Ubiquitous New York Times has recently published a quite controversial article describing shopping boom in Siberia. We at Sibers just couldn’t leave it unnoticed.
The article describes Siberia as an awkward place to live, where only hopeless descendants of Gulag prisoners remain: “The winters are long, the distances vast”. People are “living with several generations crammed into tiny apartments”. Probably authors don’t know that in such “provincial Russian town like” Novosibirsk, a square meter of a new apartment costs from 2,600 to 6,000 USD.
Pictures made us laugh. A toothless Siberian aboriginal with a 3-day shadow wearing a kepka is indeed a best illustration of savage population that’s just back from a “miner’s riot”. A log-assembled half-ruinos wooden hut growing from gray melted snow is no doubt a usual habitation of Novosibirsk Ikea customers who are in just one step from getting accustomed to “outsized yellow sized carts” that more advanced civilizations brought to them from overseas.