larry johnson shows you the difference between propaganda, 'ours', and realities in russia; 

 

I am back in Moscow for the first time in ten months, and the first thing that strikes you is the distance between the city in front of you and the city as it is described five thousand miles away. Moscow and St. Petersburg are thriving, modern, and — this is the word I keep reaching for — vibrant. The streets are clean and safe. They are not lined with the homeless or the begging. In two weeks I saw exactly one man asking for money, on a stoop in St. Petersburg, and he stood out precisely because he was such a rarity. Set that against New York, Philadelphia, Washington, Atlanta — name any major American city — and the contrast is not marginal. It is an order of magnitude.

I start with the streets because they are the simplest test of the claim the West has been pushing for three years: i.e., that Russia is an economy on the edge, its people pulling their cash out, its cities sliding toward crisis. That story does not survive contact with the pavement.

Vladimir Putin is not paying me to post a sunny story. I am reporting what I see and what I hear from ordinary Russians going about their lives — and what I see is an economy that, sanctions and all, is doing better than the Western economies it is measured against. The shelves are full. The restaurants are full. People are working, spending, building. There is none of the visible distress the West insists is just around the corner. Ask the people who actually live here and you will not find a nation bracing for collapse. You will find one that has absorbed everything the West could throw at it and kept moving.

That is the part the Western press cannot bring itself to say. For three years it has forecast a Russian financial crisis that never arrives, and the reason it never arrives is visible from any café window on Nevsky Prospekt in St. Petersburg or Tverskaya Street in Moscow. There is no bank run here, no ruble in freefall. The sanctions were supposed to break this country. They did not. Compare the mood on these streets to the anxiety in London or the decay in America’s great cities, and the question is not whether Russia is surviving the sanctions. The question is why the West ever assumed it would not.........more.........