
April 16, 2014
The news in numbers from gold teeth to a record-breaking Stradivarius to Beckett's "lost" story.
The news in numbers from gold teeth to a record-breaking Stradivarius to Beckett's "lost" story.
The head of the Kremlin boasted at the recent forum in St. Petersburg International Economic Forum about Russia’s economic resilience against Western sanctions. But behind the scenes, Russian business leaders tell a different story.
At a Veshki distribution center for the food retailer VkusVill, a chain of online Russian grocery stores.
-Analysis-
MOSCOW — "The most effective sanction to weaken the Kremlin? Not to target us and punish us, but to give us visas instead ... to abandon the sinking the ship!" This businessman's iconoclastic perspective embodies the anxiety one could detect percolating just below the surface at the "Russian Davos" Forum in St. Petersburg last week.
Stay up-to-date with the latest on the Russia-Ukraine war, with our exclusive international coverage.
Sign up to our free daily newsletter.Officially called the "International" Economic Forum, the annual event organized by Vladimir Putin is meant to attract foreign investors — but this year, the elite of the national business community were cut off from the rest of the world. "Just among Russians... And forced to line up behind the regime and its economic strategies that lead us to a dead end," says the same source, a Russian manager in one of the main state-owned companies.
Like so many others, this man in his 40s, a typical representative of the new upper middle class, with a foreign passport in hand, educated in the West, liberal and multilingual, discovered his name on the lists of Western sanctions. Directly or indirectly, a large part of the Russian business world has been caught up in the European and U.S. sanctions against Moscow.
At the beginning of the Kremlin’s “special operation” conducted in Ukraine, many top business leaders were shocked and did not hide their disapproval of the military offensive. Four months later, the successive series of sanctions are making it impossible for them to leave Russia. Departures that, on the contrary, would have weakened the Kremlin and its economic strategy.
At the St. Petersburg International Economic Forum, those silenced rebels kept a low profile. They quietly confided their discomfort and mentioned a reality: the sanctions have had a counterproductive effect. People from the working class, faithful supporters of the Kremlin, applauded the measures taken against the richest, indirectly thanking Europe for doing what the Kremlin could not do: attack the despised oligarchs.
As for the people from the upper class, they got stuck in Russia and must implement the President's objectives, in particular the hypothetical replacement of imports by domestic production. A policy that nonetheless has been a struggle for a long time.
In 22 years in power, Vladimir Putin has been able to bring order to the country and, despite a decline in income in recent years, has improved the daily lives of Russians. But he has failed to modernize the country's economy and, far from the oil and other raw materials, to diversify its industry.
By not creating the conditions for a stable, open, competitive, and business-friendly market, including a fair and transparent judicial system for entrepreneurs, he has sacrificed the long-term welfare of Russians. Not the poor, who will continue to grow in number. Not the richest either, who, despite the crises, know how to maintain their fortunes. But across the middle class that, between economic frustrations and political distortions, is now forced to stand behind the Kremlin.A chicken burger from the new McDonald's restaurant called ''Vkusno i Tochka'' in St. Petersburg, Russia. The new chain is seen by some as a symbol of the Kremlin's propaganda.
The suddenly regained strength of the ruble, artificially supported, allows Vladimir Putin to present a resilient economy. Especially with fewer imports and exports of raw materials boosted by rising prices, the trade balance is reaching record levels of surplus.
Gazprom has never earned so much from gas sales, providing the state with much-needed tax revenue to finance the war effort. The reopening of McDonald's, which was taken over and relaunched with a new name and logo by one of the franchisees, is another symbol put forward by the Kremlin's propaganda. It serves as an example of Russia's ability to rebound despite the departure of Western companies. This is enough to feed the middle classes in the cities and to maintain hopes of emancipation against the threats of isolation.
At the St. Petersburg forum, Putin put it this way: “The economic Blitzkrieg against Russia had no chance for success!”
Still, the first real damages to the economy, the performance of Russian companies' earnings, are expected to arrive in the fall. Recession looks inevitable. But, defying earlier forecasts, the gross domestic product drop is likely to be closer to 15% than to 25%. Because the very structure of Russia’s economy, which is at 70% controlled by the state and its public companies, helps it to cope.
Employment is resisting the slowdown as well, thanks to agreements (and limitations...) on part-time work and other paid leave. But eventually, waves of layoffs appear inevitable as companies are caught in the bottleneck of depleting stocks of intermediate products.
Moscow's state aid and intervention has thus helped with short-term resilience, but the false picture of an invincible Russian economy in the face of Western pressures is bound to backlash among a bewildered middle class.
The head of the Kremlin boasted at the recent forum in St. Petersburg International Economic Forum about Russia’s economic resilience against Western sanctions. But behind the scenes, Russian business leaders tell a different story.
With the complicity of leftist rulers in Venezuela, Bolivia and even Argentina, Iran's sanction-ridden regime is spreading its tentacles in South America, and could even undermine democracies.
As the Supreme Court decides to overturn the 1973 decision that guaranteed abortion rights, many fear an imminent threat to abortion rights in the U.S. But in other countries, the global fight for sexual and reproductive rights is going in different directions.
Central to the tragic absurdity of this war is the question of language. Vladimir Putin has repeated that protecting ethnic Russians and the Russian-speaking populations of Ukraine was a driving motivation for his invasion.
Yet one month on, a quick look at the map shows that many of the worst-hit cities are those where Russian is the predominant language: Kharkiv, Odesa, Kherson.
Then there is Mariupol, under siege and symbol of Putin’s cruelty. In the largest city on the Azov Sea, with a population of half a million people, Ukrainians make up slightly less than half of the city's population, and Mariupol's second-largest national ethnicity is Russians. As of 2001, when the last census was conducted, 89.5% of the city's population identified Russian as their mother tongue.
Between 2018 and 2019, I spent several months in Mariupol. It is a rugged but beautiful city dotted with Soviet-era architecture, featuring wide avenues and hillside parks, and an extensive industrial zone stretching along the shoreline. There was a vibrant youth culture and art scene, with students developing projects to turn their city into a regional cultural center with an international photography festival.
There were also many offices of international NGOs and human rights organizations, a consequence of the fact that Mariupol was the last major city before entering the occupied zone of Donbas. Many natives of the contested regions of Luhansk and Donetsk had moved there, taking jobs in restaurants and hospitals. I had fond memories of the welcoming from locals who were quicker to smile than in some other parts of Ukraine. All of this is gone.
Putin is bombing the very people he has claimed to want to rescue.
According to the latest data from the local authorities, 80% of the port city has been destroyed by Russian bombs, artillery fire and missile attacks, with particularly egregious targeting of civilians, including a maternity hospital, a theater where more than 1,000 people had taken shelter and a school where some 400 others were hiding.
The official civilian death toll of Mariupol is estimated at more than 3,000. There are no language or ethnic-based statistics of the victims, but it’s likely the majority were Russian speakers.
So let’s be clear, Putin is bombing the very people he has claimed to want to rescue.
Putin’s Public Enemy No. 1, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, is a mother-tongue Russian speaker who’d made a successful acting and comedy career in Russian-language broadcasting, having extensively toured Russian cities for years.
Rescuers carry a person injured during a shelling by Russian troops of Kharkiv, northeastern Ukraine.
Yes, the official language of Ukraine is Ukrainian, and a 2019 law aimed to ensure that it is used in public discourse, but no one has ever sought to abolish the Russian language in everyday life. In none of the cities that are now being bombed by the Russian army to supposedly liberate them has the Russian language been suppressed or have the Russian-speaking population been discriminated against.
Sociologist Mikhail Mishchenko explains that studies have found that the vast majority of Ukrainians don’t consider language a political issue. For reasons of history, culture and the similarities of the two languages, Ukraine is effectively a bilingual nation.
"The overwhelming majority of the population speaks both languages, Russian and Ukrainian,” Mishchenko explains. “Those who say they understand Russian poorly and have difficulty communicating in it are just over 4% percent. Approximately the same number of people say the same about Ukrainian.”
In general, there is no problem of communication and understanding. Often there will be conversations where one person speaks Ukrainian, and the other responds in Russian. Geographically, the Russian language is more dominant in the eastern and central parts of Ukraine, and Ukrainian in the west.
Like most central Ukrainians I am perfectly bilingual: for me, Ukrainian and Russian are both native languages that I have used since childhood in Kyiv. My generation grew up on Russian rock, post-Soviet cinema, and translations of foreign literature into Russian. I communicate in Russian with my sister, and with my mother and daughter in Ukrainian. I write professionally in three languages: Ukrainian, Russian and English, and can also speak Polish, French, and a bit Japanese. My mother taught me that the more languages I know the more human I am.
At the same time, I am not Russian — nor British or Polish. I am Ukrainian. Ours is a nation with a long history and culture of its own, which has always included a multi-ethnic population: Russians, Belarusians, Moldovans, Crimean Tatars, Bulgarians, Romanians, Hungarians, Poles, Jews, Greeks. We all, they all, have found our place on Ukrainian soil. We speak different languages, pray in different churches, we have different traditions, clothes, and cuisine.
My mother taught me that the more languages I know the more human I am.
Like in other countries, these differences have been the source of conflict in our past. But it is who we are and will always be, and real progress has been made over the past three decades to embrace our multitudes. Our Jewish, Russian-speaking president is the most visible proof of that — and is in fact part of what our soldiers are fighting for.
Many in Moscow were convinced that Russian troops would be welcomed in Ukraine as liberating heroes by Russian speakers. Instead, young soldiers are forced to shoot at people who scream in their native language.
Starving people ina street of Kharkiv in 1933, during the famine
Diocesan Archive of Vienna (Diözesanarchiv Wien)/BA Innitzer
Putin has tried to rally the troops by warning that in Ukraine a “genocide” of ethnic Russians is being carried out by a government that must be “de-nazified.”
These are, of course, words with specific definitions that carry the full weight of history. The Ukrainian people know what genocide is not from books. In my hometown of Kyiv, German soldiers massacred Jews en masse. My grandfather survived the Buchenwald concentration camp, liberated by the U.S. army. My great-grandmother, who died at the age of 95, survived the 1932-33 famine when the Red Army carried out the genocide of the Ukrainian middle class, and her sister disappeared in the camps of Siberia, convicted for defying rationing to try to feed her children during the famine.
On Tuesday, came a notable report of one of the latest civilian deaths in the besieged Russian-speaking city of Kharkiv: a 96-year-old had been killed when shelling hit his apartment building. The victim’s name was Boris Romanchenko; he had survived Buchenwald and two other Nazi concentration camps during World War II. As President Zelensky noted: Hitler didn’t manage to kill him, but Putin did.
Genocide has returned to Ukraine, from Kharkiv to Kherson to Mariupol, as Vladimir Putin had warned. But it is his own genocide against the Russian-speaking population of Ukraine.