The (Continuing) Russian Economic Miracle

Marker.Ru
June 2, 2011
Alexandra Bayazitova & Maria Zhebit
The Average Russian’s Diet Is No Better Than a Soldier’s Wartime Rations

Starting tomorrow, the minimum [monthly] wage in Russia will be increased by 6.5% to 4,611 rubles [approximately 11o euros]. It will thus be higher than the current cost of the consumer basket: this minimum selection of basic foodstuffs is now priced at just over three thousand rubles in Moscow. True, the contents of the basket have remained unchanged since 2006 and, despite assurances by the authorities that living standards have grown over the past six years, the diet of the average Russian looks no better than that of a German POW in 1941.

In the last ten years, the minimum wage has grown thirty-two times. Under current law, the minimum wage should not be less than the subsistence minimum, i.e., the value of the consumer basket. Its content has remained unchanged since 2006.

The average Russian citizen, according to the authorities, should eat 366 grams of bread or pasta per day. At the same time, in 1941, the rations for a German prisoner of war, whether in a prison camp or in transit, was almost twice as much — 600 grams. In daily terms, the Germans received three times more fish, a bit more vegetables, and four times more “salt, tea and spices.”

On the other hand, the minimum rations of Russians now include fruit (63 grams per day), eggs and milk, which German POWs were cheated out of. Russians are also supposed to have twice as much meat; Muscovites, almost three times more. We can rejoice in the fact that the Russians should receive, according to the authorities, 40 grams more sweets than German POWs during the war, and consume 16 grams more vegetable oil. Although, in contrast to the Russia-wide basket, the rations of the Germans also included flour, tomato puree, and during the best periods, peas, beans, dried fruit, and coffee.

[Title: Food Norms in the Consumer Basket and the Prison Camp Rations of a German POW
Headings: Muscovite’s Basket (2011) // A Russian’s Basket (2011) // Ration of German POW (1941)
All quantities given in grams.
List of food types: Bread and pasta; vegetables and potatoes; meat; fish; sweets; vegetable oil; salt, tea, and spices
Sources: Federal Russian Law No. 332 from December 8, 2010;  NKVD, Directorate for War Prisoners and Interned Persons, Guidelines Bulletin No. 25/6519; Law “On the Consumer Basket in the City of Moscow, 2011-2012]

Editor’s Note. Thanks to the members of the Chto Delat mailing list for pointing out this eye-opening article. In this connection, one of them writes:

It should be added that the income of 13% of the [Russian] population (according to Wikipedia) is lower than the minimum wage (below the poverty line). That is, it is not the “average” Russian we’re talking about here. According to official statistics, “average” Russians have a monthly income of 24 thousand rubles [i.e., approximately 575 euros]. Official statistics have nothing to say about what remains of this average if we deduct from the total income of the population the share earned by the thirteen percent of Russians who are wealthy.

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The Guardian
13 September 2011
Tom Parfitt
From Russia with lovage – Moscow leads gastro revolution
Middle-class Muscovites embrace food festivals and organic ingredients as city’s top chefs plan to expand into London

There was roast venison, ice cream made from black bread and beetroot, and a bar selling pints of pale ale. Such temptations, plus the promise of cooking tips from a slew of professional chefs, brought almost 12,000 people to Moscow’s Festival of Food last month.

The size of the crowds – three times the expected number – was testament to one thing: Russia is undergoing a gastronomic revolution.

“People are getting really sophisticated when it comes to food,” said Alexei Zimin, the festival’s organiser, in an interview this week. “When Russians go out these days they don’t only talk about cars and money, they talk about what they are eating.

“Fifteen years ago, 1,000th of 1% of the population regularly bought olive oil. Now it’s 1%. People are travelling abroad more, they know when a spaghetti carbonara is bad because they’ve eaten it at seven different restaurants and made it at home.”

The gastro-boom also involves the growth in the number of mid-market restaurants, a trend towards eating locally sourced produce, and the imminent expansion of “new Russian” cuisine into the west.

Zimin is editor of Afisha Eda, a slick food magazine which has become something of a bible for discerning Muscovites since its launch three years ago. At the festival in Gorky Park, a mile down the Moscow river from the Kremlin, Zimin held a masterclass on how to prepare shrimps with rosemary.

Visitors crowded around the stage, while stylish couples and families strolled through a nearby farmers’ market selling smoked duck breasts, goat’s cheese and organic vegetables. Other visitors joined long queues at field kitchens set up next to a boating lake by well-known city restaurants. Among them were Ragout and Bulka, two of a raft of new Moscow eateries that are neither smoky dives nor “elitny” hangouts for oligarch.

For now, the proliferation is confined to Moscow and limited to Russia’s slowly expanding middle class. Zimin, who trained as a chef in London, expects it to spread as wages rise and foreign travel becomes more accessible. “There is a big trend of restaurants opening that offer interesting food for sensible money,” he said. “It’s bistronomy; like the gastropub phenomenon in England.”

Foreign cuisine such as Italian and Japanese is especially popular but native dishes are also getting a makeover.

Russian cuisine is historically a bulky north European fare with an accent on boiled meat, soups and pies. Under Soviet rule the spiciest dining options were offered by Caucasian and central Asian restaurants. Yet even some of the hardiest of Russian recipes have been enticed into the realm of haute cuisine at Varvary (Barbarians) in central Moscow.

The high-end restaurant, owned by flamboyant chef Anatoly Komm sports blood-red chairs and the walls hung with traditional Vologda lace.

Offering the Guardian his own take on borscht – four melt-in-the-mouth duck livers and a perfectly spherical, hollow ball of smetana (sour cream) dissolved in a ladleful of beetroot soup – Komm said: “”I don’t do cafeteria food. After all, Tchaikovsky didn’t promote folk dancing, he wrote opera and ballet.”

Eighteen chefs at Varvary labour all day to produce a multi-course “spectacle” for 30 guests paying 8,500 roubles (£180) each. “In the beginning all my customers were foreigners but now at least 10% are Russians and I’m very pleased about that,” said Komm.

Several top chefs are planning steps abroad. Komm is exploring options in London, while the country’s most famous restaurateur, Arkady Novikov, is set to open two restaurants and a lounge bar on Berkeley Street in Mayfair, London, this autumn. Andrei Dellos is also launching a version of his Café Pushkin in New York.

In Moscow, one more sign of Russia’s food revolution is the appearance of businesses selling organic food via the internet. Companies suchas LavkaLavka and Ferma deliver lamb, eggs, cream cheese, vegetables and other products from farms near the capital.

In the absence of certification for organic foods, LavkaLavka gives detailed descriptions of each farmer and his or her property on its site.

“This is not just about healthy food,” said co-founder Boris Akimov. “It’s about tomatoes from farmer Ivan Novichikhin or butter from Nina Kozlova. It’s about money going to good people for good produce instead of being shovelled into the firebox of transnational companies that make who-knows-what, who-knows-where.”

The Russian Economic Miracle

Deloitte, one of the largest financial consulting companies in the world, has predicted that more than 1.2 million people in Russia will become dollar millionaires by 2020. Russia currently ranks 16th on Deloitte’s World Wealth List, with 375,000 dollar millionaires currently living in the country, and will climb to 13th place in the next decade, Deloitte forecasted. Deloitte’s survey includes the 25 countries with the world’s strongest economies.

This year, the top-ten list of countries with the largest number of millionaires includes the United States, Japan, Germany, the UK, France, Italy, Canada, China, Spain and Taiwan. The list is not likely to change much by 2020, Deloitte predicted, except Spain and Taiwan are likely to be replaced by South Korea and Australia.

In Deloitte’s research, millionaires were split into three groups: those worth up to $5 million, $5 to $30 million and more than $30 million. Russia already ranks in seventh place on the list of countries with the largest number of the “richest millionaires,” whose assets are worth $30 millions or more, behind the United States, China, Germany, the UK, India and France. Moreover, Russia’s millionaires beat out their foreign competitors by the wealth that is concentrated in their households: an average rich family here has $2.1 million, putting Russia in fifth place behind Switzerland ($4.2 million), Singapore ($4 million), the United States ($3.7 million) and Hong Kong ($2.9 million). Additionally, following the hardship of the economic crisis, Russia ranks third in the world in its number of billionaires, behind the United States and China. Moscow has become the world capital of billionaires (79 billionaires) ahead of New York City (58 billionaires).

[…]

Meanwhile, a survey conducted by the Moscow Higher School of Economics (HSE) found that 60 percent of the population in Russia has the same real income it had 20 years ago when the Soviet Union collapsed, and some even became poorer. HSE’s research found that income inequality between the late 1980s and the late 2000s in Russia has grown eight times faster than in Hungary, and is five times greater than in the Czech Republic. At present, the Gini coefficient, a statistic that determines income and wealth inequality worldwide, is twice more in Russia than in Sweden, and equivalent to those in Iran, Turkmenistan, Laos, Mali and Nigeria.

— Svetlana Kononova, “A Country of Beggars and Choosers: The Number of Millionaires in Russia Will Grow in the Next Decade, While Income Inequality Will Remain on the Level of African Countries,” Russia Profile, May 16, 2011

“Noblesse Oblige” as a Wrecking Ball (Paradny Kvartal, Petersburg)

Legality of Demolition of Historic Barracks Contested

By Sergey Chernov

The St. Petersburg Times

May 11, 2011 (Issue # 1655)

Another planning controversy is developing in the city, as more historic buildings in the center were demolished last week to make way for luxury apartment and office buildings.

Built by architect Fyodor Volkov in the early 19th century, the demolished buildings on the corner of Paradnaya Ulitsa and Vilensky Pereulok are known as the Preobrazhensky Regiment’s Barracks and used to house one of the Russian army’s oldest regiments, formed by Peter the Great in the late 17th century.

Following a public outcry, Governor Valentina Matviyenko ordered an internal investigation into the legality of a construction permit issued by the St. Petersburg State Construction Supervision and Expertise Service (Gosstroinadzor). The agency is subordinated directly to Matviyenko.

Matviyenko’s orders were based on a memorandum sent to her by City Hall’s Heritage Protection Committee (KGIOP) after the last building was demolished on May 3.

Yulia Minutina, a coordinator of preservationist group Living City, said that Gosstroinadzor issued the construction permit that contradicted the protected zones law.

The local press suggested that the investigation may result in the dismissal of Gosstroinadzor’s head Alexander Ort. Preservationists and public figures such as film director Alexander Sokurov asked Matviyenko to dismiss Ort in a petition in January.

The developer failed to show the demolition permit, according to Minutina.

“Demolition is a separate type of work that requires a separate permit,” Minutina said Tuesday.

“Nevertheless, it was not presented to us, nor have they seen it at the KGIOP and I’m not sure it ever existed. Of course this is a violation.”

“Besides, buildings in the center can only be demolished if they are in a poor condition, but we haven’t seen any document stating that the building was in a poor state and impossible to restore either.”

Minutina said the demolition was one of the issues the preservationists are planning to raise during a planned meeting with Matviyenko on Thursday.

While the last building was being destroyed during the May Day holidays, the authorities did not react to the appeals of concerned residents. At the same time, police reportedly harassed activists who picketed the demolition site, rather than checking whether the developer had the necessary permits.

“We waited for two hours for the police to arrive,” Living City’s Pyotr Zabirokhin said.

“But instead of stopping the demolition, they started checking our passports, copying our placards into their notebooks and threatening to disperse us if we didn’t go away.”

St. Petersburg Legislative Assembly Deputy Sergei Malkov has written a complaint regarding the police actions to the St. Petersburg police chief Vladislav Piotrovsky.

The tactic of demolishing historic buildings during public holidays was recently used when a large portion of the 19th-century Literary House was destroyed on Nevsky Prospekt during the Russian Christmas holidays in January, Zabirokhin pointed out.

“It has turned into a bad tradition that not entirely legal cases of demolition start during or just before holidays, when people are not ready to get mobilized quickly, and while officials are on holiday and nobody can be reached,” he said.

According to the project’s web site, the area previously occupied by the Preobrazhensky Regiment Barracks will be home to an “exclusive” Paradny Kvartal, an isolated “mini city” of 16 office and residential buildings.

Call Now!

“The true adornment of the quarter’s center will be a square with a fountain, comparable in size with that in front of the Kazan Cathedral,” the web site said.

However, apparently as a result of the controversy, the site was no longer available on Tuesday, redirecting to the web site of the developer, Vozrozhdeniye Peterburga. The original site can be viewed as files cached in Google.

Anna Mironovskaya, the marketing director of Vozrozhdeniye Peterburga, a subsidiary of the LSR Group, said Tuesday her company was only a sub-investor and was not in charge of legal matters and permits, citing the Ministry of Defense as the project’s developer and the Pyotr Veliky Construction Company as the commissioner.

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http://paradny.ru/questions/

— Who acquires real estate in Paradny Kvartal?

One of the main advantages of Paradny Kvartal is the social homogeneity of [one’s neighbors]. Our buyers are people of high social status. That is why we will be able to create “our own world” in which it will be pleasant and comfortable to live.

[…]

— What does the phrase “noblesse oblige,” which is frequently applied to Paradny Kvartal, mean?

The well-known phrase has rightly become not just the slogan but the authentic motto of Paradny Kvartal. It translates as “[one’s] station obliges [one].” For in Paradny Kvartal each detail underscores the project’s elitism, its exclusivity.

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Photos courtesy of Zaks.Ru and Chto Delat.

Greece: So Close, So Far Away

First, a prime specimen of reactionary brainwashing, on the Russian state channel’s news broadcast:

Vodpod videos no longer available.

http://www.vesti.ru/doc.html?id=361326

Greece is again on strike and for the fourth time this year saying no to its government. In any case, today’s strike will not change anything. Wages in the country have been cut, taxes raised. Moreover, by socialists. And this is happening not only in Greece. R0mania, Slovenia, Portugal, Spain: leftist governments as one are doing what is not at all characteristic for them. The financial crisis has dealt a painful blow to the ideas of European socialism. The principle of “work less, make as much money as everyone else” no longer functions.

Along with the economic crisis, Europe is undergoing a crisis of the socialist idea. Several thousand students rioted in the capital of Slovenia. They threw eggs at the police and broke windows at the parliament because, in order to save money, the ruling socialists are taking away their tax breaks and deprived them of free meals.

On the streets of Bucharest, Romanian trade unions brought 60,000 people plus one sheep to protest the centrist government’s plans to slash the pensions and wages of public sector workers, including those of the police who guard the biggest state palace in the world, built by Ceauşescu. “We have ‘enormous’ salaries,” ironically notes a policeman who took part in the demonstrations. “So the government wants to cut them by a quarter. It would be better if the ministers cut their own pay because theirs is enormous. We work day and night, we work overtime, but these hours are not paid. Police from around the country are here today, and we will come back if that is what it takes,” he promised.

Cutting the budget deficit is a condition of the 20 billion euro loan provided by the IMF. And there is every indication that Romania will see a repeat of the Greek scenario, which in Athens today lead to more demonstrations and everything shutting down. “The policies that Greek society has been confronted with are barbaric,” says a participant in the demonstrations in Athens.

All this is being said to Greek’s leftist government. Headed by hereditary socialist Papandreou, it is following the orders it receives from European and international capital. In the very same way Portugal’s socialist prime minister José Sócrates refuses to turn off this path. “The country needs these measures. They are essential and necessary. When a politician does what he should do and takes measures only to alleviate a difficult situation, people should realize that all the efforts that all the people of Portugal will have to make are absolutely necessary.”

“Those who earn more should have to pay more,” declared José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero when commenting on the decision to raise the income tax for rich people. At that moment the Spanish prime minister was speaking in his capacity as leader of the Socialist Workers Party. But trade unions are threatening him with a general strike all the same because at another press conference the very same Zapatero announced that the wages of public sector workers would be cut.

Socialism, after all, is not the name of a party. It is genuine where the economic conditions exist for it. The right is in power in Sweden, but it has not ceased to be the showcase of European socialism. At the municipal level there, it is now being discussed whether to cut welfare payments to chronic alcoholics who refuse treatment.

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A kind of response to this taxpayer-financed televised malarkey, here is the Vpered Socialist Movement’s preface to an essay by Olivier Besancenot and Pierre-François Grond (excerpted below):

It is surprising, but the events now under way in Greece, where hundreds of thousands of workers are demonstrating and striking in order to fight back against the harshest attack on their rights and livelihoods in recent decades, provokes only the slightest interest in Russian society. Kremlin talking heads and experts from the ranks of the liberal opposition gloat in unison as they applaud the liquidation of the last remnants of the European social state and pay their respects to courage of the Greek government, which has decided to take necessary “unpopular measures.” The silent [Russian] majority remains silent as always, assuming that the events in distant Greece have nothing to do with them. In fact, today’s Greece is closer to us than ever before. Since the beginning of this year, the Russian government’s menu practically wholly consists of “unpopular measures” prepared according to Greek recipes. Hence the [new] law that will radically cut subsidies to the public sector, and the transition to a new system of wage payments in the state sector, and the ever more persistent declarations about the need to raise the retirement age. Just as in Greece, working people in Russia are being made to foot the bill to save the banks and corporations. Like the Greeks, we turn out to be the main culprits of overblown budget deficits. We are also Greek workers in the sense that we are forced to pay for a crisis caused by the rich.

Today, as never before, we need to feel solidarity — not because it is a noble and beautiful feeling, but simply because we live in one world. A world that is strikingly insane, cruel, and unjust. A world where only the poor suffer. A world that so needs our will to resistance and protest.

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An excerpt from Olivier Besancenot and Pierre-François Grond, “We are all Greek workers”:

The Greek measures overwhelmingly approved by EU governments are an attack on social rights. According to the rules of globalised capitalism applied by these governments, Europe is losing ground in its global competition with the United States and emerging countries. Their solution is to regain competitiveness by attacking the standard of living and social protection won in Europe through decades of mobilisation by the workers’ movement.

This means a never-ending race to the bottom. And to think that they promoted the Maastricht Treaty, the EU Constitutional Treaty and the Lisbon Treaty as the building blocks of a Europe based on social justice and social welfare! What utter nonsense, when we compare this rhetoric to the bleeding imposed on the Greeks – at 5% interest, no less! The European banks can continue to grow rich on the Greek austerity plan, although they are the ones most responsible for the global economic chaos. There is nothing humanitarian about the “assistance plan” that has been adopted by the National Assembly. By supporting the government, the French Socialist Party has lined up on the side of finance and not the oppressed.

Though incapable of organising solidarity of any kind, the European Union certainly knows how to profit from a people’s misery. Sarkozy and Germany’s Chancellor Angela Merkel have jointly declared that they will rescue the Eurozone by strengthening “budgetary oversight” of states that fail to meet the criteria of the EU Stability Pact. Apparently, in a neoliberal Europe, governments are only allowed to contravene the Stability Pact when they are pumping public money into the banks. Humanity will just have to wait.

Yet, never has there been such an urgent need for a social, ecological and anti-capitalist Europe based on solidarity. None of the current problems can be solved within national borders. We are all Greek workers subject to the same logic. Government debt is the product of 25 years of neoliberalism and tax cuts for the rich – on corporate incomes, capital and shareholder dividends. For 25 years these taxes have been constantly lowered, and yet we are still told that they represent an unbearable burden for employers and the well heeled. No, this crisis is not ours. In Greece, as elsewhere in Europe, we shouldn’t have to pay for it.

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Chris Hedges, “The Greeks Get It”:

Here’s to the Greeks. They know what to do when corporations pillage and loot their country. They know what to do when Goldman Sachs and international bankers collude with their power elite to falsify economic data and then make billions betting that the Greek economy will collapse. They know what to do when they are told their pensions, benefits and jobs have to be cut to pay corporate banks, which screwed them in the first place. Call a general strike. Riot. Shut down the city centers. Toss the bastards out. Do not be afraid of the language of class warfare—the rich versus the poor, the oligarchs versus the citizens, the capitalists versus the proletariat. The Greeks, unlike most of us, get it.