As some of you will know, I lived in Moscow for like a decade, and my in-laws are Russian, so I still follow along with the nonsense going on.
There are quite a few Western YouTubers I see pop up in my YouTube feed, and sometimes I watch and almost envy how oblivious they are. Western media also falls into this trap, look how great the Russian economy is doing.
Youtubers walking around Moscow saying, “the economy looks fine to me,” look at all these new buildings, and I can’t help but laugh. Of course, it looks fine — because Moscow has always been like the Capitol from The Hunger Games: it feeds on the rest of the country.
From the Tsarist empire to the USSR to today’s Russia, power and wealth have always been sucked into the center. The state extracts — grain, oil, taxes, talent — and funnels it to the capital. Moscow gets the infrastructure, the high salaries, the investments, the cultural life. The regions get the scraps.
The Ukrainian famine (Holodomor) of 1932–1933 was also down to this: 3 to 5 million Ukrainians starved to death while their food stocks were confiscated and sent north to feed industrial workers in Moscow, Leningrad, and other urban centers.
We have Russian neighbors, too, who lament how expensive it has become here and then have a mental orgasm about some cheaper-priced whatever at home, but they never talk about the chronic fuel shortages in regions or the myriad of problems seen all over the country, apart from the major cities.
Russian regions are also basically just vassals. In the 1990s, regional governors at least had some control over their budgets and were independently elected into power. But Putin rewired the whole thing: now most taxes are collected nationally, sent to Moscow, and then redistributed back to the regions. That means local governments are no longer accountable to their citizens, only to the center.
Governors turned from regional leaders into glorified appointees. They don’t answer to their people — they answer to Putin. Their survival depends on loyalty and teet sucking, not competence. Instead of fighting for their region’s interests, they spend their time sucking up to Moscow, hoping to get a bigger piece of the pie.
So these simps rolling around Moscow don't have a fucking clue. And while, yes, Moscow is a fun city and, actually, is a pretty good city in many respects, it’s Potemkin prosperity, like Pyongyang. The wealth of the entire country vacuumed into one city while the rest of Russia is the supporting cast, unpaid extras making the Capitol look good.