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Paul Theroux has been a world-famous, best-selling travel writer since the 1970s, with 48 published books, as well as several "National Geographic articles". His 2008 book "Ghost Train to the Eastern Star" says:
Vladivostok (city on the Pacific coast) still retained (in 2006) many of its Soviet trappings: a gesticulating Lenin statue, a decaying GUM store...and that enduring Soviet trait, stone-faced bureaucracy. ....poverty-stricken, distant, out of touch and underfunded..... It couldn't have looked grimmer when it had been the fearsome railway junction for prisoners and slave laborers.
The new Russia showed in the city's dreary casinos, the Mercedes dealership, the girlie shows that catered to sailors, the piles of Russian (porno) magazines that were sold by shivering old ladies in ragged overcoats all over town. Vladivostok had become one of the Siberian centers of skinhead gang activity. These chalky-faced and blue-headed thugs with leather jackets, were straight out of "A Clockwork Orange"....but were meaner and racist, with Hitlerian views....they swaggered...looking for dusky foreigners to beat to a pulp,....and spray-painting graffiti on walls." An American Mormon missionary told Theroux "It's a sad place. Gangs, drugs, corruption, thievery. I've been robbed of my computer. The place is going downhill." The city's train station has no conveniences, no shops, no bar, no newsstand, not even any heat.
a disproportionate percentage of russians of the jewish faith ended up controlling a disproportionate percentage of that former entities vast resources
Paul Theroux has been a world-famous, best-selling travel writer since the 1970s, with 48 published books, as well as several "National Geographic articles". His 2008 book "Ghost Train to the Eastern Star" says:
Vladivostok (city on the Pacific coast) still retained (in 2006) many of its Soviet trappings: a gesticulating Lenin statue, a decaying GUM store...and that enduring Soviet trait, stone-faced bureaucracy. ....poverty-stricken, distant, out of touch and underfunded..... It couldn't have looked grimmer when it had been the fearsome railway junction for prisoners and slave laborers. The new Russia showed in the city's dreary casinos, the Mercedes dealership, the girlie shows that catered to sailors, the piles of Russian (porno) magazines that were sold by shivering old ladies in ragged overcoats all over town. Vladivostok had become one of the Siberian centers of skinhead gang activity. These chalky-faced and blue-headed thugs with leather jackets, were straight out of "A Clockwork Orange"....but were meaner and racist, with Hitlerian views....they swaggered...looking for dusky foreigners to beat to a pulp,....and spray-painting graffiti on walls." An American Mormon missionary told Theroux "It's a sad place. Gangs, drugs, corruption, thievery. I've been robbed of my computer. The place is going downhill." The city's train station has no conveniences, no shops, no bar, no newsstand, not even any heat.
I am sure I can head to parts of many US cities, like Detroit, and write up an equally, or even worse observance.
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