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Comment by olegious | Hacker News Reader

Interesting article but this is nothing new. Russian villages have been dying for centuries- life was always better and easier in the cities. Putting forward gypsies as examples of a "Russia left behind" is disingenuous at best- gypsies live in their own societies by their own rules all across Europe.

Frankly I'm a bit tired of all the negative coverage of Russia by the NYT, The Economist and other respected establishments. I can drive through the Appalachians or towns in the South or Detroit and describe an "America Left Behind"- but we all know that those places do not represent the USA as a whole.

Edit: Russia has problems everyone knows that, I would just like to see more balanced coverage- talk to the middle class that has grown in the cities, the startup people in Moscow, St. Petersburg and other cities, compare how things are today to how they were in the 90s.

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Interesting comment but this is nothing new. Hacker News threads have been suffering from "Eternal September" for years — opinions were always better and more interesting in the old days. Putting down original reporting as an example of "seen it all before" is disingenuous at best — according to the unwritten rules, one never scores points with "this is nothing new"; it's practically expected.

Frankly I'm a bit tired of all the negative comments about the NYT, The Economist and other respected establishments by simple reflex. I can scroll through comment threads or posts in the archives and describe an HN where "middlebrow dismissals" rule the roost — but we all know that those do not (or should not) represent Hacker News as a whole.

Edit: HN top comments have problems everyone knows that, I would just like to see more relevant thought coming out on top. Talk about the specific technology and techniques being used, a response to the article that demonstrates you actually read it, or compare these "new news" approaches to attempts that were made in the '00s.

;)

> [] were always better and more interesting in the old days

Replace [] with your favorite magazine, newspaper, website, music genre...

Was it really any better, or are you just wiser to the bullshit now?

nostalgia ain't what it used to be ;)

>>Frankly I'm a bit tired of all the negative comments about the NYT, The Economist and other respected establishments by simple reflex. I can scroll through comment threads or posts in the archives and describe an HN where "middlebrow dismissals"

I think that this comment thread has become a good example of a typical hacker news discussion right now. The top comments don't add anything to the discussion and the vast majority of the rest are entirely political and repeat the same thing while being totally devoid of any facts or analysis. I could (and would have if I knew nothing about the topic) learn more by searching for information about the quality of life in the rural russian countryside than by reading this thread.

I find it fascinating that criticizing something for being a middlebrow dismissal is itself a necessarily a middlebrow dismissal: you're saying that his comment is okayish, but just not good enough. A bit hypocritical.

I grew up in Appalachia, and have spent a lot of time there.

I'd love to have you show me where there are towns without electricity, ambulance access, running water, easily accessible paved roads, hospitals within easy driving distance, broadband access, etc.

Even the smallest of towns I can name in Appalachia, have such things.

In fact, I grew up in an exceptionally poor part of Appalachia, with 15% to 20% unemployment at a time when the nation had 5% unemployment. Technically I grew up quite poor, and we had all the modern conveniences everybody else in America took for granted in the 1970s or 1980s.

Incomes have doubled since then, and are roughly three times that of the average wage in Russia, much less the average wage in the dilapidated Russia (probably 8 to 10 times higher than that).

I don't think you've actually spent much time in Appalachia. It's not a bustling and booming metro, obviously, but it's not even remotely comparable to what this article describes in Russia.

Russia has a GDP per capita of about a fourth of the US or other Western countries but it also has a very large inequality among regions and rural/urban areas. So the difference between rural GDP per capita in the US and Russia is something like 5-6. So when people in this thread are screaming how this is all propaganda and the rural areas of Russia are comparable to any area of the US they are claiming things that can't possibly be true.

It can be true, but Russia also has the largest land area in the world, and a population less than half that of the US. Fixing it is not a challenge I would take on lightly.

>Frankly I'm a bit tired of all the negative coverage of Russia by the NYT, The Economist and other respected establishments. I can drive through the Appalachians or towns in the South or Detroit and describe an "America Left Behind"- but we all know that those places do not represent the USA as a whole.

But... This is not about a cherry-picked stagnant area, this is about a main highway between Russia's two largest cities. It seems to be woefully neglected, while facilities used by Putin are done up to @#$%-the-expense standard. This is about the leadership of the country gone morally astray, and not caring about who sees it.

> Russia has problems everyone knows that, ...

Oh well, that's allright then. No point actually doing something.

You're missing the point- negative coverage on Russia is ALL you hear coming from the major Western media outlets, this is my complaint.

I understand. Africa(-Americans) & Oakland can almost never catch a break either... trying to explain the imbalance is an uphill battle. If you only got your world-view from western-TV, you'd think America is paradise with perfect people, aside from blacks & mexicans. Everyone outside of it are savages not worthy of respect or consideration; perhaps a bit of pity though...

> If you only got your world-view from western-TV, you'd think America is paradise with perfect people, aside from blacks & mexicans.

That's not the view of the US I get from Spanish news: there's a /lot/ of coverage of gun crime, obesity, etc. This is "balanced" by the amount of US TV shows that are imported, of course.

Yeah, it's the same here in Norway too.

The US gets a lot of bad press here. Obesity, corruption, disfunctional government, inequality, surveillance, religion, puritanism, gay hate, gun violence etc are much more in the focus in the news about the US than the positive sides of the US are.

Most Norwegians thinks of the US as this slightly weird, ignorant country that believes it's still the best at everything and doesn't bother with the rest of the world.

> Most Norwegians thinks of the US as this slightly weird, ignorant country that believes it's still the best at everything and doesn't bother with the rest of the world.

Most Canadians think the same. Visiting the US several times, having family that lives there and listening to Bloomberg radio every morning and afternoon during my commute reinforces that opinion...

While I have no doubt the US has some benefits (high pay in certain industries), overall it seems like a strange, ignorant, backwards place. The fact that the Republicans have shut down the government to block health care (which is pretty much universally regarded as a good thing) makes it seem even more backwards (especially when watching a protest on TV in which someone was waving a confederate flag in front of the White House...).

Of course 'health care' is a good thing, that's a fairly meaningless platitude. This particular implementation being good or bad has yet to be determined. I personally don't find the ACA to be a 'good' system, but I wish they would just shut up and let it succeed or fail in production.

Also, a large part of why you have cheap healthcare and access to lots of drugs because we paid the cost to research and make them. With the ACA, a lot of that (potentially) goes away, though from the look of the early prices it seems the cost of healthcare has gone up for most, and near free for some, meaning the healthcare industry still gets massive profits. I'm wondering if it was good for the rest of the world to have our healthcare system be so expensive.

Hopefully not, I'm pretty tired of being terrified of becoming sick enough to need medical care.

> Also, a large part of why you have cheap healthcare and access to lots of drugs because we paid the cost to research and make them.

Not entirely sure about that. It seems like many (most?) of the 'important' drugs worldwide were either developed by educational institutions or laboratories (some belonging to corporations) from a wide variety of countries, not just the US.

The only reason it is currently profitable to make drugs at all (and the reason we've seen research in so many) is that US consumers will buy them at market rate with IP protection, i.e., too expensive for most places. If we didn't exist as that profit center, many would not have been put through clinical trials and brought to market.

http://www.forbes.com/sites/matthewherper/2012/02/10/the-tru...

I'm scared to get into healthcare debate, but I will say that while I understand the importance of clinical trials, if there wasn't any.... then the drugs would just be brought to market regardless even if it means people die. In Nigeria; even just in ChinaTown San Francisco, you can get some questionable origins drugs. But indeed, all bets are off when you take that stuff. Maybe it'll work, maybe it won't, maybe DOOM! Not saying this is a good thing, but the drug market would continue without USA, IMHO.

It does not look like Russia tries really hard to do something positive recently. There are many smart and interesting people in Russia or from Russia (I speak about culture and science) but they are only small part of Russia (I don't even speak about culture and science people who work for evil side). Putin, FSB and oligarchs is Russia.

IMHO Western media could be even more negative but that's most probably because I'm from one of Baltic states and we really have got (and still are getting) a lot of injustice from Russia.

> this is about a main highway between Russia's two largest cities

Go ahead and drive around in Brooklyn or NYC, the roads are much worse compared to Russian highway or Moscow streets, also it's not like in US where the most goods travel by highways, in Russia goods travel by trains, so there is not as much need in road highway compared to US.

Also I have no idea what does the gypsy wedding has to do with Russia? Gypsies have the same wedding rules everywhere they live..

Most goods in the US travel by train. Even more so than Europe. It's the main reason why passenger rail in the US is shit. Rail companies make more per mile transporting freight than they do passengers so freight gets priority.

That area had been stagnant[1] for at least as long as the USA existed.

[1]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Journey_from_St._Petersburg_to_...

Ever here the Bob Dylan song The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll? It's about a 1963 incident when a white Maryland farmer named William Zantzinger got drunk and started harassing a middle-aged black barmaid and hitting her with a cane. She collapsed and died and he got a six month prison term. In the early 90s Zantzinger went to jail again - this time for charging rent on shacks that were actually owned by the local government. These shacks didn't have running water and they were located 30 miles down the road from Washington, D.C.

Obviously the United States is not Russia and our leaders aren't kleptocrats. But they have been willing to ignore abject poverty for generations. I suspect that the dismissive, contemptuous attitude that many middle and upper class Americans have towards, say, the inner cities, would not be unfamiliar in Moscow or St. Petersburg.

'Willing to ignore abject poverty' was a part of conservative ideology which states that people must be directly responsible before God, not government, and government is not in place to support the people. This was the better part of conservative ideology as i see you, and times when it was dominant on U.S. political landscape were the best times in U.S. history.

> a main highway between Russia's two largest cities

It is not.

Moscow and St. Petersburg are 900 km apart and they never had a highway between them. Instead it's a patchwork of provincial roads most of the way. He could've chosen any city 900 km away from Moscow and his cherry-picked story would've stayed absolutely the same.

More balanced coverage shall include epidemic heroin usage, mass alcoholism and total degeneration and population decline, criminalization and corruption, ruined and sold out industry and social system at the very least.

As for Detroit, come on, we have thousands cites like that, actually, all except Moscow, Spb and Novosib.)

Yes all those problems exist, but compare the situation today to the mid-90s and I would argue that people as a whole are better today than back then- we see very little of that kind of coverage.

Yes, yes, proles and animals are free.)

> As for Detroit, come on, we have thousands cites like that, actually, all except Moscow, Spb and Novosib.

Obviously you know nothing about Russia if you say that...I can list you hundreds of cities where life is much better than many US cities and city areas...I am myself from a city called Pyatigorsk (Stavropol Region) and we have a much better roads, much less garbage on the streets and a lot less crime compared to NY (especially Brooklyn and parts of Queens and NYC which to me looks like a sewer)

Obviously.)

NYC has unprecedentedly low crime for its density and size [1]. There might be places in the US that allow you to draw parallels with Russia, but NYC is a pretty awful example.

1: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crime_in_New_York_City

New York has low crime for an American city its size.

Tokyo, Seoul, Paris, London, Hong Kong, and the like have much lower violent crime rates than New York.

New York does have less crime than Los Angeles, São Paulo, Chicago, and such.

London in fact is not a lower crime rate city than New York. It's a much lower homicide rate city however.

Per 100,000 people (all data is recent, from wikipedia, the guardian and met police; it's understood these numbers swing annually)

NYC: homicide 6.4; robbery 235; aggravated assault 327; violent crime 581; burglary 215; larceny theft 1,336; vehicle theft 123; rape 14.6

London: homicide 1.1; robbery 440; knife enabled crimes 168; aggravated assault 950; burglary 529; vehicle theft 994; rape 20

And this:

http://www.disastercenter.com/crime/nycrime.htm

Claims even lower rates for most of those crimes stats for NYC. From what I can find, New York has vastly lower crime rates on most things except homicides.

Thanks for your data filled response.

I was following a common transnational methodology violent crime by focusing on homicide. It turns out that definitions and reporting of other violent crimes is wildly different in different jurisdictions. For example, if you were a young black male New Yorker who had just been mugged, you would be wise to keep it to yourself considering the policy of the authorities toward people who look like you. There isn't much you can do to avoid coming to the attention of authorities if you're murdered, though.

Vehicle theft is pretty reliable, but motorcars per person and storage technique can vary.

I have done some work on looking through crime rates before. For example, Dublin and Stuttgart have the same crimes per year per thousand people, but, although Dublin is mostly nice, it has its sketchy areas, and you couldn't pay to get mugged in Stuttgart.

Comparing murders is like comparing the danger of drugs by comparing death rates (big report in the UK a couple of years ago); the long term effect on society of a heroin addict, stealing, disease, impact on family, etc., is so much different than a single healthy kid suddenly dying of a disco biscuit on a Saturday night.

Don't put Tokyo in the same basket as Paris or London. There's way less crime in Tokyo that these 2 cities. It's a different category on its own.

With stop and frisk out the door along with other proactive policing strategies on the side lines now it will be very interesting to see if that crime rate stays low.

Why do Russian men die at 64 if life is so great?

"They were born, they grew up in the gutters, they went to work at twelve, they passed through a brief blossoming-period of beauty and sexual desire, they married at twenty, they were middle-aged at thirty, they died, for the most part, at sixty".

Isn't ethnic crime endemic to Pyatigorsk? What I've heard about your city makes me not want to go there. Is it not the dumpster bin for Chechnya and Dagestan?

You are comparing a spa town with New York City?

Comparing the crime rate of a city with 130 000 inhabitants with New York is a bit unfair : ) Compare it with a town of similar size, and put some actual statistics upfront

Unfortunately this is the sad truth about Russia, everybody who thinks otherwise hasn't been to these places or Russia at all.

It's really hard to think of anything positive, except for the unbelievable ability of (some) Russians to daily cope with this reality and stay sane and positive.

I lived with a Russian family a few years ago for a month in one of the ten largest cities in Russia. As an American, I found many aspects of their society to be rather hostile, but I found at least one region to be a beautiful area of the country with interesting, warm, and dare I say _happy_ people. I think many of us can trivially find reasons that the state of Russia is less than ideal, but the way you describe it is a bit off the mark.

The country is incredibly beautiful and the Russian people incredibly resourceful considering the living conditions. Another trait of Russians is the importance of status and pride which results that we tend to keep face even though the conditions we live in aren't reflective of the lifestyle we try to portray. I was born in Russia and have lived there for a large portion of my life. While my direct family was relatively well off we've had our fair share of misery in the family. To get back on point, whenever we had visitors my parents would prepare the best meals even though there was a scarcity of food, but being hospitable to guests was more important than the possibility of not having food for the rest of the week. My point is that visiting Russia can be a distorted experience compared to actually 'living' there.

At least some fresh air in this in thread.

I suspect that reality is even worse. Exponentially worse.

As one poet said "Умом Россию не понять"

If we assume that media is subservient in large to the state (one can certainly insert a joke about Russia here, but I actually mean "Western" media), in accordance to Chomsky's model, this would not be surprising.

It seems with Snowden's leaks. Every week or so there is new punch thrown into America's eye. Snowden just got some kind of award. He got some time in limelight. American government is shut down. Common, how long till we hear about how horrible some other political rivals are "Russia's poverty problem" sure makes me feel a little better about NSA spying and idiots in Congress fucking around with the budget. I wouldn't mind maybe a few more "China is a terrible place" stories too for completeness.

It's ironic that your implication is that the media should focus entirely on US problems to the exclusion of any other country's problems - and you think this will be unbiased

What is ironic is the coincidence of "look at shitty Russia with 14 year old brides" when a) US government is shutdown b) Snowden documents keep revealing NSA's dirt form under the carpet.

Not to mention the age of consent in some states in the US is as low as 14 (if one partner is younger than 18)...

The marriage in the article would be legal in California.

Only with a judge's approval -- which I doubt would be forthcoming -- particularly if the putative groom sat glumly through the hearing playing video games.

In Georgia (the US state, not the formerly Soviet country), the age of marriage and sexual consent is 13.

source: Wikipedia [http://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/Age_of_sexual_consent_in_th...]

Are you sure, because I just looked at Wikipedia and it says 16 not 13

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ages_of_consent_in_North_Americ...

The internet is pretty much ruined in many ways now. Apart from the snooping, public opinion has become an open battlefield. Comments for any political article on any popular site are now full to the brim with obvious shills of all stripes.

we still have wikipedia, that alone justifies the cost of the internet. as a data scientist, I am particularly thankful for wikipedia and it's brethren like freebase as a real, up to date corpus and to some extend ontology.

Same old in a new package. Dilapidated villages, evil Putin, some churches, and an oddity, this time in a form of a gypsy wedding :)

Very well executed though. Great photography and web layout.

There have been a few Western photographers of renown who have treated Russia as a subject.

1. http://www.theguardian.com/world/gallery/2010/nov/27/bruce-g...

2. https://www.lensculture.com/articles/simon-roberts-motherlan...

3. http://englishrussia.com/

[1] Bruce Gilden

[2] Simon Roberts

It was a weird contrast. The photographs were beautiful. But the tone of the article was definitely biased against something about the Russian government's involvement in the economies of the places that were visited.

When I read the negative comments, I personally thought of many places I've been in the US (where I'm from) which reminded me of what I was reading. The comments about the Russian villages both seemed like they could be true and like they were a little hypocritical.

>I would just like to see more balanced coverage

Well, this is the NYT, so I wouldn't expect much of that, or from any major news publication that is heavily influenced by the government of where it calls home. I think one can reasonably get balanced coverage by sourcing from different places with the biases of the host nation in mind.

That's the thing, I'm a subscriber to the NYT and I like a lot of their coverage, especially their in depth pieces and interesting multimedia heavy articles like this one.

But if they're providing me biased info about a topic I know a lot about, how can I trust them on the topics I know little about?

Well personally, I wouldn't inherently trust any source by itself, on any topic, to make me not want to look up more information (no matter how they display it). I think for every type of publication (major, minor, etc) I always think about who finances them, where they're hosted, who their audience is, and what emotions they are trying to evoke in that audience by the language/graphics they use (how much they try shape the perceptions of the reader).

But if they're providing me biased info about a topic I know a lot about, how can I trust them on the topics I know little about?

That's exactly the feeling I have about all non-specialist media. All of it, even NYT, BBC, The Economist, and NPR. I know a lot about a few things, and they never can get the details right, or often even the main points right.

I still consume the stuff - for entertainment, I guess. It's good to keep in mind that it's at best an approximation of the facts.

But the article does talk about cities. In fact, one part specifically targets cities 'as a vacuum' that sucks the life and quality of life from rural regions.

If I can hazard to interpret what you mean - I think you are saying for NYT to compare the net benefit (how people in cities are better off).

However, I'd call in to question whether we should focus on the net benefit vs. the very fact that Russia has fundamentally discarded its rural regions and the like.

Just like New York city is a vacuum that sucks the life out of the rural regions of upstate New York.

Even the NYT covers this from time to time http://www.nytimes.com/2006/06/13/nyregion/13census.html?pag...

I've middle class friends living in small cities in Russia and they all tell me that, despite Russia not being the "2nd greatest country" anymore, life is much better. Some of the older people still think the Soviet era was awesome and miss it. But most of the newer people (<30yo) think everything is much much better.

I think this article went to some extreme places and made it look like Russia outside Moscow/StPtbg is just dying. Disingenuous at least.

You've never driven through Appalachia. Good roads, orderly towns and lovely scenery.

I have, and I grew up downwind from it. Parts of it are nice (e.g. Boone and Asheville where I grew up in NC), but off the beaten track are villages that look like they haven't progressed in the last hundred years. I've been to the rural parts of Pakistan too and it's frankly surprising how similar parts of Appalachia can be to it.

Chicago!

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