No, this is not a bombed out building in Ukraine. This is an apartment building in the peaceful Russian city of Chelyabinsk where 40 families are living currently. Yes, they are living in the building while it’s in this state. They haven’t had any heating since 1987. Google Chelyabinsk to see what the temperatures are like in winter and understand what this actually means.
Here’s a video of the residents standing in front of the building:
Note that they are all nicely dressed and sober. These are middle-class people with jobs and kids. You can find declassé elements living in bizarre conditions everywhere but these are not the declassé. These are normies. Taxpayers, which they mention specifically in the video.
I could post such stories all day and never run out of material. Not the mentally ill homeless, the gangsters, or the addicts (which abound) but normie moms like me living in these conditions. These are people with TVs and social media accounts who know that there are places where regular folks don’t live this way. They also have a conscience of having a glorious history and a highly spiritual, superior culture that saved the world from Nazism and enriched it with great literature, music, and philosophy. It’s normal for human beings to look for an explanation, a story that would explain this mismatch between what they know about themselves and what their reality tells them they are.
Remember the video I posted recently with the bus in the Russian city of Norilsk? Contrast it with the subway station in the Ukrainian city of Kharkiv in wartime. If you saw these images in the US, Canada, UK, South Africa or wherever you are, these people have seen them, too. Ukraine was just like that, with those miserable, crumbling barracks and horrible buses. And then it stopped being like that.
It’s got to be absolutely maddening. The neighbor you always knew was just like you but kind of inferior and somewhat dumb suddenly living better – how absolutely unbearable. There are two ways out of this conundrum. You can either accept that something is wrong with you or – and this is always the easier way – you accept that there’s something wrong with the neighbor. Some huge, cosmic injustice might be taking place. And wouldn’t it make sense to go to war to battle this cosmic wrong, especially if what you have to come back to is this building?
Clarissa's Blog 
Many things about Russia remind me of SA, except that the weather is much better and the new system simply reinforces the traditional social order.
https://dailyfriend.co.za/2022/12/11/how-to-get-a-false-impression-of-south-africa/
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Yes! That’s exactly it! Gosh, I constantly talk to people who visited Moscow or St Petersburg and can’t stop gushing how wonderful everything is there. They’ve seen a tiny, utterly unrepresentative sliver from the lives of the very rich and completely missed the 99% of regular folks rotting in the misery I posted here. It was exactly like this in the USSR when foreigners were allowed to tour very specific areas in the company of KGB agents pretending to be regular citizens. And the poor bastards always believed that what they were seeing was the normal Soviet reality.
Do you recommend the book Our Poisoned Land mentioned at the link?
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I haven’t read the book. It’s about corruption in the SA government. I’m not sure of how much interest it would be if you don’t know the people involved.
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“ussian city of Chelyabinsk”
Not to be a broken record…. but I’m gonna be a broken record and quote Galeev again… he claims that the grinding poverty and misery is necessary to keep russia together.
If any city/region (beyond moscow and maybe petrograd) rises above the rest it could incite separatist non-centralized feelings in nearby places and the russian government could never cope with that.
This is also why places like Chelyabinsk are probably run by people from moscow precisely to keep things poor (people from Chelyabinsk might have some regional loyalty… those from moscow won’t).
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Of course, it’s very convenient to keep them like this. But it’s also true that it takes some very special people to live without heating since 1987 and still complain about it in meek little voices.
Ukrainians were exactly like this, too, when I left in 1998. But then they changed. And these miserable bastards never did.
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By the way, did you see the attacks on Galeev by “region experts”? It’s absolutely hilarious. These are academics who pout like toddlers that Galeev has a large following while they can’t scare up more than a dozen likes on their “expert” Tweets.
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” academics who pout like toddlers that Galeev has a large following ”
Just checked out a couple and they offer no specific corrections to anything they say he’s gotten wrong.
My guess what really got them going was his advice to foreign students to lie to American scholars who have mistaken ideas about their background and agree with them “Yes, we russians are deeply religious and love our mysticism” – since telling the truth will only threaten the scholars and your career….
Can’t say he’s wrong but it’s not a message that will be popular.
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Apparently, there was also a spat over his reluctance to blame the current situation in Russia on the Tatar-Mongol invasion. Because we urgently need to talk about the Tatar-Mongols at this point in history.
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“we urgently need to talk about the Tatar-Mongols”
Beats dragging up Kievan Rus again for the 186,932,945th time as if it had any particular relevance….
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God, that’s such a pet peeve of mine. I hate it when people start going on about the Kievan Rus. Who cares what it was back then? Let’s concentrate on what’s happening now.
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