Friday, November 7, 2014

Window on Eurasia: Will Putin Ever Focus on Russia rather than on the West? Russians Outside of Moscow Ask


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.   

 

No comments:

Post a Comment