VAT is the most extortionate tax in the history of Russia

2024 Author: Seth Attwood | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-16 15:55

26 years ago, on January 1, 1992, in a country over which the red flag was changed to a tricolor one just five days ago, the YELTSIN-GAYDAR government introduced VAT. The most extortionate tax for the population and producers in the entire history of Russia.

On January 1, 1992, the Russian government, headed by President Boris Yeltsin, announced the abolition of centralized price controls and the entry into force of a law that lifted restrictions on the purchase of foreign currency by citizens. Those who went to the store for something were amazed. Yesterday, still bare counters, there were two varieties of domestic sausage, vodka, herring, chocolate, cigarettes - only the prices were crazy.

Svetlana Sorokina, the host of the Vesti program on the RTR channel, showed the first report from the stores. On the shelves, as the correspondents reported, there are pretty dry loaves at a price that has tripled, blue skinny chickens. Frozen meat - 31 rubles against the recent state 2 rubles. 90 kopecks in the store and four rubles in the market, minced beef - 72 rubles. against 3 rubles. 50 kopecks Etc. But no one asked the question: where did these products come from, if on New Year's Eve we were assured that there was nothing in the country, and everyone who managed to get something with a fight in giant queues felt like a winner?

All these products rotted for several months in the formulations on the outskirts of Moscow. They were specially kept to create an artificial shortage and the subsequent creation of a vile myth: Gaidar fed the country.

Agriculture Minister Viktor Khlystun explains in the video: "Price liberalization should reduce the price gap between industrial and agricultural products and give workers property." Immediately, the President of Ukraine Leonid Kravchuk said that during the Soviet years the people were taught to think: “… the state guarantees everything, and it will give everything. People were weaned from taking responsibility for themselves. There is no such thing anywhere in the world. And we have rallies on the streets: why are the prices so high, why don't you raise salaries, why don't you give anything? Throughout the world, the state does not give anything, it must only create conditions so that a person can take care of himself and be responsible for himself. And we must pass such laws to increase this responsibility”.

When they went to work on January 3, people learned that one of these laws, the new 28 percent value added tax, VAT, had already been passed.

A tobacco famine was artificially created in the country. Boris YELTSIN stopped 26 of the 28 Russian tobacco factories for repairs in one day. The Chairman of the USSR Council of Ministers Nikolai RYZHKOV then called this deliberate sabotage and sabotage for the sake of the final discrediting and liquidation of Soviet power.

THREE LETTERS

In the official "Rossiyskaya Gazeta", which published all the laws, after which they came into force, the telephone was broken. Factory directors from different parts of the country called, shouting and begging to urgently publish instructions for calculating this tax. They say that materials and components are sold to us in the morning at unheard-of prices, explaining them with this damn 28 percent VAT, and we don't even know what it is. Yeltsin's decrees contain the most general provisions.

Outwardly, the scheme seems to be similar to the sales tax, which was paid by the buyer of finished products - for example, cans of stew. The difference is that the 5% sales tax, which was introduced in the USSR in January 1991 by the government of Valentin Pavlov, was levied once - at the stage of retail sales. And the prohibitive Gaidar VAT was levied at every stage of the process of creating and promoting goods to the consumer, including their transportation and storage in wholesale warehouses.

For example, at a cannery, the first shop produces the bottom and lid for a 5-liter can, the second shop produces the body and solders the bottom to it, in the third they fill the can with food and seal the lid. And they are all self-supporting. That is, everyone considers their products to be, as it were, final and has the right to set their own price for them, then add VAT to them and sell them by bank transfer to another workshop. The plant will pay general tax on all value added, as well as 32 percent income tax and other fees. At the same time, the state promises to him and the intermediaries to reimburse part of the costs when the goods are sold. Here is such a casuistic horror.

Crimes against one's own people have no statute of limitations. And if there is nothing to ask from the dead, then Vladimir SHUMEIKO (center), like many others, may well be responsible for his complicity in the collapse of the state.

THE ESSENCE OF THE DUTY

As a result of an unpredictable process, which in life was much more terrible than in such a crude illustration, the price of a can of tomato paste in a store could cost so much that no dining room could buy it. But this was the essence of Gaidar's idea.

Businessmen will bring canned food from China and sell it cheaper than domestic ones. It is no coincidence that even the liberal Andrei Illarionov, who was the first deputy head of the Working Center for Economic Reforms under the Russian government in 1992 and early 1993, called the Gaidar tax interventionist. Others call it the occupying and tossed America.

In a word, soon our canteens were closed and the factories stopped. All enterprises had nothing to pay each other with. Collective farms, catering and light industry were the first to fall into the trap of non-payments. How would they "save them" in August they introduced debt offset. The directors had to pay the salaries of the workers with the products they produce. Okay, if it's a can of squash caviar or Ivanov's panties. You can try to sell them at spontaneous flea markets in other cities and along highways. And if this is a machine?

Already in January, gloomy chilled "shuttle traders" were running around the country with carts, languishing under the load of goods. They were robbed by hooligans, racketeers were robbed, the police chased them - Yeltsin issued decree No. 65 "On freedom of trade" only on January 29, but it did not say where it was allowed to trade and where it was not allowed.

And yet the "shuttle traders" were lucky, for doctors, teachers, professors, librarians and everyone who lived on government salaries, the amount of which was becoming more and more ridiculous against the background of prices day by day, could not sell the results of their labor.

All the savings of citizens have depreciated before our very eyes. By the end of January, for the first time, old men and women appeared on the streets of the capital, digging in garbage dumps in search of leftover food and bottles, which were bought at the price of wine and vodka shadows.

BLUFF REFORM

In 2009, Yegor Gaidar admitted that the laws that came into force were prepared hastily and “did not differ in the depth of elaboration”. The economic transformation program was never published. But the 35-year-old reformer, deciding to treat the people with shock therapy, argued that as a result, prices would increase by a maximum of three times, although Academician Alexander Petrov, a prominent specialist in the field of mathematical modeling of economic systems, already then predicted a five thousand-fold increase in prices. And he was right.

VAT did little to replenish the treasury, or even ruin it. By the way, he does it now. After all, the financial and economic bloc is still ruled by Gaidar's heirs.

Due to an acute shortage of qualified personnel, the tax authorities were physically unable to quickly check the swollen packages of documents for such a complex tax. And for its untimely return, the company is entitled to interest. For example, according to the data of the Accounts Chamber of the Russian Federation, as of November 1, 2012, the treasury paid 1, 42 billion rubles. "Penalty". At the same time, the total amount of collected VAT amounted to only 1.886 billion rubles. That is, the budget has lost the lion's share of what it received. Scandals began related to illegal VAT refunds, which washed out billions from the treasury. And this in 2012, when every tax officer already had a computer with a database and an electronic "Consultant" at hand. You can imagine what was happening then.

The tax has become a tool for the rapid development of corruption. For the loopholes were countless. Exporters, for example, were exempted from VAT. Many underground workshops immediately turned into pseudo-exporters, distilling, for example, alcohol or medicines from the Moscow region to Siberia through Ukraine. And it is not known how much the country lost and continues to lose on frauds in which the customs were also involved.

I AM NOT OFFENSED

Russia continued to beg for loans from the IMF. The first came in the fall - $ 1 billion. Almost a tenth of the total annual Russian budget. And do you know where Gaidar sent him? According to Andrei Illarionov, all the money went to Paris to save the Eurobank, which served as a roof for financing legal and illegal financial transactions in Europe.

In February 1992, Gaidar signed an agreement with the legendary American company Kroll International, consisting of FBI and CIA officers, to search for the party's gold. Russia paid for the report $ 1.5 million from the budget. But no one, except Gaidar, saw the report. He allegedly disappeared.

Gaidar requested that non-residential premises with a total area of 6106, 6 sq. m, at home in Gazetny lane near the Kremlin. I got it, however, not entirely free of charge, but at a preferential rate - $ 32.8 per square meter. And he began to rent to foreign and joint firms, funds and banks. Now there is the Institute for Economic Policy. E. T. Gaidar.

Ironically, Gaidar shared the fate of many millions of fellow citizens, driven into poverty. I got drunk and died. According to Boris Nemtsov, the reformer "persuaded" a bottle of whiskey every evening. He drank the last one in Anatoly Chubais's office.

QUOTE

Jeffrey SAKS, American economist, shock therapy developer in Bolivia, Poland and Russia, Gaidar's advisor:

- The Russian leadership surpassed the most fantastic ideas of the Marxists about capitalism: it considered that the state's business was to serve a narrow circle of capitalists, pumping as much money as possible into their pockets as soon as possible. This is not shock therapy. This is a malicious, premeditated, well-thought-out action aimed at a large-scale redistribution of wealth in the interests of a narrow circle of people.

NOT GAYDAR, BUT GLAZER

Yegor Gaidar has no kinship with the writer Arkady Gaidar (Golikov). There is not a drop of his blood in the reformer.

The boy Timur was not the son of Arkady Gaidar. When Arkady married Rakhil Lazarevna Solomyanskaya, she already had a three-year-old son. Gaidar (Golikov) became his stepfather. True, the couple soon parted and never saw each other again. Rakhil Lazarevna fled to the secretary of the Shepetovsky Ukom of the RCP (b) Israel Mikhailovich Razin, who was later shot in 1938 for participating in a counter-revolutionary organization. Her third husband, Samson Volfovich Glazer, was a famous figure skating coach. It was he who raised Timur.

When Timur grew up, he asked to write himself in his passport by the literary pseudonym of the first, most famous of all, stepfather. Arkady Gaidar could not object to him, since by that time he had already died on the fronts of the Great Patriotic War.

Then Timur had a son, Yegor, who was also recorded by Gaidar, since this surname was famous in the Soviet Union and brought great dividends. Later, Yegor Timurovich had a daughter, Masha, who is Timur's granddaughter, but our beloved Soviet writer Arkady Gaidar is no one! So this Masha lived under the name of Smirnov until the age of 22, since Yegor Timurovich abandoned her mother, Irina Smirnova, when little Masha was three years old. Having matured, Mashenka, like her ancestors, realized that life with a loud surname would give her a steady career growth. She quickly changed from Smirnova to Gaidar and, as we can see, she made the right decision!

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