Originally Posted by CyberSEO

The people in European part of Russia live the same way as anywhere else in Europe. If you visit Moscow, you won't find it really different to other European capitals. As about the garbage, please believe me - Moscow is much cleaner than Rome, for example. The same applies to all other big cities here. Course there are many depressing and boring places to the East. If you look at the night map of Russia, you'll see that Asian part of the country is almost unpopulated, since most of people here live on the West (almost 20% of Russians live only in Moscow region and SPb).

There are many villages in the States for example (I saw a lot of them), but in Russia they all almost dead. Nobody wants to live there. The youth escapes to the big cities, so most of our villages look like abandoned ghosts. Yeah, they are very depressive. On the other hand, as I said above, most of the Eastern territories are unpopulated (there you won't find a single person for thousand of kilometers). Thus there is a truly untouched nature. So there is a lot of places to visit. E.g.: Baykal, Altay, Kamchatka, Ubsunurskaya Valley, Komy Forests, Putorana, Wrangel Island, Sikhote-Alin Reserve, Кurshskaya, Siberian taiga etc (<< make sure to click all the links to see the images).

As about the war zones. They all are localized in the North Caucasus region and caused by radical Muslim extremism there. It may seem unbelievable, but Chechnya is the most calm place there (the anti-terror operations are very rare and mostly being performed by the local police). Anyways, if you don't live on the North Caucasus, you won't even know there is a war.