> now offer far more for a post-coronavirus getaway
There is an amusing but true saying: "The strictness of laws in Russia is compensated by the lack of compliance with them". On the one hand, some laws and requirements may exist "on paper" and in most cases no one will demand their exact implementation. On the other hand, in some abnormal domestic case, they will be immediately recalled to make you guilty, and this anomaly is difficult to predict in advance. For example (this is a predictable but not very obvious case), it may be caused by the fact that at the end of the reporting month police officers are required to make a certain number of reports on an offense. Managerial decisions that cause such anomalies are, in most cases, made non-publicly.
This applies to many aspects of life in Russia.
> precipitous decline of western countries into woke totalitarianism
According to my observation, it resists falling into Western totalitarianism because it already has its own. Although they are very different.
> I now trade the financial markets full time, online.
Russian bureaucracy is no less terrible than Western bureaucracy. But worse, it may be reinforced by the increased activity of the intelligence services in recent years. I think you will be the focus of their attention one way or another, because your story will be very atypical. And the consequences could be unpredictable. Although the likelihood of this event is small, there is a steady upward trend in that likelihood.
If you are involved in exchange trading, you need to take into account that there has been talk about disconnecting Russia from SWIFT for several years now. I think that there will not be an absolute financial autarchy, but money transfers may be unavailable for some time. In addition, there is a possibility that communication with your broker will not be available, because the Russian authorities in recent years often talk about Internet-autarchy, the so-called "суверенный интернет", and even periodically conduct tests to disable cross-border transmission, so far not very successful.
> coming indoors from being in 32 degree heat in the garden, and pouring half-formulated thoughts into the forum.
I don't think there was anything fatally wrong with it.)
> Russia has gone full bore with forced vaxxer madness
I find it particularly depressing that this happened a few days after Putin and Biden met in Switzerland. I asked a few questions here:
https://cassiopaea.org/forum/threads/questions-from-russia.50840/ (may be "Awaiting approval before being displayed publicly.")
> Your way of describing Russia's response to covid is very emotional
I can describe the situation as I see it from the inside.
Putin did not explicitly mandate universal vaccination (to leave himself room to maneuver if something turns out to be wrong with the vaccine and to shift responsibility to other officials), but soon after the Putin-Biden meeting, "prescriptions" from supervisory bodies began to appear stating that if any enterprise (private or state) had less than 60% of its employees vaccinated, then fines would be imposed on that enterprise. Those employees who are not vaccinated are to be "suspended" (because there is no law under which they can be fired) without any pay. This is more and more like the situation of the Jews in Hitler's Germany. There is a flourishing trade in fake vaccination certificates (with remote entry, without entry, with entry and pouring the vaccine down the sink). Because many people don't want to get vaccinated and quit, logistics suffer - no one to unload truckloads of groceries, for example. Even the employees of the pharmaceutical company that produces one of the Russian vaccines are sabotaging "voluntary and compulsory" vaccinations!
90% of Russia is uninhabited and uninhabitable. At least if you don't belong to a tribe of indigenous people.
I myself am thinking about moving to the south (maybe to Novorossiysk), although the locals do have a different mentality. Or even leave Russia for Montenegro. Perhaps you, too, would be interested in this country.
