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.