Paul
Goble
Staunton, February 1 – Vladimir Putin
has clearly learned the lesson some of his predecessors did not: when times are
tough, boosting alcohol prices is a good way to trigger a social
explosion. But his decision to cut the
price of the cheapest vodka -- which goes into effect today -- is a recipe for a
longer term disaster.
And that is all the more so because
it comes at exactly the same moment that thanks to the Kremlin leader’s
policies and decisions, regions have run out of money to maintain the electric
train routes on which many Russians outside of the cities rely. As a result,
Russian Railways is ending service, and the regions and their people have no good
way to compensate.
There has already been a great deal
of discussion about the direct impact of cheaper vodka prices: they will lead
both to greater consumption of hard liquor and they will also lead Russians to
turn to surrogates which will now be harder to distinguish from “official”
production.
Both of those things will have a
negative impact on public health, driving up alcohol-related illnesses like
diabetes and alcohol poisoning even as they keep an inebriated public from
protesting against the policies of the Kremlin which increasingly appear
directed against the Russian people (forum-msk.org/material/news/10683478.html).
And there has been some discussion of
the budgetary shortfalls in the regions that are leading to an end to
government-subsidized electric train service in many of them, a service that is
often the only reliable link people outside of rural areas have to cities where
they can gain access to many services, including pharmacies and hospitals.
Ending electric train service to
rural areas is creating conditions which some Russian observers are already
calling “a real genocide” of the Russian people. (See windowoneurasia2.blogspot.com/2014/12/window-on-eurasia-real-genocide-trains.html
and windowoneurasia2.blogspot.com/2013/04/window-on-eurasia-russian-regions.html.)
But the coming together of these two
policies, a reduction in the price of vodka and the end of rural train service,
a development that will exacerbate public health more than either on its own
has only begun to be the subject of concern – and first of all in Pskov oblast
where the trains stopped running today (lenta.ru/news/2015/02/01/pskov/).
To save money, the Pskov oblast
authorities had already cut bus service to rural areas and ended the plowing of
many roads outside of the cities, steps that cut off many rural residents from
medical services and sent live expectancies in rural areas plummeting over the
last two decades.
Indeed, the situation there is so dire
already that as Vyacheslav Glazychev,a professor at the Moscow Institute of
Architecture, has suggested, in five to seven years, there will only be four
cities left in Pskov oblast “and nothing else.”
The cities will be Pskov, Velikiy Luky, Pechora, and Dno because of its
railway junction (svpressa.ru/society/article/67168/).
Putin’s latest twin decisions will only
accelerate that trend: more than 12,000 Pskov residents are currently suffering
from alcohol dependency of one kind or another. Many of them live in rural
areas. They will now be able to get vodka for less, but they won’t be able to
get into the cities for medical help. As
a result, as local officials concede, many will die prematurely.
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