Putin's audacious building boom in Mariupol, Donbas - why it's important, by Charles Bausman - The Unz Review

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why it's important, by Charles Bausman - The Unz Review I tweet about migrating to Russia at @cbausman and Telegram. DMs are open Blog housekeeping: It has happened every of the 4 Falls that we have been here. Energy levels in Russia seem to fluctuate more than in the West. Russians, like the French, take their vacations very seriously, and seem to do absolutely nothing from late July to early September. www.unz.com

 

But he didn’t articulate what I find so striking about modern Russia, something I only gradually came to be aware of when I started writing about the move-to-Russia phenomenon – that is the untapped economic potential of this enormous, and relatively empty country. This is the piece that I think most observers are missing. People tend to think of Russia as a safe haven perhaps from destructive social trends in the West, an idiosyncratic place, not easy to understand, with an exotic (to us) Christianity, a rich culture – but one doesn’t think of it as an economic tiger, on a par with the more dynamic economies of Asia. But it increasingly looks like this economic potential is being released, and certainly, on paper, it seems inevitable. One only has to look back at Russia’s startling economic growth before the revolution, mirroring America’s at the time, to appreciate what could be.

One of the fancier new residential buildings. Apartment interior below. I asked approximately what an apartment like this would cost – about $US100,000.

And this, I think, will be the main reason people to move here eventually – for the economic opportunity.

It turns out that Russia can afford to completely rebuild a 430,000 population city like Mariupol. And claims it can do the same in other cities. One sees dramatic improvements in infrastructure and social services everywhere – in big cities and small. Eventually one realizes that that humans, when not held back by venal corporations and governments, are amazingly productive, and that things can move very fast with the right government policies. Think of what China has achieved in the past decades, or Germany’s economic miracle during and after the 3rd Reich, and a similar boom in the US after WW2.

That, for me, was the message of Mariupol. It is a pattern one sees again and again across this vast country, and an economic reality which most observers are missing.