It is, during the campaign for the legislative elections in September, the assistant of an elected opposition member of the Moscow suburbs who entrusts to feed his family by supplying themselves with expired products. It is a retiree from Chelyabinsk, in the Urals, who tells a local site to go without beets, too expensive for her pension of 10,000 rubles (120 euros). These are families for whom a dentist appointment is a disaster. It is a Vladimir Putin forced to publicly bang his fist on the table for ” require “ a drop in the price of pasta …
After twenty years of reign of Vladimir Putin in Russia, the observation, in the form of a paradox, is striking: the country has never been so rich; its inhabitants are getting poorer year after year. On both sides of this theorem, the indicators are clear. On the one hand, they are bright green. With the exception of 2020, the budget is in balance or in surplus; public debt does not exceed an enviable 18% of gross domestic product (GDP); at the last score in September, financial reserves reached 618 billion dollars (535.2 billion euros), or two and a half years of budget.
On the other side, they are bright red. The poverty rate stood at 13.1% at the start of 2021, an almost constant increase since 2012. And this, with a poverty threshold defined by law particularly low – or 11,700 rubles per person. The data from the official statistical agency Rosstat are more telling. They indicate, for example, that 62% of Russians have an income that is sufficient only to pay for food and clothes.
Rising prices for basic necessities
The median salary in the country is 32,400 rubles, the average pension is 16,800 rubles. According to a study by the Levada Center, an independent Russian NGO, two-thirds of Russians have no savings whatsoever and, in the absence of an effective safety net, are particularly vulnerable to the vagaries of life.
The first two terms of Vladimir Putin had been marked by a sharp rise in the standard of living – largely attributable to a continuous increase in the price of hydrocarbons and to a catch-up, after the decline of the 1990s. population was able to discover mass consumption, travel, but also debt.
Since 2013, the trend is quite different. During this period, while the GDP grew by a modest 7.5%, the standard of living of the Russians fell by more than 10%, a decline that the fall of the ruble and the rise in taxes are not enough to explain. The progressive phenomenon has become particularly painful over the past year, with a sudden and very marked increase in the prices of basic necessities.
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