Paul
Goble
Staunton, June 28 – The pandemic and
associated economic crisis have exacerbated widespread anger among Russians
that they live in poverty despite the enormous natural wealth of their country
and its sale earlier abroad for more than six trillion US dollars. Had even a
small part of that money gone to the people, there wouldn’t be 18.5 million
poor in Russia.
The Krizis-Kopilka portal,
which carries stories about the pandemic and the economic crisis today presents
a series of comments by ordinary Russians and by Moscow observers that
underscore the growing sense that the situation in Putin’s Russia is unjust and
unsustainable (krizis-kopilka.ru/archives/77671).
It sums up its findings with the
following questions: “Why in one of the countries with the largest natural
resources in the world do so many live in poverty? Why do developed countries
in which there is no oil or gas live many times better than us according to the
majority of indicators?”
“Perhaps,” Krizis-Kopilka
says, “this is because in developed countries, there exists political
competition, regular changeover in the powers and honest elections which do not
allow one ineffective individual (and his friends from the Ozero cooperative)
to usurp power for 20 years.”
Over the two decades Putin has been
in power, the share of convinced patriots in Russia has fallen by almost half,
from 84 percent to 46 percent; and it quotes Andrey Kolesnikov’s observation
that the Putin era cannot show “a single achievement … All achievements are in the
past.” And he has not given Russians anything to be proud of since he came to
power.
And it also cites the conclusion of
Lev Gudkov that “general concern, dissatisfaction, fear and anger have
intensified. And this has led to a heightened assessment of the probability of
mass protest,” and more immediately, it has pushed up the share of Russians who
think the country is headed in the wrong direction to more than half.
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