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Wow I lived in Petersburg for 6 months but my ex girlfriend has all my photos :(

I'll post some of my pics of Moscow from my time there if I can find any.

Hey I married a Russian and would love to go back for good if I could though.

Siberia is cool, literally, very flat. I'd recommend going in winter and spring, summer has too many mossies about. Watching cars drive over a frozen river is fun.

CCIP I'll try and remember where my flat in St Petes was and then you can tell me if I was lucky not to get into trouble or not. When I first got there I stayed in the ob. with the other students in my group. That was on the broken metro line. I wonder if they have fixed that yet?

Let me post some more.

http://xed.xanga.com/8ba8346102ca810.../w74402311.jpg

Here’s the famous little ship named ‘Avrora’ parked on Neva in St Petersburg.

http://xb6.xanga.com/1b8d00331433110.../w74402321.jpg
And here are some pictures from Kronshtat (http://maps.google.com/?ie=UTF8&z=14...0.080338&om=1), an island with naval school.

http://x83.xanga.com/abbd1a34d7d3110.../w74402320.jpg

http://x04.xanga.com/cea8066302ca910.../w74402315.jpg
http://xaa.xanga.com/b2fd01325433110.../w74402319.jpg

http://xa3.xanga.com/a1dd03333413110.../w74402313.jpg

What sub is that ;)

Final picture for today: Typical sight; a completely rusted and ignored ship. It does make a good photogenic scenery.
http://xcc.xanga.com/39b835f6592a810.../w74402317.jpg

(I can send full pics, send my private with email address)

That sub would be a 877 (or other version) Kilo Class SSK.:know:

More excellent pictures. You guys are going to force me to take two weeks to visit there, aren't you? :rotfl:

For those who live or have lived in Russia, what do you think is the biggest problem now? What's the largest issue for the average Russian person?

http://img104.imageshack.us/img104/2121/scan0001pg7.jpg
Moscow 1994, White House. This was taken 6 months after Yeltsin attacked The White House. more to come...

wow fascinating. :yep:

My stepfather lives in the rich side of st petersburg so the only view that ive ever realy had is the people with money and he has some money:

To give you what he gets a month a break down:

Pension from Stena bulk $351.18 per month
Pension from the former soviet navy paid by the russian government $32.00 per month
Payment for any service he provides in the naval academy $12 per day
Payment for going to sea $53 per day.

Total with no days at sea and 5 days teaching included (which is average)

total is about $443 per month for a 62 year old
Out goings is around $390 to $410 per month.

That makes him fairly well off some of his friends get allowencies of just $38 per week to live on.

ive been there only a few times most of my trips take me into murmansk where he lives in what i can only discribe as incredibly poor conditions, its a big leap from rich to poor, the block of flats are half disused and blocked up the childrens play ground is well hasnt been maintained since the 80's most likely, but the buildings would what id discribe as the following:

A realy realy bad council estate thats due for demolition (for the UK people)

Theres very few people with money in murmansk and if you show you have money you probly end up getting mugged or robbed (hence the dress down), its pretty wild out in murmask cut off an isolated and St Petes for me is a 50 min plane ride.

In the city of murmansk tempratures get down to around -18*c (thankyou tall buildings) (thats as cold as your deep freeze) in the open country side the tempratures have been known to drp to -32*c and further east in omnicom the record is -89*c (thats in siberia)

He lives about 55km from the acctual arctic circle and its winter 9 months a year in summer the best you can realy hope for is around 5*c or 6*c.
Being so high up the nights are far longer and in summer the days are longer if i can remeber right its light for 24 hours a day for a whole week at one point in the calender (have to re check that)

My stepdad lives on the 5th floor of a block of flats near the docks, there is 1 bus but thats fine because nearly everything is within walking distance (yes including the pub)

It is fun theres a great sence of comunity and most of the old old locals do not like forigners (americans AND BRITISH (YES EVEN ME))

My stepdad isnt hard core old soviet style but you can tell he does have alot of it in him born when stalin still reigned ! so he has been through the entire cold war and listed to the soviet proaganda and is in more of a position to wiegh up the situation than most other people because he was a soviet person who was working on british registerd ships so he got both sides of nearly every story.

I enjoy it i was due to go out there a few weeks before the london meet up with you dan and lesrae but he went to sea so i had absolutly no where to go so i didnt go (dont fancy my chances alone).

Anyways thats about it.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Chaotic42

For those who live or have lived in Russia, what do you think is the biggest problem now? What's the largest issue for the average Russian person?

I still haven't had the chance to do my rant yet, but it's definitely socioeconomics. That is, the vast majority of the population is poor; many are unemployed; naturally, problems with housing, living conditions, crime and so on stem from that. This is why I think it's a misconception in the West to view the 'un-democratization' under Putin as the overriding issue in Russia. It's fairly low on the agenda compared to trying to edge out a stable living. This is why, for example, since the mid-90s the support for real liberal-democratic politicians has plummeted to single-digit percents of the vote.

Consider Kapitan's pension figures. My grandmother, who worked as a teacher all her life, gets 3500 roubles (~$140) a month, with price levels for household goods and food being virtually identical to those in the US.

More Moscow pix.
This is not me!
http://img161.imageshack.us/img161/2702/lenin1lr9.png

The wall behind the White House.
http://img161.imageshack.us/img161/1473/wallkd1.jpg

Avrora with guard.
http://img161.imageshack.us/img161/9320/avroragc3.jpg

Kolomenskoye -15 degrees when I was there that day.
http://img182.imageshack.us/img182/6...enskoyeit1.jpg

Exactly CCIP that $140 doesnt go far either, what my stepdad gets in pensions he is lucky if he hadnt have gone to work for stena bulk then he probly be on about the same or maybe less.

Before more pictures, a quick rant that I promised.

Just to explain to the people what, in my view, is the real story of the "abortion of Russia's middle class".

Perestroika. Gorbachev's wonderful reforms suddenly turn up massive economic problems and there is a huge deficit of goods. Naturally, with nothing on the shelves to buy, most people save their money. Thanks to the reforms, though, some enterprising individuals set up cooperatives, but these are rather few.

Then the devaluation of currency starts. Naturally, people try to get their money out and buy something - except for the most part, there's nothing to buy. Some are lucky; my father managed to buy a wad of grey cloth worth a few hundred dollars and later converted it to colored metals (money was worthless) - not much but I think it really made a difference for a rainy day. And the rainy day came.

Sberbank (the central and only bank in the USSR) closes all withdrawals. Soon, the currency crashes. People's entire savings are wiped out. It should be noted that with the way the Soviet system worked, people had little in the way of assets as most of everything was state-owned.

Not all the people however. Naturally, the ones that didn't lose were those who did not rely on Sberbank - and who they are might be easy to guess. For one, it's the wise entrepreneurs who, in the brief couple of years between being allowed to organize cooperatives and the crash, managed to build up small businesses and gain some assets. Then, of course, it's the black market run by the mafia who, understandably, would not have relied on the state bank. Thirdly, it's of course the party elite, for obvious reasons.

Privatization - for which some consider its mastermind, Anatoly Chubais, an economic genius, and for which I'd love to see him drawn and quartered. Up until now, this was a typical economic crash story, but Privatization is where it got uniquely ugly.

With the USSR gone and the Soviet system collapsed, naturally there was now a need to switch to a new system which encouraged private enterprise - and thus hand off the economy to the people. There was a problem of course: the people just lost all their money.

But in any case, in a stroke of genius, the government sells Russia's massive industrial power for remarkably low prices. International investors are not in the scene, of course, seeing the massive instability within the country. Of course, however low the prices, most people can't afford anything. They are broke.

Now, the government decides to play fair. They issue vouchers for a proportional share of state property to every soul in the country. There are two things that one can do with their voucher: invest it into one of the many investment companies that suddenly spring up out of nowhere; or, more cynically - sell it to one of the myriads of guys standing at subway entrances offering the equivalent of $10 for your voucher.

Most who went with the latter option were the better for it. My family, who were persuaded to invest, were luckier than most - we got a few dollars' worth of dividents before the company mysteriously disappeared. Most other people who invested never saw a rouble.

Meanwhile the sale of state assets is proceeding full-force. And those buying it are the ones with money. The former party officials are of course there by default. The mafia, coming out of the black market to the 'white market', are best adapted to negotiation. They benefit massively. The entrepreneurs are in a disadvantaged position for the most part - assuming they hadn't already been forced out by the envigorated mafia's racketeering. When trying to buy these major state assets, many are simply told "this is not for you". Only the most persistent and the most willing to bribe secure their spot.

Out of these three groups comes a great new Russian elite, called "Novye Russkie" meaning "New Russians". The most advanced of them are the famed Oligarchs - but the rest aren't too badly off. Consider the fact that at the present moment, just 12 people own 50% of Russia's GNP. It's fair to assume that the next 1% of the population owns another 40-something percent. The New Russians are that very group - former party officials and their families (the Chernomyrdin [ex-premier] and Yeltsin [ex-president] families are among the top names); children of the black market and shady trade (Berezovsky, Abramovich come to mind) and the mafia;
lucky entrepreneurs (Khodorkovsky) who were willing to go the way. With the mafia and the former party (a mafia of sorts in themselves) being the most numerous of the New Russians, it's easy to imagine their cultural values and ethics.

I've no sympathy for the New Russians whatsoever.

Meanwhile, what's all the more absurd is that following all that upheaval, what one would associate with 'cultural elite' or 'core middle class' are suddenly at the bottom of the well. Teachers, doctors, scientists, and other public workers were, at least during the 90's, some of the least paid professions (at one point the teachers at my school were earning around $15 a MONTH - not an exaggaration).

The stabilization of the economy in the past few years has smoothed things over somewhat and most people can survive - just barely. Not all is great, of course. For all the supposed positives, the current government seems to be bent on starving out the numerous pensioners. This may be unsurprising: pensioners overwhelmingly favour the remaining Communist Party that consists of the party members that didn't, in their view, "sell out" and go over to the new government. The parliament, without much debate, has passed a few bills in the past couple of years which would strike any reasonable person as death warrants for pensioners. Little noise has been raised over it. Likewise, Putin prides himself in incentives for families with children that he recently introduced. These are also a total joke, unless one believes that a lump sum of about $400 is enough to convince a family to have a child.

Remember that the cost of living in most Russian cities today is about the same as in most US cities for example.

The Russian middle class is dead, having never been born. Russia is not a democracy. Russia today is essentially a feudal state run by the few New Russians that have, with the have-nots being just that - have-nots.

Way back in January of 1984 when I spent a few days in St. Petersburg, I stayed at a hotel which gave me a great view of the Aurora. Unfortunately I was ill most of the time in St. Petersburg. I can't remember the name of the hotel. I do remember showing the house doctor a Tylenol (the old capsule type) and the look on her face. She was amazed. She then asked for a magazine. I had to tell her that every western magazine I had was taken from me when I entered the country. She seemed disappointed.

http://xed.xanga.com/8ba8346102ca810.../w74402311.jpg

Quote:

Originally Posted by CptSimFreak

http://x66.xanga.com/066d224537c3310.../w74294670.jpg
(inside subway station...it's illegal to take pics, but I did it anyways :D)

If you look carefully, you can see a KGB agent watching you. ;)

thats pretty incredible! i thought it was a museum! not the tube

Quote:

Originally Posted by flintlock

Quote:

Originally Posted by CptSimFreak

(inside subway station...it's illegal to take pics, but I did it anyways :D)

If you look carefully, you can see a KGB agent watching you. ;)

Yeah, they don't like that. A girl in our class was taking pix there, and she had a little talk to from a cop.

just for the nostalgia: http://www.metro.ru/

I lived by the Vykhino http://www.metro.ru/stations/tagansk...nskaya/vyhino/

if you took a photo of the underground here in London the lens would break!

very pretty, a part of Russia most of us forget exists