i traveled around eastern europe extensively doing surveys and market research, i spent the most time in russia, ukraine, and belarus. russia became a pretty nice place after they got rid of yeltsin, by 2010 most of the issues plaguing the country had been addressed. saint petersburg is far nicer than moscow imo but they are nice cities for sure. russia has a lot of rural areas with very limited services, but the only place i visited i'd outright call a shithole was kalmykia, that place is horrible. the subway in moscow ran pretty reliably, i never had any power issues, the water tasted fine, the apartment i was staying in was in dorogmilova so it was pretty bougie. saint petersburg is gorgeous, seriously one of the nicest cities in europe, tons of beautiful buildings, great museums, and only the occasional body part on riverbank. belarus is basically russia but poorer, minsk was very pretty though (the theater was doing a performance of the nutcracker that was fantastic), the only problem was the people were rude as fuck to me for some reason. ukraine was horrible, you couldn't drive on a lot of streets because nothing is maintained, kiev was full of crumbling architecture and half finished building projects, i don't know if they ever finished that stupid fucking bridge but the two years i was there they did no work on it. embezzlement is a huge problem there. the police liked to shake people down and there was a general sense of suspicion everywhere you went. the older folks were generally pretty nice but the youth? i don't know what the fuck they did to them because they were all shitstains. the only place i had a worse time in was latvia and that's because i got jumped by some mystery meat teenagers.
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