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| "I've got morons on my team." Mitt Romney Minor Deity  |
What Russians are Telling their families ... about what they see (and loot) in Ukraine. Outside of the posh areas of Moscow and St. Petersburg, much of Russia remains a poor developing (or not) country. Those posh areas are what our sanctions are designed to crush, BTW. Much the same thing happened at the close of WWII. Many Russian soldiers who entered Berlin saw running water and indoor flush toilets for the very first time in their lives. | ||
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Has Achieved Nirvana |
I remember my Mom telling those kinds of stories about the Russians who occupied Lithuania....
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| "I've got morons on my team." Mitt Romney Minor Deity |
Overall, Russia seems like a very backward place in Europe. In so many ways ... | |||
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Minor Deity |
74 years of an ass-backward economic system will do that.
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| Has Achieved Nirvana |
To hear Mom tell it, they’ve been at it for centuries……..look up “muzhik”. Members of my Mom's family were deported to Siberia; she carried a grudge for the rest of her life..a common Lithuanian insult is to call someone a "mužikas"....
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| Serial origamist Has Achieved Nirvana  |
Even in Moscow, things are not so great. There are a few small pockets, like around Red Square where there are Western stores and nice hotels and restaurants. As soon as you are away from that, outside The Garden Ring (the first ring road around the city) it starts looking pretty bleak. In the suburbs, it's just rows and rows of five-story apartment blocks, and the same few stores over and over. Infrastructure is bad (other than the Metro). One of my co-workers there was telling me that next to apartment buildings, there's a little steam plant to heat the building. You can't control the heat in your apartment other than turning a radiator on or off (no in-between, just on or off). In his building, the pipes were never connected properly. The apartments in the middle of the building are always 90 degrees when the heat is on and the apartments on the ends of the building are freezing. He said this is just typical of how things are in Moscow. And when you get outside of Moscow and St. Petersburg, it's a lot worse. There are sections in the outer suburbs with single-family homes, but they are out of the reach of the middle class. What was true when I was there in 1981 was still mostly true when I was there 30 years later. Russians are very curious about life in the west. But if you tell them how it is, they generally don't believe you.
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| "I've got morons on my team." Mitt Romney Minor Deity |
And we now know that their military isn't worth sh!t against anybody with determination and modern weaponry, even if they've got a 4-1 advantage in numbers. | |||
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| Serial origamist Has Achieved Nirvana |
Modern weaponry? If you head out of downtown Moscow, north from the Kremlin on Tverskaya Blvd, it becomes Leningrad Hwy. Just before you get to the airport, in a suburb called Khimki, on the opposite side of the road, next to the IKEA, there are some huge "Czech hedgehogs", also known as "jacks" like in the children's game.  It's a monument. It is 25 km from the Kremlin. It marks the spot where the Russians stopped Hitler's tanks as they rolled toward the Capital. Once you roll up on a hedgehog, your tank is stuck. And you are a sitting duck. The Ukrainians are using the same hedgehogs.
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| Foregoing Practicing to Post Minor Deity  |
Maybe I’m the only one to notice it, but there’s something about those “hedgehogs” that is rather brutalist sculptural.
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| Has Achieved Nirvana |
They reminded me of Calder's Flamingo in downtown Chicago. 
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| Foregoing Practicing to Post Minor Deity |
Love Calder!
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| Serial origamist Has Achieved Nirvana |
But will Calder's Flamingo stop a tank? Actual Czech hedgehog tank traps look just like those by the Moscow IKEA, but are only a couple of feet tall. This article shows some guys in Lviv making them. https://theworldnews.net/my-ne...cupper-russian-tanks
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