Khovchenko leaned forward, resting his arms on his knees and propping his chin with his right hand. His eyes shone as he looked at Wang Ye and said:
"Misha, after touring the remote border regions recently, I was deeply shaken!
I used to think that even if ordinary people were not well-off, their lives could not be too bad. After all, our country's economy has developed quite quickly over the past few years.
But only after seeing things firsthand did I truly realize that those places and Moscow were practically two different worlds...
The people in those remote areas live far too hard a life!
So I began wondering why this situation existed."
It was a huge question, and Wang Ye found it difficult to answer right away. He could only smile wryly. "There's no easy solution to that. We can only take it slowly."
The issue Khovchenko raised was indeed troublesome. Russia's territory was so vast and its population so sparse, with most people concentrated in just a few major cities and their surrounding areas.
That left the border regions virtually uninhabited. Some so-called remote little towns might have only a few hundred residents, while lying over a thousand kilometers away from the nearest major city.
Under such circumstances, never mind that Russia had not been wealthy these past few years—even if it were wealthy, it would hardly build highways, railways, airports, and other infrastructure for so few people.
And without proper transportation, with so few residents, how could those little towns possibly prosper?
So this was a problem with no real solution.
Perhaps things would improve only after Wang Ye began pushing urbanization in the future, gradually concentrating the population in major cities and eliminating those small towns and villages.
Khovchenko was clearly speaking from the heart, not