The last month of war is nearing its end, the day after tomorrow is a grim date — 24 of March.
It is already clear what this war is and what it will be known as —
the most senseless and shameful act of violence in the latest Russian history.
The kind of violence where a city is being destroyed not for the purpose of capturing it
(what would be the point of capturing ruins and rubble?),
and people are being killed not for the purpose of inflicting damage on the enemy's manpower,
but it all happens due to some irrational viciousness of individuals in charge.
Individuals who are willing to bury its own economy, its own society, its own country only to bring misery to a neighbor.
By the care of Vladimir Putin we’ve literally become a shaheed country on the other side of civilization, and this civilization is at war against us.
A war on land and a war in refrigerators of Russian citizens.
Today we will take a look at the near past, and then we will try to figure out what awaits us afterwards,
what we can already say about the end of the war.
We need to start with the event that happened two years ago, but which has acquired a completely different meaning today.
At the end of February - beginning of March of 2020, the whole world was quarantined.
Till the last moment the Russian government hoped to conduct a constitutional plebiscite according to the plan, but at the end of March it also gave up:
for the whole of April, a “non-working day regime” was declared.
For a second it seemed that the Russian government would do the right thing instead of the usual thing —
that it will establish a full-fledged quarantine, make compensations for business and the people… but it was an illusion.
The government explained: we won’t be limiting you in any way, we will just allow you to stay at home at the expense of your employer, and we don’t care what the employer thinks.
The active part of the society reasonably asked “what the hell?”
Navalny, still not poisoned and imprisoned at the time, even proposed a plan that is especially interesting from today’s perspective.
Navalny’s plan was to pay all citizens 20,000 roubles in the first month of the quarantine, and another 10,000 in each subsequent month.
A simple multiplication shows that it would mean three trillion rubles or 40 billion dollars in the first month,
and 20 billion dollars in subsequent months, a total of $300 billion in the first year.
The plan was approved and supported by every important Russian economist:
Sergey Guriev, Sergey Alexashenko, Konstantin Sonin.
It would help support households, demand for goods and services, maintain employment, and most importantly, maintain real, not imaginary quarantine, and save people's lives.
The Russian government with its powerful apparatus of propaganda dug their heels in,
making it clear in the most cynical and unambiguous way, that the reserves belong to the state,
and the problems of Russian citizens are not the state’s concern.
It looked exactly as it sounds — absolutely crazy.
While developed countries are getting into huge debts, spending everything they can so that people could stay at home and keep themselves safe instead of working,
the Russian government is holding on to its money and only cares about the budget balance,
while explaining its actions with the most ridiculous of economic arguments.
And this all led to what was expected — the real quarantine hardly lasted a month, and all other restrictions were completely nominal.
Back then I was wondering, along with other public speakers: how is that possible?
How is it possible to sacrifice the lives of citizens in order to make balance sheets converge nicely, to keep reserves intact,
and to keep inflation within the planned parameters?
Today, two years later, we all know what they were saving these reserves for.
This safety net was not intended to be used in the times of a crisis, not to help the government in case of difficult elections even, but it was meant for war and sanctions.
There is a reason I made this crude approximation of Navalny’s plan costs before: it would cost us less than $300,000 billion.
The reason is that this sum is less than the amount of reserves of the Bank of Russia which ended up frozen as the result of international sanctions.
And the grim reality is: the lives of Russian citizens were sacrificed in the name of killing Ukrainian citizens,
and the money that could be used to save lives, to make additional payment to medical workers, to buy medicine and additional medical equipment,
will now be used to restore Ukraine after the war.
Vladimir Putin sacrificed the lives of Russian citizens, sacrificed the economy, to save for the destruction of Ukraine,
but he also saved for its restoration.
This also tells us a lot about what the Russian leaders were preparing for, and about the quality of these preparations too.
This terrible war will someday end — sooner rather than later —
and it is already quite clear that it will not end with a Russian victory.
It will end with terrible bloodshed on both sides and the inglorious return of morally and physically injured people back to Russia.
This has already happened in our history before. And it drastically changed the world we live in.
It would be appropriate to recall the favorite propaganda stamp here — “the crazy nineties”.
Let us think for a while: why were they “crazy” exactly? Where did all these “crazy” people, criminals that is, come from?
We have a good socio-economic explanation for this:
a transformational crysis divides people, quite sharply, on a tiny minority of those who could adapt to the new reality,
and an absolute majority of those who failed.
The result is a sharp stratification in society:
such a stratification that the cheapest of salads in a prestigious restaurant costs more than a factory engineer makes in a whole month.
People lose everything they have, from money to social status.
All the previous accomplishments are nullified. The old societal norms, the old morale are now dead and new ones are yet to be born.
All of this understandably leads to a sharp rise in violenc and criminal behavior, from theft and robbery in search of money for food, to organized crime.
The transformational crysis of the nineties wasn’t easy for anyone in the former socialist camp, but such rampant organized crime,
such a level of banditry when clashes over a share in a factory’s profits could look more like an actual military operation,
was not seen in neither Poland nor Romania, it only happened in post-soviet regions.
So how did that happen?
How did Russia in the early 90s end up with so many people who didn’t hesitate to shoot at live targets from machine guns,
where did they all come from?
There can be only one answer — Afghanistan.
More than 600,000 people went through Afghanistan in 10 years.
Even if you don’t count all the people who were far away from the real combat, all the staff officers and auxiliary troops, it is still in the hundreds of thousands.
Hundreds of thousands of people with real combat experience, people for whom human life has lost its value: they caused deaths, they saw death everyday and got used to it.
But it’s not just that. Something much worse had happened to them:
all their acts of bravery, all their injuries, all their illnesses, both physical and mental ones, turned out to be completely alien and worthless in the new country.
All they went through was now officially declared a one big mistake.
And a real combat experience, a close acquaintance with death, and the feeling of injustice are not a good mix.
Just imagine: while you were stuck in a burning tank under Kandagar, someone was doing business and now has his own pub.
All you got in three years is three fractures and five shrapnel wounds, and he got his own restaurant and a Mercedes.
It is very difficult to resist hatred in this situation.
A lot of people involved in organized crime in the 90s, both among the organizers and among ordinary thugs,
are people with Afghanistan experience, and numerous veteran unions of the time
were criminal organizations themselves and were exterminating each other with great pleasure.
The cult TV series “The Brigade” starts exactly like this.
Sasha Beliy comes back from an Afghan border.
The mood of the time is conveyed pretty accurately: a man comes back from war and into the world that is now alien to him,
a world in which he is not needed and not wanted.
“The Brigade” is not the only representation of the phenomena in our culture.
The film “Brother” is all about this:
a man returns from war (chechen war in his case) and doesn’t find a place for himself, except for becoming a very successful killer.
and that is the treatment participants in the Ukrainian war are going to get
and all their experience is declared a criminal mistake — this never ends well, this always creates a whole community of socially deprived people who have a very specific account for the rest of society.
this never ends well,
this always creates a whole community of socially deprived people who have a very specific account for the rest of society.
Any big war ends with a sharp surge in crime.
This fact is not getting much coverage, but the post-war USSR was a dangerous place where crime of all sorts flourished.
And it only got worse after the Khruschev’s Thaw, when masses of people with a similar experience — prison camp experience — were released.
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Next, we will talk about what awaits us in the economy.
What happens in Russia in the last weeks is often compared to “Titanic” catastrophe:
the ship has already hit the iceberg, water is all over the holds,
and while some passengers have already figured it all out and ran to lifeboats,
the captain and the crew keep insisting that everything is fine.
And many do believe them — he is the captain after all — and keep going on about their businesses like nothing happened.
I believe an underwater earthquake would serve as a better analogy.
Powerful tremors (man-made in our case) result in a tsunami —
a huge wave that washes away entire cities with all their inhabitants.
The only way to escape a tsunami is a timely evacuation to a safer location.
Today, we only see the outlines of the upcoming waves, they are yet to reach us after some time,
especially since the earthquake, that is the war in Ukraine, is still going on.
But it is already possible to make the first estimates.
People often compare the upcoming crisis with the late USSR or Russia in the nineties.
Like, people who lived through all this aren’t afraid of anything anymore.
If we’ve managed to survive back then then we’ll do fine now too.
Alas, the situation will be nothing like both of these cases.
Let’s start with the USSR. The first thing we need to mention is that the Soviet Union had twice the population of modern Russia and it included another 14 republics that are now independent countries.
The first thing we need to mention is that the Soviet Union had twice the population of modern Russia and it included another 14 republics that are now independent countries.
This includes Ukraine and Kazakhstan, which contributed a quarter of the Soviet GDP.
Litva, Latvia, and Estonia with their advanced industries were also in the USSR.
The USSR had Uzbek cotton, Azerbaijani oil, Georgian wine — today's Russia has none of these.
Moreover, the USSR had satellites in the Eastern Europe and in other parts of the world, who together formed the Council for Mutual Economic Assistance.
It included, for example, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, East Germany.
There was a division of labor within CMEA.
The USSR was responsible for providing oil and raw materials.
Countries of the Eastern Europe produced what the USSR wasn’t very good at — the products of manufacturing industry and consumer goods.
Czechoslovak trams "Tatra" still run through our cities — this too is the reminder of CMEA.
Hungarian canned foods, furniture from East Germany, sugar from Cuba, cosmetics from Poland —
all of that was imported into the USSR and it compensated for the deficit at least partially.
CMEA used ruble as currency,
so you didn’t need dollars to trade between countries within the socialist camp.
So even while economically isolated and under sanctions, the USSR could postpone its collapse for quite some time.
The inefficiencies of the planned economy was its main problem, and it made the collapse inevitable.
It is the collapse of the planned economy that led to empty stores in the end of the 80s.
The USSR kept clinging to fixed state prices that didn’t represent reality and couldn’t pay for production.
It all ended with long lines and food stamps.
But when it comes to self-efficiency and replacing imports which is being talked about so much, modern Russia, which represents just 2% of the world’s GDP
and is incorporated into the global economy, cannot be compared to the USSR by any criterion.
The 90s aren’t good for comparison either.
The 90s is a time of the transformational crisis, the transition from a planned economy to a market economy.
The first months of reforms resulted in hyperinflation in 92, when everyone had to face the grim reality
in which the soviet ruble had no value.
Many ineffective enterprises went bankrupt, and state institutions kept paying soviet salaries which weren’t even enough to buy bread.
The main consequence of the crisis of the 90s was losing points of reference in one’s life.
A dream career of yesterday (like, a student — an aspirant — a docent — a professor) suddenly turned out to be a deadend.
Someone with just 9 years of school could become a rich man by selling turkish coats, while a doctor of science ended up on the sidelines of life.
An official of the mayor's office had to do private taxi runs,
teachers were forced to sell their personal possessions on markets, and a policeman who's always dreamt of hunting criminals,
now had to start working with them in order to provide for himself and his family.
Kitchen gardens and farms became a way of survival for many.
Even in Moscow, as well as in other big cities, people were keeping chickens on balconies so that they could have meat and eggs.
It is this devaluation of one’s savings and drastic change in one’s lifestyle — is what we remember as a crisis of the nineties.
But the nineties is a time of development, not decline.
Russia has become a free country with a democratically elected government.
Investors were standing in line to get there.
It was the best time to grow business in Russia — markets are empty, import fees are low, and the price of labor is dirt cheap.
Yes, there are certain risks, such as a high level of crime, but the potential for massive profits is more than worth it.
A bit later, in 98, when the ruble was suddenly devalued after the default,
it was no longer as profitable to sell imported goods here.
This spurred the development of local industries.
For example, “PepsiCo” had only one factory producing soda before the default,
but then it opened three more, and also built snacks factories and bought a few local producers like “Wimm-Bill-Dann”,
becoming one of the biggest food producers in Russia.
Today, the situation is different.
Putin halted the development of democratic institutions, established an autocracy, and then attacked a neighboring country.
The future of our country is vague to say the least, and investing into it is even riskier than doing business with a Columbian drug cartel.
Literally not a single large corporation that cares about its reputation can afford to keep doing business in Russia.
Those who still do, will soon encounter such a wave of criticism in their own countries, that their whole businesses will be in danger, not just the Russian part of it.
And it is not just the criticism:
not many people would want to invest in a country whose officials are quite serious about nationalizing assets of companies from unfriendly countries,
a list in which anyone can find itself for whatever reason.
Super profitability is required to make risks like that worth it, and Russia can no longer offer one.
I’m not even talking about the monstrous logistical problems with delivering goods, payment and the withdrawal of profits.
So what should we be expecting then?
Some combination of the late USSR crisis and the 90s in Russia.
On one hand, there will be a deficit in consumer goods, because Russia can’t produce anything on its own:
even the “Avtovaz” halted due to the lack of imported parts, and milk producers are sounding the alarm over the lack of cardboard for packaging,
which used to come from Finland.
Some things we can replace, but it won’t happen fast enough,
plus the economy is more complicated now than it was in the 70s, and Russia no longer has the industrial capacity
of 15 allied republics and CMEA countries.
From the 90s, on the other hand, we’ll have hyperinflation, unemployment, and the collapse of the usual lifestyle.
Yesterday you were a successful manager in “PriceWaterHouseCoupers” and you knew that no matter what headhunters will kill to have you.
Today you are nobody, your skills worth nothing, there are no companies left in Russia that could hire you, or there will be none left soon.
All your investments in your career, all your money, all your diplomas, all your sleepless nights at work — are now burnt in the fire of the senseless war in Ukraine.
You are basically starting from scratch in your 40's, and you are looking at a career as a taxi driver or a courier.
Will it be better in Russia when the war ends. Of course it will.
We will no longer be citizens of a country that’s bombing civilian infrastructure and is killing people for no reason.
The developed world will stop isolating itself from us, after the change of government and the president of course
and a new country’s leadership will be given a chance to clean up the mess.
But a simple reference to the past experience is enough to assess the consequences.
The legacy of the Afghan, and even more the Chechen campaigns — two wars that pale in comparison with what is happening now — is still being felt.
The consequences of the Ukrainian war: our ruined reputation in the world, the constant feeling of guilt,
the long-term consequences of sanctions in the form of losing energy markets, the crippled social environment, the need to start anew the long 30 years path to humanization - this is the legacy we are leaving to our children and even grandchildren.
the need to start anew the long 30 years path to humanization —
this is the legacy we are leaving to our children and even grandchildren.
It is February 24, 2022, and not 1991, that we will now consider the birth date of the new country —
a completely different country that we will have to fix and repair.
Ekaterina Shulman, in her interview published 3 years ago, expressed an idea that seemed quite obvious at the moment, that reforms in Russia are literally half a turn.
Just tweak the institutions a bit, remove stains of autocracy from them, and the car will drive better than a new one.
Because we have it all, we have a healthy society with low levels of violence,
we have an economy that may not be growing but at least working,
the atavisms of soviet times, like widespread atomisation and the lack of trust, are steadily dying off, as well as societal vices like alcohol consumption.
We are very close to a good and rich life, just tweak the institutions a bit and here we go.
And it was all true three years ago.
It was a shame back then.
It was a shame to be stuck in an aging primitive autocracy while the society was ready for a more complex and advanced model.
It was a shame to lose year after a year.
It all changed today.
Now we are really in for a very long way out of the ditch we’ve found ourselves in.
There is no “half a turn” anymore, the longer Putin is in power and the longer this war goes on
(which are the same things in essence),
the closer we get to the end of the 80s, to the absolute collapse of everything. and the need to not just tweak a bit, but to build everything anew.
Before we had special courts and special judges for political trials, the rest of the judiciary worked as “normally” as the framework of the crooked law allowed it.
Now it is the time of looking for public enemies, and the whole judiciary that already has experience in political trials, will have to be replaced in the end.
Before we had a few crazy teachers that were intimidating students before rallies.
Today, the whole of secondary education is made into a tool of propaganda.
In addition to traumatized soldiers, who will cause great harm to the country when they return home,
we will also have a traumatized society.
Because the state is literally saying this: it is a right thing to be a bastard, it is ok to lie, telling on your neighbor is a good thing.
To be a good citizen today, a citizen that is not under a threat of persecution — one needs to literally corrupt himself,
to break all morality, to break free of all checks.
If your superiors want hospice children to form letter Z in support of killing their peers in another country —
you do that and get praise.
The state is mocking sanctions, saying — so what, all your factories are here, we have all the planes, we will just take it all from you and have it nationalized.
That there is no more law.
That if you believe that someone is “unfriendly” then it’s ok to steal from them, who’s to stop you?
No one can stop us, we do what we like and face no punishment, we don’t care about sanctions —
this is the main refrain of propaganda.
It would be naive to assume that the society is not affected, it is very much affected —
if you are strong and are out of reach, just take what you need from the weak.
Why can’t I burn a competitor’s shop if it’s ok to blow up a birthing hospital in Mariupol?
Lucky me that a competitor’s surname ends with “o”,
he is clearly not very friendly, he’s probably keeping the enemy’s flag under his bed.
They aren’t gonna catch me. I face no risks, but profits will rise.
Take a look at this “special military operation” term. It is a blatant lie elevated to law!
To be a lawful citizen today is to quite literally call things for what they are not.
One can see the pride of a con artist here: look at us, we lie, we make millions lie, and no one will punish us for it, aren’t we cool?
Coolness is the right to lie and make others lie with impunity.
What we have is not just the propaganda of hatred, the round-the-clock attempts to convince the TV viewer that Ukrainians are second-class people and thus deserve to die.
What we have is enforcement of hatred through legislation.
When the society is being centrally depraved like that, when they say that there is no right or wrong, that momentary benefit,
no matter how illusory, is all that matters — this is all very dangerous.
The problem is that when a society is taught to fear and hate one’s neighbor,
then the best way to survive is to really fear and hate your neighbor, because he fears and hates you.
And if a fight is inevitable, then strike first, like a certain geostrategist once told.
It is scary to live in a world where the question of causing harm to your neighbor is not a moral question,
it’s not about right vs wrong or good vs evil, it is a question of utility: will i be caught or not?
Because no police can keep order in the world of might is right.
It is easy to change laws, building new institutions is difficult but possible.
The societal norm of “you die today so that i can live tomorrow” will haunt us for decades.
The last 10 years are, of course, a terribly sad display. I came into politics in 2011.
Came with ideas of rebuilding cities environment, because this was the perfect moment — it was a period of rapid growth, people were fed, they recently had a decent renovation in their apartment, yeah there are some authoritarian tendencies in big politics, but on a personal level you have as much freedom as you need — a perfect moment to go outside and make the environment around you better.
it was a period of rapid growth, people were fed, they recently had a decent renovation in their apartment,
yeah there are some authoritarian tendencies in big politics, but on a personal level you have as much freedom as you need —
a perfect moment to go outside and make the environment around you better.
Narrower or wider sidewalks, street advertising and design codes, benches, parks, trams, street reconstruction,
the cute clashes with Navalny about the cost of a metro ticket.
It was a world where asphalt and tiles, mini buses and trolleybuses, the different ways of renovation of the Gorky park were fought to the death on Twitter.
Now we are in a reality where we have to discuss the post-war structure of the society, and how much grief and violence there will be.
We were thrown far back, and are stuck in a very deep pit.
The good news, if there is such a thing at all, is that societies succeeded in crawling out of even deeper pits in the past.
The process was long and hard, they suffered great losses, but still managed to crawl out.
140,000,000 people can’t just disappear, they will have to restore their society.
The modernized swastika in the form of letter Z will not be here forever.
And the sooner the war will end, the more people will remain who still live by pre-war norms, who still remember what is right.
When the war just started I was thinking, what do i do in this situation at all?
I had a well established life in Moscow, a working NGO, a business, and a good social circle.
Me and my wife were getting ready for the birth of our first child, bought our first apartments, we weren’t planning on changing anything.
bought our first apartments, we weren’t planning on changing anything.
But when it all started it became clear that we will have to choose — either we keep our established lives but stop telling what we think, or we leave.
Maybe for months, maybe for years.
Our whole editorial staff has decided that the most important thing we can do in this situation is to keep telling the truth, to keep calling things for what they are.
Maybe it’s you and us, and it’s a million of us here,
who will be the ones to bear pre-war norms through the times of war, to remember what is right and to try and bring it all back.
So that we could again be thinking about how we can improve tram traffic in our cities and about placing more benches for the comfort of our grandmothers,
and not about how many inhabitants of Kyiv and Kharkiv were killed today by our troops, and how many of our troops were themselves killed.
The peaceful life will have to be rebuilt and these times must be lived through.
These times devour everything good in people, they drive people to frenzy and dehumanization.
To an illusion that there is no truth beyond utility, and anyone who doesn’t comply is a traitor.
At this moment we cannot challenge this system. It is devoured by the hysteria of war, and we cannot stop it now.
But we can try to stay true to ourselves, to keep our humanity, to not be silenced. We will try.
Till tomorrow.