M-12 highway of Russia will now be extended to ... Vladivostok. Currently it is in Yekaterinburg, Tyumen is next and ...
To put it into perspective: the duration of flight from Moscow to Vladivostok is 8.5 hours on average. Will this be the longest "interstate" in the world?
At some point you get emotionally overloaded with the crap in real life. But there are places where one goes both physically and in the imagination to get a peace of mind. Forestalling a possible challenge: but there are places like this in Russia. Yes, there are, such as stunning Altai:
But there is a crucial difference between Altai and Montana Glacier Park or Banff in breathtaking Alberta--places, among very few in the world, which have almost a spiritual influence on me with their indescribable beauty. For me, to get from Altai to another life necessity of a big water--the ocean--I will have to get to Gorno-Altaisk, then to Novosibirsk to take a plane to Vladivostok, or Petropavlovsk-Kamchatsky to feel the mighty breath of the Pacific--a 3,000 miles flight. A 5 or so hours affair.
But when you are in the magical Montana, in Glacier National Park:
Or driving through Alberta:
You are never more than 6-7 hours drive from the Pacific Ocean shores. And that matters. You just have to be near, within reach of those places. Middle Russia is flat, even mountainous Ural is very low, Caucasus can rival Rockies but it is Caucasus, and no ocean, just the seas. It is a bizarre feeling of finding in the beauty of Rockies and near pacific something which simply warms your soul. Western North America (US and Canada) are simply indescribable in their beauty and they are near ocean. Because you need to be near this too:
It has a healing quality of sorts to be here (Russia's Far East Coast near Vladivostok is similar) and they are always within reach. I think we need to take breaks from the chaos of life in those true safe spaces.
One photo (among few below) which struck me this Victory Day was not from Moscow, which recorded 850 000 people, biggest ever, marching in Immortal Regiment, nor even St.Petersburg (Leningrad, of course) with its mammoth 700 000 march. It was expected from Volgograd (Stalingrad), Sevastopol. But it was Vladivostok which really did it for me.
You are not Russian if you don't know your Kalashnikov
Each year, more and more youngsters join this and each year, one can sense how, despite all efforts, all those "rukopozhatnye" (hand-shaking capable--meaning uber-liberal so called "intelligentsia") cringe and squeal as a devil at the sight of a cross, you can hear how Solzhenitsyn rotates in his grave, how all those who denigrated Russian history of the 20th Century are going apoplectic. Arctic Fox beautifully put it in one of the Sal's Blog threads about new mythology being born in Russia. I do, however, have a slight correction--it was always there, it is just that it was buried in 1990s under the layer of lie, propaganda, hatred and outright russophobia by the so called new Russian "elites". If there is a sign of a complete break from 1990s it is this Immortal Regiment. Does Putin understand what he had started? I think he does, hopefully this understanding will manifest itself in what overwhelming majority of Russians wait from him, and it is better be soon.
