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There's nothing flashy about Lyudinovo (pop. 47,000), whose name translates roughly as People's Town. The central square is a traffic island with a Soviet T-34 tank on a pedestal, a World War II memorial. Next to it is a farmers' market, where local babushkas with woolly hats and dodgy teeth sell homegrown carrots and potatoes for 10¢ a kilo. But look closer and it's clear that even Lyudinovo isn't frozen in time. An emporium that opened a year ago sells South Korean refrigerators, French yogurt and fake Italian pumps. Several houses are being built...
...biggest fallout has happened in cities that are wholly dependent on one big industry, especially steel or autos. In the Urals town of Magnitogorsk, a gigantic steelworks has placed 3,000 workers on forced leave. In Novolipetsk, to the east of Lyudinovo, thousands have been furloughed since Nov. 14, when the steel factory idled two of its blast furnaces. The government estimates that companies laid off about 200,000 workers in December and January, but that's probably an understatement. Yevgeny Gontmakher, an economist who heads the Russian Academy of Sciences' Social Studies Center, expects that Russia's official unemployment...
Lyudinovo is no stranger to unemployment: it suffered a bad bout in the early 1990s, when several of the town's factories closed and 4,000 workers lost their jobs. But by October, after a run of good years, the number of unemployed people had fallen to just 320. That number doubled in November, and for this year, all bets are off. "This is just the beginning," says Pronin, the newspaper editor, with worry...
Back in Lyudinovo, snow is falling heavily. Andrei Petrov, the biggest retailer in town, owns many of the stores, including the new emporium, and also runs a wholesale-distribution business to supply them. Getting in to see him is hard. A security guard wants to know whether we are American spies. Petrov's deputy, Viktor Denisov, nervously locks his office door when he crosses the corridor to see his boss. Petrov is deliberately cagey about business prospects. Yes, an economic crisis is now raging, "but this is not the first time we've had one," he says. Indeed, back...
...sure where the award ceremony for the feature films was held, but the shorts awards were given out a mile from town at a weird '80s dance party with a really bad buffet in a room without seats. I did not see Robert Redford. Standing near the stage, rehearsing my speech, I was relieved not to get any of the eight "honorable mentions," which is some kind of Sundancespeak for "loser." But when the actual award was given, they called up a young hipster named Destin Cretton, who not only did not have a speech prepared but also was holding...