--- Doug Henwood <dhenwood at panix.com> wrote:
>
> You can't answer this now, because you've already
> hit your daily
> quota, but you're evading the point - Moscow is much
> richer than the
> rest of Russia. You keep citing the wealth of Moscow
> as if it were
> represenative. It's as if I took Manhattan's Soho as
> representative
> of life in the USA.
>
Well, of course. But St. Petersburg, Kazan, Rostov-on-Don, Ekaterinburg, and Vladivostok are not hellholes either.
The North Caucasus and Siberia, on the other hand... Thiose places are really poor (excepting the towns based around the natural-resource extraction industries -- those are rich, albeit with a very high cost of living). I already mentioned Kalmykia with its Chess President.
(Then again, there's the issue of whether one can accurately compare the living standards of an urban dweller and a Siberian reindeer herder. They're really different lifestyles after all.)
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