Negative trends in Russia

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

An overview of modern Russia based on materials from domestic media (June-July 2018), the blogosphere, and recent opinion polls.

Tourism

Philosophy teacher Andrey Nikulin writes on his Facebook page:

“Tour operators have poured in again, several companies have already reported problems. The tourist market, due to its competitiveness, relatively low profitability and dependence on "ordinary consumers" and not on state subsidies, is the very "canary in a cage" that reacts to alarming atmospheric currents in the economy. It seems that nothing portends a large-scale crisis, in addition, football anesthesia should be taken into account, and tourist offices are starting to shake. Because the depreciation of the ruble, because the declining purchasing power and the actual decline in real wages, the savings of most of those who had them were largely wasted in the four years of "getting off their knees", well, they remind of the deferred, but more urgent, rather than trips abroad, purchases that can no longer be delayed - treatment, new household appliances, repair or replacement of a car. So, no matter how bravura forecasts domestic statistics may regale us, the tourist market refutes them with its disappointing diagnosis that the country cannot count on easy times."

The Free Press writes:

"In the midst of the holiday season, seven major tour operators in Russia announced serious financial problems. They massively cancel charter flights to other countries, and paid tourists attack offices in the hope of refunding money. This summer, it seems, repeats the scenario of the stormy 2014: in recent weeks already seven tour operators have announced serious financial problems. Almost one and a half thousand tourists who have already paid for tours are simply stuck abroad. The economic situation is to blame, in which Russian business should not live, but survive. In the spring, when the majority of Russians booked tours, the rates jumped sharply The price of aviation fuel went up steeply (in April-May alone, kerosene rose in price by almost 14%), which is why the air carriers even threatened the Russian government to introduce an additional (to tariffs) “fuel surcharge”."

Far East and Siberia

The upcoming hike in the price of travel packages, associated with the rise in prices for aviation fuel, causes only dull irritation among the inhabitants of the Far East. Against the background of other upcoming price increases, people consider it more logical to leave the macroregion for good, a REGNUM correspondent reports.

“Every morning the news brings something nasty. From July 1, all housing and communal services will rise in price, gasoline and solarium will rise in price, and will continue to rise in price, all groceries in stores and essential goods will rise in price for fuel - nevertheless, they are delivered here from afar, we do not produce anything here. VAT will be raised to 20% - it will still rise in price. The list goes on. What vouchers are 10% off? What for? One way ticket - get out of here! Run! We are waiting for a buyer for an apartment, so for now we are here. As soon as we sell the apartment, we will not be here. We are planning to leave for the Kaliningrad region. Nobody is waiting for us there, but we don’t care, to be honest, it will not be worse anywhere. It is high time to understand that life in a more or less acceptable form in Russia exists and will exist only beyond the Urals, if you look from here. Here our income will not survive. And not before the vouchers already. It is necessary to leave - it is already a matter of survival ,

- Sergey Petrenko, a resident of Sovetskaya Gavan, Khabarovsk Territory, shared his opinion. Vouchers in the fall and winter, according to the Federal Tourism Agency, will rise in price by 10% due to the rise in fuel prices. In this case, however, as always, the residents of the Russian Far East will suffer the most. Already today, the Far East are forced to cancel vacations due to the increased prices for air travel to the center of Russia. If the rise in ticket prices is added to the rise in ticket prices, residents of the Far Eastern Federal District will have to forget what a vacation is.

As reported by IA REGNUM, the word "vacation" may disappear from the dictionary of the inhabitants of the Far East forever. From some regions of the Far Eastern Federal District, the cost of flights to Moscow already exceeds 100 thousand rubles. And from Moscow you also need to fly to the warm sea - Crimea or Krasnodar.

Rosbalt writes:

“Quite an official statement of Plenipotentiary Representative Trutnev:“Currently 70% of the Far East is not provided with air traffic. Of the 470 airports and landing sites that existed in 1991, one-sixth has survived. The lack of air communication leads to a direct danger to the life and health of people, making it impossible to receive medical assistance in a timely manner. " This situation has not existed for the first year or even for the first decade. The plenipotentiary himself says that the degradation of infrastructure has been going on since 1991. Moreover, already very recently, from 2015 to 2017, the Ministry of Transport made "gross mistakes" due to which money was not allocated for 42 runways. That is, it is necessary to multiply the absence of small aircraft, the lack of money for it from the state, the lack of funds for tickets for passengers and the physical absence of airports. And as a result, we get a demographic problem in which people leave the Far East. The Far East is people. There is no territory without them."

In the opinion of Yuri Medovar, senior researcher at the Institute of Water Problems of the Russian Academy of Sciences, the "sawing out of Siberia" has reached alarming proportions that threaten to disaster.

The "lungs of the Earth" are being destroyed in the name of profit, and the drop in the water level in Lake Baikal is a direct consequence of the criminal actions of the ruling regime. Practically all forestry business in Siberian regions belongs to China,

- said the writer and public figure Pavel Pashkov following the results of the expedition "Russian Taiga". The members of the expedition traveled all over Siberia and, in particular, observed massive deforestation from the air. Pashkov claims that even Russian logging enterprises in Siberia have ended up in the hands of Chinese businessmen. In his opinion, Siberia has actually become a raw material appendage of China.

The state of the economy

The Free Press writes:

"The Russians will have to tighten their belts. We are waiting for accelerated inflation, a decrease in the growth of wages and incomes, and a further reduction in public spending. This follows from the new forecast of the Ministry of Economy, which the department sent to the government. The forecast of the Ministry of Economic Development for this and next years looks disappointing. lowered expectations for all key indicators. The forecast for GDP growth was reduced from 2.1% to 1.9% for the current year and from 2.2% to 1.4% for the next. The situation is even worse with the growth of real wages. this year, as expected, they should grow by 6, 3% (which is also doubtful), then next year the growth will slow down to 1%., 7% instead of 2.5% in the April version of the forecast. Inflation from the current 2, 2% will accelerate to 2, 9-3, 1% by the end of the year, and by the middle of 2019 will reach 4.5%. Investment growth will decline from 5.6% to 3.1% in 2019."

Economic growth in Russia is unlikely to be able to accelerate even in the event of a hypothetical lifting of Western sanctions - it is primarily limited not by external pressure, but by a set of internal problems, ACRA analysts write in a new report on the impact of sanctions on the Russian economy.

"Among other things, now there will be added such constraints as the pension reform, which does not include measures to support employment, and the increase in VAT (the government proposed to increase it from 18 to 20%.)"

- indicates the macroanalyst of Raiffeisenbank Stanislav Murashov.

Standard of living

A quarter of Russians (25%) assess their financial situation as “bad” or “very bad”. This is evidenced by the data of a survey conducted by VTsIOM experts. Sociologists note that the recorded figure is one third higher than the level of last year (18%) and became a record since the crisis year of 2009, when 28% of Russians complained about financial problems.

It is also reported that the index of economic expectations collapsed to its lowest level since 2008: 26% of survey participants said they expect further deterioration in their financial situation. The share of expected improvements fell from 33% to 24%, which also became a historic low. At the same time, the number of pessimists exceeded the number of optimists for the first time in the entire period of research. The social well-being of the population has deteriorated in all aspects, VTsIOM points out.

A public opinion poll conducted by the Bank of Russia in June showed a record collapse in consumer sentiment in 9 years and a growing fear of rising prices. The inflation rate Russians have seen hit a record since October 2017 and double-digit for the first time in more than six months. The indicator fixed by the Central Bank - 10.6% - was almost 5 times higher than the official figure from Rosstat, which in June fell to 2.3%. In the course of the survey, 35% of respondents complained about "very strong" growth (a record since 2017), 18% are expected to further accelerate inflation, or the maximum number in more than two years.

Belief in low inflation was shaken by a jump in gasoline prices, which 57% of respondents complained about - almost twice as much as in May, the Central Bank states. Another 31% said that prices for meat and poultry began to rise faster, 28% saw an increase in prices for vegetables and fruits.

The fear of inflation has not left room for hopes that the financial situation will improve after the longest recession in the 20th century. The consumer sentiment index, which measures income levels and people's ability to spend and save, plunged 13 points in June. Its collapse became a record in the entire history of Central Bank statistics (since 2009), and the fixed value - 93 points - the minimum in 15 months. First of all, hopes for the future collapsed, it follows from the survey: the consumer expectations index fell from 117 to 100 points, and its fall also became unprecedented in all 9 years of data.

Metropolitan Hilarion of Volokolamsk said on the air of the Russia 24 TV channel that due to the decrease in the purchasing power of the population, the incomes of the churches of the Russian Orthodox Church have also decreased. So he commented on the preliminary data of Rosstat for 2017, according to which the poverty rate increased in 44 regions.

“The general observation shared by many clerics is that the purchasing power of the population has declined. This can be felt in churches, among other things: on the sale of candles, on the sale of icons, on how people order prayers, how they serve notes. That is, the income of the temple as a result of this fall in the purchasing power of the population also fell"

- said the metropolitan.

Forbes published an article with a loud headline stating that the quality of life in Russia is lower than in China. The material itself contains even more depressing information - according to this indicator, Russia is inferior not only to China, but also to Mexico, India, Brazil and even Ukraine. This conclusion was made by the author of the publication, Kenneth Raposa, after studying the ratings of living standards in different countries, compiled by the Numbeo website. Ukraine has 88.28 points on this list, while Russia has 86.2. China has 91.4, India has 99.9, Brazil has 94.2, and countries like the United States or Switzerland have more than 180 points out of 200 possible.

El Murid writes:

“Putin signed amendments to the 2018 budget law. Social expenditures have been cut by more than 50 billion rubles (almost all of the cuts affected pensions), and spending on security officials increased by about the same amount - and only on open budget items."

Ensuring the activities of the State Duma in 2018 will cost the budget 10.69 billion rubles, follows from the estimate of the lower house, with which RBC got acquainted (the authenticity of the document was confirmed by three sources in the apparatus of the Duma). Compared to the previous year, expenses for the ward increased by 829.2 million rubles, or 8.4%, indicated in the estimate.

Extinction of the population

According to Rosstat, the extinction (natural decline) of the population of Russia, which reached a minimum in January-April 2014 (-28, 2 thousand people), in the same period in 2018 amounted to 121, 3 thousand people, an increase of 4, 3 times and reaching the maximum since 2009 (in January-April of which the natural decline amounted to 131, 5 thousand people).

The medicine

"Komsomolskaya Pravda" on July 6 writes:

“This week, the medical community is vigorously discussing a seemingly common event - the departure of another doctor from the public health system.

However, this story attracted the attention of both doctors and patients with two features: it is not just a doctor who leaves, but, in the opinion of the patients who voted, the best district general practitioner who was included in the top ten best doctors in Moscow: Anna Aleksandrovna Zemlyanukhina. And he leaves not silently, but publicly explaining in detail in an open letter why such a cardinal decision was made: “As a result of constant overwork, emotional overload and lack of rest, I have already suffered mental devastation. Nothing makes me happy, I have neither the strength, nor the desire to do anything at home, I went to work every day for the past few months with disgust and looked forward to the end of the working day."

All recently, there has been an outflow of personnel from state and municipal medical institutions, said the organizing secretary of the trade union of health workers "Action" Andrei Konoval. As the trade union leader told a Rosbalt correspondent, the situation is critical.

“Due to the extremely high workload, which in recent years, according to our observations, has been increasing, due to low salaries, an unhealthy situation in relations with the administrations of many medical institutions and its attitude towards employees, the interest of health workers in continuing to work in state and municipal medical institutions. Because of this, many are beginning to look for new jobs: someone leaves the profession altogether, someone goes into private medicine. As a result, we are seeing a shortage of personnel. A common situation is when the number of local therapists or pediatricians is two, and sometimes three times less than the number of sites. The number of the population attached to a specific site is also much higher than the previously valid norms. In an ambulance, it is common to find that field teams are not staffed by a second health worker in general-purpose teams. Specialized brigades are also not fully staffed in accordance with federal standards, or these brigades are transferred to the status of general profile ,

- said Andrey Konoval. The trade union leader stressed that the situation is only getting worse.

Oleg Smolin gave the following statistics:

“According to Rosstat, from 2010/11 to 2015/16 academic year --- the number of university teachers decreased by 77 thousand;

- the number of doctors from 2010 to 2016 - by almost 35 thousand;

- the number of employees in the field of science from 2005 to 2016 - by almost 91 thousand.

Total: over ten years, the reduction amounted to more than 200 thousand high-tech jobs."

Education

Every third Russian teacher does not know how his salary is calculated, whether incentive and compensation payments are accrued. Such data are contained in the monitoring of the All-Russian Popular Front - in May, experts interviewed more than 3 thousand school teachers in 82 regions. According to the ONF, wage growth rates remain insignificant and do not allow them to reach the level announced by Rosstat. According to experts, teachers receive even this salary under extremely high workload. Every fourth teacher works part-time, and every fifth teacher, due to the high workload, is thinking about leaving school. In addition, 7% of the teachers surveyed speak about full or partial non-payment of salaries, 23% - about its incorrect calculation, and 57% do not receive compensation payments for overtime work or combination, the Vedomosti newspaper writes.

The results of a poll conducted by VTsIOM on July 3, 2018 showed that 77% of Russians are confident that the level of knowledge of schoolchildren since the introduction of the USE system has only deteriorated (four years ago, only 64% adhered to this point of view).

Andrey Rostovtsev writes:

“The situation with university rectors has become clearer. All in all, this is a disaster. The disaster was orchestrated by corrupt Ministry of Education officials who use their position to trade in university rector posts. As we can see, in recent years, these posts have been predominantly occupied by inveterate swindlers or businessmen. After all, further trade in diplomas on the post of university rectors is a completely legal business model in the Russian Federation. About the newly appointed rector of the Kurgan University, who bought himself a scientific degree, they write from their places: “Laughter, laughter, but today one of the last true doctors of science, a really serious scientist, head of the Department of Biology, NI Naumenko, has resigned. incompatible with science, however, with high-quality education and human decency, too. " This is a very typical situation - specialists are washed out of universities and ball skiers come to replace them, whose role is to support the new leadership. We observe this situation in many universities in Russia. The time bomb planted by the crooks from the Minobra begins to operate. When it explodes, it won't seem a little to anyone."

The science

The Russian government continues to cut funding for science in the country. The publication Finanz writes about this with reference to data from the Higher School of Economics. At the end of last year, 377.9 billion rubles were allocated from the federal budget for civil science, the study says. The amount spent is 2, 7% of the budget - three times less than the state spends on supporting the apparatus of officials and state authorities (1.2 trillion rubles) and 13 times less than spending on the army and police (almost 5 trillion rubles), experts say … Compared to 2016, funding for civil science has nominally decreased by 24.8 billion rubles, or 6.3%, and when compared with the pre-crisis level - 2014 - by 13.5%, or 59.4 billion rubles. On average, every year, science is deprived of 8, 4% of state funding, and its current volume is the minimum in 10 years, the researchers add.

Flight from Russia

Half of the Russian scientists expressed their desire to emigrate. This conclusion is contained in a study by the Boston Consulting Group, in which 24 thousand respondents from the Russian Federation participated, including both specialists themselves and recruiters involved in hiring employees. 50% of Russian scientists, 52% of top managers, 54% of IT specialists want to work abroad. 49% of engineering workers and 46% of doctors are ready to join them. Nearly two-thirds of potential expats (65%) are “digital talent,” notes BCG: artificial intelligence specialists, scrum masters, user interface designers, and more.

57% of them are young people under the age of 30. Among students (under 21), the share is even higher and reaches 59%.

A third (31%) of Russians aged 18 to 24 would like to leave to live in another country. This is the highest figure for the last five years. This is evidenced by the VTsIOM poll published on July 2.

Life-abroad.ru website:

“About 4,000 young scientists leave the country every year.

Causes:

- Low wages and prestige of the profession;

- Insufficient state funding for research;

- Non-transparent labor organization and bureaucracy;

- Limited opportunities for scientific growth;

- Lack of computing power and equipment."

The outflow of the educated population from Russia is growing, while skilled immigration to the country has declined. This is stated in the RANEPA study “Skilled Migration in Russia: Balance of Loss and Gains”. The authors of the work are Yulia Florinskaya and Nikita Mkrtchyan, employees of the Institute for Social Analysis and Forecasting. In the current decade, “there has been a real increase in skilled (intellectual) emigration from Russia,” the authors of the report say, citing foreign country statistics and interviews with people who have left the country in the past six years.

Defense

The Free Press writes:

“Russia has forgotten how to build aircraft carriers and is asking for help from China. Shocking news from analysts of the American Internet magazine The American Interest: seemingly gaining power, Russia will soon be forced to order new aircraft carriers from Chinese shipyards.

Today it can be stated: of the surface warships, we are more or less successfully transferring to our fleet only small missile ships and corvettes. That is, they are well-armed combat units, but of a very modest displacement and with very limited seaworthiness. In other words, ships are very limitedly suitable for operations in the far sea zone. Even with frigates, the situation is not the best. "Admiral Gorshkov", head project 22350, the Russian industry has been trying to send the fleet since 2006. Alas, so far unsuccessful.

We have created a lot of excellent weapons. Recently, however, the fate of completed developments began to take shape sadly. According to Konstantin Sivkov, Corresponding Member of the Russian Academy of Rocket and Artillery Sciences, “Our missile armament is excellent, but it is scarce among the troops. The Americans have weapons worse than ours, but there are many of them in the troops."

Absolutely the same applies to other types of weapons. The current state defense order provides for the purchase of only 12 Su-57 fighters for the Aerospace Forces. The T-14 tank is also ready. And, it would seem, he should enter the armored forces in the hundreds. Initially, it was supposed to be so - to purchase 2300 cars by 2020. However, this figure was cut to the completely obscene level of 100 units. This is enough only for parades and participation in international exhibitions."

JSC Tushinsky Machine-Building Plant (TMZ) - until recently it was the largest enterprise in the aerospace industry in Russia. It was founded in 1932 with the aim of mastering the latest models of the aviation industry (the Stal-2 aircraft). Since 1936 - State Union Plant No. 82 of the People's Commissariat for Heavy Industry. In wartime, the plant produced front-line fighters Yak-7 and Yak-9. 1980 to 1993 there they built the "Buran" reusable manned orbital spacecraft. In Soviet times, the company employed 28 thousand people, in the early 2000s - about 3500 people, in 2012 there were 1500 people. In 2013, the number of employees was 860 people. Then the plant went bankrupt, and in 2013-2015. another 706 workers were laid off, that is, there were only one and a half hundred people remaining in the staff of the once largest plant. And then an ad appeared on the Avito website, a well-known Internet site for the sale of all kinds of used junk: "Tushinsky Machine Building Plant" Moscow. The object is being implemented within the framework of Federal Law-127 "On Insolvency (Bankruptcy)".