Paul Goble
Staunton, July 22 – The predominantly ethnic Russian regions around Moscow are generally discussed as a group, one in which they share common demographic and economic problems. But last week, Anatoly Nesmiyan, who blogs under the screen name El Murid, made a 5,000-kilometer road trip through them and found an amazing diversity.
Viewed from his car, the blogger says, three of the federal subjects, non-Russian Tatarstan, and predominantly ethnic Russian Samara Oblast and Krasnodar Kray, looked good. Their roads were generally in good repair and facilities along them provided the services one needed (t.me/anatoly_nesmiyan/19598 and kasparov.ru/material.php?id=669DFCED9EDE6).
At the other extreme was another predominantly ethnic Russian region, Voronezh Oblast, El Murid said, a place that looked as if it has already been bombed, as the Russian anecdote has it. Its roads if one can call them that are a disgrace and the services along them are sparse and of poor quality. Other regions El Murid visited were in between.
The blogger noted that there was no difference in the condition between paid highways and free public highways. Bringing all the roads and the services up to them is a task of 20 to 30 years; but it will never be carried out by leaders who are distracted by “nonsense like ‘we can repeat.’”
El Murid’s point is that the leaders of the country should be focusing on those issues rather than on their aggressive plans abroad, but his road trip report is also a sign that oblasts and krays often lumped together are in fact very different from one another, the result of a variety of factors that deserve to be the object of attention.
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