I am not the user you shared your experience with and would be far from defending or ignoring Russia for anything. But some comments from me.

While I’m not with a Christian group, I’m actually in the area professionally for a major mechanical engineering firm in 2020.

Magadan does have a dark past, but their church contacts seem confusing.

— But, as already mentioned, he is very far away – and “very far away” really means something different there than Hahn’s “Frankfurt”

Sokol Airport is just over an hour by bus from the city center. It only runs once an hour, which is a bit of a pain, but the Frankfurt Hahn is harder to get to than the Zeil.

— The region’s biggest employer is the military – and they now need their soldiers elsewhere.

The largest employers in Magadan are large gold and non-ferrous metal processing companies since reunification. Magadan was a restricted military area until the fall of communism and the dents afterward, but the commercial port is now much bigger than the military part, so you confuse it with Vladivostok.

— Measured by Russian standards, it is also a very underdeveloped area.

Thanks to the savings mentioned, the Magadan region is the region with the seventh highest GDP per capita out of 83 RF subjects, after the major oil and gas regions and Moscow, but ahead of Saint Petersburg, for example.

Magadan, of course, is not Sochi, but it is not a dark, pre-end of the world gulag either.

I can only write about what I experienced there in the summer of 2018 – of course that was five years ago and a lot has happened since then, especially in Russia. However, since the 1990s, Magadan has lost around a third of its former population and this is directly linked to the massive military withdrawal. Mining has of course been in place in 2018, but for local people it can’t compensate for what was lost due to structural upheaval. That is why the Russian government launched a series of infrastructure projects for the region in 2018, including the aforementioned reorganization of regional airlines, and officially classified the region as structurally very weak.
I didn’t take this trip because my employer was involved with a local mining company but, as mentioned, as part of a church project, which might provide a slightly different perspective for me. However, if you delve deeper into the history of the Soviet Union during the Stalin era, the name Magadan has certain connotations that cannot be separated from it. Auschwitz is now a thriving mid-sized Polish city and you can take a great tour through the Lüneburg Heath from Bergen-Belsen. However, that is not the meaning of these place names in international cultural-historical discourse. The reason I travel has everything to do with it.
I also remember the bus, but at that time each of us was transported by car. As also mentioned: We have our church contacts there. As far as I can remember, the airport is about 50 kilometers “outside” – and yes, that’s less far than Hahn’s distance from Zeil. By comparison – somewhat crooked – I tried to clarify what “rural area” in Siberia means in contrast to Palatinate, for example, and what is the difference in the size of the area one faces – in other words: what dimensions are different.
It was a memorable trip for me, even if I may not be able to go there again anytime soon – which is very important to me in light of the current reports: the people there were not easy to deal with the event about incidents like landing safety of Air India to be disbanded along with the political regime, but at the same time not writing anything good is not good. I try to “think” what I’ve read about passenger accommodation in the context of my own experience of the place and the people I met there and my impression is this is the place. locals who gave what they could.

And then my second big point: And then break it apart from what you can and should write about Air India on this occasion.

This post was edited on 06/08/2023 4:27 PM.