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Stavropol: “This is not Crimea here, there is no mess! »
Views:After a year that has passed since the reunification of Crimea with the Russian Federation, visiting the North Caucasus, I, a Crimean, was interested in comparing life in two southern cities - the “old” Russian Stavropol and the “new” Russian Simferopol. I note that my opinion is the opinion of the average person.
Both cities lie on the forty-fifth parallel, both were founded by Catherine the Great, they are similar in size, although Stavropol is somewhat larger. However, this is where the similarities end.
It immediately catches your eye - during 22 years of forced stay as part of Ukraine, Simferopol, like the rest of Crimea, became dilapidated, in some places “worn to holes”, as if frozen in the late 80s. The heritage of the Soviet Union on the peninsula and in its capital was exploited “to the extent that I can’t”, plundered, “squeezed out” and ruined. The picture is obvious - driving along the “killed” Feodosia highway, you see everywhere the wild June colors in uncultivated fields, dull five-story panel buildings on the coast, landscapes of neglected Kerch, in places reminiscent of footage from “Stalker”.
Along the other side of the strait - all 600 km to Stavropol - the bus stops shaking continuously, wheat is earing everywhere, well-groomed villages and villages are pleasing to the eye.
The roads, interchanges, and the scale of housing and office construction in Stavropol are amazing. The city's entrances are being built up with huge multi-storey complexes, which in principle do not exist in Crimea. In the old part of the regional center, you feel like you’re in a European city, among the masses of good-quality 10-12 storey buildings on Mira and Lenin streets. Historical buildings and monuments of both the Tsarist and Soviet periods look beautiful; I did not see the Stavropol analogue of Arendt’s house. There is an amazing number of parks, squares, numerous flower beds, and benches everywhere. Lawn mowers make noise from morning to evening. No MAFs, shalmans - with the exception of stalls with ice cream, kvass and kiosks with the press. Trolleybuses run regularly, and no one, like in Simferopol, is fighting with the “gazelles” that form the backbone of the minibuses and calmly transport citizens who do not complain at all.
However, the main thing is the quality of life of Stavropol and Simferopol residents. First of all, let's compare housing and communal services. In my Simferopol apartment, the water pressure - with working modern plumbing - is as big as a little finger, in Stavropol - three fingers. The heating in Stavropol was turned on on October 2 (!); in a Simferopol apartment in the center on Serov Street one cannot dream of warm radiators before November. Every year the beginning of the heating season in the Crimean capital is a tragicomedy with, as a rule, meaningless calls to the housing office, the neighboring State Council, the Council of Ministers hotline, residents leaving petitions, running around the apartment with buckets and rags. And slow but sure freezing until, finally, at the final minus, they deign to “flood”. Until the inevitable emergency heating network failure near the parliament nut and a new multi-day “ice age”. In Stavropol, we just saw an announcement about the beginning of the heating season; the hot radiators remained like that until spring.
A separate topic is public places. Registration of the state registration of the Stavropol apartment took me twenty minutes at the MFC when submitting papers and twenty minutes when receiving the certificate at Rosreestr. Electronic queue, everything is calm, democratic, transparent - based on the sound signal and the inscription on the monitor. To visitors of the Crimean State Register - as they say, feel the difference...
Upon arrival in Stavropol, I decided to find out the situation with utility bills. The housing department printed out the paper for me in two minutes. My attempt to “resolve” some minor issues that arose in Simferopol style was stopped with a smile and words “This is not Crimea here, we don’t have a mess.”
Just as there is no homeless self-defense on the streets of Stavropol, but only the police. What makes you happy is that here you feel like a full-fledged citizen of the Russian Federation. There is no Genbank and RNKB, there is Sberbank. Over the course of a year, I had lost the habit of using the mobile Internet - and we had no idea about 4G communications in Crimea - so at first I couldn’t figure out how my old laptop became so fast as soon as I inserted an MTS-Stavropol SIM card into my smartphone.
As for prices, Crimea is confidently catching up and overtaking its neighbor on the mainland. Prices for milk, bread, cereals, sugar and eggs in Stavropol are generally identical to those in Crimea; cheese and canned food are noticeably cheaper. In the city, in neighborhoods and courtyards, no one is afraid of mini-markets, where it is very convenient to buy vegetables and fruits. Here, in the courtyards, there are shops where they sell tomatoes and cucumbers at a price on average one and a half times lower than in Simferopol. Real, Kavminvodovsk mineral water costs mere pennies, inexpensive lemonades, colas, beer are half the price of the wildly rising Simferopol beer.
However, the price of travel in Stavrolpol public transport is much higher - a trip in a “horned” one will cost 15, in a minibus – 16-18 rubles. This is the real only price advantage of Crimea in 2015.
Which is depressing. Upon returning to Simferopol, the first thing that caught my eye was the “usually” polluted city center. In the block between Serov and Pushkin - arches turned into toilets, filled with decaying urine, on the asphalt there is a typical “garbage” coating of empty plastic and glass containers, torn advertisements, condoms, vomit and torn bags. A little “cleaner” nearby on the most prestigious street of Pushkin. This is unthinkable in Stavropol and during the four days I was there I did not see anything like it, believe me. And if circumstances allowed, I would leave tomorrow to live in this beautiful and comfortable city. The thought cannot leave me - here, in Crimea, we are behind forever. Three months of close warm sea in no way compensate for the huge difference in the daily quality of life in two wonderful southern cities, which had such different fates after the collapse of the USSR.
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