Paul Goble
Staunton, Sept. 29 – Since Putin’s mobilization order, Russians have begun to live more like their Soviet predecessors, going to restaurants and cafes less often but when they can spending far more on air tickets to get out of the country, a pattern that was true last spring after his invasion of Ukraine began but that had been reversed over the summer.
“These changes,” Vitaly Grankin of the Rosbalt news agency says, “are more expressive of popular attitudes than are the general figures for spending. Russians have not only begun to live more modestly but to return to the consumer habits of Soviet people who … generally didn’t have many of the habits of post-Soviet people” (rosbalt.ru/russia/2022/09/29/1975795.html).
Because of inflation, this process of cutting back has been going on for some time, the commentator says, but the Sovietization of the daily behavior of Russians has increased significantly since the mobilization order and gives every sign of continuing well into the future as well.
This doesn’t mean that Russia is about to return to Soviet conditions in all respects, Grankin continues, but it does set the stage for further Sovietization of behavior and attitudes and what is perhaps most worrisome, Soviet behavior and attitudes like those before Khrushchev’s times rather than later.
For as he concludes, this “return to Soviet habits of daily life is taking place literally in all directions. In the best case, it will not be quick and citizens will learn how to adapt in a timely fashion” to what they appear to think is coming.
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