PRESIDENT Vladimir Putin’s state of the nation address deserves close analysis. One of his warnings concerned a drastic fall in the Russian birth rate. Another dealt with Russia’s need to substantially boost its defenses — not least because the US spends 25 times more on defense than the Russians. The inference was certainly that his administration is running out of ideas.
Twenty years after Mikhail Gorbachev began the perestroika reform process, Russia has little to show in the way of economic might. The current strong foreign currency earnings come from its position as a major supplier of oil and gas. Once the reins of state control were loosened, the Russian nation fairly ambled to an economic halt.
This in spite of all the brilliance of Russian scientists and an industrial transformation that began in the twenty years before the Bolshevik Revolution.
Foreign investors having piled into the country expecting a re-enactment of the growth bonanza of America a century before were hard hit by the 1998 ruble collapse and foreign debt default. Russia has since been left very much to itself while far better investment opportunities have opened up in countries such as China and India.
Implicit in Putin’s highlighting the extraordinary 700,000-a-year decline in the population was the fear that, in the face of graft, corruption and the snail-like pace of economic progress, Russians were resorting to their legendary stoicism and had basically given up trying to improve their lot. Evidence of this may possibly lie in the apparent disillusionment with multiparty politics and a vigorous free press. Putin has twice won the presidency on his reputation as a type of strong ruler to which the Russians seem to respond. The outside world may twitter at the suppression of dissent in the press and media but most ordinary citizens are not much bothered. As long as the tyranny of the KGB police state does not return, they are content to let their elected leader — of whom the majority apparently still approve — get on with the job of running the country and trying to re-establish its place in the world.
Herein, however, lies a disconnect between the leader and the led. There are very few Russians who burble excitedly about Putin’s political program in the same way as supporters of US presidents. This is partly because there is not really much of a program. This week, reverting to Soviet-style terminology, the Russian leader announced a ten-year plan. But much of it focuses on fixing what is wrong, such as the potentially catastrophic population decline and the graft and corruption, which have been endemic since communist days. There are no promises of broad sunlit economic uplands, no ambitious schemes to encourage new entrepreneurs, no tax breaks for risk takers — nothing indeed which would galvanize a seemingly indifferent nation into productive action.
The Kremlin’s policies all seem reactive rather than proactive. There is no plan, not even a plan to post an English version of Putin’s speech on the presidential website as soon as he finished speaking. Those knowing no Russian were still unable yesterday to discover precisely what the man said.
