On healthcare, private is better, but is public really terrible?
I love this basing fees on income levels. Until someone posted that story on the speeding tickets in Sweden, or wherever, I'd never heard of such a thing.
Thanks Chris. BTW, what is a Stalin apartment? ----------------------- Unfortunately, Russia does not base fees on income levels (would be hard to do, since nobody knows how much anybody earns). It has a flat rate based upon some multiple of the minimum monthly wage and adjusted for inflation.
Public health care isn't horrible, but it's not very good either, as the state is strapped for cash. The good doctors, unless they're really committed, go to work in private clinics. A doctor at a polyclinic (a public hospital) gets a salary of about $50 a month -- of course, this gets increased by the gratuities they expect from patients, part of the shadow income I keep talking about.
Apartments, which of course were all previously the property of the Soviet State, were privatized and given free to their residents. If several families lived in a single apartment, which was common, each received part-ownership. And, no, there would be no way for a typical wage-earner to rent an apartment on their own, though they could probably afford a room.
A Stalin apartment is, appropriately enough, an apartment in a block of flats built during the Stalin era. They are solid, spacious, comfortable and warm (which is very important in Russia). Like most buildings in Russia, the quality of Stalin-era apartment blocks is head and shoulders above what was built afterward, especially the kommulanky (communal apartments) that were built to cope with urbanization during Krushchev. You'll have three or four families living side by side in one of those. Most of the good architecture in Moscow is either tsarist- or Stalin-era, the latter especially if you have a taste for monumentalism and don't mind hammers and sickles all over the place.
Stalin (or Kh., shortly after? I don't remember) actually built the largest free-standing statue in the world, Rodina Mat' (Mother Homeland). Uncle Joe did not f. around when it came to building stuff (the metro, which is widely reputed to be the finest in the world -- average delay between trains is 45 seconds -- for instance).
The Moscow is just chock full of hammer-and-sickles and Vladimir Illyches, by the way.
Chris Doss The Russia Journal