Inside Russia right now, almost everything works—and almost nothing feels normal.
The people who notice these changes most clearly are Russians who left the country several years ago and have now returned for a visit.
They remember the Russia they left. They have lived long enough somewhere else to lose the habit of accepting everything around them as normal. And when they come back, they notice things their relatives may barely see anymore.
I’ve been reading accounts from returning emigrants, along with local reports, regional news, and social media. And what they describe is neither the Russia of Kremlin propaganda nor the collapsing wasteland sometimes imagined from abroad.
It is stranger than either of those pictures.
Today, we are going to look at Russia through the eyes of people who left—and then came back.
Here’s our roadmap.
Everything Works — why an authoritarian country at war can look much more normal, comfortable, and functional than outsiders expect.
Everything Is Being Rearranged — how war is reshuffling money, people, industries, businesses, and entire regions.
The War Is Everywhere and Nowhere — how the war has transformed daily life while people increasingly avoid talking about it.
The Daily Obstacle Course — how ordinary life now requires constantly navigating restrictions, technical barriers, self-censorship, and uncertainty.
The Missing Future — what happens when people can still plan for next weekend, but struggle to imagine the next five years.
Welcome to Absurd — how the state denies problems it cannot solve and sometimes punishes people simply for talking about them.
Everything Works
If most of what you know about Russia comes from bad news, you can easily construct a rather cinematic picture of the country.
A mafia runs the state. People are arrested for words. Corruption penetrates everything. So perhaps you expect the physical country to look like the political system: gloomy, decaying, vaguely Mordor-like.
And then you arrive and discover a nice riverfront. There are flower beds. New playgrounds. Stylish coffee shops. Clean pedestrian areas. Food arrives quickly. Government offices issue documents. A private clinic can get you an appointment tomorrow.
The opposite fantasy exists online as well. There is now an entire ecosystem of accounts presenting Russia as some enchanted civilization untouched by modern problems: women in kokoshniks, endless Russian flags, suspiciously beautiful blond children, and landscapes that look as though National Geographic filmed Canada and somebody added an Orthodox church.
Reality lies somewhere else.
Russian cities really have improved in many visible ways.
Long before the full-scale war, federal and regional governments began investing heavily in what Russia calls the “comfortable urban environment.” In my native Nizhny Novgorod region alone, billions of rubles went into these programs, and by 2026 Governor Gleb Nikitin said more than 750 public spaces had been transformed.
Many returning emigrants are struck by how much better their hometowns look. One writes about a transformed Tyumen, another about new parks and hospitals in Perm. An authoritarian country at war does not necessarily look like a ruin. A state can issue documents efficiently, renovate a park, wage a war, and build a system of political repression at the same time. None of these things contradict one another.
In fact, beautification itself can become a propaganda tool.
Take Gleb Nikitin’s official social-media feed. You see a freshly paved road, a landscaped square, a new public space opening with smiling officials. The message is relentlessly optimistic: things are being built, repaired, and improved.
It resembles the development news that comes out of China, where progress itself becomes a political language.
What disappears from this picture is everything that does not fit inside it.
By mid-September 2026, the Nizhny Novgorod region had been repeatedly targeted by drone attacks throughout the year. Homes, industrial facilities, energy infrastructure, and even the regional courthouse were damaged; in the deadliest confirmed attacks in June and July, three civilians were killed, while at least ten people were injured in attacks over the summer.
Independent researchers have identified nearly 3,900 people from the Nizhny Novgorod region who have died in the war against Ukraine. The regional government continues to finance payments and benefits connected with military service.
The finances are increasingly strained as well. The region’s planned budget deficit for 2026 has roughly doubled, from about 30 billion to 59 billion rubles, while public debt has risen above 210 billion. Officials have already postponed some development spending while adding billions more in war-related expenses.
And this summer, finding gasoline became an adventure. Drivers sometimes spent seven or eight hours searching for fuel or waiting in line. At the height of the shortage, the governor himself described the situation as an acute deficit.
Visible order is reassuring, but it also has a political function. If people trust those in charge to keep things working, they are more likely to stay passive. If that trust disappears, they start looking for ways to solve problems themselves, organize, complain, pressure officials, or demand change. That is where political activism begins. For the regime, maintaining the appearance that everything is under control is therefore not just cosmetic. It helps keep people from deciding they need to act on their own.
Everything Is Being Rearranged
The next thing returning emigrants notice is that everything has been rearranged. People left. Some sold apartments, closed businesses, or moved their work abroad. Foreign companies disappeared too, leaving behind market niches that Russian firms and Chinese suppliers quickly filled.
You can see the change just by looking at the street. European and Japanese cars are still there, but the new-car market has been transformed. Chinese brands now dominate sales, and some supposedly Russian models are built on Chinese platforms.
Shopping has changed as well. Ozon and Wildberries are essentially Russia’s versions of Amazon, but with one important difference: instead of waiting at home for a package, people often pick it up from a small collection point around the corner. These outlets are now everywhere, even in small provincial towns, and until very recently the system was extraordinarily convenient.
Then the war reached the warehouses. In the summer of 2026, repeated drone strikes set major Wildberries logistics centers on fire. One warehouse near Moscow burned for two days; the blaze was so enormous that it was visible in satellite images and appeared in international news. Other Wildberries facilities were hit in several regions, and Ozon logistics sites have also been damaged. Suddenly, the infrastructure that had made shopping almost effortless began looking much less secure.
Money is moving just as dramatically. Some poor towns have suddenly become much richer because of military enlistment bonuses or defense factories. Places that had been losing people for years now have households with more cash to spend.
At the same time, civilian employers cannot find enough workers. War, emigration, and demographics have created labor shortages, so Russia is recruiting more workers from countries such as India.
And the changes are extremely uneven. One city is full of construction cranes while apartment sales are weak. One pharmacy has everything; another cannot get a familiar medicine. Public spending continues, but inflation eats away at what that money can actually buy.
Even the moral landscape has shifted. Russian law still criminalizes aggressive war and mercenary activity. Yet men connected with Wagner are commemorated publicly as heroes.
So returning emigrants do not encounter simply the old Russia with fewer Western brands. The war is reorganizing the country.
The War Is Everywhere and Nowhere
Returning emigrants say the war is impossible to miss — and strangely absent at the same time.
One man coming back from Germany was shocked by the airports: soldiers on crutches, men missing limbs, wounded veterans moving through ordinary civilian spaces. Others notice recruitment posters, fresh military graves, and people with prosthetics in provincial towns.
And then they meet friends for dinner, and nobody wants to talk about the war.
One woman who returned to Russia after living abroad said that in emigration, the war had been almost impossible to stop discussing. Back in Russia, bringing it up at a dinner table could produce an immediate reaction: “Let’s not get into that.” People change the subject and return to work, children, mortgages, and vacations.
Another returnee described Russia as a country of extreme self-censorship. Friends who once spoke freely now choose words carefully. Even people known to oppose the war often prefer not to discuss it with strangers — and sometimes not with relatives.
This does not mean that everyone is secretly against the war. The accounts are much more mixed than that.
Some people support it. Some strongly oppose it. Many appear to have incorporated it into ordinary life.
A woman who regularly visits relatives in Primorye said that families sometimes talk about men at the front almost as if they were shift workers: he left, earned money, came home, then went away again. What exactly happens during that “work” is rarely discussed outside the family.
And the visibility of the war varies enormously from place to place. One man who returned to Kazan expected recruitment booths and military propaganda everywhere and was surprised to find relatively little of it. A visitor to St. Petersburg said that in the city center, the war could almost disappear from view until a drone alert closed the airport.
The Daily Obstacle Course
What returning emigrants notice most sharply is not collapse. It is friction.
One woman who recently visited Yekaterinburg described the routine almost as a comedy. Turn on the VPN to read Telegram or Instagram. Turn it off because Ozon or the banking app may not work properly with it. Turn it on again. Turn it off again.
And the Internet itself may simply disappear. By 2025, mobile Internet shutdowns had become routine across much of Russia, sometimes lasting for hours or days.
Then there is travel. An airport can suddenly stop accepting flights because of a drone threat. In 2026, disruptions became so frequent that hardly a day passed without restrictions somewhere in Russia; sometimes airports closed repeatedly within the same day.
Navigation may stop working properly. A taxi app cannot find you. A payment does not go through. A messenger is blocked. Another service works only without the VPN.
None of this is catastrophic. That is precisely why people adapt. But each small problem adds a few degrees of tension. Then another few. By the end of the day, you have spent hours checking, switching, waiting, and improvising.
And the same habit extends beyond technology. You think about what you are saying, where you are saying it, and who might hear you. Life becomes a series of tiny calculations.
The Missing Future
Perhaps the most disturbing thing returning emigrants describe is not higher prices, propaganda, or Internet restrictions. It is the disappearance of the future.
People still go to work, renovate apartments, take children to school, and make dinner plans. But when the conversation moves beyond the next few months, confidence disappears.
A woman who returned from the United States to Novocherkassk said what struck her most was the people themselves. Their eyes, she wrote, no longer seemed to light up. She kept hearing the same prediction: things would only get worse.
Similar expectations appear in other accounts. Even people who support the authorities have little idea what Russia will look like several years from now.
And planning becomes difficult when the rules themselves are unpredictable. A profession can suddenly become politically suspect. A familiar service can disappear. Another mobilization may or may not happen. Parents cannot be sure what universities will teach by the time their children get there, or whether those children will eventually want to leave.
So people shorten the horizon.
They concentrate on what they can still control: family, a pet, a garden, a hobby, an apartment renovation, a weekend with friends.
That can look like political indifference from the outside. Often it is something simpler: a survival strategy.
If you cannot influence the direction of the country, thinking constantly about its future becomes exhausting. It is much easier to think about what you will cook tonight or what needs fixing at the dacha.
One Meduza reader in Moscow described slowly preparing to emigrate because she no longer believed the country she remembered was coming back. Another said the constant restrictions felt like living in a room that was gradually shrinking.
This may be one of the deepest changes produced by prolonged uncertainty.
A society does not need to be in permanent panic to lose its sense of direction. The difference is that plans shrink, and the future becomes something you try not to think about.
Welcome to Absurd
There is one more thing returning emigrants notice: the growing absurdity of the system.
People say one thing, do another, and often seem to believe something else entirely.
The Russian state has made control of Ukrainian territory a national priority. In June 2026, Putin again said Russia would continue trying to capture all four Ukrainian regions it claims as its own.
What concrete benefit an ordinary Russian family is supposed to receive from acquiring another Ukrainian town is difficult to identify.
Meanwhile, the costs keep accumulating.
Regional governments face strained budgets and the consequences of a war they cannot control. Officials themselves operate in an increasingly unforgiving political system: the former governor of Kursk was sentenced to fourteen years in prison this year, while other regional leaders have been removed or investigated.
And yet official communication remains relentlessly optimistic. Roads open. Parks improve. Factories report success. Everything good happens with government support, and every new problem is presented as temporary, manageable, or non-existent.
A friend of mine who recently returned from Novosibirsk gave me an example.
This summer, bears were approaching populated areas across the Novosibirsk region. They are searching for food and, in some cases, migrating away from massive forest fires in neighboring Tomsk region. Many saw them with their own eyes.
Then residents began forwarding warnings that a mother bear and cubs had been seen near the botanical garden. The regional Ministry of Natural Resources couldn’t do much about the bear invasion, so it said the reports were false and that locals mistook large dogs for bears.
The subject became perfect material for Siberian chats: jokes, memes, and horror stories. How did the authorities react to the rumors they couldn’t control? In Zabaykalsky Krai, a woman posted an AI-generated photograph of a bear, and the court fined her 30,000 rubles and confiscated her iPhone.
The logic is simple: make people cautious about talking about bears, the rumors die down, and the problem appears to disappear — without officials ever having to leave their offices.
The strangest thing about modern Russian life, judging from these accounts, is that there is no single spectacular catastrophe. Everything is . . . fine. Almost.
And yet underneath ordinary life there is a constant feeling that something is wrong and that you cannot calculate what happens next.
There is a psychological term that works well as a metaphor here: rumination.
Rumination is when the mind keeps returning to the same disturbing problem. You think about it again and again because your brain is searching for a solution. But there is no new information and no action available to you, so the thought simply goes around in circles. What am I supposed to do? Should I leave? Should I stay? Will there be another mobilization? Will my job still exist? What happens to my savings? What happens to my children?
And this trap is not limited to people who oppose the war. Putin’s supporters live with the same uncertainty.
Inside Russia, an individual has very little power to change the larger situation, and even symbolic acts of dissent can carry real risk.
That sense of helplessness is made worse by another problem: many Russians feel that the outside world holds them collectively responsible for decisions they never controlled. А Russian passport itself now brings restrictions and extra scrutiny, regardless of what that particular person thinks about Putin or the war.
There is a strange historical echo here. After the Bolshevik Revolution, many Russians fled precisely because they opposed the new regime. Yet Russian refugees were still treated abroad as potential security threats or even as possible carriers of Bolshevik ideas. In other words, you could run away from the Bolsheviks and still be viewed with suspicion because you were Russian.
So you cannot change the past. You cannot control the present. And increasingly, you cannot predict the future.
The mind keeps coming back to the same question: What am I supposed to do?
