The media love to hype Russia as a formidable international foe for lots of reasons (including propping up the Russian Collusion Fantasy they used to attack Trump with and the need to deflect attention from China), but it’s important to remember than, in a lot of ways, Russia is still suffering the debilitating after-effects of 70+ years of communist rule. The United States’ GNP is fourteen times that of Russia, and Russia’s GDP has actually shrunk since 2013, due to an economic crisis and devaluation of the ruble following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and a decline in worldwide oil prices. In many ways, Russia is a very large, very broke third world country that happens to have lots of nuclear weapons.
As a reminder of what Russia can look like outside the big cities, here are some videos from a Twitter thread.
One more video from the Kolyma federal highway in northeastern #Russia:pic.twitter.com/P7EOm4ThVO
— Alex Kokcharov (@AlexKokcharov) July 25, 2021
Kolyma is the far eastern region of Russia where some of the Gulag’s most notorious arctic death camps were located.
Here’s a video from Mutny Materik on the Reka Pechoria in the Komi Republic. It’s just shy of 1,000 miles from Moscow, but still in the same time zone.
This is real Russia, not the facades of Moscow or St Petersburg:pic.twitter.com/hinQ6UWLPD
— Alex Kokcharov (@AlexKokcharov) July 25, 2021
And now, to round out this post, here’s a video compilation of crazy Russian car crashes: