Paul
Goble
Staunton, December 27 – A majority
of the residents of Chelyabinsk say that sanctions and the decline of the ruble
have not affected their lives and that they continue to support both the
Russian central government and the regional authorities, according to a poll
conducted by the regional branch of the Russian Academy of Economics and State
Service.
While this finding stands in sharp
contrast to the media reports about life in Moscow and recalls an American
country and western song in which the singer recalls that he and his family
were too poor to have noticed that the stock market had collapsed in1929, it offers
a corrective to the assumption that the economic situation is pushing all
Russians in the same direction.
But perhaps even more important,
these findings may be typical of the kind of information that Kremlin
subordinates are now supplying Vladimir Putin and thus reinforcing his obvious
conviction that he can and will ride out the current crisis whatever other
sources of information are suggesting.
According to the poll, 59.2 percent
of the residents of the city said that their families were not living worse now
than they were a year ago, and 17.8 percent said that they had were now living
better than in 2013. Three percent said
they were living much worse, and 15.3 percent said they were living slightly
worse (uralpolit.ru/article/chel/25-12-2014/53692).
At the same time, Chelyabinsk
residents do not view the future with much optimism. Only 15.1 percent said
they hope for positive changes in 2015, although only about 30 percent said
they expected deterioration. Just over 40
percent said they expected to be able to maintain their current standard of
living.
The Academy which conducted the
survey, of course, is closely tied to the Kremlin, and therefore is inclined to
put the best face on things: In publishing the results of the poll, it pointed
out, in the words of Uralpolit.ru, that they represent “a unique reaction to
the economic war unleashed by the West against Russia.”
Chelyabinsk, a city of a
million people just east of the Urals, was closed to foreigners until 1992 and has attracted only
intermittent attention since, sometimes because of nearby nuclear facilities that have
left it one of the most environmentally contaminated cities in Russia and in
2013 because of a meteorite fall.
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