During his visit to Russia to interview Vladimir Putin, former right-wing Fox News talk show host Tucker Carlson made headlines by praising the alleged abundance and low prices at a Moscow supermarket. He said the experience had “radicalized” him towards US leaders and that Moscow was “far more beautiful than any American city”.
How can we know if Carlson is right that life in Russia is better than in the United States? Experience the evidence of people voting with their feet. When people choose the government under which they want to live through electoral voting, they have much stronger incentives to make good decisions than voters at the polls or media pundits.
Since 2022, more than 1 million Russians have fled Vladimir Putin’s increasingly repressive regime. They are willing to go even to relatively poor countries such as Armenia and Kazakhstan. Many thousands have attempted to move to the United States across the Mexican border, despite the real risk of detention and deportation. Many more would emigrate to the United States and other Western nations if we only let them (as we should!).
In contrast, Americans who want to emigrate to Russia are few and far between. Last year, the Russian government launched a plan to build a village for dissatisfied right-wing American expatriates. But they appear to have quietly put the idea aside, probably out of fear that it wouldn’t attract a significant number of buyers.
Why are so many Russians eager to flee to the West? One major factor is that, despite Carlson’s claims, Russia is actually a poor nation. In 2022, GDP per capita was about $15,270, less than a fifth of the U.S. figure of $76,300. And this is despite the fact that Russia has some of the largest oil and precious metal deposits in the world. The average monthly salary in Russia is around 73,800 rubles (an annual salary of around $9,700 at the current exchange rate). About 20% of Russian households do not have indoor plumbing.
It is also worth noting that Moscow is the richest city in Russia. And even there, Carlson (like many other visiting Westerners) probably hasn’t seen many of the parts where ordinary people live, as opposed to the sites frequented by foreign tourists. If he had done so (like I did), he would have seen Third World-like poverty. And poverty is much worse in smaller cities and rural areas.
One of Carlson’s mistakes was at least somewhat understandable. I made one like this once too. I am originally from what was then the Soviet Union and a native speaker of Russian. In 1995, I visited Russia for the first time since emigrating in 1979. Like Carlson in 2024, I noticed that many prices were lower than in the United States. When I pointed this out to a Russian relative of mine who lives in Moscow, she got angry: “Stop saying prices here are low,” she admonished me. “I am Not low compared to our incomes.”
She was right. Part of what I (and later Carlson) saw is the strength of the U.S. dollar, which enjoys highly favorable exchange rates because many foreigners want to hold dollar-denominated assets as a “store of value” (in contrast, few non-Russians have a similar demand for rubles). Another relevant factor is that prices of many goods and services are lower in poor nations, partly because labor is much cheaper (having fewer alternative opportunities).
Relative to income, food prices in Russia are actually much higher than in the United States, not lower. In 2021, the state news agency TASS (which certainly doesn’t want to paint the Russian government in a bad light!) reported that 75% of Russians spend half or more of their income on food. Things have probably gotten worse since then, due to inflation and shortages caused by the war with Ukraine. In the United States, by contrast, the average American spends about 11.3% of disposable personal income on food. Even for the poorest quintile of the population the percentage rises to 31%.
Even as Carlson praised Russia’s food abundance, the government urged Russians to start growing their own bananas, to make up for expected shortages resulting from Putin’s restrictions on imports. Maybe Carlson can make a special program about how the Russian climate is great for growing bananas. Thanks to Putin, the country is on its way to becoming the largest banana republic in the world!
In addition to widespread poverty, there is also terrible repression in Russia. You risk up to 15 years in prison just for calling the “special military operation” in Ukraine a war. Just today, Russia’s most prominent opposition leader, Alexi Navalny, died in prison. Other prominent dissidents, such as Vladimir Kara-Murza and Ilya Yashin, are also behind bars, often in terrible conditions. Carlson says he is a big believer in free speech. If he is like that, he shouldn’t defend Putin.
Carson also fantasizes about how the U.S. government might conscript his sons to fight in Ukraine, though there’s no real prospect of such conscription here. Russia, however, actually has a project in which thousands of young people are forced to fight in an unjust war, mainly the poor and non-Russian minorities.
Increasing repression and mandatory conscription are further reasons why so many Russians vote with their feet against their government. If you want to know what conditions are really like in Russia, you should listen to them, not Tucker Carlson.