Here, There, and Everywhere - Rural Russia

We didn't get the chance to visit small-town Russia: we would need to rent a driver to get there and a room to stay in. All we saw of rural Russia was from walking on the outskirts of small cities or looking out the window during bus and train travel. Although the architecture and agriculture were slightly different, it appeared that the rural lifestyle was very similar to (the poorer parts of) rural Canada.
Our first sights were outside Viborg, a small city near the Finnish border. The terrain and vegetation were quite similar to eastern Ontario. Centuries ago it was contested between the Swedish and Russian empires, so there was a small castle at the river and medieval fortifications on the outskirts. There is not much agriculture today, only subsistence farming, because the land is so swampy and so far north.
On the road in European Russia we saw the usual signposts of rural life: farmland, construction yards, truck and tractor mechanics, flea markets. I couldn't take any pictures because I was fighting off nausea.
In Siberia, we saw thousands of kilometers of boreal forest with little human presence. The towns we did see had typical wood panel houses and simple buildings. The Siberian cities we passed through seemed to be a wasteland of flaking concrete and rusting metal; but then again we only saw what was along the railway.

Outside of Novgorod, we walked through an "open-air museum of peasant architecture." This showcased the best surviving rural buildings in the region. The traditional Russian cottage (izba) was built with rough-hewn wooden logs, and wealthy houses or churches evolved from this. In fact, for a while the tsar outlawed stone buildings except in St Petersburg. Below are a series of 16th and 17th century buildings; those with onion domes are churches.

The last two show a brick church and kremlin.