What differentiates a resident of Moscow from a citizen of Russia?

Hello, my name Brutalsky. I’m in Fili, western area of Moscow, Russia. I show special railway tracks. It was used to transport Vostok space rockets from factory that used to be here. After Soviet Union dissolved, new leadership decide no need to make rockets. They gutted rocket factory and built residential high rises.

The chimney pipe is from electric station of the rocket factory. There is fence to keep non-residents out and residents in.

I stand on the spot where rocket Vostok was constructed that sent first cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin to space. No commemorative plaque. No monument. No memento to remind of glorious history of the place.

Workers and engineers used to live in these brutal concrete housing.

New housing is luxury. You can judge it by the brands of the parked cars. This is a child-free place. Government wants families to have three and more children. But where they gonna live and play football? It’s all pure geometry and trigonometry that leaves no space for chaos, spontaneity and play. Its deadness is oppressive.

Ah, a rocket logo! So there’s some memory embedded in the name of the international school where all subjects are taught in English. Comrades want their children to live their adulthood in Anglo Saxon nations.

The high rise wall facing the old chimney of the rocket factory features no windows because it would be hard to sell apartments with such terrible view from the windows.

The segment of the wall that faces the thermal power plant has windows and the smoke can blow right into them but it doesn’t matter because it is new and pretty. Look how closely adjacent the power plant and the high rise are.

Signs in the shops are in English. It’s liberal, Western and smells of money.

Dogs in this neighborhood are the size of the rats in New York subway.

All the condo buildings are massive, imposing, towering.

Courtyards are perpetually in the shade even on a sunny day. At least they have two trees in the courtyard.

Residents celebrate Halloween, although it’s banned in the rest of the country.

Picture yourself a child living here. You have no playground. And nowhere to go. Gotta jump into the car and hit the heavy traffic and maybe in an hour you’ll make it to the sports club.

There are no ramps but plenty of steep stairs. This was marketed as “cascading terraces.”

As I walked towards the riverside, architecture took the turn for the dystopian.

I looked to my right and gasped in awe. I saw the future of Moscow. It is squished and the top floors are lost in the fog.

There were more rat-size dogs than children taking a walk on a Saturday afternoon.

If a baby were to peek out of the baby stroller, it would see the black fence and not much else.

Mother is watching a movie to take her mind off the dystopian landscape. A young debutante in good physical shape if she plays her cards right can land in this neighborhood relatively fast hitched to a bald executive with beer belly. A young professional would need at least a decade to put aside the down payment.

All the benches are facing away from the embaknment. The concrete railing completely blocks the view of the river.

This is what you see when you sit on the bench. It was raining and there was no cover. There is nowhere to hide from the sun or the rain. You sit here, stare at the tall wall and let the precipitations go down on you with all of its wrath. Brutalsky.

Blue metal fence ends the picturesque walk. You have to turn around.

There’s a footpath trudged by people who took the shortcut.

A water truck spraying wet road and sidewalk. Don’t even ask why.

Another flight of cascading terraces.

I just couldn’t stop staring at this congregation of monstrosities. Putin’s buddy oligarch Vexelberg and his right-hand man Lieftscitz developed them. The condition was to provide employment to young professionals who were to buy apartments there. A pharma research and development facility and a pharmacy factory were supposed to appear but none did.

Well, hello darling. I hope you’re enjoying wonderful weather today.

A lone high-tech boat was going back and forth on a short circuit. It’s advertised in every metro train like a major achievement of the technology savvy mayor. He’s in fact a total moron.

A communist star of a by-gone epoch. Instead of bright future, they created darkly urban hell.

Somebody has dropped a phone and nobody would steal it.

Imagine the noise in the apartment on low floors of the building that stands right next to the highway. There’s a great shortage of space in Russia that they have to squish them like that.

Oligarch Vexelberg sold stents to hold weak blood vessels to hospitals. They were so badly designed that it was much preferable and advisable to die rather than go through a surgery to install them.

The name is absolutely meaningless. If you ask ten owners of the apartments what headliner means nobody would give you the right answer. It sounds Anglo Saxon. So it should compensate that Russians were building it.

Vexelberg bought American materials to make stents but the very mention that a Russian hand was involved in its production sent customers scurrying away in great panic.

Likewise when I bought my car I wanted to be one hundred percent sure than no Russian man has been seen anywhere close to the production site in Slovakia.

A courier man picking up kebab from a kiosk. I stopped to get something to eat.

I thought again about government trying to stigmatize people who don’t have children. Who would want to have children in this building without a courtyard or a playground.

Moscow city across the road. It’s a short walk from one cubicle to the next. The booze, the smokes, the antidepressants, the midget dog walk.

In the train station there was a long line to the toilet.

The German train was ominously squeaking and making loud rattling noises as it wobbled from side to side on uneven tracks. If there was a German engineer to ask what’s wrong with it and how to fix it but they all left after Putin had started war in Ukraine and so this train will run until it just doesn’t.

I had to drink vodka to drown what I saw in Fili.