Magadan Now Most Anti-Putin Region in Russia and for Good Reasons, Its Residents Say

Paul Goble

            Staunton, July 8 – Recent polls show that if presidential elections were held this week, only 36 percent of voters in Magadan would cast their ballots for Vladimir Putin, a figure far lower than the roughly 50 percent in the Russian Federation as a whole and one that makes it the most anti-Putin region in the country.

            Andrey Pertsev of the Meduza news agency visited the region which is still associated with the GULAG in the minds of most and found that in addition to the problems they have in common with other regions, Magadan residents have a long list of reasons for turning away from Putin and his regime (meduza.io/feature/2019/07/08/hotim-sdelat-bolshe-a-deneg-net).

            While their nominal incomes put them in the top five regions of the country, Magadan residents say their actual incomes are only about half what officials say; and their standard of living is reduced because prices for basic goods like food are many times higher than in other regions.

            Moreover, and again in contrast to most Russian regions, Pertsev says, they are dependent on air connections to the rest of the country. Those are subsidized but still expensive and hard to get tickets for. As a result, many in Magadan cannot afford to make what had long been their annual trip to central Russia.

            And Magadan residents were hit perhaps even harder by the pension age boost than other Russians because many of them expected to be able to retire to somewhere else in Russia and now can’t afford to do so, at least as soon as they had planned. They blame Putin for that, the journalist says.

            But the most important difference between Magadan and other regions and the one that explains most of the anger at Putin is that Magadan residents compare their current state not with the wild 1990s as the Kremlin has succeeded in getting most Russians to do but with the last decades of Soviet power.

            For Magadan’s people – and their number has fallen by more than half since 1991 – the golden age was the Soviet period and they compare what Putin has wrought to that period. And that attitude has been compounded by the sense many of them have that the Kremlin has written off the Russian north for all its claims to the contrary.

            Not only have Russian officials from Gaidar on talked about the need to reduce the population of the North because of its costs on the state budget but they have not provided the funds needed to maintain public institutions like schools and hospitals.  Residents of Magadan feel they are being singled out for mistreatment by the center.

            And the officials Moscow has sent to Magadan have made things even worse by not listening to the population. The local governor wants to take away the city’s main square not for a cathedral as in Yekaterinburg but for a school. Residents oppose this plan as they have since the 1980s.  And they blame Moscow’s man, that is, Putin’s man, for that as well.