Post-Soviet wooden district of Kirov city 

 
Soviet wooden house

Today I have made a little walk at the district Veresniki district of Kirov. Kirov is a Russian city with a population of 500.000 people. It was industrial in a soviet time and some factories work till today. In general, the city is nice and has most of the facilities you need. But it’s not Moscow, Sankt Petersburg, or Kazan, it’s much smaller and the local budget has less money.


 
Veresniky is a quite typical place for many Russian towns. During the soviet time two factories were built here and a small town with apartments for the people, working there. For the workers a 2-floor block wooden houses with apartments for the working class. This district has a small disadvantage: in the spring it is floated by the Vyatka river. After the collapse of the Soviet Union factories were mostly closed or at least reduced the number of workplaces dramatically. Locals lost their jobs and income.
Soviet postbox
 
Typical soviet house
People were looking for new jobs, moving from one place to another, the government was not investing money into infrastructure, and these districts became cheap, a bit criminal places with bad reputations. Although that district is located 5 minutes from the city center people don’t want to live there. The price for a standard 2-3 bedroom apartment is about 12-15.000 USD. Inside they mostly look the same as they were 30-40 years ago, but sometimes owners renovate them.
 
broken pipe at the winter
Something have happened with the water pipe, and the water was coming out through the wall. It was freezing due to the cold weather (-20 is absolutely normal here) and now you can see this frozen waterfall. My grandma told me her memory from childhood: Leningrad, winter 41-42, the half building was destroyed by the bomb, and the water froze the same way.
 
Ice stalactites at the roof
Poor term isolation of the roof makes the snowmelt, it goes down to the sides and freezes as huge ice stalactites. You should be careful walking under them, they can fall down once.
 
House after fire

There was a fire, the wall was burning. As you can see the fire was stopped by a fire crew, but the house is not repaired yet. People still live here. Things are slowly changing, these types of houses are slowly replaced by the modern ones, and life is slowly changing for the better way. You can see normal cars there, now a luxury, but not rusty tin cans at all. People who walked back and forward were not alcoholics, they were just normal people, saving money to move to another place. Or probably they just moved here from a remote village or another country, who knows.

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