Sadly, but nothing is changed, it's still the same.
On one side incredible beauty with it's own Russian uniqueness. On another: the same villages, same unploughed fields, the same wooden or stone houses, the same impassable roads and trails, the same grubby peasants in rags, all the same - one to one, as it were before, during and after the 70 years of the Communism rule.
And I forgot the main thing - it would hardly change in the future;).
You are so right, Nicola. Everybody I know who's been to provincial Russia in recent years, that is, the Russia outside of major cities like Moscow and St. Petersburg, says that it's like being back in the 17th or 18th century, it's so impoverished and backwards. These areas include not just the obvious backwaters, but also the immediate rural environs of the capital cities. Today's Russian peasants live like dogs, much as they've always lived, only perhaps worse because now, understandably, most of their young people have fled to the cities to seek employment and a better life for themselves.
It's all very quaint, looking at these beautiful photographs, but we mustn't forget the real misery and poverty that lay behind most of these pictures. I don't think it's quite fair to compare turn-of-the-century Russia with the United States of the same period - most of agricultural Russia proper languished under the double threat of a poor climate and poor soil and was as a result always famine-prone (in fact, this region experienced a massive crop failure and subsequent famine in the early 1890s; Count Tolstoy and his wife organized the initial relief efforts - note,
not the tsarist government). Only the "black earth" regions in Ukraine and other parts of the old southern Russia ever consistently prospered agriculturally in the imperial period.
