Separately taken communism. Not all of the Russian hinterland lives in poverty

Popular blogger Yevgenia Korobkova traveled to her historical homeland in the city of Kartaly, Chelyabinsk region.

Based on her impressions of the trip, she wrote a post that caused a lively discussion on her page. It turned out that everything in this (separately taken provincial town) is "covered in chocolate":

“Now they will fuck me, but it seemed to me. I repeat, it seemed that the laments about the poor province were a little exaggerated.

I also left, and thought that everything was very bad. “We are not Moscow”, they constantly told me reproachfully that I live and fatten like a seal.

And now I come to the city of Kartaly and I can’t believe my eyes. But it’s not even as bad there as it is commonly believed. Fifteen years ago it was much worse. First, there is work to be done. Moreover, not bad. We built a mining and processing plant, where Moscow salaries and employees are constantly required. I was surprised that trade union vouchers work at this plant and employees are sent to rest in Karagaysky bor, Kisegach, Yangan-Tau, etc. Is free.

In addition to the GOK, there are several railway enterprises operating in the city, where salaries are quite good. After a long break, the construction of microdistricts was resumed. Roads, stadium and infrastructure were put in order in the city. There are cafes, sports centers, leisure centers, a strip-bar (!!!), a hookah bar, a dispensary. I'm not even talking about the fact that there are three stores in each house. If people did not have money, they would not open shops.

From Kartaly to Chelyabinsk they launched the "Swallow" train (Lastochka - editor's note). If in my time I was shaking on wooden seats for six hours, and even in an unheated carriage, where my hair froze to the glass, now the swallow reaches Chelyabinsk in two hours. Moreover, a ticket costs 350 rubles for students, and for pensioners it is generally free.

The area looks very good. I was in the surrounding villages - they are like a needle. Streets, new brick houses, there is something to do. In Varshavka, marble gobies are bred. Ferschampenoise has chickens that are exported throughout the country.

The fields are very well maintained, like in Europe. Everything is very neat. The roads are excellent.

A separate song is pensions. The average pension in the city of Kartaly, excuse me, is 40-50 thousand rubles. It is not joke. Because in the city half of the residents are honorary railroad workers, and the other half are elite soldiers who participated in the liquidation of the missile town and receive some kind of large-scale payments.

I went nuts when at the commemoration one retired aunt said that she travels to Turkey three times a year.

I don’t go three times.

Let's add to everything that all residents of the city have vegetable gardens and personal plots where they breed poultry. That from the salary and from the pension, everything is bought not in Russia, but in neighboring Kazakhstan, because there it is three times cheaper. And the whole infrastructure is just a stone's throw away, so there is no need to spend money on transport, prices for provisions in Kartaly are not in Moscow. And lately it has become normal to live here so that a man works, but his wife does not. And people come home from work not at twelve o'clock in the morning, but at half past five in the evening.

This was not the case with me. This is not Moscow, in short.

PS

There is one deterioration, and a significant one. Earlier, while I was in school, there were very good teachers and gave a good education. The school was a railway school, so there were excellent salaries, plus there was a time of school reform, when millions flowed there. The teachers were rolling like cheese in butter.

Now the railway school has been transferred to the city. Salaries have decreased by two and a half times. Good teachers packed up their belongings and left for Chelyabinsk or Magnitogorsk. The rest teach very badly and earn money by tutoring and all kinds of exam. Learning has ceased altogether, exact sciences and languages are especially affected.

The price of an hour of lessons with a tutor is comparable to the average for a hospital and varies from 600 to 1500 rubles..."

The responses to this publication left no doubt that the topic of life in the Russian hinterland is very painful. True, it turned out that such a situation is not in Chelyabinsk Oblast alone, in Mordovia, too, the standard of living has increased over the past two decades, writes Tatyana Bogdanova:

"Agree. My parents live in Mordovia. A lot of shops have opened there, brick two-story houses are growing by leaps and bounds (with me everything was wooden and old), paid leisure centers for children are opening. The bus from our area to the city runs once a day, because there is no need to drive it back and forth, everyone has cars. And the most interesting thing is that young people never leave there. There is work too. My brother gets 35,000. For our regional center, this is not a little. But everyone walks and whines that there is no money, but in Moscow, and they themselves come to the sea and an apartment, they buy a car. The only thing with pensions there are seams - mom gets about 10 thousand, and dad is a few thousand more and this is the maximum. And prices for housing and communal services, food and medicine are growing worse than in Moscow..."

However, it is hardly possible to extrapolate Kartaly's experience to the whole country, Olga Kochnova rightly believes, and explains why:

“That's right, the city of the military and railroad workers. And the plant also. Where this is not there, there are no such pensions either. The usual average pension in my region is 12-15 thousand. And this is 158 km from Moscow, and the prices are Moscow. To remove from this money the rent of about 4-8 thousand, and what remains for people? Yes, there are a couple of organizations and there is a Wagonzavod, where salaries are excellent, but not everyone wants to go to IT or workers in the shop. Yes, I have a couple of acquaintances who earn about 200-300 thousand rubles a month, work for foreign companies or in banks. A few years ago, an acquaintance called me to her school, to teach Russian and literature, promised a good salary - 10 thousand (!) Well, now, taking into account inflation, she would promise 15 thousand. What is this? Everyone who could get a job in Moscow, because it is impossible to live on salaries in Tver at Moscow prices".

And Vyacheslav Siestov categorically disagreed with the author:

“What you described is directly the City of the Sun, it is already clear from the comments. There are very few such oases, to put it mildly. I will add one simple observation: even in the described paradise place, where everyone has huge, downright Moscow salaries - for some reason “everyone” has vegetable gardens and poultry (which requires a lot of work), and “everyone” goes to buy food in Kazakhstan, where cheaper. If I, conditionally, have a salary of 150+, or a pension of 50+ - well, I won't run after smokers, and the need to lug around for groceries somewhere in order to save money is doubtful. In general, I see a kind of disharmony in the picture described.

Sorry, I'm not trying to catch you in a lie, it just doesn't stick..."

Natalia Sadovnikova also strongly disagreed with the author:

“As you described, this is where there are large raw material production, monopolies (railway) and large agricultural holdings. GOKs, metallurgical plants, power engineering. That's it, the list of "successful" enterprises is over.

This is a very unreliable economy device. The resources for the GOK will be exhausted, or some other force majeure - an accident at a hydroelectric power station or there is a collapse in the market - and the khan of a well-organized life. This is illusory well-being".