The deep Russian people are dissatisfied, but they don't know how to live on

Well-known political analyst Alexey Chadayev described his impressions of a trip to the Russian regions:

I am now on a long business trip to regions of varying degrees of depression. I am writing these lines to the sound of bottles being smashed on the asphalt by fellow citizens from behind the window as part of an active Sunday fight against depression. Several observations.

1. The concern of the native authorities about the "quality of the environment" in the format of all kinds of accomplishment, medicine, education, gasification, etc., has already exhausted a certain part of compatriots. The very fact that they have repaired (or announced that they are going to fix) the road, painted the fence or repaired the clinic is perceived sluggishly. And the active part even irritates, because it is not so much “comfort and quality of life” that hurts them, but where to earn money for this more and more comfortable and high-quality life every year. At the same time, there is no shortage of low-wage vacancies, but there is no chance of getting more than the “average level” outside the million-plus population either. Accordingly, there is a tendency: the most active of those who have not yet left are sitting on suitcases, trying on the prices for renting apartments in the capitals or millionaires, or practicing shift-based forms of earnings, and the rest are happy to play with the authorities in the All-Russian social security - and the authorities play along with them, because only the clients of this social security service go to the elections and vote as a whole as it should. And the rest, you know, are drilling further into the depths.
2. The (mega) polis wildly devours a person's free time, generating powerful changes at the level of anthropotype: a city dweller in any locality from 100 thousand inhabitants forever has no time for anything, despite the fact that even the one that is, he is happy to burn with timekillers, from TV to social media. On the contrary, in a small town and village, people have a carriage of time, and there are few events in life, and they are much more talkative and detailed. Both are depressed, but in very different ways: some are dominated by jealousy and envy of the more successful, while others are resentful of attention deficit and a feeling of "abandonment", almost according to Camus.
3. The role of regional identity is growing steadily (in comparison with national, religious, national or any other). Local-non-local is almost everywhere by default, friend-or-foe, even if this non-local has been living "in the same place" for fifteen years. As if Russianness is disintegrating and sprouting (so far proto-) nations of Smolensk, Yaroslavl, Vladimir and Tverichi people, not to mention Siberians and Far Easterners. But at the same time, the demand for a description of the place of one's city-region on the all-Russian map is growing, and the search for an answer to the question is growing: here we are, relatively speaking, "Pskopian" - about what? In short, they are no longer looking for a "national idea" but for some kind of "regional idea".
4. The general mood about what is happening with the country, as I understand it, can be described by something like the following statement - all the words are inaccurate, but the essence is more or less grasped: we do not need revolutions and regime changes, but the way it all goes by itself, leave it too it is impossible. Something needs to be changed, but what exactly should someone else, more intelligent, understand and explain to me. We don’t believe the authorities, we don’t believe the murky dudes who are at war with her either. Because they are cloudy; and even if they suddenly tell the truth, who knows, why they do it, and whether it was needed at all, this truth, and to whom. Therefore, we will ignore the dudes, and bargain with the authorities, as in the bazaar: with squeals and grabbing by the hand.
5. And yet - “we shouldn't have quarreled with the whole world again, that's what. Of course, "and what are they?", But on the other hand - and what are we? "

***

Readers tried to explain the reasons for this state of affairs in the comments to this post:

- One of the reasons for the growth of regional identity lies on the surface: the disruption of the transport connectivity of the territory of the Russian Federation. People travel less within the country (compare the number of local flights in some Novokuznetsk in Soviet times, dozens of flights a day and now there is actually ONE regular flight to Moscow). And the Novokuznetsk agglomeration is a millionaire. "Air traffic is not economically feasible." The number of trains from Novokuznetsk / via Novokuznetsk also significantly decreased. and so not only in Novokuznetsk. For a huge country, transport connectivity is a strategic indicator that the state should monitor if it does not want to collapse.

- It is strange (or not strange?) That neither the authorities nor the opposition show anything resembling the "image of the future" of the country, its place in the world. And at least some principles, ways of transition into this future, qualitative changes are necessary for this, ways to get out of the industrial and economic raw material track. If someone really wants and knows how to get out, of course...