was fluent in standard (Poltava) Ukrainian, as well (it is getting rusty lately). I grew up in Lugansk, and my teacher of Ukrainian language and literature (we had several hours per week of these all ten years of school in the USSR) loved me because I was the only kid in a class of 40+ who could speak proper Ukrainian. Even though in TN, where I live, only ~10-15% of the population speaks Spanish, I do like the fact that everywhere, in stores and even ATMs, you can choose between Spanish and English. In fact, a few years ago there was a referendum in TN about making English the official language of the state. We were alerted to this fact by our American colleagues, who advised us to vote against it. The measure failed. Fact is, there is no such thing as an official language in the US. Of course, to be successful in the US you need English: I teach grad students in English, read books in English, and wrote 200+ scientific papers and book chapters in English. I had my own lab since 1995, never had “tribal lab”, always making sure that English is the only common language my people have. Right now I have people from 7 different countries from 4 continents in the lab (one post-doc and one grad student are Americans). Legal immigrants benefit the country, bringing skills that the school in the US does not teach. Compared to the USSR, American schools are pathetic. I know that for sure, as my daughter went to school here. She learned a lot more from us than from her school. Education must be dramatically improved in the US, but nobody even talks about it any more.
Illegal immigration is a whole different ball game. I believe it ruins the US and should be stopped. However, I do not believe the wall or similar simple-minded measures have any chance. This should be done through employers: a large (say, $50,000 per occasion) fine for hiring an illegal would do the trick, as it would make hiring people legally cheaper. I work at a University, so everyone in my lab is perfectly legal. Yet these people bear the brunt of the “fight” against illegal immigration while crossing the border, with fingerprinting and all, whereas millions of Mexicans migrate freely. This is counter-productive and ludicrous. So is so-called “green card lottery”.
Another thing that ruins our country is “political correctness” forced upon us by globalist elites. When you call a non-white criminal a criminal, you are labeled a bigot. If you say that being gay or lesbian is a mental disorder (as I believe, being a biologist), you are labeled a homophobe.
As a country, it is in our best interests to ally with Russia and China against global terrorism. As an Empire, though, we see both Russia and China as rivals that do not toe the State Department line. Unfortunately, our elites take the imperial view. I do hope that our country can still be saved by stopping this madness, cutting “defense” spending (which is already greater than that of the rest of the world put together), balancing the budget, and disengaging from senseless wars all over the world. Hope springs eternal.
horror of the USSR
What horror do you mean:
– free education, up to the doctors studies,
– free sports, culture, free activities,
– free hollidays, allmost zerro-price traweling,
– guaranteed employment and state appartments,
– enough of free time and energy, for something except working & sleeping,
– too much help for Soviet Republics, the East-European and the other allies?
If you think of Stalin Gulags – it s not clear at this site: who organized them, and who was torchured there_
I think a new Ukraine with “little Russia” is next to impossible.
Whats more likely is eventually Donbass or the older NovoRussia have referendum.
Most of the Ukrainians want to keep Southeast Ukraine to themselves.
Its a tough case. Divide and conquer from the West is hard to beat.
I just want Slavics to stop killing each other, and moving to the West,
while East Europe is depopulated slowly.
I am Anon from TN
Many people here bring up Ukraine, so I feel compelled to add my two cents. I was born in Ukraine (Lvov, Western Ukraine) and grew up in Lugansk (Eastern Ukraine, now Lugansk People’s Republic). I have friends and relatives in Lvov, Kiev, Kharkov region, and Lugansk, so I have first-hand knowledge of what’s going on.
Ukraine in 1991 was the richest of the post-Soviet republics, with the population of ~52 million. Now it is the poorest of the post-Soviet republics, with just 22-24 million residents (estimated by Ukrainian researchers via the consumption of bread and flour; the government is reluctant to conduct a census, fearing the result).
All Ukrainian governments since 1991 are to blame for this. First, the country was very heterogenous, yet from day one the government pushed things that divided people, rather than those that could unite them. Second, all Ukrainian governments (current included) were composed of thieves lining their pockets, who did not give a hoot about the country. Ukrainian elites plundered all that was left from the USSR, including huge stocks of light and heavy weapons, which they sold all over the world. They increasingly supported nationalism of the primeval tribal variety, which can ruin any country. They eventually made Hitler servants Bandera, Shuhevych, and veterans of Waffen SS division Galytchina national heroes, alienating those who fought against Hitler in WWII. No enemy could have possibly done more damage to Ukraine than its own governments. I am sad to see that now Ukraine is a basket case, with no light at the end of the tunnel. It could have been a country, and pretty decent one, at that.
the Soviet Union of with Stalin and after were basically two different things.
Most people who love SU seem to love either Stalin winning Ww2 or the conditions inside afterwards.
But millions did die under that guy. There is no escaping it. Even Putin admitted it.
Soviet Satellite states even though they had less murdered than the SU itself,
were poor outside of some basic industry like coal, or weapons productions.
All Ukrainian governments since 1991 are to blame for this. First, the country was very heterogenous, yet from day one the government pushed things that divided people, rather than those that could unite them.
In other words, diversity sucks. The curse of Ukraine was its identity was weak compared to other republics. Lithuanians know what a Lithuanian is. Ukrainian identity never formed into anything definite since it was always the hinterlands of Poland-Lithuanian Empire and Russian Empire.
They increasingly supported nationalism of the primeval tribal variety, which can ruin any country.
No, such will not destroy ANY nation. Just a very heterogeneous one. If Ukrainians were homogeneous, its brand of tribal nationalism would have worked. But it was bound to not work in a heterogeneous one because it will alienate other groups.
But it seems to work in Israel because (1) Israel is solidly Jewish. There is a sizable Arab population but Jews still make up 80%. Also, Israel has had the full backing of the one super power, the US. In contrast, no single Ukrainian group had dominant support, and its foreign support has vacillated among US, EU, and Russia. Not only is Ukraine divided by ethnicity and culture but it is divided in foreign leanings.
Things would have done better if the heavily Russian parts of Ukraine had joined with Russia with the fall of USSR. And then, the western tip that is closer to Poland should have gained independence.
It should have broken apart like Yugoslavia.
Because it didn’t, it is now paying the price. A heterogeneous nations are easy to subvert from the outside. Russia can side with one group against other. US can do the same thing.
Agree
Don’t you think: Golobalists planted the Ucraine as a poissoned wound on a Russian body? Everything they needed from Ucraine was: to stay ready for a cause of a great European war?
I am Anon from TN
The curse of Ukraine was its thieving greedy elites, not diversity. Still is. Diversity, handled correctly, gives strength. Look at Russia: there are ~100 nations speaking different languages there. Defense minister Shoygu is half Russian half Tuva (a Buddhist, just imagine that). Foreign minister Lavrov is half Georgian and half Armenian. As former commander of Gorlovka (Donetsk People’s Republic) Bezler said: “my father is a German, my mother a Ukrainian, so who am I? A Russian!
Tribal nationalism falters even in such homogenous countries as Japan or Poland. Most countries are diverse, so tribal nationalism is a deadly poison there.
I am not so sure that “millions died under that guy”, ‘cos the history is being rewritten very fast. Some say that jewish Bolsheviks killed 1917-1924. twenty milions of mostly Russians. And that in 1930-ths Stalin killed allmost 700 thousands of Bolsheviks, in orede to free Russia from them. So they cannot forgiwe him, but scream that he has killed theirs wictims.
I am Anon from TN
I’d put it slightly differently: the US Empire and its vassals wanted to use Ukraine as a battering ram against Russia. They found the hard way that it’s too rotten for that use. Now they are unsure whether their investment is a total loss, or whether they can squeeze some value out of the wreck of Ukraine yet.
Even Putin ? Lol. I wonder when investigation starts into crimes that started in 1991 and caused long term demographic and existential catastrophe. This is where attention should be. Leave Stalin alone
Once again – everybody wants to stop killing, but nazy still kill and torture. Try to stop them. I”m absolutely sure, only disintegration of Ukraine will do and it”s quite close. Believe me )), or wait we will see But U people will never be together again. To much blood in between
It would be a lot wiser to concentrate on very recent events. Lenin Stalin combo created and left great country. 1991 and later events destroyed and killed millions causing long term damage….
The curse of Ukraine was its thieving greedy elites, not diversity.
Yes, fish rots from the head, but elite corruption is much more easier and likely in a diverse nation. In a homogeneous nation, the elites are one people with the masses. And the masses can unite as one to make demands on the elites. But in diverse nations, the elites are always seen as representing THIS group or THAT group. So, diversity makes politics more tribal.
Diversity, handled correctly, gives strength. Look at Russia: there are ~100 nations speaking different languages there. Defense minister Shoygu is half Russian half Tuva (a Buddhist, just imagine that).
Problem is diversity is much harder to handle than homogeneity. With homogeneity, you can take unity for granted. With diversity, you have to work at diversity.
Also, most non-Russian ethnic groups in Russia are tiny. Most of those 100 nations are just a small percentage of the whole. Russia is still solidly majority Russian who are 80%. But suppose Russians were 40% of the population and 30% were Turkic Muslims and 20% were Mongols and 10% were Hindus. Russia would have lots of problems.
Diversity is manageable IF there is a solid overwhelming majority respected by all minority groups. US used to be like that. Non-whites accepted that US is mostly an extension of European Civilization. But with rising tide of color, US is dividing along racial lines. Also, whites are dividing into reds and blues, with blues siding with color against fellow whites.
So, not all diversity is the same. Also, Russia has few blacks. Blacks are the most destructive race, and the biggest curse of the US and will be for Western Europe.
Imagine two nations.
One is 90% Russian and the 10% is made of 100 minorities.
The Other is 10% Russian and the 90% is made up of 100 other groups.
Which Diversity will work better? Surely the first example.
While Russia manages with its diversity, I think it would be even better if it were 100% Russian. But since Russia grew as an empire-nation, it has to accept the peoples conquered by Russians. IF Russian were all Russian, there wouldn’t have been the terrible Chechnyan War, the terror bombings, the gangsterism from the Caucus, Jewish fleecing of Russia in 90s, the problems in Ossetia and etc.
One thing for sure, USSR was unmanageable in the end because it was too diverse and communism lost luster as the theme holding all those people together.
As for Ukraine, its identity was never very clear. Some Ukies felt as the Other Russians, some felt as the Other Poles, and etc. It was like a no-man’s-land conquered and shaped by competing empires.
In the United States, housing and finance serve two main purposes: provide a laundry system to internationally fund an ever more expensive military and the continous development of odious debt.
This is a fantasy. Means of housing finance have not a thing to do with the fiscal indiscipline of the United States Congress. That aside, the ratio of military expenditure to gross domestic product is near the post 1939 nadir. The vast public sector deficits of the last decades were incurred while the allocations to the military sector were declining.
{- free education….free……..free……..free}
There is no such thing as ‘free’ education, etc.
Somebody has to pay the teacher’s or prof’s salary, for example.
And that somebody is another (wealth-producing) worker’s taxes.
So it is not free: it is taxpayer funded.
I agree that the Soviet education – high school thru university – was superb.
And the Soviet system was more egalitarian. I remember people took one month vacations without fear that their job would be gone when they came back. And as you say, people had more time for leisure.
But the system could not sustain itself, because there was no incentive to do anything.
Consumer products were lousy, service was lousy,……
So the system gradually atrophied.
There was a saying in SU: “They pretend to pay us, and we pretend to work”.
Just the same, it is a shame SU collapsed so catastrophically: millions of people who had invested their working lives in the Soviet economic system (e.g. pensions and such) ended up with nothing.
I am Anon from TN
There is something in that, but that’s an oversimplification. Yes, it’s easier to manage diversity when there is a majority nation (not necessarily ethnically; the US has white majority composed of many nations). In case of Russia, small nations (including Chechens now) take pride in being an important part of a mighty Empire, rather than inconsequential pigmies (like Baltic vaudeville states are today). There is even a joke about a Ukrainian complaining to God that he is unfair: he gave Russians oil, gas, gold, poets, writers, composers, while he gave the Ukrainians very little. God says to the Ukrainian: but you had all of this! When? When you were a Russian.
Yet even in a very homogeneous Poland (admittedly, made homogeneous by Poles exterminating Ukrainians and Jews during WWII) the elites do not heed the opinions of a huge chunk of the population that wants better relations with Russia and resents a union with Germany (after all, Germans killed a lot more Poles in a few years of WWII than Russians did from 1945 to 1990). Thing is, for an external Empire it is always much cheaper to buy the elites of smaller countries than their population. Especially when the elite is so greedy and shortsighted as the Ukrainian one. Many Ukrainian oligarchs discovered the hard way that mega-thieves do need a strong state to protect them from the thieves of different nations: what is stolen once can be stolen again. Quite a few Russian oligarchs (who are also thieves, first and foremost) learned from this and became “patriotic”.
No free. It was called public funds and those were growing. The key we that those were used to fund public needs. Not those of 1% or wall street.
This is the great loss to the world.
It was the responsibility of the US Boomers to look after their legacy, and respect and protect the roots of the USA in the European tradition after ww2 (which really means race and tradition), and move forward the with remarkably successful history of an unquestioned Anglo-European USA.
If they had been responsible guardians rather than fashionable Counter-Culturals, the US could still be welcoming a controlled number of immigrants from around the world with an America First attitude, and planning to become full and useful American citizens.
Instead, it has a divisive Jewish-Zionist racist elite, a violent radicalized black underclass and a flood of confused Mexicans who probably wanted to be America First, but who’re also now being radicalized.
Can you really blame the boomers? Oldest Boomers were 20 when the Immigration Bill was pushed through Congress in 1965.
Boomers inherited the mess from their elders. Of course, they were having too good a time and too much into being ‘cool’ to be sober about power and politics.
Ironically, consumer-capitalism which has infantilized the American mind has opened the path toward socialism. Americans, forever child-like with pop culture and idiocy, never want to grow up and take on adult responsibilities.
They could have done something.
Much less great than it would have been without them, built on brittle foundations, with an artificially limited economic potential, tens of millions of people less than there should have been, and resented by most of the countries it had ostensibly liberated.
Scientifically speaking, we cannot be sure, as experiments in history, in sharp contrast to the experiments in natural sciences, have no proper controls. So, everyone can argue whichever way s/he wants.
BTW, speaking of economic potential, there is a saying that if you believe that unlimited growth is possible, you are either mad, or an economist.
The national groups may not be large but they are quite visible, and there are many of them. As to the Russian solid majority, Russian is not so much an ethnic qualification but a cultural one. Every mongrel in the country instantly becomes a Russian even when there is no Russian ethnic component in the mix. Do you know that, for example, Sergey Lavrov (Russian Foreign Minister) is half-Georgian, half-Armenian born in Georgia? This doesn’t make him any less Russian.
People in Russia realize the duality of the “Russian” designation quite well, and lovely discussions about what it means to be a Russian happen quite often. Most, but a handful of Russian nationalists, agree that anyone could be a Russian – all it takes is to speak Russian and love Russia. That’s mostly how Russia manages the diversity: by embracing under the Russian umbrella all nationalities and cultures without suppressing them. Has done for centuries.
In the late Soviet and post-Soviet times, the local “national” elites encouraged nationalism in order to cover their pillaging of the local resources: in the Baltics, Moldova, Central Asia, then in Georgia, and, finally, in Ukraine. The results have been uniformly disastrous.
Why is it seemingly necessary for Russians and Russophiles to be homophobic assholes – most likely you are all fags.
Why do you you say “our elites”?
You have no elites. Every English speaking nation has been hijacked by the Global Jewish Nation through a massive program of extortion against government figures.
The game is genocide of the White race. You should ask your local Jews to desist from murdering your family.
Somehow hesitantly but I do have to second you.
Not so hesitantly I second you also.
That’s like bragging about improving body-mass index while dying of hunger…too clever by half.
Dezinformatsiya, ny tak cto?
In case of Russia, small nations (including Chechens now) take pride in being an important part of a mighty Empire, rather than inconsequential pigmies (like Baltic vaudeville states are today). There is even a joke about a Ukrainian complaining to God that he is unfair: he gave Russians oil, gas, gold, poets, writers, composers, while he gave the Ukrainians very little. God says to the Ukrainian: but you had all of this! When? When you were a Russian.
But, that is a bad way to look at things. GREATNESS is overrated. What’s essential is goodness. There is no need for a people to be GREAT. They only need to be free and good. So what if Baltic States are no longer part of a ‘great empire’? They are free and decide their own national sovereignty.
The real threat to the Baltics is that EU is another empire, albeit a puppet empire of the US. And Western Culture and Values aren’t what they used to be. In the past, it was a good thing for Eastern European nations to look toward and learn from the great Brits, French, Italians, and Germans.
But what is Western Values under globalism dominated by Jews and their proxy homos? Homomania, Rap music, Jungle Fever, ugly feminism, slut pride, skankery, adultery, Diversity, and infantilism.
That is why Baltic States are vulnerable. It was a wonderful thing for them to break free of the repressive Soviet Empire. But they are now falling under control of globalist empire. Baltics need to be free of all empires.
My point is both Soviet and Glob Empires were evil. Sure, they had power(and power comes with prestige and glory), but Soviets stood for commie repression, and globalism stands for Zionist-Homo supremacist lunacy.
What Baltic States need is national sovereignty and security. They don’t have to be GREAT. They just need to be free and good. Most people are not great. They are not great scientists, great artists, great thinkers, great tycoons, or great athletes. But do they not have value? They have value if they are good, and most nations should aspire to be good, free, and independent.
Better to be free as a good man than be a slave of a great empire. The latter may be part of something great but he is a slave. Under Soviet Union, those Baltic States were puppet-states. They were freed with the fall of Soviet Union. But now, they face the danger of becoming puppet-slaves of globalism, an ideology even worse than Soviet Communism.
I’m sure you’re not a great person. But you are free as an individual and want to stay that way. Don’t you want to be free as a good humble person than a slave of a great lord? As a slave of the great lord, you may share in his glory, but you’re still just a slave.
The national groups may not be large but they are quite visible, and there are many of them. As to the Russian solid majority, Russian is not so much an ethnic qualification but a cultural one. Every mongrel in the country instantly becomes a Russian even when there is no Russian ethnic component in the mix. Do you know that, for example, Sergey Lavrov (Russian Foreign Minister) is half-Georgian, half-Armenian born in Georgia? This doesn’t make him any less Russian.
True enough, but the cultural definition of Russianness is possible because there has long been a solid core of Russian Ethnic group. Because such ethnic core existed, others could hope to assimilate into it.
It’s like Anglo-Americanism. Many non-Anglo whites moved to the US but in time became ersatz Anglo-Americans by learning English, celebrating Thanksgiving, adopting Anglo values, and adopting Anglo-American history as part of their own. But this was possible ONLY BECAUSE an Anglo-American Core founded and developed America. Because such existed, OTHERS could assimilate into Anglo-Americanism. German-Americans became part of Anglo-America. Many Irish also became Anglo-ized. And Polish and others. Even swarthy Italians and Greeks adopted Anglo manners. And Jews changed their names to sound more Anglo. Also, this was much easier among white Europeans since a Polish person could easily pass as an Anglo. Italians look less Anglo, but with proper manners and attitude, they could still easily fit in. But becoming part of Anglo-White America was always more of a challenge for non-whites.
Russianness can be cultural because there has long been a core Russian ethnic majority in Russia. Also, most non-Russians aren’t racially all that much different from Russians. Most people from Caucasus are white and could easily pass for Russians if they speak Russia and dance with bears and get drunk. It’s like a German could easily become Polish, and vice versa. They are racially similar and easily meld into each other’s nation.
But if 50 million Chinese were to enter and pretend to be ‘Russian’ by speaking Russian, dancing on tables, and diving into ice water, the whole Russian-ness idea would begin to crack. Poles and Caucasus folks can easily melt in with Russian core because they are racially similar. But Russian racial character would be profoundly altered by 50 million Chinese pretending to be Russian.
Russianness as cultural idea owes to existence of Russian ethnic core as the majority population to assimilate into. Once the ethnic core vanishes, the idea vanishes too.
It’s like the Roman Empire. There was once a solid Roman core, and non-Romans could aspire to become Roman citizens and emulate the core Roman group. But when the empire grew too big and Romans were a minority in the empire, the meaning of Romanness grew weaker and weaker as it became more an idea than an identity. An idea with core dominant identity will fade in the end.
Byzantine Empire called itself the other Roman Empire, but too many people were non-Romans, and the Roman identity just couldn’t hold in the long run. Eventually, Greeks went back to being Greeks, Syrians went back to being Syrians, and etc.
You captured the state of affairs in these formerly-United States of America right there, sad to say.
That’s what I was thinking. IMO, the better the women, the better the country. American women have become fat, ugly and frumpy while Russian women (from what I understand) are thin, beautiful and stylish. This means Russian culture is superior to American culture because we cultivate ugliness in women.
The real threat to the Baltics is that EU is another empire, albeit a puppet empire of the US. And Western Culture and Values aren’t what they used to be. In the past, it was a good thing for Eastern European nations to look toward and learn from the great Brits, French, Italians, and Germans.
But what is Western Values under globalism dominated by Jews and their proxy homos? Homomania, Rap music, Jungle Fever, ugly feminism, slut pride, skankery, adultery, Diversity, and infantilism.
This is why I am skeptical of Poland continuing to be a US/EU ally. US is majority liberal/neocon (the latter something not European), smaller pockets of socialists, libertarians, and paleocons. This isnt 1500 or 1900 ad. the world has shifted. Old Christian Europe of West is dying.
Visegrad has to expand to new countries (V4 plus or V8) and free itself from both of the above, if not then improve relations with Russia,
if not, i fear for the future.
100% agree with this. Visegrad is a sort of Noah’s Ark in this flood.
Maybe they should concentrate on keeping themselves afloat rather than expanding, but the new reality is that they have more interests in common with Russia than they realize. Their beloved USA no longer represents Freedom and Democracy, and their “historic enemy” Russia is no longer a Communist totalitarian Empire.
in a very homogeneous Poland (admittedly, made homogeneous by Poles exterminating Ukrainians and Jews during WWII)
Are you sure?
Yes, we are homophobes, but assholes are u, that is the your window to a world, asshole
Ah Anatoly Anatoly, you are again engaging in alternative history and wishful thinking. I presume you have been talking about public funds/ общественные фонды. Those public funds allowed Soviet state to give population everything free what current generation of Russian citizens has to pay through the nose. Everyone I knew eventually received free accommodation form the state according to family size and there was clear and obvious progress both in size and quality. Were it not for the crash and destruction of the whole system Soviet citizens and those of RF would have enjoyed places to live of far better quality and absolutely for free. Now they have to become debt slaves for life to get place to live and I suspect it is part of demographic issue that afflicts Russia. I also wonder what will happen after there is no more option to get Soviet era grandma or parents apartment to live or to sell and get money to buy newer one.
What about providing population with free high quality education from school and PTU to Institutes and Universities? I checked it costs 300 000 annually to study at Moscow University.
Retirement when retired persons did not have to work elsewhere to additionally because pension is not enough to live considering a lot more things that cost next to nothing to Soviet people costs a lot for retired person? There was a lot more but all allowed by those very same public funds.
Regarding being brittle, brittle systems do not win wars like USSR did and do not recover after level of destruction inflicted within few years without no help from outside.
Free Soviet medicine should not be dismissed.
I get it you don’t like what happened after 1917, but hopefully being logical person you cannot deny that it was Nikolai II and his камарилья surrounding that brought Russia to the state that caused revolutions. Without Nikolai II taking Russia into that war revolutions would not take place in 1917. later may be but that would have been different alternative history. You blame Soviet state for saving Russia from sorry state that was inflicted upon her by those whom you admire.
I also notice you are constantly critical both of the Soviet past and Putin now, but I have not heard what you have to propose. Anything constructive? I hope not something like Krushev or Gorbachov style desire to play with a wheel?
Home construction:
http://akarlin.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/08/russia-housing-construction-history.gif
Living space per person:
http://www.rusfact.ru/sites/default/files/images/47465_original%282%29.jpg
The Soviets also had problems with this, they were just rationed differently (long waiting times, kommunalki, etc in USSR; market prices in Russia).
If you pay the full price – i.e., are not intelligent or studious enough to qualify for a бюджетное место – well, that’s a pity, but hardly unfair.
Russia does need to increase education funding but it should go towards raising academic salaries to leading world standards, not this idiotic egalitarianism.
Average life expectancy in late USSR: Around 68 years.
Average life expectancy now in Russia: 73 years.
USSR – Only industrialized country to see a sustained, multi-year rise in infant mortality not in wartime. Something like 25% of hospitals without running water.
Yes I think I’ll go right ahead and dismiss it.
I am not in power or even in a position of political influence, writing primarily for an English language audience. Not my job.
Sergei, basically I agree with your points, but every university and institute has some free places/licensies. For example my son studiing in Moscow state university on physical faculty absolutely for free. He was winner of many olimpiades, and even he gets about $170 of стипендия.
But number of free places is limited and decreasing.
“If you pay the full price – i.e., are not intelligent or studious enough to qualify for a бюджетное место – well, that’s a pity, but hardly unfair.”
Spurious denouement and on with the show!
“Average life expectancy in late USSR: Around 68 years.
Average life expectancy now in Russia: 73 years.
USSR – Only industrialized country to see a sustained, multi-year rise in infant mortality not in wartime. Something like 25% of hospitals without running water.
Yes I think I’ll go right ahead and dismiss it.”
I am not dismissing this.
I am trying to understand why. I believe that considering timing of all this the reason behind those troubles was break down in trust between population and the ruling elite due to what started happening after Stalin death including smearing Stalin name and basically destruction of the system built by Stalin. How do you think population would feel when all things that they kept dear to their hear were called false. Take into consideration all those crazy things Khrushchev did. All those lies and idiotism at the very top that caused troubles to common folk. No wonder alcohol epidemic started. As a kid I saw it first hand how families were decimated by green snake. I believe that crisis and drop of life expectancy was psychological and alcohol epidemic caused that drop in life expectancy.
Meanwhile, despite longer life expectancy for RF now Soviet Russia and USSR had growing population and despite 10 things that according to you are better now in Russia than in Russia , Russian population is still shrinking.
https://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D0%9D%D0%B0%D1%81%D0%B5%D0%BB%D0%B5%D0%BD%D0%B8%D0%B5_%D0%A0%D0%BE%D1%81%D1%81%D0%B8%D0%B8
I believe this is far worse than lower life expectancy as it is death or life question.
“The Soviets also had problems with this, they were just rationed differently (long waiting times, kommunalki, etc in USSR; market prices in Russia).”
I was born in communalka in 1968. In 5 years my grandparents received new 2 bed rooms apartment, not Krushev style. In 1975 my parents received one bed room apartment. In 1985 new building was built near our building and it was even better. Were it not for collapse Russian/ Soviet citizens would have been enjoying excellent living conditions without going into massive debt for life.
“If you pay the full price – i.e., are not intelligent or studious enough to qualify for a бюджетное место – well, that’s a pity, but hardly unfair.
“Russia does need to increase education funding but it should go towards raising academic salaries to leading world standards, not this idiotic egalitarianism.”
The problem I see is that you believe that Western education and standards are better than Soviet education and standards were.
I will only state, as a student in China as Sinologist I was observing German, French, American and Japanese students. Our Chinese and everything related to Chinese studies was better hence the top group consisted only of the Soviet and Japanese students.
Soviet education was holistic and started from early age. It created people with holistic thinking. I would say Western also is holistic but other way around.
It is called gradually boiling the frog or тихим сапом или тихой сапой removing everything that is free. This way they have taken every single right that Soviet citizens enjoyed for free and made it for profit.
I remember Chinese started doing same with students being gong fei and zi fei/ those who studied for free and who paid for their education. There is nothing new under Sun.
You must be proud of your son.
Meanwhile mine is just 6 but is already going into math school and we are putting aside for his education. I would hate for him to start life with debt. Math worries me. In local schools it is far from what we were learning in Soviet inferior schools 🙂
Check this out, this is hilarious:
https://www.mediaite.com/online/was-nikki-haley-duped-by-russian-comics-to-comment-on-the-island-of-binomo-which-doesnt-exist/
“I’m talking about the next 30-50 years, you dumbass.”
The Latvian woman shows her exceptional Latvian manners. And how do you know what’s going to happen during the next 30-50 years? By listening to MSM? — judging from your Kagans’ phraseology of “Russian meddling in Ukraine.” Are you really a Jewish-Latvian woman?
You see some kagan under every bed I bet (like they see “nazis” everywhere). Ridiculous, of course, I’m not Jewish (and I sure don’t look it).
But I do have plenty of anecdotal evidence of Westerners arriving in the Baltic states to settle long term (Russians from Moscow, too). More so than even just 5 years ago. And, yes, it will probably accelerate in the future. That was my whole point.
As it snows, so it goes.
Alcohol is indeed a toxic influence in most cultures and the Russians are particularly afflicted. Unfortunately, it’s so deeply ingrained that not even Putin could perform the necessary exorcism.
Should be called “10 Ways Life in Russia is Better than in America…for now.” Seems decadent American consumer culture and the associated liberal faggotry it comes packaged with is still the gold standard even in the savage wilds beyond the Empire’s direct reach. It’s still the same old blue jeans and Coca Cola and “we are loving the America!” for aspiring proles and status conscious liberalized urbanites with disposable income.
Watched an RT documentary from 2013 about Syrian journalists risking kidnapping or death reporting from insurgent held areas. One lady reporter they profiled had been kidnapped by the FSA and her colleague killed before they were freed. She went on about her love of “the motherland” and how could the west do this to Syria etc….while driving a BMW, talking on an iPhone and drinking a Pepsi. Her husband sitting next to her tapped away away on an HP laptop.
A bit depressing how even the people in countries marked for assimilation or destruction by the Greater European Empire mindlessly use their hard earned cash to prop up the very forces that want to destroy them.
Thanks mom, I’ll pass on the message to Vlad and Dasha.
Your concern trolling about the evils of oxycontin therapy saved “sad” Appalachian deplorables from nodding their lives away so this might work too!
Where does the paranoid and absolutely irrational fear many Americans have of a non-existent socialist (or Marxist or communist) bogeyman come from? Cold War 1.0 propaganda recycled and passed down to the offspring, or…? Because what Americans refer to as “Marxist” “socialist” or “communist” is nothing of the sort.
E.g. Obama the Marxist. Really? So the “Kenyan Muslim” planned to nationalize all banks and private companies and switch the US of A to a command economy, did he? Grab a dictionary or a polisci textbook and look up all your leftwing -isms and stop making fools of yourselves. (Or not…no skin off my scrotum if yer a weirdo masochist who likes using words with very specific meanings in the wrong context and being ridiculed for it.)
Sure, SJWs might talk about the “evils of capitalism” but in the context of identity politics and “racism” and “misogyny”. That’s right, they are clueless idiots too who think leftist class analysis is misogynistic because it doesn’t “recognize” the eternal victimhood of the wimmins of color, trannnies, fags, negroes …you get the picture. Only a privileged white male or Uncle Tom coons would talk about income inequality and class because they are racist oppressors or oppressed and tricked by racists. Crazy, huh?
SJWs adopted Maoist style group shaming rituals to preserve their loony race and gender essentialist “argument” (i.e. if you are white and male you are born baaad and the ills of this world and the next are all your fault…if you are a white woman you are bad but redeemable if you accept faggots, trannies and brown negro dudes/dykes as your masters. Black women of color and Jews are inherently superior beings because they have most SJW invented and approved oppression bingo points as decided by liberal Jew black feminists of color academics based on some shit they made up out of whole cloth. Ya dig?
So what does SJWism have to do with capitalism? Nothing. They love it. That’s the point. SJWs love making themselves feel all superior by “embracing” green and diversely sustainable eco-friendly ethical blahblahblah consumer choices. i.e. global capitalism….they eat it with a fucking soup ladle. The anti-capitalist [sic] crap they spew is a holdover of when the left was anti-capitalist (probably the influence of aging Trot academics.) At its core SJWism is about elevating words and rhetoric above actions in a weird and disjointed attempt to grab power so they bitch about capitalism as their profs taught them to do while living like zombie consumers every day of their outraged lives. They are idiots who make no logical sense.
So what’s your excuse?
Why does the American right repeat the words “Marxist” “socialist” and “communist’ as often as possible in its rhetoric? My guess is they are simply the right’s hate words and repeating them is the right’s very own virtue signalling ritual!
Taking it to extremes are the tag team duopoly of whiny SJWs and the whiny right faction of the American right (spiritually lead by Alex Jones’ rent boy, the whinging Brit YouTuber John Paul Watson). They are like lovers who can’t admit their taboo animal attraction for each other. They need to get a room and hate fuck some of that aggression out…or just go away and STFU once and for all.
Well yes, I proud of my son, he’s working hard. It’s last year, next will be аспирантура, now i’m writing on my phone and it’s not handy to go to dictionary.
You are right about bad tendency in health and education in Russia, but I see some signs of improvement. We’ll see it soon, next few years will show, mainly
It depends on destiny of liberal fifth column.
But less than 10 hours left to probably most loving day in the year here – New Year.
I congratulate everybody with it and wish it be better than previous. Actually seeng a desperate zoo of silly imbeciles in Western governments, mainly in US – it’s hadr to believe in improvement, but I’ll try
You have made excellent points!
global capitalism….they eat it with a fucking soup ladle.
Good example is the reaction to the Apple’s Batterygate. No outrage. They buy Apple’s excuse and somehow can’t see it is all lies.
Great comment.
There is no such thing as ‘free’ education, etc.
Somebody has to pay the teacher’s or prof’s salary, for example.
And that somebody is another (wealth-producing) worker’s taxes.
So it is not free: it is taxpayer funded.
Oh, you haven’t surely lived in a comminist country: there ain’t tax payers! The state earns the money, and the state spends it – the way it thinks is the best!
The destiny of the Baltic republics is to be between two giants. There is no way they can stay out of the relations between the giants. I am not sure what a slavery Baltic republics suffered from, during the Soviet era? They were used as a harbor for the great Soviet trade, were industrialized, extended in a territory, their language & culture were respected. In a nowadays they would feel only a positive influence of a EA-trade. Instead – they are now a NATO-patzdarm for a next “Drang nach Osten”, and they are a legal Russian target.
Farmed salmon isn’t nearly as good for you as wild caught. The protein ratio is off and these farmed fish live in veritable sewers while being fattened for market. They are fed things salmon aren’t meant to eat. Sounds like Russians are buying the lies of western food corps that spend millions trying to convince you that their knockoffs are better than the real thing,
You forgot to mention, NO NIGGERS
You didn’t address Russia’s public education system, which I understand is many times better than in the US. And what about the birth rate. Unlike western Europe, are white skinned Russians reproducing enough offspring to maintain their dominance?
No, but RUSSIANS everywhere.
Steve Sailer offers a nice balance. It is correct that HBD has its limits, and IQ can be fuzzy.
Eugenics too can be dangerous, even harmful. The mainstream “Antifragility” book concept could be applied to eugenics though, to ensure top-down meddling doesn’t create problems. Eugenics in some form seems necessary due to our easy lives, but it could certainly cause great harm, especially to identity.
Dr. Fleming at Chronicles and other Paleos have often warned of the limits of HBD. They’re correct. But it certainly has value as well.
Russians seem to dislike how they’re slightly mixed, but in my view they should simply take pride in being a distinct group since race often flows from one part of the world to another. They can still be distinct. I doubt Russian IQ is wanting, but I’ve never looked into such a thing.
The great risk of Russia is: Who fills Putin’s shoes? Russia could be a disaster post-Putin.
Autogyro.
The Mexicans from the potato farms made Friday nights in Boise entertaining 30 years ago. Go upstate to, say, McCall and you find more more ex hippies than survivalists.
In Russia, suitable accomodation and poorly paid insecure jobs limit family formation.
Uninhabitated villages in the Far East. Your groceries come by truck 1500 km from Vladivostok. It’s an offer that’s easy to refuse. One high profile Volga German family returning disillusioned from Germany lasted about 6 weeks. They didn’t stay in Russia even. Straight back to the Rhineland.
And “Irish” variants of Welsh classics stolen by ’50’s follies because Irish/Liverpool sold better. Holy Ground/Swansea Town, being the most prominent. It was sung on the Cape Horner’s (very dangerous route) bringing copper ore from Chile to Wales for refining. No copper works in Dublin or Liverpool.
When I meet non Russians doing business in Russia there is a moment of tension when they reveal their identity. Ingushetian most recently. It’s like saying you are Catholic in the UK when your surname doesn’t spell it out.
When I meet non Russians doing business in Russia there is a moment of tension when they reveal their identity. Ingushetian most recently. It’s like saying you are Catholic in the UK when your surname doesn’t spell it out.
The EU is baling out of NATO.
“As for the second major migration associated with the Mongol conquest of the medieval Russian principalities, its genetic traces is impossible to detect. This conclusion is mutually confirmed by the analysis of mtDNA and Y-chromosomes, and the data of anthropology. For example, the total frequency of Eastern-Eurasian mtDNA haplogroups in Russian populations of less than 2%: the same frequency is typical for the Western European Nations. For the Y-chromosome typical “Mongolian” marker is haplogroup C (the medium was believed to be Genghis Khan, – this haplogroup is most common among Mongols and related peoples). However, for the Russian population this haplogroup almost completely absent (frequency below 1%, i.e., from the formal standpoint of genetic polymorphism on this basis, the Russian population can be considered fully “genetically European”).”
E. V. Balanovskaya And O. P. Balanovsky. Russian gene pool of the Russian plain. M., 2007. P. 296
The same according to anthropology:
“Thus, the Russian population of Eastern Europe in the anthropological indicators or coincide with the average Western European , or deviate from them, remaining within the limits of variability of the Western European groups…”.
Bunak, V. V., the Origin and ethnic history of the Russian people according to anthropological data. M., 1965
melanf,
ty for the reply. Genetic heritage is certainly not something I’m well versed in.
The Cape Horner pub in St Thomas is now a derelict wreck, or was the last time I looked (not that it is of architectural distinction). (And the Norwegian Church has been moved.)
The late Peter Bellamy used to talk about the way folk lyrics were altered to suit 60s politics, as in Greenland Whale Fisheries, where the captain mourning his lost crew is altered to him mourning the lost whale.
It’s almost sure than IQ is higher in Russia than in USA, for example with this test online : https://www.my-iq.net Russia is the top country, but intelligence is not happiness…
Sorry for my late reply.
I didn’t understand this namefagging stuff.