VASILEVO, RUSSIA — Truckers with empty tanks or bellies stop here in this hamlet between Moscow and St. Petersburg, climb to the ground, stretch their legs and poke a cigarette between their lips.
The drivers are worn out from grinding over the potholed, shoulder-less, often two-lane ribbon that is, improbably, Russia's main commercial thoroughfare. They haul the parts and pieces of a vast economy -- chicken legs, coils of rope, dinner plates -- over roads so jarring the cargo is often damaged before it arrives.
Nobody is more keenly aware of the corroded state of Russia's transport infrastructure than the country's truckers, who earn their pay traversing broken highways and improvising where roads don't exist.
"Thirty-one years I've been driving, and the roads have gotten worse," said Valery Gorbunov, a beefy trucker with a mouth full of gold teeth and a truck full of pears.
"The way they do repairs, they just put a patch on top of another patch."
Over the last decade, as Vladimir V. Putin presided over an oil-rich, newly assertive nation, outside observers marveled at Russia's resurgence. But daily life inside the would-be superpower is still strained by mundane, fundamental failures.
As anybody who has tried to explore the country by car can testify, Russia's abysmal road infrastructure is perhaps the most pointed reminder of all the things left undone during long years of economic boom.
Outside the major cities, the roads are harrowing -- narrow and perilously pitted with potholes; groaning with cargo trucks; edges dropping off abruptly onto earth without a shoulder.
Even fresh pavement often ripples in waves, which are often coated with winter ice, sending tires skidding back and forth. And in many parts of Russia, the roads are simply unpaved.
Although spending on infrastructure has tripled over the last few years, drivers and experts agree that the cash has failed to trickle down meaningfully to the roadways, partly because it got snared in local corruption.
And now, with the GDP shrinking and the International Monetary Fund predicting zero economic growth in 2010, there is a growing fear that Russia may have squandered its best chance to reinvent itself.
"This time was irretrievably wasted," said Viktor Dosenko, vice president of the International Transport Academy in Moscow. "We missed these favorable conditions, and we can't expect them to return."
