Russia Now Relies on Foreign Producers for More than 98 Percent of Its Machine Tools, Moscow Experts Say

Paul Goble

    Staunton, May 5 – Machine tools, the machines that are used to make machines, are the building blocks of any advanced economy. But now, the Russian Federation must import more than 98 percent of such machines from foreign countries, leaving that country in critical dependence on other countries, including on countries with which it has hostile relations.

    Importing is often cheaper than producing such machines especially from scratch, Russian experts acknowledge, but allowing the share of imports in this sector to grow to such a point makes a mockery of any claims that the country is economically sovereign (svpressa.ru/economy/article/462999/).

    And to rectify this situation, experts like Elena Veduta of Moscow State University say, will require more than throwing money at the problem. It will require the restoration of planning so that the production of these machines in Russia itself will be a priority and not an afterthought.

    Even in Soviet times, Moscow imported many of the most advanced machine tools; but in that period, the government set as its task the production of ever more of them. But in the decades since 1991, the Russian government has failed to keep such programs in place and the domestic share of machine tool production has fallen to insignificance.

    At present, Veduta says, Russia is importing 70 percent of the machine tools it needs from China with a large share of the others coming from Turkey or India. Moscow must  recognize that as a result, it is becoming dependent on these countries, whose governments may not always be friendly to Russia.