Murmansk Promises Residents will Live Better in 2035 but Admits There’ll Be Fewer of Them

Paul Goble

            Staunton, Jan. 5 – Residents of Murmansk, the Russian city which claims to be “the capital of the Arctic, will live better a decade from now, according to the city’s administration; but the 77-page planning document admits that there will be far fewer of them in 2035 than there are now.

            The city government says that residents will live far better in that year without explaining how that will take place or why, if that is the case, they project the city’s population will fall from 267,000 now to 251,000 then, both figures far below the 480,000 at the end of Soviet times (citymurmansk.ru/img/all/162_prognoz.7z).

            In his report about this document in The Barents Observer, Denis Zagorye says that officials act as if each of these trends is independent of the other and something that is the product of the state of nature rather than specific policies (ru.thebarentsobserver.com/murmansk-2035-zit-po-planu-stanet-lucse-a-zitelej-po-prognozu-mense/442989).

            Such a presentation, he suggests, raises questions about both parts of the document, the one that says people will live  better when in fact they may not and the other which says their number will decline by more than ten percent – when in fact the decline may be far larger than that.