re: Young American Family w/Traditional Values Flees To Russia

I try. If moving to Russia floats their boat so be it. But, I would caution people to beware when dealing with Russian officials and the Russian art of Mariskovka which for lack of a better definition is purposeful deception that forces you to expend untold amounts of energy and in our case money. I learned that if they told you 500,000.00 you were going to end up spending close to double that. If there was a form, it was in Cyrillic.....and we had people on staff that could read it and even those forms were deceptive. Made US forms seem straightforward.

If we had construction....forget it. You had to end up either paying independent help ....off the books and probably Vory but it would get done but by that time you were paying closer 800 K on a job that you had originally contracted out at 500K and the workmanship was less than optimal. Want help from local bureaucracy with permits, etc. Better have a native speaker that you can trust. It was so bad at one point we had an Israeli come in who spoke Russian who had been Mossad to help us navigate....good guy who told me afterwards that we were getting shookdown by the local officials in Moscow .

What started as a 3 month stint ended up being closer to 10.....learned to hate Vodka after it. Learned a lot about Russia though. Enough that I won't go back. My feelings were not necessarily out of line with the majority of western business guys who got sent there mostly English and Norwegian as well as American.

Yeah it's pretty safe to walk in downtown Moscow at 3 am ( never did it) but venture out to the more outer rings, it can get rough. Tucker Carlson's subway stop.... at least then yeah it was nice and maybe the reliability of the trains has improved but it was not unheard of to have a train stop working between stops...experienced that 2x. Lived in NYC area ( Northern NJ) for close to 20 years never had that happen to me....yeah it's not as dirty as Penn Station.