Despite an overwhelming daily dose of anti-American pounding in media, where would many Russians want to live if given the opportunity? Answer: the bad ole USA.
The most recent form of anti-American propaganda has to do with international trafficking of women and children. Most organizations fighting this legitimate fight will say that the worst offenders are Middle Eastern Muslim countries and Israel.
The new Russian narrative however is that the USA is the hot spot destination. To a degree, some of those claims are true, but Russian media conveniently overlooks the fact that it is organized crime in Russia that supplies "dancers" and "escorts" to Russian mafia groups in the USA, primarily via New York. Many of these are modern serfdom situations with girls lured by the promise that if they will "work" for a certain period of years, they will be released with proper documents, etc, to stay in America. Rarely are those promises of freedom realized.
All this is very interesting in light of a poll taken by Moscow's English language radio station, Capital FM (formerly known as Moscow FM). Moscow listeners are asked to answer the question that "if you could live in any city of the world, which city would you prefer?"
Program director Pete Cato says that so far, the overwhelming response has been-you guessed it, New York.