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.
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.
>>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.
>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.
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.
> 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..
> 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.)
> 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)
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.
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.
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
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
This article is outrageous propaganda, I knew that the US government had issues with the Russian government, but it saddens me to see that most posters here have nothing but hatred towards Russia.
Just the fact that the NYT picked life in a gypsy settlement (no water, no electricity, child weddings) to generalize about the life in Russia makes it obvious to me that the journalists had no other intentions but to villify the Russians.
What they did not tell you is that gypsy settlements look the same in France, Germany and other industrialized countries. (Yes - children not going to school, no electricity, no water, weddings of 13 year olds and so on)
Are any of the facts mentioned false? Is the author implying that all of Russia is like this?
As a journalist I find it very surprising when people react to specific articles (often "negative" to their own beliefs) by imagining a grand conspiracy.
There are numerous realities in every country and every company. A skilled journalist can tell any one of those in an interesting manner. But that doesn't imply there aren't other stories.
For instance, the USA is currently
(a) leading the "software disruption" war
(b) shut down and about to default because of partisan politics
(c) spying indiscriminately on almost everyone in the world
(d) incarcerating the largest proportion of its citizens
(e) meddling in the affairs of numerous countries
(f) reshoring manufacturing that had been outsourced
(g) saddled with a fighter jet program that is outrageously expensive and possibly average
(h) trying to reform one of the most convoluted & corrupt healthcare systems in the world
Is the author implying that all of Russia is like this?
I did find that to be the implication, yes. e.g. At the edges of Russia’s two great cities, another Russia begins. - this implies that only the two largest cities in Russia are first world, and another decaying world begins beyond the pale. Perhaps that's an accurate description, but given the treatment of stories like the NSA surveillance in the NYT (severely lacking, and often just parroting the government line without question), Iraq wars (again, severely lacking), and the lack of similar treatments of similar US problems with decaying infrastructure, I'm inclined to think that there are plenty of other stories about Russia to be told which don't paint it as a third world country in decline, and that this is a somewhat biased, limited portrait. I cancelled my subscription recently because of the limited coverage of world events - it's just too one-sided, but perhaps that's inevitable when you're reporting from within a superpower.
Which of these are reality? Which are propaganda?
Well, quite. We rely on journalists to sift through information and give us a balanced story based on their perception of the truth. That means we need journalists to step outside the view of the world that their country, culture and government gives them and try to see it afresh, without preconceptions. So we have to trust them to some extent, and when that trust is abused to present things through a distorted prism, it is disheartening.
Still, this is quality journalism (particularly the mix of map/graphics/text), and perhaps to say it is propaganda is a bit harsh, I'm not sure I'd go that far, but I do find the lack of balance and parochial worldview of the NYT and US press disturbing at times. The temptation is to see the world through a US prism without taking into account other viewpoints. Sometimes the NYT get it right though - for example this article on healthcare comparing systems around the world:
author took only dirty facts, that's the propaganda.
I'm russian and I admit it's a wild country. But Gypsy.. calm down, they never were even called russians.
This article is barely about Russia at all. It's mainly about wealth! privilege! inequality!, which is a perennial favorite topic of the NYT.
You aren't expected to read this and thing "omfg, Russia is so bad". No one in the US is thinking this - all they are thinking is "omfg, if inequality keeps growing, the US will be like this". This is of course nonsense for various reasons (we don't have gypsies and therefore the bottom 50% will not adopt gypsy cultural indicators, and our inequality seems to be merely differing rates of positive growth).
Note that many of the Americans on this thread are posting about Detroit, Appalachia and even Oakland (!?!?).
You aren't expected to read this and thing "omfg, Russia is so bad".
I think that's exactly what you're supposed to think, and you'd be quite justified in coming away with that impression when the strapline is 'A journey through a heartland on the slow road to ruin.' It's a beautifully executed and written article with a slanted premise. Reminds me of Newsweek or Time with better graphics/writers to be frank.
Imagine this as an NYT article about the US (which has examples of much of the same poverty, inequality and disillusion) - there's no way it would be published in this paper, without sympathetic asides/articles about other areas of the US which are developing well. The slant here is that the entire Russian nation is decaying and on a road to ruin.
I admire the quality of the writing in the NYT (it beats any other english language paper I'm aware of), but often the editorial slant is far too parochial for a truly global newspaper, and far too close to the official US government line on important topics (like surveillance or budgets for example) where the NYT should be standing up to government, not relaying its pronouncements without question.
> (we don't have gypsies and therefore the bottom 50% will not adopt gypsy cultural indicators,
Am I misreading this or are you throwing the "gypsies are like this because of culture making them lazy" argument?
> and our inequality seems to be merely differing rates of positive growth)
Then why has median purchasing power gone down for the past fifteen years? It doesn't matter if the dollar value goes up when prices go up faster.
I'm amazed you believe that's what Americans will be reading into this article - it's not what I read. FWIW, I grew up in Appalachia and it ain't nothing like the Russia the article discussed - plenty of food for the most part, water, decent roads.
drive by comment: I don't know what you mean to imply by Oakland (!?!?), but... I took the amtrak south from Oakland, and I was shocked by the level of poverty thats visible from the train.
> What they did not tell you is that gypsy settlements look the same in France, Germany and other industrialized countries
Exactly. I'm Romanian and when I saw the photo with the young gypsy couple I said to myself: "Hey! These people look exactly like the gipsies I used to grow up with". At least I learned that there are gipsies in Russia, also.
I'm Russian too but I see there only dirty facts. I live in Saint Petersburg now, but I lived 27 years in 2 another cities, small towns. One if them is rich, without gipsies, full of green woods and with clean streets. So yes, Russia is not a best country, but this article is a pure propaganda. I like story "Vasily" on Vimeo - there less propaganda and more true.
Yes, this article is a disgrace. Putin has built a relatively successful and stable economy, which worst of all for the NYT is both pursuing an independent path and is rich in natural resources. If they weren't able to defend themselves Russia would fulfil all 3 of Chomskys criteria for Western Intervention, however they have a capable defence and cannot be "Iraq'd" or "Libya'd", so instead of missiles they have to settle for black propaganda instead.
LOL @ 'relatively successful and stable economy'. Their economy is entirely based on selling off natural resources (sell 5%, steal 95% for yourself). When those resources run out, entire country will be bankrupt.
Source: I'm from Russia and know what I'm talking about.
I am a citizen of a country near Russia and have a rather good knowledge about Russia internal politics and economics.
Black propaganda, you say? That's adorable.
Not so stable now given the lack of economy growth and perspective of cuts amidst growing oil prices and diving into recession. Russian economy outlook is less than bright for a few years now.
I agree this is propaganda, and it is dangerous. Despite the fact that bad roads and decaying villages are very real in Russia, Russia has tremendous oil and gas wealth, and the medium and long-term economic trends for Russia are upward.
Russia has many symptoms of an industrial nation turning into a resource-extraction oligopoly, but it would be a very risky mistake to think Russia headed toward collapse. Russia may have many problems, but it will be a strong and rich nation. Allowing that fact to surprise us will lead to bad policy decisions.
As a Russian i know this is all true and much more than that.
They never 'picked' gypsy settlement, it was one of the many places they visited. It was you DominikR who 'picked' the gypsy part out of the long article.
Yes of course Roma are special. And they are nearly like that everywhere (possibly in places where they are living more permanently, like Romania, they are better off than in others, but more or less the same). This is part of Russian and European life. Native Americans are living about like that in the USA and nobody is trying to conceal that fact, or present things in a way that all of the USA is like that, neither does this article try to present all Russian to be gypsies and marry at 13.
But looking at the article overally yes, this is how Russia actually lives. And, further away from large railways (railways, not highways, are the bloodlines of the economy in Russia, like in XIX century America) - and the places visited are closest to most important railway - things are much, much worse. In many places you will need AWD vehicle to move around, and even that possible only in dry summer, and find little more than rotten huts and peasants who look like zombies, and illiterate children who drink at the age of 10. These places were too scary to travel too (you can be killed just for wearing suit and tie and not looking like zombie), but THAT is also how about 20-30% of Russian live.
'The _____ left behind' is a phrase with a well established meaning.
The poor parts of Eastern Kentucky, West Virginia, as are well as parts of the Ozarks are 'The America Left Behind'. Recently they have been seized upon by the artistic elite and made hip by music like Mumford and Sons and movies like The Hunger Games.
The phrase means a subgroup that is not enjoying the prosperity that the rest of the group enjoys. To use the phrase, the author must believe the opposite of what you read.
Makes things sound desolate and hopeless. But the residents of provincial cities like Kazan would tell a different story pointing to new subway lines, a new airport terminal, new rapid transit from the airport to the city center, new highways, new apartment buildings, etc.
A foreigner will say, but St. Petersburg is an important port city. How could the main road link between the port and the capital be in such a sorry state? The answer lies in the Russian way of doing things. Russia has an excellent train network, and goods mainly travel from the port to the capital by train. Roads serve those areas which are not important enough to have trains, so when you take a road trip in Russia, you are choosing to travel off the beaten track in the back of beyond. Charming and full of natural beauty, but also full of poverty just the same as you would see on an indian reserve in the USA. Only the natives live in such places in Russia, clinging to the traditional way of life of their ancestors. You look at these people and see white faces like those of you and your neighbors and you are confused because you are used to seeing brown faces on the aboriginals. But in Russia, the white faces ARE the aboriginals, living in this land since before the end of the Ice Age 12,000 years ago when all of Europe was under a thick sheet of ice.
Russia is a very big place, and the government cannot afford to spend its money everywhere and anywhere. In order to make Kazan and Sochi into modern cities that are productive and desirable places to live, they have to neglect some other places. In a vast territory that means that most of the villages are neglected. But there are lots of people who like it that way because they want to live in the forest, breathe fresh air, collect mushrooms and berries, etc. It is their traditional way of life since time immemorial.
How much time does it take for NYT to make these interactive stories? (pure technology not data collection or field journalism)
If it's not significant then this is certainly future of journalism.
[EDIT]: Looking at couple of interactive stories in recent past (Snow Fall and New Silk Road) looks like this is something they want to repeat again and again. Do you think they've developed some sort of framework (like Django/Rails) ?
I do not work for the NYT. I did, once upon a time, work for a news organization that was considered to be innovative with respect to using technology to further the presentation of journalism.
One of the things I worked on was a generic framework for "composite" stories -- that is, a collection of not just text and photos, but integrated presentations of text, audio/video, photos and data visualizations, with customizable templating to lay it all out and organize for the web.
Time and link rot have not been kind to the things that were done with that. For example, the data bits of this:
no longer function, and it certainly shows its age, design-wise. But that was where we were in early 2007, technology-wise, and it was built with a hacked-together-in-a-week proof of concept of the underlying framework.
What we had at the time shipped with some standard out-of-the-box templates for presenting a story, and for one-off stories we could also task someone to work on creating new ones which could be slotted in for use. When new templating work wasn't required, they could put together a composite story presentation in a matter of hours, once they had all the materials they wanted.
The next evolution of that, which I was pushing for toward the end of my tenure there but never got to complete, would have been integrated data processing and visualization tools, allowing journalists to toss various sources (my rough draft worked with spreadsheets, since those were a pretty common source) into a denormalized data store, scrub a bit, and generate useful presentations from them.
While I can't be sure, I strongly suspect that the NYT has done something similar, developing the underlying framework for tying together a bunch of content in an attractive way, and probably building some tools to simplify and speed up the generation of the data presentations. What they're doing here, and have done a couple other times, seems well within reach for someone who knows what they're doing and has access to six years' worth of advances in technology.
(anecdotally, I've heard that the NYT special projects are done in Rails; ours were done in Django since it was originally our in-house web framework, but in either case it's a strong argument for the productivity gains of those web frameworks)
Edit: FWIW, here are slides from a lightning talk I gave at PyCon in 2008, about a data-driven project and the timeline involved in it:
I'm particularly curious what they're using these interactive stories for. Refining design or technique? Gauging user interest? Putting processes into place to speed up their development?
It's most likely all of that. They seem to be testing the waters on what written journalism means in the 21st century, and I think it's great.
The Rolling Stone recently did an article[1] that I otherwise would have ignored(due to my distaste for their material), but ended up reading because of the fantastic presentation. I don't know if this trend will stick, or how it will evolve, but it is certainly an interesting spin at modernizing these features.
There is nothing really that novel about this story to anybody who knows anything about Russian history. Rural Russians have been saying "God is too high and the Tsar is too far away" for centuries now. A strong central government that cares little for the provinces is the status quo that has been maintained despite a variety of different political systems. Unlike the US, which has had powerful agrarian political parties that were fiercely suspicious of a strong central government since at least Jefferson, Russian serfs and the overall "agricultural class" have never had any significant political power (factory workers and other lower-class city dwellers were the prime force behind communism while the serfs were mostly an afterthought).
I don't know if anyone can make any sort of objective claims as to whether the highly centralized Russian power structure is any better or worse than a more evenly distributed one. Yes people in small towns live without infrastructure, but they also choose to live there, often for the "clean air" as the article notes. I'm sure there are many American individualists out there that would love to be able to disappear into an unregulated wilderness, mostly free of government scrutiny and yet be like 4 hours away from the capitol.
>(factory workers and other lower-class city dwellers were the prime force behind communism while the serfs were mostly an afterthought)
I heard that that was not because the communists did not like or did not trust the serfs, but rather because factory workers knew how to show up at a particular time and place, e.g., the location of a demonstration.
I spent two years living in a variety of cities eastern Ukraine (Donetsk, Kharkov, Makyevka, Gorlovka), and what I saw there wasn't too far removed from what is described in the article. As I read the article, with the exception of the 14-year-old Gypsy wedding, I found myself saying "Oh yeah, I remember that." I would argue that what was described wasn't so much a story of a dying and decaying Russia, as it is some aspects of Russian/former-Soviet culture, especially in small cities or villages.
Long Bet #5: "By 2012, the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times will have referred to Russia as "the world leader in software development" or words to that effect.”
Predictor (who lost) was Esther Dyson, an investor in several Ruassian start-ups. Challenger was Bill Campbell, chair of Intuit.
JetBrains is actually from Czech Republic, not Russia. Yes, they have offices in Moscow and SPB, but also in Munich and Boston - that does not make them German or US company either.
Readit News
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.
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.
;)
Replace [] with your favorite magazine, newspaper, website, music genre...
Was it really any better, or are you just wiser to the bullshit now?
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'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.
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.
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.
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..
[1]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Journey_from_St._Petersburg_to_...
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.
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)
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 suspect that reality is even worse. Exponentially worse.
As one poet said "Умом Россию не понять"
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.
Very well executed though. Great photography and web layout.
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
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.
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.
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?
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.
Even the NYT covers this from time to time http://www.nytimes.com/2006/06/13/nyregion/13census.html?pag...
I think this article went to some extreme places and made it look like Russia outside Moscow/StPtbg is just dying. Disingenuous at least.
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Just the fact that the NYT picked life in a gypsy settlement (no water, no electricity, child weddings) to generalize about the life in Russia makes it obvious to me that the journalists had no other intentions but to villify the Russians.
What they did not tell you is that gypsy settlements look the same in France, Germany and other industrialized countries. (Yes - children not going to school, no electricity, no water, weddings of 13 year olds and so on)
Are any of the facts mentioned false? Is the author implying that all of Russia is like this?
As a journalist I find it very surprising when people react to specific articles (often "negative" to their own beliefs) by imagining a grand conspiracy.
There are numerous realities in every country and every company. A skilled journalist can tell any one of those in an interesting manner. But that doesn't imply there aren't other stories.
For instance, the USA is currently (a) leading the "software disruption" war (b) shut down and about to default because of partisan politics (c) spying indiscriminately on almost everyone in the world (d) incarcerating the largest proportion of its citizens (e) meddling in the affairs of numerous countries (f) reshoring manufacturing that had been outsourced (g) saddled with a fighter jet program that is outrageously expensive and possibly average (h) trying to reform one of the most convoluted & corrupt healthcare systems in the world
Which of these are reality? Which are propaganda?
I did find that to be the implication, yes. e.g. At the edges of Russia’s two great cities, another Russia begins. - this implies that only the two largest cities in Russia are first world, and another decaying world begins beyond the pale. Perhaps that's an accurate description, but given the treatment of stories like the NSA surveillance in the NYT (severely lacking, and often just parroting the government line without question), Iraq wars (again, severely lacking), and the lack of similar treatments of similar US problems with decaying infrastructure, I'm inclined to think that there are plenty of other stories about Russia to be told which don't paint it as a third world country in decline, and that this is a somewhat biased, limited portrait. I cancelled my subscription recently because of the limited coverage of world events - it's just too one-sided, but perhaps that's inevitable when you're reporting from within a superpower.
Which of these are reality? Which are propaganda?
Well, quite. We rely on journalists to sift through information and give us a balanced story based on their perception of the truth. That means we need journalists to step outside the view of the world that their country, culture and government gives them and try to see it afresh, without preconceptions. So we have to trust them to some extent, and when that trust is abused to present things through a distorted prism, it is disheartening.
Still, this is quality journalism (particularly the mix of map/graphics/text), and perhaps to say it is propaganda is a bit harsh, I'm not sure I'd go that far, but I do find the lack of balance and parochial worldview of the NYT and US press disturbing at times. The temptation is to see the world through a US prism without taking into account other viewpoints. Sometimes the NYT get it right though - for example this article on healthcare comparing systems around the world:
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/02/health/colonoscopies-expla...
Good propaganda is exclusively made of true informations. The corruption comes from the bias, not from the lies.
This article isn't awful, though. Some people must have stopped after the first section, thinking the next title introduced another article.
You aren't expected to read this and thing "omfg, Russia is so bad". No one in the US is thinking this - all they are thinking is "omfg, if inequality keeps growing, the US will be like this". This is of course nonsense for various reasons (we don't have gypsies and therefore the bottom 50% will not adopt gypsy cultural indicators, and our inequality seems to be merely differing rates of positive growth).
Note that many of the Americans on this thread are posting about Detroit, Appalachia and even Oakland (!?!?).
I think that's exactly what you're supposed to think, and you'd be quite justified in coming away with that impression when the strapline is 'A journey through a heartland on the slow road to ruin.' It's a beautifully executed and written article with a slanted premise. Reminds me of Newsweek or Time with better graphics/writers to be frank.
Imagine this as an NYT article about the US (which has examples of much of the same poverty, inequality and disillusion) - there's no way it would be published in this paper, without sympathetic asides/articles about other areas of the US which are developing well. The slant here is that the entire Russian nation is decaying and on a road to ruin.
I admire the quality of the writing in the NYT (it beats any other english language paper I'm aware of), but often the editorial slant is far too parochial for a truly global newspaper, and far too close to the official US government line on important topics (like surveillance or budgets for example) where the NYT should be standing up to government, not relaying its pronouncements without question.
> and our inequality seems to be merely differing rates of positive growth)
Then why has median purchasing power gone down for the past fifteen years? It doesn't matter if the dollar value goes up when prices go up faster.
Exactly. I'm Romanian and when I saw the photo with the young gypsy couple I said to myself: "Hey! These people look exactly like the gipsies I used to grow up with". At least I learned that there are gipsies in Russia, also.
Russia has many symptoms of an industrial nation turning into a resource-extraction oligopoly, but it would be a very risky mistake to think Russia headed toward collapse. Russia may have many problems, but it will be a strong and rich nation. Allowing that fact to surprise us will lead to bad policy decisions.
They never 'picked' gypsy settlement, it was one of the many places they visited. It was you DominikR who 'picked' the gypsy part out of the long article.
Yes of course Roma are special. And they are nearly like that everywhere (possibly in places where they are living more permanently, like Romania, they are better off than in others, but more or less the same). This is part of Russian and European life. Native Americans are living about like that in the USA and nobody is trying to conceal that fact, or present things in a way that all of the USA is like that, neither does this article try to present all Russian to be gypsies and marry at 13.
But looking at the article overally yes, this is how Russia actually lives. And, further away from large railways (railways, not highways, are the bloodlines of the economy in Russia, like in XIX century America) - and the places visited are closest to most important railway - things are much, much worse. In many places you will need AWD vehicle to move around, and even that possible only in dry summer, and find little more than rotten huts and peasants who look like zombies, and illiterate children who drink at the age of 10. These places were too scary to travel too (you can be killed just for wearing suit and tie and not looking like zombie), but THAT is also how about 20-30% of Russian live.
The poor parts of Eastern Kentucky, West Virginia, as are well as parts of the Ozarks are 'The America Left Behind'. Recently they have been seized upon by the artistic elite and made hip by music like Mumford and Sons and movies like The Hunger Games.
The phrase means a subgroup that is not enjoying the prosperity that the rest of the group enjoys. To use the phrase, the author must believe the opposite of what you read.
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A foreigner will say, but St. Petersburg is an important port city. How could the main road link between the port and the capital be in such a sorry state? The answer lies in the Russian way of doing things. Russia has an excellent train network, and goods mainly travel from the port to the capital by train. Roads serve those areas which are not important enough to have trains, so when you take a road trip in Russia, you are choosing to travel off the beaten track in the back of beyond. Charming and full of natural beauty, but also full of poverty just the same as you would see on an indian reserve in the USA. Only the natives live in such places in Russia, clinging to the traditional way of life of their ancestors. You look at these people and see white faces like those of you and your neighbors and you are confused because you are used to seeing brown faces on the aboriginals. But in Russia, the white faces ARE the aboriginals, living in this land since before the end of the Ice Age 12,000 years ago when all of Europe was under a thick sheet of ice.
Russia is a very big place, and the government cannot afford to spend its money everywhere and anywhere. In order to make Kazan and Sochi into modern cities that are productive and desirable places to live, they have to neglect some other places. In a vast territory that means that most of the villages are neglected. But there are lots of people who like it that way because they want to live in the forest, breathe fresh air, collect mushrooms and berries, etc. It is their traditional way of life since time immemorial.
>in Russia, the white faces ARE the aboriginals
Also in Germany, France and Norway.
>the government cannot afford to spend its money everywhere and anywhere
Of course not, they have to focus spending on facilities exclusively used by the elite... right?
>there are lots of people who like it that way because they want to live in the forest, breathe fresh air, collect mushrooms and berries, etc.
And not have hot water, electricity or access to ambulances. 'Cos to have that, plus fresh air and berries is just wrong.
Is that how you justify pumping 50 billion in olympics that they shouldn't have in the first place?
Well, it's not that it didn't happened before. Greece was the olympics host a few years ago, and spent for that billions of euros. Greece!
If it's not significant then this is certainly future of journalism.
[EDIT]: Looking at couple of interactive stories in recent past (Snow Fall and New Silk Road) looks like this is something they want to repeat again and again. Do you think they've developed some sort of framework (like Django/Rails) ?
One of the things I worked on was a generic framework for "composite" stories -- that is, a collection of not just text and photos, but integrated presentations of text, audio/video, photos and data visualizations, with customizable templating to lay it all out and organize for the web.
Time and link rot have not been kind to the things that were done with that. For example, the data bits of this:
http://www2.ljworld.com/news/mining/
no longer function, and it certainly shows its age, design-wise. But that was where we were in early 2007, technology-wise, and it was built with a hacked-together-in-a-week proof of concept of the underlying framework.
What we had at the time shipped with some standard out-of-the-box templates for presenting a story, and for one-off stories we could also task someone to work on creating new ones which could be slotted in for use. When new templating work wasn't required, they could put together a composite story presentation in a matter of hours, once they had all the materials they wanted.
The next evolution of that, which I was pushing for toward the end of my tenure there but never got to complete, would have been integrated data processing and visualization tools, allowing journalists to toss various sources (my rough draft worked with spreadsheets, since those were a pretty common source) into a denormalized data store, scrub a bit, and generate useful presentations from them.
While I can't be sure, I strongly suspect that the NYT has done something similar, developing the underlying framework for tying together a bunch of content in an attractive way, and probably building some tools to simplify and speed up the generation of the data presentations. What they're doing here, and have done a couple other times, seems well within reach for someone who knows what they're doing and has access to six years' worth of advances in technology.
(anecdotally, I've heard that the NYT special projects are done in Rails; ours were done in Django since it was originally our in-house web framework, but in either case it's a strong argument for the productivity gains of those web frameworks)
Edit: FWIW, here are slides from a lightning talk I gave at PyCon in 2008, about a data-driven project and the timeline involved in it:
http://media.b-list.org/presentations/2008/pycon/lightning.p...
Sadly, the story itself is no longer functioning.
Here's one that's actually miraculously still online, from the fall/winter a few years back when everyone was worried about swine flu:
http://www2.ljworld.com/data/flu/
The core of that was put together very quickly, and then it was about an hour's work each week to update with the latest data coming in.
Really impressed either way.
The Rolling Stone recently did an article[1] that I otherwise would have ignored(due to my distaste for their material), but ended up reading because of the fantastic presentation. I don't know if this trend will stick, or how it will evolve, but it is certainly an interesting spin at modernizing these features.
[1]- http://www.rollingstone.com/feature/the-geeks-on-the-frontli...
I don't know if anyone can make any sort of objective claims as to whether the highly centralized Russian power structure is any better or worse than a more evenly distributed one. Yes people in small towns live without infrastructure, but they also choose to live there, often for the "clean air" as the article notes. I'm sure there are many American individualists out there that would love to be able to disappear into an unregulated wilderness, mostly free of government scrutiny and yet be like 4 hours away from the capitol.
I heard that that was not because the communists did not like or did not trust the serfs, but rather because factory workers knew how to show up at a particular time and place, e.g., the location of a demonstration.
I love this style of presenting journalism content and hope to see more of it. Finally seeing the web being used to do things that print cannot.
Great job to the NY Times team.
Predictor (who lost) was Esther Dyson, an investor in several Ruassian start-ups. Challenger was Bill Campbell, chair of Intuit.
http://longbets.org/5/
Still, not enough to say Russia is the world leader in software development. That title still belongs to the US of A for now.