| Day after day the television news is filled with shots
of smiling
pensioners tickled pink by the Kremlin's plan to replace benefits for
socially vulnerable groups with cash payments. And day after day opinion
polls record growing hostility to the reforms among average Russians.
On several occasions the regime has promised that no one will suffer
as a
result of the proposed reform. But such is the general skepticism regarding
such promises that even if the compensation offered by the state were
adequate, people would still remain firmly convinced that they'd been
conned. And in essence they'd be right. Because the issue here is not
just
how many rubles each individual pensioner will need to get by without
free
public transportation.
So long as benefits were in place, people knew that come financial crisis
or stock market crash, they would still have a roof over their heads,
access to basic medical care and basic mobility. Now that certainty is
under threat.
The more this system is commercialized, the more it will cost to run.
Reimbursing transportation companies so that a portion of the total
ridership can travel for free is one thing. It is quite another to give
people enough money to cover the cost of bus tickets. After all, the price
of tickets includes a margin of profit for the operators, their taxes,
the
astronomical salaries of their top executives, income for the insurance
companies and dividends for the stock market speculators.
The same logic applies to medical care, housing and much else. The state
will be unable to keep up with spiraling costs. But it doesn't even plan
to
try. Having compensated people once, the state will wash its hands of
them.
The governors, in turn, know full well that popular resentment will
be
directed primarily at them. Regional and local budgets are already
strapped. Regional leaders complain to Moscow, and the feds reply that
the
requisite funds have been allocated. Technically, that's probably true.
But
the "requisite" funds are never sufficient to patch up all the
holes left
in regional budgets by the Kremlin's financial policy.
The value of social benefits rises as society becomes poorer. And the
experience of the last few years has shown that as the economy becomes
more
market-oriented, most Russians are less well off. In the early 1990s,
many
low-income people expected to have a wonderful life following the
implementation of market reforms. Today, just the thought of further
changes makes them shudder. All the more so because the Kremlin's latest
reforms bear the stamp of the same ideology that reigned in the early
1990s.
State propaganda isn't working, and not just because the messengers
are
incompetent. Even a brilliant spin doctor is powerless against lived
experience. If you'd never been to Africa, someone might be able to
convince you that the people there all have three legs. But he'd never
convince you that you and your neighbors are three-legged, no matter how
many tons of newsprint and hours of prime time he invested in the effort.
Free market propaganda was effective in Russia in the late 1980s and
early
1990s because people knew no more about living in a market economy than
they did about life in distant galaxies. They knew their own, Soviet world
inside and out, however, and they understood that communist propaganda
was
designed to deceive them at every turn. Wholesale rejection of the old
ideology led to an uncritical acceptance of new ideas that were, moreover,
presented as the only possible alternative.
Now the situation has changed. Russians have learned a lot since 1991
as
capitalism has become their reality. Gone are the days when people believed
that life would get better after another round of liberal reforms. Personal
experience has taught them just the opposite.
Among the reasons for the Kremlin's falling-out with the liberal
intelligentsia was its discovery that it no longer needed the well-paid
army of free market ideologues. Not because the regime plans to turn its
back on the market, but because now that the public knows what's what,
these ideologues are becoming increasingly less effective. Paying them
the
same high salaries, and more importantly according them the same political
influence that they enjoyed in the 1990s would be a complete waste of
resources -- something no market economy can allow. That's why the latest
stage of neo-liberal reforms has been accompanied by a cooling of the
regime's relationship with the gurus of neo-liberalism.
State propaganda is becoming blunt and aggressive because everyone knows
the state's main argument will be delivered with nightsticks, not with
words.
Boris Kagarlitsky is director of the Institute of Globalization
Studies.
See also:
the original at
www.themoscowtimes.com
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