Mornings in the outskirts of Moscow #3

I was thinking of this part of the Khimki forest, on the road out to the airport, which I cycled past again this morning, when I wrote the following passage in an as yet unpublished introduction to a book I am working about law in Russia:

"You travel ten kilometers beyond the Moscow beltway (or MKAD) and you are already in vast forests which are completely unmanaged and, for all practical purposes, unowned-that is to say no-one knows or cares which department of the unfathomable state apparatus effective controls them. Everyone treats them as if they are a public resource. They are mostly impenetrable, except where paths snake through the undergrowth, but they are said to be inhabited in warm weather by escaped criminals, drunks, vagabonds and even migrant workers, though I have never seen any. What I have seen is Russians happily hiking and picnicking there, camping, cooking shashlik, having sex, dumping rubbish and generally doing whatever they feel like doing without any concern for society generally. I have friends in a village further away, but still within the Moscow-Petersburg orbit, which is the most heavily populated part of in the country, who lost a dog to wolves recently and who, while out walking in the early summer, caught sight of a bear cub-before making their way as fast as possible back to the village before its mother appeared."