Putin’s Optimization Plans Designed to Make Life in Rural Areas Unbearable and Drive People into Big Cities, Nesmiyan Says

Paul Goble

            Staunton, Dec. 13 – Vladimir Putin’s consolidation of small towns with the closure of schools and hospitals in those no longer deemed centers is intended to make life in rural Russian unbearable and thus to drive people into cities, leaving Russia a country with 200 cities surrounded by increasingly empty space, Anatoly Nesmiyan says.

            That will make it easier for the powers that be to run the country, the commentator who blogs under the screen name El Murid says; but it is already sparking resistance in many places as people seek to defend their schools and medical points by fighting Moscow’s plans for consolidation (versia.ru/glubinnuyu-rossiyu-zakryvayut-lishaya-infrastruktury).

            Resistance is widespread, including most prominently in Chelyabinsk where residents of several villages have been contesting plans to consolidate them with a larger center for the last several years. Nesmiyan for his part thinks Moscow will ignore such protests, but the result will be an increasingly impoverished and angry population outside of the big cities.

            Ant that is no small thing. As Versiya commentator Ruslan Gorevoy points out in citing Nesmiyan’s conclusions, “Russia in general is a country of small cities.” They form a fifth of the population and with their rural surrounding areas more than a third. And although he doesn’t say so, they now constitute much of the Kremlin’s most reliable electorate.

            If Putin goes ahead with his current plans to destroy life outside of larger cities, voters now there may change not only their place of residence but their political loyalties as well.