Paul Goble
Staunton,
June 22 – The overwhelmingly negative reaction to the Russian government’s plan
to raise retirement ages has prompted many Moscow commentators to suggest that
Putin will “moderate” the reform, blame the government of Dmitry Medvedev, and
win back his popular support which has been slipping.
But
Kirill Martynov, the political editor of Novaya
gazeta, argues that Putin may have “a Plan B,” one that would involve
placing all the blame on Kudrin “and other liberals” and using this crisis as a
way for a wholesale removal or purge of these people from his regime (novayagazeta.ru/articles/2018/06/21/76891-kto-podstavil-kudrina).
For the moment, the commentator
says, Putin has been keeping his distance from the debate about the pension
system, thus positioning himself to intervene in a timely and carefully
calculated fashion to cut back the raising of retirement ages and thus allow
the reform itself to go through “in a more or less unchanged form.”
The pro-Kremlin commentators who of
course support the reform fall into two camps. The first consists of television
talk show hosts who “are competing with each other to say how profitable and
useful raising the pension age will be literally for all Russians” and even
that it will by itself promote better lives as people strive to live to pension
age and beyond.
That group’s arguments have clearly
been rejected by the population, Martynov says.
The second group
which includes people like Federation Council Speaker Valentina Matviyenko cast
their arguments in favor of the reform in “pragmatic” terms. They acknowledge that while no one is happy
about it, the country has no other choice but to raise retirement ages and to
do so immediately.
They point to “objective demographic
causes” and to the fact that the decision has been put off for too long,
conveniently forgetting that those who put it off are the ones insisting on it
now. They also ignore the fact that the
government appears to have no intention of raising the retirement ages of some
groups, such as the siloviki.
“But the chief argument of ‘the
pragmatists,’” Martynov continues, “is to rely on authorities. Leading liberal
economists like Aleksey Kudrin,” they argue, “for a long time have explained to
us that raising the pension age is inevitable. Why then are you disputing that?
Perhaps you have more competent specialists?”
Those making this argument, of
course, never mention that liberal economists never have called for pensioners
to pay for “’the geopolitical successes’ of the country in Syria and other
regions of the planet.” They’ve never called for a speedy approach to reform so
that Moscow will have enough money to support its campaign in Ukraine and deal
with sanctions.
“And certainly only in their worse nightmare
would they want to cut social guarantees at the very time when the tax burden on
the citizenry and business is growing, as is happening now,” the commentator
says. Even the most committed of them
must be “bewildered” by the timing of what the Russian government is doing.
And they must be especially
concerned that the government has taken up such an unpopular measure out of the
liberal reform agenda and not addressed any of the other problems liberal
reformers support, Martynov says.
“Without real reforms and changes in the rules
of the game within Russian state capitalism, in particular without the
reduction of the appetites of ‘the fat cats’ sitting on their monopolies, all
manipulations involving increasing the retirement age will simply disappear in
bookkeeping holes in the current budgets,” the Novaya gazeta writer argues.
But none of this can be discussed in the current
political environment, he continues. It is simply “too dangerous.” And one way out of this politically explosive
situation is for Putin to save himself and his friends by denouncing Kudrin and
the liberals, dispensing with their services, and pushing through a much less
radical reform.
Indeed, Martynov implies, this may have
been the Kremlin leader’s plan all along.
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