I tweet about migrating to Russia at @cbausman and Telegram. DMs are open
Blog housekeeping: It has happened every of the 4 Falls that we have been here. Energy levels in Russia seem to fluctuate more than in the West. Russians, like the French, take their vacations very seriously, and seem to do absolutely nothing from late July to early September. They likewise enjoy an obscenely long winter break, from lat Dec. to mid-Jan, and again from late April to mid-May. Autumn and early winter however are a flurry of activity and energy, with another burst in late winter and late Spring. I was prevented from writing much here, or even tweeting as much as I would have liked due to getting pulled into various projects and activities, but I fully plan to return to it in the new year.
There is growing interest in moving to Russia from Westerners, and honestly, even I am surprised, the more I dig into this story, how compelling the case is, once you unpack it. This is driving demand for hourly consulting on the various aspects of moving here, and I have decided to start offering that service in the new year. If this is of interest to you, get in touch with me directly here on Substack, or Twitter, or let me know in the comments.
In my last article about the Donbas and why I think it will eventually attract many immigrants from the West, I touched on the massive rebuilding in Mariupol, which I visited in October, and I want to return to it before too much time passes because it has major implications. Putin brought it up Thursday at a press conference, and it really is an extraordinary phenomenon.
Incidentally, a few weeks ago I made a very brief trip to Crimea, visiting the capitol, Simferopol, and Metropolitan Tikhon’s remarkable Christian-historical-archeological “theme-park”, New Khersones, which is next to Sevastopol, Russia’s main naval base, and just opened its doors about 3 months ago. I was in Crimea just long enough to realize that it too will be a remarkably attractive place for Westerners to settle in, and its story compliments neighboring Donbas and Mariupol. It is all basically the same region, with similar histories, climates, and prospects. One could write a great deal about the opportunities, history, and towns of Crimea, which are fascinating. With the completion of a new highway around the Azov Sea, New Khersones will be about 4 hours drive from Mariupol.
The remarkable New Khersones complex sits on 24 hectares, or about 60 acres.
Now, as for the building boom in coastal Mariupol, the second largest city of Donetsk Republic, after Donetsk city – it really is huge, and the first thing I thought when I saw it was, why in the world isn’t Russia talking about this more? Why hadn’t I heard about it? And then I remembered why – because Russia is terrible at the Infowars – something you come to realize living here, watching them miss opportunity after opportunity. If they just put smart Westerners in charge of their propaganda efforts they would get a very different result – but they don’t and won’t. Despite looking similar to us, Slavs are quite different from Western Europeans in how they think, and this is very important to understand if you are thinking about moving here.
There must be some factory in Russia pumping out these outdoor weight-training parks very inexpensively. I have seen them in Moscow, Nizhny Novgorod, and now Mariupol. Why pay for a gym when you can have the same thing free in the fresh air? Free-weights and everything. Real, pro-social policies in action. Many such examples.
When I say huge I am not exaggerating. Driving around downtown Mariupol, it seems every other building is freshly rebuilt, with entire neighborhoods being completely new, with the new from-scratch buildings far superior to the old building stock. One encounters new parks, new roads, new medical facilities, new universities, and a few high value cultural buildings – like the historic dramatic theater in the center of town.
Civilians fled in advance of the battle for the city in May 2022, but now Russia claims the population is back up to around 300,000, close to its pre-war level of about 450,000, and growing quickly. Here is a wiki-style list of objects built and when, and what is still ahead, and it is rather impressive. It comes from a Russian alternative to Wikipedia which got started about 10 years ago. I don’t know how large or successful it is, but here is a real life demonstration of how useful it is. Win for Russia to realize they have to create their own parallel data infrastructure.
I have no idea how complete and exhaustive that list is, and indeed, trying to get some hard data, both from the Donetsk government or researching Russian media on the internet, yielded very little. It seems no one really knows – certainly the Russian media has not reported on this in depth – well except Mr. Putin, because his analysts must have prepared some data for his statements about it in the press conference – but who knows if even they got it right.
We have become somewhat numbed by people throwing around stats and big numbers and the enormity of what is transpiring only dawned on me when one of our hosts handed me a 100 page internal document listing about 150 buildings and other things repaired or rebuilt since 2022. It had before and after photos of each site, what was done, how much was spent, when work began and when it was completed, who did the work, and so on. Flipping through this list, seeing building after building (and they are not small) you start to realize that this is very unusual indeed.
The list was about 60% high-rise apartment buildings – but I found the other items more illustrative of how comprehensive the rebuilding is:
Parks, kindergartens, statues, fountains, band-shells, banyas (public bath-houses, a uniquely Russian phenomenon and a stark civilizational advantage over the West), doctor’s offices, schools, warehouse complexes, indoor gyms, hospitals – and not small – they looked like fancy, cutting edge specialized hospitals, libraries, a LOT of playgrounds, “palaces of culture” – a Soviet term meaning “community or neighborhood cultural centers”, movie theaters, “multi-functional centers” – government offices where citizens can come to deal with all aspects of the sprawling Russian bureaucracy with which they may need to interact – now highly digitized, indoor swimming pools, monuments, general landscaping, bus-stops, roads, government offices, hotels, university dormitories, gas pipelines, sewage systems, tramlines and tram depos, digital billboards … I could go on but you get the idea I think.
Facade of the very spiffy, brand-new naval academy
Perusing this list of 150 “objects” was already making my eyes glaze over and wondering when we would have lunch. And this was just 150 of a total of 2000! So yeah, its a big project. I asked for a copy of the list – nyet – not allowed, secret, classified, whatever, so I made the above notes. This gets back to the whole Infowars thing – it just doesn’t work the same in Russia.
The brand-new Mariupol naval academy. An entirely separate category of spending in and around the city, not reflected in the above data, comes from the military.
On top of this top-down construction, citizens can apply for government payouts to undertake repairs themselves, receiving between $US100 – $US 450 / square meter of damage depending on how bad it was. According to the government 4162 apartments have been renovated this way, with payouts totalling $US132 million (at current rates). Due to purchase power parity, this would be similar to perhaps $US 0.5 billion in the US.
Some more stats, this time fresh from the government in Donetsk, so as of today. I was unable to find this data on the Russian internet, so this blog is the only place it is available, which is a little surreal:
- Total apartment buildings in Mariupol: 3029
- Destroyed or damaged apartment buildings: 1998. 1637 of these salvagable, 361 unsalvagable.
- To date, 1480 apartment buildings have been either newly built or repaired, comprising 80,000 apartments.
- Population before the SMO: 430,000
- Current population: 300,000
- Abandoned homes and apartments (i.e. their owners have fled and are not returning to claim them.): 5197. They will be distributed to the public who can demonstrate need.
Mariupol boosters in the Russian media claim that it is already one of the most modern and desirable places to live in Russia, an example for other cities. In addition to the rebuilding, social services have returned, – schools, universities, medical services, pensions, social security, etc.
The next thought I had re the boom was, is this really prudent? Isn’t the war still quite hot? What if a barrage of NATO missiles or drones made it through Russia’s formidable missile defence systems? Would it not be better to wait a few more months? So I pestered our hosts about this over the course of a few days, and after some difficulty, got the following explanation pieced together from different answers from various people : Yes, that is a risk, but when weighed against the advantages of pressing ahead already a year ago, it became clear that moving forward was the right decision. What are those advantages you ask?
The university is freshly renovated inside and out. We went there to visit with students and had a blast.
- Real estate deficit spending strongly stimulates economy because large sums to into workers salaries and building supplies companies, many of them local. In economy-speak, the velocity of money is very high when it is spent this way, generating a lot of economic activity – much more than just handing out subsidies, pensions, etc. This helps take the local economy off of life support, which is also very expensive for Russia.It is interesting that the money is flowing into Mariupol via major Russian cities and provinces – obviously a way to boost these local economies. Here’s a list from that wiki page above – not sure how comprehensive this is, but it gives an idea:
- It is powerful propaganda because it shows in deeds what Russia will likely do for other damaged towns and cities in Novorossiya. I can attest that the locals we talked to in Mariupol where absolutely thrilled, barely able to believe that finally a government was doing something for them, after the disastrous reign of untrammeled oligarch plundering over the last 30 years. Apparently the propaganda is working, as large numbers of those who fled are returning.
- Massive public works, infrastructure, and building projects play to Russia’s strengths. Energy intensive – inexpensive in Russia compared to the West. Steel, concrete, asphalt, wood, stone, plastics, piping, tractors, cranes, trucks, fuel – and the hordes of disciplined construction brigades from Central Asia -Russia has it all in spades. And a happy freedom for stifling regulations, legal, insurance costs, etc. Russia can do this much, much cheaper than Europe, for example.
- It is powerful propaganda because it telegraphs to the world and to the home front a great confidence that the likelihood of a reversal on the battlefields is neglible.
And regarding the NATO missiles and large drones, our hosts argued that there simply aren’t very many of them, that they are very expensive, and that it wouldn’t make sense to expend them on random civilian infrastructure. The less expensive smaller drones would also not be an effective weapon for damaging civilian infrastructure.
I asked the priests at New Khersones park (above), the same question, and they explained that construction had started long before the start of the SMO, but that there had been some scary moments, but so far so good.
One aspect of this war destruction which I don’t see much discussion of is that the late soviet prefab residential blocks damaged by the fighting were some of the ugliest, most soul-crushing, unpleasants dwellings for humans ever built, and at the end of their life cycle. Destroying them and making room for new buildings using new technologies is a good thing. That said, the new construction isn’t winning any design awards – it is has to be built quickly and inexpensively, but as you can see from the photos here, it is a vast improvement.
Example of Soviet housing which is typically being replaced – not exactly a great loss to humanity.
Example of typical Mariupol apartment block damaged by the fighting. It was horribly ugly before the fighting. Most of Russia is littered with these eye-sores – it all needs to be replaced.
This is one aspect of the disaster which was Communism which is not appreciated enough – how intolerably ugly most Soviet-era, and many post-Soviet, buildings are. Indeed, much of what was built after communism is also a disaster, especially private homes, but one does see a steady improvement and growing sophistication and improvement in taste. One could see this as a drawback, but is it not also an opportunity, for the entrepreneur who is able to build aesthetically attractive homes and communities will certainly attract an enthusiastic clientele. Over the coming decades Russia plans to build 50 small cities of about 50,000 inhabitants from scratch, some of them far from the current ugliness.
So we’ve established that it really is very large, and that, counterintuitively, it makes sense to embark on it before the war’s end, but why is it important, beyond another propaganda play or economic boost in this interminable war?
Mariupol has a pleasant shore and beaches – with a climate similar to coastal Connecticut or New Jersey.
A downtown civilian pier.
Putin seems to think it’s important. He was talking it up at one of his periodic marathon 5 hour press conferences two days ago (no Western leader does anything remotely similar, although the questions are quite softball) – announcing ambitious plans to build a new highway encircling the entire sea of Azov, not to mention rebuilding all of the roads in Donbass, many of them destroyed by fighting. He also announced that Russia plans to build or rebuild another 20,000 buildings, in addition to the 1,700 in Mariupol. Asked whether Russia can afford this, he said he was certain it could, and that a complete reconstruction of damaged buildings and infrastructure would be completed by 2030.
A massive new cathedral being completed in downtown Mariupol. Construction began in 2014, 8 years before the SMO.
But he didn’t articulate what I find so striking about modern Russia, something I only gradually came to be aware of when I started writing about the move-to-Russia phenomenon – that is the untapped economic potential of this enormous, and relatively empty country. This is the piece that I think most observers are missing. People tend to think of Russia as a safe haven perhaps from destructive social trends in the West, an idiosyncratic place, not easy to understand, with an exotic (to us) Christianity, a rich culture – but one doesn’t think of it as an economic tiger, on a par with the more dynamic economies of Asia. But it increasingly looks like this economic potential is being released, and certainly, on paper, it seems inevitable. One only has to look back at Russia’s startling economic growth before the revolution, mirroring America’s at the time, to appreciate what could be.
One of the fancier new residential buildings. Apartment interior below. I asked approximately what an apartment like this would cost – about $US100,000.
And this, I think, will be the main reason people to move here eventually – for the economic opportunity.
It turns out that Russia can afford to completely rebuild a 430,000 population city like Mariupol. And claims it can do the same in other cities. One sees dramatic improvements in infrastructure and social services everywhere – in big cities and small. Eventually one realizes that that humans, when not held back by venal corporations and governments, are amazingly productive, and that things can move very fast with the right government policies. Think of what China has achieved in the past decades, or Germany’s economic miracle during and after the 3rd Reich, and a similar boom in the US after WW2.
That, for me, was the message of Mariupol. It is a pattern one sees again and again across this vast country, and an economic reality which most observers are missing.
