Russia On Four Wheels. Episode 2

Description

Justin Rowlatt and Anita Rani continue their epic road trips across Russia, discovering two very different sides of a vast and bewildering country looking to assert itself once again on the world stage. Having started out at Sochi, the Black Sea resort hosting the 2014 Winter Olympics, Anita is in Moscow where she meets wealthy socialite Alisa Krylova, Pussy Riot protester Yekaterina 'Katia' Samutsevich and some rebellious night drag-racers and their souped-up cars. She then moves on to St Petersburg, Russia's former capital and its gateway to the west. She gets the chance to open a massive bridge and behind the tourist sites she finds a city of migrant workers and gay rights protesters. Anita then turns north to meet entrepreneurs harvesting caviar from sturgeon stocked in the warm waters of a nuclear power plant, before reaching her final destination of Murmansk, high in the Arctic and Russia's new economic frontier. Justin continues on his journey east, from Perm and one of the last Gulag prison camps, deep into the Ural Mountains and Asia. He spends time with some very traditional bear hunters, gets close to some powerful military buyers at Russia's biggest arms fair, and drives on to Yekaterinburg, where he comes a little too close to men protecting the graves of local gangsters from the 1990s. Finally, Justin reaches the lands of Russia's incredibly rich natural resources - a world of grim copper smelters, Cold War nuclear bomb-making plants, and a road that seems to go on forever into Siberia, looking east towards China and Japan.

Runtime

52 minutes

Series

Geography

Genre

Database

Alexander Street

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