Russians Crave Basic Help But Putin Spends On War
Russia is a social and environmental disaster
When a dam burst a few days ago portions of a Russian city of 230,000 were flooded so badly that thousands had to be evacuated from their homes.
Citizens of Orsk were angered enough to launch a protest – unusual in the current crack-down environment of Russia, where state suppression of demonstrations for Alexei Navalny is in recent memory. Tass, the Russian state news agency, reported that hundreds of people gathered in front of the main administrative building in Orsk with people chanting “Putin help us”, and “shame”.
They have a point.
The governor of the region, Denis Pasler, offered compensation of 10,000 rubles a month (about $107).
But the total infrastructure damage goes well beyond households: it is estimated at some $227 million.
A criminal probe is now underway to investigate possible construction violations that may have contributed to the breach.
The damage from this flood, however, goes well beyond fiddling with the fringes of engineering or a few violations – the entire watershed needs to be re-evaluated with an eye to changes on a fundamental level.
Local authorities said the dam could withstand water levels up to 5.5 meters (nearly 18 feet). But in the recent flood the water level reached about 9.3 meters (30.51 feet)…more than double the anticipated crises containment need.
Engineering disasters occur in other countries too, but corrective action is taken in places where people have a vote. The Francis Dam Disaster in 1928 is a classic example; designed by the legendary William Mulholland, the Los Angeles-area dam gave way when the earth on its sides proved soft. Within a few days there were a dozen investigations underway and fundamental changes were made to public policy and administration.
This does not happen in countries with no democracy – if authorities do not have to pay attention to the people, their concern is diluted. Putin got more than 80% of the Russian vote – but no democracy around the world would acknowledge the legitimacy of the electoral sham. People showed up, saluted, and went home. Putin does what he pleases, including invasions of neighboring countries.
His entire economy is based on a return to the past: to a time of oil and extraction. In fact, growing awareness of climate change and social inequality was the real threat to Putin’s oil-fed fiefdom. Putin’s aim is to restore the reign of oil, steel and smoke, the majesty of military power, and the coerced unity of the people.
Russia’s oil industry was created by an American capitalist of the Old Mindset: Fred Koch. He built 15 refineries in Russia between 1929-1932. His sons are now pushing the US back to a Right-Wing reign of climate denial. David and Charles Koch each own more than $50-billion; their only redeeming factor is that Donald Trump says they are a joke (they don’t support him).
Under the extraction era, Russia’s industrial base withered, and its income floated more and more on oil. Fossil fuels now make up more than two-thirds of Russia’s exports and fund more than half of its federal budget.
Extraction requires few workers; the average Russian income has been falling since 2012, which happens in few other countries. Russia’s people matter less and less; Russia underspends on social investments like education so badly that it ranks 125th in the world, falling between India and Vietnam.
Now, almost half of Russia’s territories are exhibiting signs of significant ecological distress. Deforestation, gas well burn-off, pollution and nuclear waste top the list. Russia is currently warming up 2.5 times faster than the rest of the globe.
One example from the Russian Arctic shows how bad the environmental impact can be: the Norilsk Nickel sites in Norilsk and the Murmansk region. Norilsk took first place among the country’s cities with its emissions of 1,787,000 tons of pollutants into the air, or 10.5% of atmospheric emissions from all stationary sources in the Russian Federation. Lunas landscapes extend from the mines out 30 kilometres, where “there is not a single living piece of grass or shrub.”
It has been labelled as one of the ten most polluted places on our planet.
Abandoned houses, neighborhoods and villages have become a symbol of northern Russia.
Vortuka has become the largest mining enterprise in Russia, and a calling card of its operations is a lack of funds to maintain urban infrastructure in proper condition. So it was in 2022, on New Year’s Eve, that Vortuka’s wastewater treatment plants collapsed. The contents of the sewer were dumped into a nearby stream for almost three weeks, from where it flowed along the Vorkuta and Usa rivers into the Pechora River, which flows into the Barents Sea.
In neighboring Usinsk region 200,000 tons of oil spilled from a pipeline to become the largest onshore oil spill in world history. Environmentalists say it will take 100 years for the territory to regenerate itself.
These are not isolated infrastructure disasters; these are regular occurrences fed by an authoritarian state that cares nothing for its land or its people. A huge gas pipeline explosion outside St. Petersburg, major fires in two separate Moscow shopping malls allegedly caused by poor welding, faulty power grids that have left tens of thousands without heat and electricity, sewer pipes bursting in the southern city of Volgograd and flooding several streets with feces and waste water while leaving 200,000 of the 1 million residents without water or heating for several days - these are regular features in the Russian landscape.
“During the last heating season more than 7,300 accidents occurred in housing and utilities sector of the country, and, judging by the way the winter started in 2022, one should not expect the statistics to go down” said an article in the city of Perm.
A Russian senator, Andrei Shevchenko, said in 2022 that utility infrastructure in Russia had depreciated by 60 percent and that the cost of needed repairs exceeded 4 trillion rubles, or about $58 billion. Shevchenko noted that in some regions, the state of public utilities was “of great concern,” and that in some cases the overall wear and tear had exceeded 70 percent.
A civil society group in the Siberian city of Omsk, where winter temperatures fall to minus-4 degrees Fahrenheit, noted that “On TV they say that Europe is freezing, but no one mentions that in Omsk 40,000 houses do not receive gas. The rest of the homes have to regularly turn off the heating, because the infrastructure for utilities has been totally worn out.”
They highlighted the fact that many Russians outside Moscow still live with rudimentary heating and experience regular utility accidents, such as exploding boilers. Many freezing Russians have been forced to cook their meals out in the streets.
Their mood is not improved by their observations of “thieves’ capitalism” whereby their leaders enjoy villas and vineyards on the Cote d'Azur, luxury real estate in Dubai, personal planes and yachts the size of a destroyer.
On top of this another catastrophe is superimposed – a copying of the Western, liberal idea of creating huge urban agglomerations. Russian planners say that they cannot and will not develop the entire Russian Federation. There is no money, with a war on, so it is necessary to concentrate development around cities like Moscow, St. Petersburg, Kazan, and Nizhny Novgorod. A consequence of this philosophy is that villages, villages, towns and cities are dying out, shrinking, and large cities are swelling. With a fundamentally old infrastructure.
Vladimir Milov, a former deputy energy minister turned opposition politician, said infrastructure failures would not trigger protests but would contribute to an eventual uprising. “Putin and his government are used to thinking that the Russian population are folks who will continue to suffer and tolerate all this negativity for as long as they rule.”
Before he was killed in Putin’s jails, Alexei Navalny had been filming interviews in Siberia that highlighted construction problems and the dangerous living conditions of certain neighborhoods.
Russia’s invasion thus far has cost it the money it needed to invest in infrastructure, including social costs, and has created a pocket of national poverty where sanctions have cut Russia off from access to Western technologies.
Even before the war, Putin’s fascination with the military jeopardized Russia’s infrastructure. In the 20 years that Putin had leading up to his war, China, for example, radically modernized its entire infrastructure during that time.
At the start of his war, Russian regional authorities estimated that at least four trillion rubles ($43-billion) was needed to replace all of the country’s utility networks. In the first nine months of his war, the fighting cost Putin 5.7-trillion RUB ($60-billion). He could have fixed all the old infrastructure in Russia for the cost of part of a year’s worth of fighting.
Meanwhile, the costs of standing still are rising. Taxes for utilities and public services like wastewater removal have been raised by almost 20%.
The environmental damage is another issue.
Today’s Russian social catastrophe on its own could have used up all of Putin’s reserves.
Society in Russia has gone backwards.
Over the past decade, GDP in other advanced economies has grown by 22%; across the world as a whole it has risen by 41% (both adjusting for price changes). Russia’s economy is now 7% smaller than it was in 2012.
Russia’s oil export proceeds have fallen by two-thirds since the invasion.
“Russia’s economy is entering a long-term regression,” predicted Alexandra Prokopenko, a former Russian Central Bank official who left the country shortly after the invasion.
She was echoed by Russian billionaire Oleg Deripaska, who warned this month that Russia is running out of cash. “There will be no money next year, we need foreign investors.”
The money that does exist goes to the top. Nearly half of Russia’s national income goes to the upper 10% -- an amount even worse than in America. It was produced by companies owned by just eight families. No taxes were paid. It was a family affair.
The percentage of the population living under the poverty line has grown from 10.8 % in 2013 to 13.8 % in 2016 – which means that nearly 20 million Russians now do not have enough money to live on. Perceived poverty is even higher – according to one survey, 20-23 % of the population considered itself poor in 2017, up from 15 % in 2014.
In the meantime up to 35 million Russians do not have a toilet, although the situation mostly concerns rural areas, according to
http://Trud.ru
. Every 10th apartment in most cities does not have water, sewage or heating, and every fifth family does not have hot water. Russia has the largest population share of any developed nation with no access to indoor plumbing. 45% of Russian families with multiple children are not connected to centralized sewage systems. Three quarters of rural residents use outhouses.
The effects of the sanctions on the Russian economy will make these conditions even worse. The firms that pulled out of the country are not coming back any time soon - and Russia will be on the sidelines while these firms continue to modernize globally.
Even Putin’s women are letting him down.
Russia now has about 1.5 births per woman, which is below the rate of 2.1 needed to maintain the population. Russia’s low fertility rate has been a key priority for the Kremlin since Putin came to power, but previous interventions, such as more state benefits for mothers, have not had the desired effect.
And in conditions of uncertainty, such as a war and a tumbling economy, many couples will continue to postpone having children for some time until the situation stabilizes. In 2024, Russia is likely to see an even further decline in the birth rate.
Women live in families that are rarely full and rarely nuclear.
Their domestic environment is uncertain: Russia tops the world for divorce rates. About 75 percent of marriages ended in divorce and the average duration of a marriage is about ten years.
The husband is typically 5-10 years older; same-age marriage is rare. Women are expected to get married as early as possible.
Even if she stays married the average Russian woman lives for fourteen years longer than a man. She will spend a greater part of her life as a widow or divorcée than as a wife.
Life expectancy in Russia in 2021 is 65.3 for men and 77.1 years for women – a difference of almost twelve years, the highest in the world.
It is different in many other countries. In Italy, for example, the gender gap in longevity was 4.3 years and the average marriage was expected to last seventeen years. The average Italian woman spent more years as a wife than as a widow.
Part of the reason for the high divorce rate – and high male death rate - is that Russian men make a habit of binge drinking, heavy smoking, high-fat diets and poor exercise. Unhealthy lifestyles are also the norm for many Russian women, but - even if unemployed or impoverished - women still have their children and grandchildren to take care of. For them, childcare is both a burden and a refuge.
Men tend to avoid their families and children far more often than women, and this crucial difference is connected to men’s shorter lives.
Historical traumas, a general lack of trust and the debilitating experience of many Russians in prisons and military barracks also play a role.
In fact, women are birth-avoiding. From the late Soviet period onwards, Russia was a world leader in abortions.
In 2022, the number of terminations per woman in Russia – a country in which abortion was almost never talked about – was four times higher than in the US, where it was a central political issue.
Last year, the Kremlin reintroduced the Soviet-era Mother Heroine award for women who have 10 or more children, offering a lump sum cash prize of $16,500.
Women are disadvantaged in their attempts to get out of their trap. They cannot engage in job activity with the same effectiveness as men. The salary of a Russian woman is 40 percent less than that of a Russian man. Women are well integrated into the labor market and hold skilled jobs even more often than men, but these jobs were not better paid.
Poor pay extends to poor power: In 2021, 10 percent of ministerial positions in Russia were held by women, compared to 46 percent in the U.S.
They are not supported by their men. Russia is a patriarchal state. The frequency of domestic violence in Russia exceeds Western figures by a factor of four. Every year, some 600,000 women are victims of domestic abuse and 15,000 women are murdered by their male partners, and Russia’s per capita rate of feminicide surpassed that of all other countries. Moreover, in 2017, Russia decriminalized domestic battery. Domestic battery kills a Russian woman every 40 minutes. Russian police, if called to a scene, tend to laugh it off as in internal matter and tell the woman to be nicer to her husband.
Violence affects one in four families in Russia; two thirds of homicides are committed due to family or domestic reasons.
Now, under Putin’s new rules, a man who beats his wife or children can only be punished with a fine or 15 days in prison. The bill proposing the change was passed almost unanimously in the socially conservative (male) legislature.
An article in the popular tabloid Komsomolskaya Pravda cheerfully told readers about an “advantage” of wife-beating: “Recent scientific studies show the wives of angry men have a reason to be proud of their bruises. Biologists say that beaten-up women have a valuable advantage: they more often give birth to boys!”
The logical extension of the proposition was never mentioned: pain makes boys.
The article was later amended.
Health spending per capita is appalling: 104th place, on par with Nigeria and Uzbekistan. Russian people don't go to the doctor in regular basis, they are afraid of them or simply don't believe in them.
It is also not surprising that one global happiness index placed Russia 78th, between the silent Turkmenistan and the protesting Hong Kong.
This does not help Putin establish political stability; Russia ranks 147th in 2020, between Belarus and Papua New Guinea.
Five million people left the country during the first twenty years of Putin’s rule.
Russia has become peripheral to the world economy. As a resource extractor it can and largely has been replaced by Western powers. Its ownership class emerged from the state monopoly of the Soviet years, with a bureaucracy that included most of the old Soviet actors – but in a ‘private enterprise’ role. Read; they now had no limits.
According to Jacobin: “the Russian capitalist and managerial class was created out of a certain kind of people: the bureaucratically connected criminal vultures who fed on economic destruction.”
This illuminates not only the emerging form of Russian capitalism, but also the omnipresence of violence and corruption.
At the same time, the government avoids responsibility for living standards by offloading economic progress onto the remaining market forces and family structures. This is how a violent government can co-exist with social and economic stagnation.
It is not a stable or long-lasting combination. At some point, it will collapse inward and there will be another astonishing and rapid change of regimes.
By historical precedents, a change of leader in Russia has almost always been accompanied by liberalization, not bloody chaos.
Khrushchev’s thaw after Stalin, Gorbachev’s perestroika after Brezhnev’s gerontocracy, and Yeltsin’s reforms after the end of the Soviet Union, show the liberalizing trend that will no doubt work again after the Putin collapse.
Recall how close we came, in fact, to a Putin collapse already, when the mercenary army of Yevgeny Prigozhin closed in on Moscow. The Russian crowds cheered him on and posed for selfies. We were within 200 kms of seeing a regime change.
Putin had all of this in his hands to change, in 2022.
Instead of invading Ukraine, he could have revamped Russia.
He could have enhanced the educational system, supported families, increased funding to innovative new firms, supported new infrastructure and cleaned up environmental disasters.
He would have been praised throughout the land.
Instead, he fell back on a tradition of lawless exploitation and murder.
Russia has spent up to $211 billion in equipping, deploying and maintaining its troops for operations in Ukraine. The war had cost Russia an expected $1.3 trillion in previously anticipated economic growth through 2026. A million Russian soldiers have been killed or have become casualties. It has lost one-third of its Black Sea fleet - 25 ships costing some $215-million each, for a total of $5.3-billion. And the rest of its fleet is functionally inoperative. 342 Russian aircraft and 325 helicopters have been shot down; the aircraft vary in cost between $1-million and $300-million, but certainly the total for the lost air power is approximately $10-billion.
Then there are those one million human beings.
Setting aside the most important element – the grief and pain – a hard-cost estimate of a human life is assumed in the West to be some $7.5-million.
That would be $18-quintillion.
Oddly, that’s the number Putin would have no trouble pushing aside.
And then there is the damage to his oil refineries etc. His economy is shrinking on a weekly basis because of those strikes.
If Putin had put 1% of all that expense into solving Russia’s real problems, he would be ruling one of the most expansive countries in the world.
It has not occurred to any Russian media source to do an analysis of Russia’s “opportunity cost” - the cost-benefit to Russia of having taken this alternative course of action.
And as long as Putin is at the head of the table, it won’t be done.
But he won’t be there forever. Maybe not even for long.
There is a whole new future waiting for “Russia 2.0”.
Thank you for reading Barry’s Substack.
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Barry, thank you for writing about Russia and Ukraine! Your insights and information are so valuable! I used to read your posts on Medium but for some reason I got an error the last time I searched for you there. What happened?