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The Russia.

It is a country bigger than three continents, and it is a dark place, or so it seems to be.

It seems to me so unknown, a fairy tale place stuck in a different

time and world where immeasurable wildernesses are interrupted by the odd settlement. And those

settlements could range from a few ramshackle houses to forgotten brutalist concrete ruins,

from a checkered past, and even up to colorful castles that inspire the mind.

It's a dream world, an ocean of unknowns painted green and brown and gray.

It is a rope tugged between the two poles of Europe and Asia, the great west and the greatest

of the east. And the strain of this tug of war has left its marks on the land. A tossing

here and there between pagan history and Christian settlement and godless communist uprisings

has beaten the country to a pulp time and time again, leaving it bloodied in the face and bleeding out

from vitals. Yet it remains. It lingers

on, sometimes confusedly, dancing its dance of orthodoxy and dealing still with the rampant

sin that few have been immune to in this modern age. Even its modernity shows signs of its

incompleteness, for that is what Russia really feels like,

incomplete somehow.

The metropolitan titans of Moscow and St. Petersburg shine with lights as bright as any major

center of modern human development in our day.

But bright as they may be, they cannot cover up the shadow over the bulk of the land.

Again, it's like a fairy world, caught between what modern man wants to pigeonhole it into and what it actually is,

what it perhaps used to be.

...