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FAQ
2. Unlike other eastern European countries, which took only three to five years to recover from their market reforms, Russia has struggled. Why do you feel it has taken them longer to adapt to a free market system?
When I moved to Siberia, I also thought it would be a relatively quick fix to turn the slow Soviet system into a rapid Russian economic rocket. Now I know better. The reason is threefold: size, time, and location.
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SIZE: Small cars can turn on a dime while larger vehicles are less mobile. Eastern European countries were small and agile enough to do the equivalent of an economic u-turn quickly, while massive Russia, saddled with an SUV of an economy, needed to shift from forward to reverse over and over again in order to maneuver the economy 180 degrees.
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TIME: Russia had been torturing itself, it's people and it's infrastructure, for over seven decades in order to conform with the twisted logic of communism. That is longer than any other country. China, despite its size, has had a relatively smooth transition to a free-market economy. This, in my opinion, is the result of China having been communist for 30 years fewer than Russia.
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LOCATION: Russia, because of its location, suffers from Eurasian schizophrenia. It is both a European country and an Asian country, and yet it is neither. Europe is never quite willing to embrace Russia as one of its own, and Asian countries are even more standoffish to the big bear upstairs. Russians refer to Europeans and Americans as Westerners, while Siberians refer to Russians west of the Urals as Europeans. Siberia is at the heart of this continental identity crisis. If India is the Asian subcontinent, then Siberia is the Asian super-continent. As with India, Siberia is part of Asia, and yet very separate. Russia's Eurasian location can pull the enormous country in contradictory directions, preventing it from moving quickly. Ultimately, however, I think that Russia, like the US, will learn to transform its inherent diversity from a burden into a blessing. I know that part of the reason I found life in Siberia so rich, was this intense confluence of cultures.
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