Window on Eurasia: Let Russians Eat Potatoes, Novosibirsk Vice Governor Says

Paul Goble

 

 

Staunton, December 6 – In words that echo those of Marie Antoinette adjusted to the circumstances of Putin’s Russia, the vice governor of Novosibirsk has suggested that Russians should stop complaining, eat less, and be satisfied with potatoes and herring, even as his colleagues spend more money on crowd-control equipment if people don’t and aren’t.

 

In an interview with NGS.ru, Sergey Syomka said that it was “a good thing when in everyone’s refrigerator there was a similar selection of products and that potatoes and herring were on the table” and that people should not complain about having a more varied and interesting diet (news.ngs.ru/more/2008762/).

 

As often happens in such circumstances, the official whose remarks landed him in a hole as far as his audience was concerned continued to dig.  He insisted that the government was doing everything possible to substitute for the loss of imports, although he acknowledged that “gourmands of premium class cheese will not find it in the stores.”

 

Then, the vice governor who is responsible for food suggested that “everyone should live within their means and think more about how to be “good, orderly and honest” than about what they eat because it is on such “generally recognized and humane” values that “out spirituality and strength are based.”

 

And in response to a questioner who said that such comments recalled Soviet times, Syomka said that Russians today need to think again about “what is the ration an individual needs in order to move about.”  That much, he suggested, the current Russian authorities, would continue to guarantee.

 

Such remarks were hardly reassuring. As one Siberian activist put it, “no one in Novosibirsk has any doubts that on New Year’s eve, the local bureaucrats having begun by reflecting upon spirituality and morality” will be eating far better than the people over whom they rule (sibpower.com/novosti-regionov/menshe-esh-i-povinuisja.html).

 

Nor can they have any doubts, the Siberian said, that the authorities will make sure that the people are kept in check and not allowed to do anything that might threaten the powers of those in office. Indeed, he reports, officials in Novosibirsk have just spent a great deal of money for new crowd-control equipment.

 

And thus, “despite the fact that ‘Crimea is ours’ and that 86 percent of the people choose Putin, the authorities are all the same preparing for hunger and war. A war with their own people … and next year, if the people don’t go along with that, black Volgas [like those Stalin’s henchmen used to round up Soviet citizens in the 1930s] will be moving about in the night.”