Instead of going all Travel Guide on you, I show you how regular rusky live in Moscow.

Moscovites like to repeat their favorite mantra, “Mayor Sobyanin made Moscow beautiful.” Russian emigres call Moscow nostalgically “krasavitsa” - “beautiful (woman).”

The reality is Moscow is just an ugly Asian mega-city.

In the picture is the most common panel apartment block “panel’ka” series п-44.

Everything about п-44 is brutalsky - elevators that stall midway, uncomfortable floor plans, low ceilings, non-soundproof walls, neighbours’ front door that crashes into your front door when opened simultaneously.

Still, п-44s are functional and millions of Moscovites call them home.

Yesterday, I uploaded photos to represent every region of Moscow, but lacking any landmarks they all look the same and I can’t tell which one is which - just an endless ocean of concrete, glass and asphalt with perennially leaden sky above from being too close to the Arctic Circle and from heavy smog.

These nicer apartment blocks are reminiscent of the gentler times when advanced Soviet technology didn’t permit to go above nine floors. A new Sobyanin’s “renovations” scam will see off thousands of five-storey apartment blocks demolished to make way to 20–30 storey apartment blocks.

New seventeen-storey apartment blocks are becoming a rarity too - greedy recently consolidated construction mega-corporations go for taller and taller towers justifying the height by shortage of land in Russia.

There are many green pockets in Moscow. Unfortunately, summer is short and we don’t get much time to enjoy parks that receive half of federal parks and recreation budget, because most of us leave for our dachas and the Black Sea.

With almost no underground and multi-level parking anywhere except for the rich, cars in Moscow are like homeless pets. Abandoned for the night in random places, often far from home of their owners, tucked into the children’s playground, a distant nook, a road shoulder, a lawn, they get assaulted by rain, snow, hail and an occasional hooligan.

Before you pass judgement about how come a European people can live like that, bear in mind that a hundred years ago 95% of their ancestors were illiterate peasants living in gross izbas (log huts) without sanitation, electricity, sewer, water on taps. What you see is a social miracle.

Moscow is a capital of a strong regional power (you didn't see the other countries in the region). As such, it has a downtown with sky scrapers. Most of the tenants are government officials.

On the left is the Ministry of Foreign Affairs with half the building white and lower half black.

It symbolises two things - corruption (funds for whitewashing the lower half were embezzled) and a nation striving to bring pure goodness to foreignsky, but winding up drowning them in sorrow and quite often, blood.

The rich live in ivory towers as elsewhere in the world. Moscow has adopted the Cult of Wealth from the US. An iPhone, a Mercedes, an apartment with “Euro-remont” finishings, one point four children, trips to Italy. This is the Rusky Dream.

Moscovites work a record number of hours without any overtime pay, although productivity is considered low by Western standards.

Moscovites spend long hours in traffic.

The other day I read an article by Vladimir Pastukhov, Honorary Senior Research Associate at UCL School of Slavonic and East European Studies.

Mr. Pastukhov calls the Russian people "social permafrost" with only two states - solid, when it is frozen, inactive, apathetic, hibernating; and gaseous, when it is heated and behave highly irrationally and chaotically.

Transition between the two state happens almost instantaneously, without any intermediate stages.

Yesterday, we celebrated the three hundredth anniversary of the Romanovs' house. Today we throw the whole family down the shaft of a mine.

83% of us vote for keeping the USSR intact. Next day, the USSR is dismantled after some heavy vodka drinking in the woods of Belorussia.

Today, Moscow is a city of permafrost. Who knows what momentous changes melted social permafrost will bring.