A must-read. Very accurate and very sad. Roadless Sovereignty: How Russia Is Turning Into a Void
I had meant to write a column about the Chelyabinsk meteor, but instead I unexpectedly found myself witnessing a disaster of comparable scale: repairs on the federal M9 Baltia highway, which I happened to take from Moscow to Tartu. To be fair, this road, which runs through the Tver and Pskov regions, had never been known for the quality of its surface, so those in the know used to drive to the Baltics via the Minsk Highway. But this time something extraordinary happened, even by Russian road standards: 250 km (155 miles) from the capital, the asphalt simply ended. ... It took us 4 hours to cover 100 kilometers (62 miles) without asphalt, and the entire time we did not see a single road worker, a single police car, any machinery, or any notices about completion dates or detour routes—just a vanished roadway. At a gas station we were told that the road crews had stripped off the asphalt at the beginning of autumn and left, without saying when they would return. For the fourth month, the road has stood there as if after an air raid in late 1941, when fighting was raging near Rzhev and Velikiye Luki. At the same gas station they told us about a French truck driver who came to them pleading, “I got lost on the back roads—how do I get back to the main highway?” He was told that this was the main highway, the one leading from Europe to Moscow. ... I have been driving this road to Tartu for almost 10 years now—the very same years in which Russia was supposedly steadily rising from its knees—and I have watched as, with each passing year, the space itself begins to disintegrate before your eyes just 200 km (124 miles) from Moscow. The M9 is under constant repair, yet it only gets worse. There are more and more dead villages all around—at night, not a single light for dozens of kilometers—and the people you meet look ever more joyless, trudging somewhere along the shoulder with sleds or hitchhiking with little hope in their eyes. I did not see any regular buses either, by the way. Aside from a few chain gas stations, the roadside services are increasingly miserable: ramshackle kebab joints you would be afraid even to pull into, and sheds selling truck parts. The local population, as if it were the 16th century, sells the gifts of the forest by the roadside: dried mushrooms, frozen berries, coarse fur clothing. ... In Tartu we were holding a winter school on the problems of the state and sovereignty. And it occurred to me that the road apocalypse on the M9 is directly related to that subject. While the State Duma is busy fighting foreign agents and the “orange plague” (a reference to post-Soviet pro-democracy “color revolutions”), and Dmitry Rogozin tells us that Russia is defending its sovereignty either in the battle for Syria or in its confrontation with U.S. missile defense in Europe, we have already lost that very sovereignty on the M9 highway. Sovereignty has two aspects: nominal authority and control. The symbols of authority are present on the highway, after a fashion: in the town of Zubtsov, next to the Beverly Hill hotel, you can see the local administration building with the Russian tricolor, and on the approach to the town of Nelidovo there is a concrete booth bearing the slogan “Russia, Forward!”—but effective control over the territory has already been lost. There is no state here, no infrastructure, no institutions, and, really, no life. Read the full piece here. Do. A very accurate description. Despite the fantastic flood of oil-and-gas dollars pouring into the country, Russia has turned into one huge bloated Moscow, guarded by a million police officers, and the rest of the country—completely abandoned—where between the islands of life in the largest cities, zombies roam, the bittern booms, and every now and then a yellow "Lada Kalina" drives by, making an unpleasant impression on what remains of the local population. For the sake of fairness, here is a link to some good news as well, illustrating the steady growth in society’s prosperity: [I]n a year, the number of dollar billionaires in Russia increased by 11. There are now 131 of them.({{URL_3}}) By this measure, we are second only to the United States. Something to be proud of. Even if, on the road from Moscow to Tartu, the local people are selling frozen berries and dried mushrooms.