Nowhere is it as clear as in the center of Moscow that Russia is a rich country.

Bentleys, Maybachs and tuned Mercedes SUVs with darkened windows are waiting in front of luxury department stores and fine restaurants;

Pompous light garlands hang over the sparkling clean pedestrian zones.

No trace of poverty: the old mothers who still sat at the metro entrances in the 1990s to earn a few rubles by selling cigarettes, household items or cucumbers from their own garden have disappeared.

If someone plays the violin or begs in one of the underpasses under the multi-lane streets, they are usually quickly gone.

Katharina Wagner

Business correspondent for Russia and the CIS based in Moscow.

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Poverty does not fit in with the successful great power that Russia is supposed to be under Vladimir Putin. But it is still there, especially in the villages far from Moscow, where there are pit toilets in the garden and fresh vegetables are a luxury in winter. And you can even see them in the privileged capital, you don't have to drive far, just a few quarters further out of town, to the high-rise castles with their crumbling prefabricated buildings and cheap liquor stores.

Or to Sokol, a middle-class residential area in northwest Moscow.

There, in front of an inconspicuous house on a large arterial road, a queue has already formed that morning: "Mnogomama" is above the door, which means something like "Mama of many" and is the name of an aid organization for large families, so with three or more children: You can pick up bread for free from Mnogomama on this day.

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Jelena Saforova and her five-year-old daughter Amina, the youngest of four children, also stand in line. You have traveled a long way; First they took the bus, then the metro to get to Sokol from Khimki, a suburb of Moscow. Jelena had found out about the bread distribution on the Internet. She knows Mnogomama's actions, she always comes when she manages. The two of them wait patiently for their turn, then Jelena pulls the mask hanging under her chin up to the tip of her nose, and they enter the windowless room.

When Jelena gave her name and showed her ID card for large families, she received two large plastic bags with packaged bread and biscuits, a pencil case with an ice queen motif, pens and a large mandala coloring pad. Jelena throws 250 rubles, about 3 euros, into the donation box for the gasoline of the volunteers who fetched the bread from the bakery. Jelena estimates that all of this would cost more than 10 euros in the store. The bread is good and expensive, she says, otherwise she could never afford it.

Families with children have replaced the old mothers in the Russian poverty statistics: of the 12.1 percent of Russians who had to live below the subsistence level in 2020, i.e. on less than the equivalent of around 130 euros a month, around 80 percent were families with children. Around one in five children in Russia lived below the subsistence level in 2020. Pensioners, who made up half of the poor back in 2000 when Putin first became president, are now virtually absent from the statistics; Meanwhile, each of them is entitled to support in the amount of the subsistence level, which for them is currently around 120 euros. This is very little even by Russian standards - if you consider that good medical treatment in Russia, for example, is not free - but in this way it was possible toreduce the poverty rate from 29 percent in 2000 to 12.1 percent last year.