Finns Robbed in Russia
Hiski Haapoja
> Let's concentrate on Vyborg. Anybody visiting Vyborg sees immediately
> that the city is in a terrible state of neglect and disrepair. You can,
> of course, say the same thing about *certain parts* of NYC, but Vyborg
> is a wreck from start to finish, no pun intended. To anyone arriving in
> Vyborg from Finland the state of the disrepeair is as shocking as it is
> saddening: most of the center of Vyborg has buildings that have
> architectural counterparts in Finnish cities. That these buildings have
> been allowed to degenerate to the degree they have is shocking.
A decade ago, someone made the point that if Viipuri had remained
Finnish many of those buildings would have been demolished in the
1960s and 1970s and replaced with ugly boxes. You can see a lot of
examples of this in Finnish cities, starting with Turku and Helsinki.
> But it is not the neglect of a beautiful architectural heritage that
> makes Vyborg fourth world; it is no crime to be poor and have to use
> every spare kopek to survive. It is the utter lack of hope, the despair
> of the population. When a tourist bus parks beside the market square
> there are dozens of people waiting at the doors: women with babies,
> invalids, street children in rags, literally assaulting the unwary
> tourists, begging for even the smallest handout.
I've been there in a Finnish-registered private car. No trouble. But
then we avoided the places which the tourists and beggars favor.
> Nationalist phobias and hatred have nothing to do with it. Even a
> casual visitor can see whether a city is healthy or not, whether its
> street life is dominated by prosperity or poverty, whether the city
> administration cares about the city looks or not. The impression one
> has of Moscow, St. Petersburg, or Kiev is one of cities where the
> people work hard, are relatively prosperous, and are proud of their
> home town, if they are not the beehives of activity that New York or
> Moscow are.
I'll skip Moscow and Kiev, having been to neither. But my impression
of St. Petersburg is full of contrasts: in the center, magnificent
palaces meticulously preserved. In the suburbs, hideous apartment
buildings from the Soviet era. Even newly built apartment blocks often
look somewhat messy, because the builders and renovators change
colors, materials and styles in the middle of a wall. This anarchy
would not be tolerated in countries with facade control. Maybe it
depends of which color of bricks were available each day.
The two groups of people that stand out on the streets of St.
Petersburg are 1) amazingly beautiful women and 2) suspicious-looking
guys driving around in cars with darkened windows. I was told that
they were the dreaded Russian Mafia. If all of them really were
crooks, Russia has a serious problem.
> Both have major flaws that have not been and perhaps cannot
> be rectified, thus making their inhabitants somewhat passive and
> fatalistic: the Cernobyl fallout which makes it necessary to hose Kiev
> down on a daily basis, and the parasite-infested, undrinkable water in
> St. Petersburg.
Speaking of the water, is it drinkable in any Russian city?
Hiski, adding scr