Sheremetyevo Plane Fire Highlights Shortcomings of Putin Isolationist Policies, Shelin Says

Paul Goble

            Staunton, May 7 – The fire on the SSJ-100 at Moscow’s Sheremetyevo airport that cost 41 lives highlights the shortcomings of Vladimir Putin’s import substitution program, efforts that have cut Russia off from better products including planes than the country can produce and led his subordinates to rush the release of equipment more likely to fail, Sergey Shelin says. 

            Instead of facing up to this reality, the Rosbalt commentator says, the Putin regime has not declared an all-Russian mourning for the victims, has not suspended the use of this kind of aircraft until all investigations can be completed, and has chosen instead to trumpet the notion that the disaster was the result of pilot error (rosbalt.ru/blogs/2019/05/07/1779917.html).

                But what is especially unfortunate about all this, Shelin continues, is that the isolationism that Putin is imposing on Russia as a result of his vision of the country as “a besieged fortress” is a parody of the kind the Soviets did, without the resources or even the commitment to doing the right thing rather than pursuing profits that characterized the earlier system. 

            The Kremlin has been very proud of the SSJ-100 as “’the first passenger jet developed in Russia after the demise of the USSR,” but it has not taken note of the fact that even the few foreign countries which have purchased it, including Mexico, have complained of its shortcomings and are planning to use alternatives instead.

           

            The SSJ-100, of course, was developed in large part before the onset of Putin’s new isolationism and so includes some parts from the West, but it was rushed into service without the kind of testing that one would expect for airplanes. And now that the isolation is greater, even bigger problems are likely in the coming months.

           

            “The deeper the isolation of the country, the worse will work the links of any parts of the production chain, and government protection to everything that looks like import substitution or at least imitates it will constantly grow,” Shelin continues. Failures will increase in number and so too will the human victims.

            What is happening now is both similar to and significantly different than the isolationism of the Soviet past.  The Soviet authorities cut off Russians from the rest of the world, but they focused on trying to produce quality products especially in the military sphere, out of which civilian aircraft largely came. At the very least, they didn’t pursue profit above reliability.

            Soviet civilian aircraft were clunky and they did sometimes crash, a reality that the authorities hid from the population via censorship.  But mostly they worked, and they were seldom rushed into service without the kind of testing that Soviet engineers knew was necessary and more or less corresponded to standards elsewhere.

            “The present-day efforts to impose all this over again are a parody,” Shelin points out. “Today’s Russia is not the USSR. It doesn’t have the reserves of strength for any competition. And it has still fewer reserves of self-denial both among those at the top and those at the bottom,” each of which has adopted “entirely different life strategies” than in Soviet times.

            Those at the very top pursue profit, and those who are qualified below move abroad to work. Both work against quality, the first by ignoring shortcomings and the second by depriving the Russian system of the kind of quality personnel that to a large extent even the Soviet system was able to rely on.

            “With the onset of isolationism,” Shelin says, business capable of competing “has almost died. Instead, what one sees is “bureaucratized capitalists ‘with a statist mentality’” who are in no way similar to “the captains of Soviet management” who knew what was expected of them and that profit for those above them was not the highest value.

            “Enriching themselves by means of import substitution, today’s magnates do not think about denying themselves the goods of the foreign world,” the Rosbalt commentator says. They want it both ways for themselves even if that costs the lives of their fellow citizens as it has at Sheremetyevo.

            And as a result, “our newly-minted isolationism of the 21^st century not only guarantees that Russia will lag behind others. It is intellectual, moral and professional decay.” The only real question, Shelin says, is when will people draw the obvious lessons from the accidents and catastrophes the Putin system is producing.