Under the effects of the sanctions imposed on it in response to the invasion of Ukraine, Russia is expected to plunge into a recession of 7% to 15% of gross domestic product in 2022, according to various estimates. For eight years, the country has certainly strengthened its economic and industrial autonomy. However, the crisis caused by these measures will not be experienced in the same way by the different categories of the Russian population, crossed by many fractures, explains Anna Colin Lebedev, specialist in post-Soviet societies and lecturer in political science at Paris-Nanterre University.
Since 2014 and the annexation of Crimea, Russia has strengthened its independence, in order to be able to remain self-sufficient in the face of new sanctions. How far can she?
People who are rich and close to power have been prepared for a long time to escape possible individual sanctions, by resorting to shell companies, nominees and various financial arrangements. This is common practice in Russia.
From an economic point of view, the country was also prepared. However, he had not imagined being imposed sanctions on such a scale. Admittedly, it has developed an alternative to the Western financial network Swift, from which some of its banks were excluded following the invasion of Ukraine. But the freezing of the reserves of the Central Bank of Russia held abroad had not been anticipated. Nor that so many Western companies would choose to pull out of the country because of the reputational risk.
Russia is a rentier economy. Apart from hydrocarbons, certain raw materials and armaments, it produces very little. And what it produces depends heavily on components and materials imported from overseas. In this regard, the country has failed to strengthen its autonomy, which was nevertheless a flagship project in 2014.
What fracture lines within Russian society make it possible to understand how these sanctions are experienced by the population?
Russian society is much more heterogeneous than one might imagine from Western Europe. The gap between a modest Russian and another of average income is abysmal, disproportionate to what is observed in Europe. There is a century of development gap between Moscow and the countryside.
Economist Natalia Zubarevich of Moscow State University speaks of a geoeconomic fault line, encompassing both differences in income and geographical position, i.e. more or less remoteness. less important in large cities. This draws three Russias: that of the wealthiest (excluding here the oligarchs and the ultra-rich) living in the large cities and especially in the capital, that of the medium-sized towns, in economic decline after the deindustrialization of the USSR, and that of the rural or semi-urban areas, very underdeveloped.
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