Moscow.
Moscow in 1930 was extraordinarily prosperous. While Europe and America collectively sank into an economic crisis, the world's other major cities were almost scenes of apocalypse: businesses went bankrupt, workers lost their jobs, armies of vagrants swelled, and most citizens wore faces etched with sorrow.
Yet Moscow, the central city of the Red Empire, displayed an utterly different vitality. Vast numbers of enterprises were being built, everyone performed their own duties, and all were filled with hope for the future.
This was the conclusion Yakov, an East African scholar, had reached after traveling through numerous European cities. He said to Videnoye, the Soviet "guide" beside him, "This year, I visited London, Paris, Berlin, and other cities. Aside from Paris, most of them were mired deep in the abyss of economic crisis. Yet even though Paris and other French cities escaped disaster, they gave me a sense of decadent extravagance, a feeling of being drunk on gold and drowned in paper. Only every region of the Soviet Union seemed filled with vigorous life and flourishing prosperity. As for the United States... I imagine its situation must be even worse."
Although Yakov had not personally traveled to the United States, it was the center of this economic crisis and the first country in which it had erupted. Coupled with all kinds of reliable reports, he dared to conclude that the United States was now in the worst condition among industrialized nations.
In his previous life, Germany had been the most miserable industrial nation during this period. Americans could at least rely on government relief and their vast, resource-rich land to put food on the table. But German citizens, burdened by enormous debts, had no other choices left to them. In the end, they could only follow Germany's extremist parties down a