‘Optimization’ Killing Off What’s Left of Rural Russia after Privatization, Vereshchagin Says

Paul Goble

            Staunton, March 1 – Vladimir Puitn’s “optimization” program, the most absurd and misleading euphemism the Kremlin has yet employed, is killing off everything in rural Russia that Moscow’s earlier privatization drive did not, raising the disturbing question as to whether that was the real intent of both policies, Oleg Vereshchagin says.

            On VKontakte, the Russian actor and commentator who comes from the Perm region and maintains a house there, says that what is one view now outside of Moscow can only be described as “murder by optimization,” the destruction of the lives of the millions of Russians who still live in villages or small cities (vk.com/id118446906?w=wall118446906_10444%2Fall).

            Over the last five years, in the name of “optimization” and saving money, 37 percent of the schools which existed in rural Russia in 2014 have been closed. Education can’t “by definition” by measured by short-term profit and loss calculations: it has a longer term and broader impact. Eliminating schools lowers the culture and ultimately destroys lives.

            As a result of these Moscow policies, Vereshchagin says, “the village has become a place of total unemployment. More precisely, they have made it so.” Now the people remaining in the villages must try to figure out not how to live but how to survive.  The opportunities they had in the past have been taken from them.   

            It is “practically impossible” to work in farming. Not only has Moscow destroyed the institutions within the country that make that ancient and honorable professional possible, but it has opened the floodgates of foreign producers who undercut and thus drive out of business Russians who try to engage in it.

            Many Russians in the city have accepted the Putin regime’s claims that it has recognized the problems earlier governments created and is now working hard to “save” the villages. But those who exist in them or visit them with open eyes can easily see that this is not the case, Vereshchagin continues.

            In his district alone, he writes, “I have seen dozens of times, vacant multi-story houses in which there used to be gas and water.  I have seen roads good at one time but now being broken apart by weeds. I have seen burned out schools, clubs with locked doors.” Now, when one looks around, everything is “dead.”

            To be sure, the exodus of people began in Soviet times, but it only became a flood after 1991. Consequently, he continues, the village was not “killed by ‘the accursed communists’” but by the reformers and optimizers who have come after them. No amount of propaganda can conceal that reality.