Rich Russia, poor Russians

It is, during the campaign for the legislative elections of September, the assistant of an elected official of the opposition of the great suburbs of Moscow who entrusts to feed his family by providing outdated products. It is a retiree from Chelyabinsk, in the Urals, who tells a local site to deprive herself of beets, too expensive for her pension of 10,000 rubles (120 euros). These are families for whom a dental appointment is a disaster. It's a Vladimir Putin forced to publicly bang his fist on the table to "demand" a drop in the price of pasta...

After twenty years of Vladimir Putin's reign in Russia, the observation, in the form of a paradox, is striking: the country has never been so rich; its people are getting poorer year after year. On both sides of this theorem, the pointers are clear. On one side, 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 tally in September, the financial reserves reached 618 billion dollars (535.2 billion euros), ie 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 that is particularly low – i.e. 11,700 rubles per person. Data from the official statistics agency Rosstat are more telling. They indicate, for example, that 62% of Russians have incomes that are sufficient only to pay for food and clothing.

Rising prices of 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 and, in the absence of an effective safety net, are particularly vulnerable to the vagaries of life.

Vladimir Putin's first two terms in office were marked by a sharp rise in the standard of living – largely attributable to a continued rise 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 has been quite different. Over this period, while the GDP increased by a modest 7.5%, the standard of living of Russians fell by more than 10%, a decline that the fall of the ruble and the increase in taxes are not enough to explain. The gradual phenomenon has become particularly painful over the past year, with a sudden and very marked rise in the prices of basic necessities.

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