A building in Irkutsk, Siberia, looks more like a fridge in need of defrosting than a home. Yet several families, with children, live here, saying local authorities have neglected them. An official said they must prove that they have the right to live in the building before they can be rehoused.
On January 15, 2020, Russian President Vladimir Putin delivered his annual address to parliament about the state of Russia and changes for the future. What would ordinary Russians have said in his place? Ahead of Putin’s speech, Current Time talked with voters in four Russian cities.
Pictures of Pripyat, the abandoned town near Chernobyl, are world famous -- but Ukraine has another nuclear ghost town. Orbita was built for workers at the Chigirinsky nuclear plant. The workers moved in, but the plant was never finished, and Orbita is now a crumbling ruin with just 100 inhabitants.
From “correcting” Russia’s constitution and expanding parliament’s powers to increasing child-welfare payments and modernizing primary health care, Russian President Vladimir Putin’s annual speech to parliament on January 15 came with a lot of proposals for change. To get a sense of how his statements are playing with ordinary Russians, Current Time spoke with voters in the cities of Kazan and St. Petersburg.
Navigating a Russian city in a wheelchair is incredibly difficult -- and the challenge is even greater in the middle of winter. One disability activist in the Siberian city of Tomsk says government projects intended to improve accessibility have largely failed to deliver on their promises.
Temperatures of minus 40 degrees Celsius mean only the horse farmers and their families stay to endure the winter in the village of Tumul in the Far Eastern Russian region of Yakutia. But ancient traditions and crafts still survive there, despite a dwindling local population.
Current Time asked people across Russia, from St. Petersburg to Yekaterinburg to Vladivostok, about their hopes for 2020.
Yulia Tsvetkova, an artist and activist in Russia's Far East, runs social-media pages focusing on women's art and LGBT issues. Her posts prompted officials to charge her with “propaganda of nontraditional sexual relations among minors” and distributing pornography, an offense for which she could face years in prison.
Valeria ran away from home, and now she's joined the circus. She's one of dozens of kids from tough backgrounds given a new start in life by a unique social project.
Uzbekistan's president has warned citizens not to go into debt to pay for traditional weddings. One Uzbek man has spent 19 years working in Russia and saving for the marriages of his three children.
One man's obsession with the collective farm he ran for more than a quarter of a century led to the creation of a unique open-air museum in a village in southern Russia.
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