| Speaker | Time | Text |
|---|---|---|
|
Metro Miracles
00:01:44
|
||
| One of the ways you understand a society is through its infrastructure, the places where people gather, the places where they go to travel. | ||
| You've got a lot of people in one place, it tells you a lot about the people. | ||
| So with that in mind, we're standing in front of the Kyivskaya metro station and there's a train station next to it. | ||
| Now the metro station was built by Joseph Stalin 70 years ago. | ||
| And the question is, how's it doing now, after 70 years? | ||
| So we went into it to take a look, and what we found shocked us. | ||
| Now, that's not an endorsement of Stalin, who was bad, obviously, nor is it an endorsement of the current president, Vladimir Putin. | ||
| You may not like him either. | ||
| But it doesn't change the reality of what we saw or, more precisely, didn't see. | ||
| There's no graffiti. | ||
| There's no filth. | ||
| There's no foul smells. | ||
| There are no bums or drug addicts or rapists or people waiting to push you onto the train tracks and kill you. | ||
| No. | ||
| It's perfectly clean and orderly. | ||
| And how do you explain that? | ||
| We're not even going to guess. | ||
| That's not our job. | ||
| We're only going to ask the question. | ||
| And if your response is to shout at us slogans dumber than the slogans we used to call Soviet and mock, that's not really an answer. | ||
| How does Russia, a country we're told is a gas station with nuclear weapons, have a subway station that normal people use to get to work and home every single day that's nicer than anything in our country? | ||
| We're not going to speculate. | ||
| We're just going to raise the question and wait for someone in charge to give us an answer. | ||
| What is the answer? | ||
| So we'll stop the lecture and let you take a look for yourself at what the Kievskaya metro station in Moscow, Russia looks like today, February 2024, in the middle of a war. | ||