#5 - JRL 8176 - JRL Home
From: Sergei Roy <roy@mn.ru>
Subject: Moscow News, Sergei Roy. The Real State of the Nation
Date: Tue, 20 Apr 2004

The Real State of the Nation
By Sergei Roy

Quite soon, after his inauguration, President Putin will deliver his annual state of the nation address. It’s a safe bet that he will be moderately critical of the government’s performance in the past and more than moderately upbeat about the country’s prospects during his second term. Catchwords like fighting poverty, crime and corruption, and doubling the country’s GDP, are sure to resound.

Looking back at Putin’s first term, it is easy to be positive: Political stability has been achieved, stability is good for business, and what is good for business is good for the country ­ with certain grim reservations about the deplorable tendency of Russian business to move what it gets (one nearly wrote “earns”) by exploiting Russian resources to other, more clement climes.

The picture is marred, of course, by the concerted outcry in the Russian oligarch-owned media and abroad about “controlled democracy” and authoritarianism in the current political setup.š It is assumed, or stated outright, that the decade before Putin saw a mighty efflorescence of democracy that is now being suppressed.

It would not be inappropriate to consider some of the boons that mightily flourishing democracy meant for the state of the Russian nation in practical terms. The relevant statistics have been collected in a recent White Book: Economic Reforms in Russia in 1991-2002, by S. Glazyev, S. Kara-Murza, S. Batchikov.š Here are some of the statistics, picked out more or less at random.

The incidence of syphilis in these years increased 50 times ­ hard to believe one’s eyes, but there it is: 50 times; in 1997 alone more than 2000 girls under 14 were registered as having syphilis ­ the unregistered ones went unregistered. There has been a fourfold drop in the overall number of books printed in Russia; the print-runs of magazines decreased by a factor of 15. To really appreciate this last, one should bear in mind that “stout” monthlies were a fixture of the Russian cultural scene since the 19th century, something that families with any claim to education took for granted as part of their life style. No more. In 1990, an average monthly wage packet would buy you 95.9 kilos of beef, or 1010 liters of milk, or 776.9 kilos of first grade wheat bread. In 2000, it would buy 38.6 kilos of beef, or 302.2 liters of milk, or 220.4 kilos of the same kind of bread. This last figure is especially important since, with the consumption of meat and milk more than halved, the Russian population relies for sustenance mostly on bread, of which an average person buys 124 kilos a year.

Actually, one does not have to pore over books of statistics to find out one’s true situation or the “state of the nation.” A professorial acquaintance says that, if she did not moonlight, doing a couple of jobs in addition to her official one, she would be a bomzh ­ a down and out. What she (or the present writer, for that matter) can look forward to is a pension of 70 to 80 dollars a month, more than half of which will go to pay for the utilities. That leaves less than a dollar a day to live on ­ about the same as for a poor, exploited manual laborer in Africa whose plight the UN and other “concerned” organizations keep worrying about. It is interesting to remember that having a tooth filled now averages $50 in Moscow.

Some more statistics. In 1999 Academician Platte warned that “at most enterprises involved in particularly dangerous production, equipment wear and tear amounts to more than 50 percent. The wear and tear of urban infrastructure is more than 60 percent.” Of all the government ministries, the ministry for emergency situations is the most visible, and its analysts have stated that 50 million people in Russia ­ one third of the population ­ live in danger zones.

Again, we do not have to look these things up in books. News of gas explosions, pipelines bursting, buildings collapsing, vast areas flooded, man-made earthquakes, miners dying underground, subs sinking, etc. etc., are as regular as weather forecasts. Like weather forecasts, news of disaster mostly proves worse than expected.

So the gut feeling is that things will be getting more and more apocalyptic. To turn the tide, a powerful effort to concentrate the country’s resources for a real breakthrough is needed, not this go-slow, more-of-the-same, too-little-too-late policy that can only be sustained by praying twice a day that the oil prices stay where they are.

Concentrating political will and resources, Russia’s leader would have to do what was done in the past by F.D. Roosevelt, De Gaulle, or Deng Xiaopin. But, even if Putin were a man of such stature ­ which he isn’t ­ what would he use for a political machine to carry out any plans for a mighty push, if he has them? United Russia? Yeah, very funny. Or should he resurrect SPS and Yabloko? Easier to clone the dodo from a bone cell. That only leaves Zhirinovsky’s “party” and Rodina. Better pray for those oil prices.