{"id":24605,"date":"2017-08-08T17:21:20","date_gmt":"2017-08-08T22:21:20","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=24605"},"modified":"2017-08-08T17:21:20","modified_gmt":"2017-08-08T22:21:20","slug":"the-nyts-grim-depiction-of-russian-life","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=24605","title":{"rendered":"The NYT\u2019s Grim Depiction of Russian Life"},"content":{"rendered":"
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The NYT\u2019s Grim Depiction of Russian Life<\/a><\/h3>\n<\/header>\n
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As a top propaganda outlet pushing the New Cold War, The New York Times paints life in Russia in the darkest hues, but this one-sided depiction misses the reality of the increasingly vibrant country that Gilbert Doctorow sees.<\/p>\n

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Our five-week stay at our home in the Russian countryside was approaching its conclusion when I got an email from a friend in France asking me to comment on an article<\/a> in The New York Times<\/em> entitled \u201cRussia\u2019s Villages, and Their Way of Life, Are \u2018Melting Away\u2019.\u201d<\/p>\n

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New York Times building in New York City. (Photo from Wikipedia)<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

The article surely met the expectations of its editors by painting a grim picture of decline and fall of the Russian countryside in line with what the author sees as very unfavorable demographic trends in the Russian Federation as a whole. The fact that his own statistics do not justify the generalization (a net population loss of a few thousand deaths over live births in 2016 for a population of 146 million) does not get in the way of the paint-by-color canvas.\u00a0 Nor does the author explain why what he has observed in a village off the beaten track in Northwest Russia, in precisely the still poor region of Pskov, gives an accurate account of country life across the vast territory of Russia, the world\u2019s largest nation-state.<\/p>\n

As the author notes, the main source of income from the land of the town he visited was \u2013 in the past \u2013 linen. That cultivation turned unprofitable and was discontinued. Consequently, the able-bodied part of the population has been looking for employment and making their lives elsewhere (a process internal migration common all over the world, including the United States).<\/p>\n

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The NYT\u2019s Grim Depiction of Russian Life As a top propaganda outlet pushing the New Cold War, The New York Times paints life in Russia in the darkest hues, but this one-sided depiction misses the reality of the increasingly vibrant country that Gilbert Doctorow sees. Our five-week stay at our home in the Russian countryside […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[5,6],"tags":[149,12827,1921,8682,655,694],"class_list":["post-24605","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-geopolitics","category-liberty","tag-cold-war","tag-gilbert-doctorow","tag-new-york-times","tag-nyt","tag-propaganda","tag-russia"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24605","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=24605"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24605\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":24606,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24605\/revisions\/24606"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=24605"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=24605"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=24605"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}