Paul
Goble
Staunton, November 7 – Just as people
in other countries have criticized their leaders for focusing too much on
foreign policy rather than domestic affairs, so too now Russians, especially
those living beyond the ring road, are beginning to ask whether their country’s
leadership will ever pay more attention to their problems than to the United
States and the EU.
That attitude, one that has been
picked up in a Levada Center poll which found that one Russian in two is
convinced that “the head of the Russian state must concentrate on domestic
problems,” is beginning to undercut earlier Russian backing for the Crimean
Anschluss and Putin’s continuing aggression in Ukraine (echo.msk.ru/news/1432232-echo.html).
And it has surfaced, the center’s
sociologists say, in large measure because Putin has defined what he is doing
in Ukraine as being in the first instance about defending ethnic Russians. Now,
many Russians in Russia and perhaps especially those beyond the ring road are
saying it is high time for him to defend Russians at home as well.
This week, Moscow’s “Argumenty i
fakty” publishes a letter from an elderly teacher in Nizhny Novgorod who says
that she and her neighbors are not all that interested in what the Moscow media
are showing them about issues like the choice between Europe and Asia or
whether Russia will survive Putin (aif.ru/society/opinion/1374078).
Instead, she writes, she and others
like her are interested above all in something else: “when will the authorities
stop thinking about America and remember about Russians?”
She says she barely has enough money
to pay for her apartment and food, and making ends meet is thus her first concern.
“Not the European choice interests me,” the teacher says, but whether I’ll be
able to go down the stairs without breaking my leg. There haven’t been any
repairs at our bloc in more than 40 years, and all the stair steps are broken.”
The Nizhny Novgorod teacher doesn’t
express anger and she makes only the slightest criticism of the powers that be.
Thus, she says that Russian television has created the impression that “all
life revolves around Moscow and the Kremlin,” forgetting that “there is another
Russia,” one that seldom gets any coverage.
In presenting her letter, the weekly’s
Vyacheslav Kostikov says that such criticism is entirely just. Neither Russian
media nor Russian sociologists now devote much attention to the provinces. “Everything
revolves around big politics and Putin’s speeches.” And everything on the media
is upbeat even if reality is not.
But “millions of Russians living in
five-storey Khrushchev-era slums, darkened huts, and decaying barracks aren’t
agitated very much by the question of how many Lenin monuments have been
destroyed in Ukraine or how low has fallen the rating of President Obama.”
Instead, they are affected and upset by rising prices and their declining
standard of living.
The journalist said that in his
opinion, such people are “very surprised when they are shown on television
polls about their happiness,” which suggest that everything is getting better
and everyone is happier. “Can it be,” he asks, that Russians have some special
relationship to their own fate,” that they have all become philosophers or holy
elders?”
Ordinary Russians are in fact able to put up
with a lot, Kostikov continues. Those doing most of the complaining now are the
bureaucrats and the better off, who are losing some of their accustomed
privileges. Many of them are complaining and some are even leaving the country
in the search for a better life.
Russians in the provinces are not
like them, but their polite request that the Kremlin start paying attention to
Russians in Russia and not just Russians in other countries may ultimately
prove decisive because, the experiences of other countries and leaders suggest,
such feelings while they can be ignored for a long time cannot be ignored
forever.
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