Economic woes for rural Russians

You don’t have to travel far from Moscow to see the contrast between rich and poor. This town is 60 miles away from Moscow but feels like a world away and this man says they have yet to see more money from Russia’s improved economy. Only 170 people live here and most of them are old. There’s a small village store but not much else. It’s absolutely treacherous walking on the ice here. This place has plenty of history. This woman and her husband have a better pension now thanks to Putin but food is so expensive they depend on their animals and their garden for food. She says the village is dying. She has no gas for heating, despite Russia being the world’s biggest exporter of natural gas. They don’t have any of it here. Instead everyone has an old metal stove to keep them warm. Medvedev’s biggest challenge is to hook up thousands of small towns like this one into the national grid. This library is the only public place in the building and one corner has been turned into a voting station. Everyone I spoke to said they would vote for Medvedev. the question is can Russia’s next president deliver and if the views of people here, if he doesn’t, harden.