most of them are not living very well. And many are doing terribly. There is so much talk now about supporting Russians and protecting them. Beefy deputies talk about it, with St. George ribbons pinned to their Zegna jackets and salaries of 450,000 rubles a month (about $4,900). Ministers talk too—just as beefy, only without the ribbons and in Brioni jackets. TV hosts talk as well—not beefy, just well-fed; they have to keep up appearances, and they try to live a Western lifestyle. They talk and talk, but life does not get any better for these Russians. They are, supposedly, the most Russian of Russians. Blue-eyed, fair-haired, living on ancestral Russian soil. Let’s spare them a thought.
Trains used to stop at Kilometer 232 (that is Dolzhitsy) several times a day, so if you got up at 5 a.m., you could go into town, visit the market, and be back before the evening news. Now not a single train stops there. Instead, four times a day—out and back—a shiny new railcar passes through Dolzhitsy: a Russian Railways service train that carries repair crews and switch operators along the Dno–Oredezh line (Oredezh is a settlement in the Leningrad Region). In theory, people from Dolzhitsy could ride it too, but only those with Russian Railways employee ID are allowed on board. So the railway workers—the children of Dolzhitsy postwoman Lyudmila Gavrilovna—are allowed on the train, but her school-age grandchildren are not. It should be said that the good drivers let Dolzhitsy residents onto the railcar anyway, while the bad ones do not. True, the good ones become bad after the very first time unauthorized passengers are discovered and their bonuses are cut. No one in Dolzhitsy takes offense—they know the bonus is 10,000 rubles (about $110). On January 29, Lyudmila Ivanovna Matveyeva had Quincke’s edema: her face and throat swelled up, and she began to suffocate. “I had to get to a hospital—but they wouldn’t let me on the train!” Matveyeva recalls calmly, sitting in her kitchen. “So we went out onto the tracks and blocked them. They took us on the train, brought us into town, and I was taken to the hospital. But when we blocked the tracks again, that’s when the cops picked us up…” ... Read Novaya Gazeta’s report—the kind that makes you want to cry—about how people live in the villages of the Pskov Region. Russian Railways canceled their local trains (“unprofitable”), there are no roads, and the only way to get anywhere is on foot. Russian people walk along the railroad ties to get to the hospital. And right now, probably, someone is walking there as you read this, while billionaire and international-scale crook Yakunin, the head of Russian Railways, collects signatures from assorted international riffraff to demand the lifting of sanctions imposed on him, Yakunin. ... Trains to Dolzhitsy were canceled on January 11. Now a trip to the market or the hospital from Dolzhitsy works like this: first you have to walk for a long time along the tracks, watching the signals so you can jump clear when a train comes. Then you pass the crossing, walk through the neighboring village of Lyuboneg, and trudge another two kilometers (1.2 miles) across a field to the large village of Lukomo. From there, once a day, you can get to the district center, Dno, by bus—or by taxi for 300 rubles (about $3.30). And then the same trip back. In summer, the whole route can be done by bicycle; in the cold winter, or in very dry weather, by SUV. ... In 2014, Russian people are roofing their izbas (traditional wooden peasant houses) with advertising billboards:
They chop firewood:
In short, they are living exactly in line with “Eurasian traditions” and Russia’s supposedly special path of development. And those beefy deputies and ministers do not pity these Russians one bit. Let’s at least pity them ourselves. People left late. “Mark my words, this will all end in a Maidan!” grumbled Galina Ivanovna, squelching through the mud. (Maidan refers to the mass protest movement in Kyiv, Ukraine.) “The main thing is that it doesn’t end in Magadan…” came the reply from the darkness. (Magadan is a remote Russian city long associated with Stalin-era labor camps.) http://www.novayagazeta.ru/society/62774.html