“Nezavisimaya Gazeta”: “Anti-crisis confrontation”
The Russian prime minister is borrowing the American experience of the 1930s whereas the president is warning that everything could come back
The government announced in August that the crisis had reached its nadir, the economy began to grow, inflation approached zero and production started gaining momentum. The economy continued improving in September. However, according to a study by Medialogia (the information and analytical system processing Russian media) at NG's request, the president and the prime minister gave a different assessment of the economic situation. Their views are different now, too. From August to November President Dmitry Medvedev mentioned the word "crisis" 1,077 times. The relevant figure for Prime Minister Vladimir Putin is 940 times. The tone of their speeches was not the same.
Since the very beginning of the crisis, Putin tried to use the word less and less in order not to stir emotions. As soon as the economy showed a sign of growth he was filled with optimism. In his public speeches, Putin preferred to always praise the activities of the government. Most often he used the following phrase: "Despite the global crisis, we have managed to..." In his words "we have managed," for instance, to preserve the budget funding of the federal targeted programme for the Far East development and to upgrade the level of mortgage lending.
In an interview with the Chinese media last October Putin said that he felt a real drive pulling the country out of the crisis: "Obviously, today all of us are in a unique position - in the global financial and economic crisis. Overcoming it is our priority. This is such a big challenge. In principle, I like dealing with such large-scale and urgent issues. It always creates a certain drive." His speech at the United Russia congress was crowned with the statement that the government had coped with the crisis and was ready to reach new ambitious goals on the road of modernisation.
On the contrary, President Medvedev did not miss an opportunity to tell the public that it is too early to rejoice and calm down, that it will take a long time to overcome the crisis. Moreover, he believes that the crisis may return. If the economy is not switched to the tracks of innovation, one more wave of crisis will destroy raw materials production. Medvedev wrote this in his programme article "Russia, Go!" in September and developed this subject in his address to the Federal Assembly.
Curiously, in the last few months the media has also covered the crisis in different ways. For instance, the electronic press, television and radio, which attract mass audiences, mentioned the word "crisis" 2,077 times. The press and internet-media, designed for a more sophisticated audience, wrote about the crisis almost five times more often - 11,067 times. Apparently, television and radio largely shared the opinion of the prime minister on the need to abstain from negative statements.
Obviously, Putin's optimistic rhetoric appealed to journalists more than the president's pessimistic statements. The media used the expressions "we are coming out of the crisis, "the crisis is overcome," "the crisis is weakening," and "we have started coming out of the crisis" about 2,000 times, whereas the phrases "the crisis continues," "the crisis is not yet over," "the crisis is dragging out" and "the crisis is at its peak" were mentioned only 326 times.
However, all in all, the positive changes in the Russian economy which took shape in the beginning of autumn were short-lived. In October a temporary recession occurred in the processing industry and GDP continued falling, from 7.8% to 8.1%. This was largely caused by the problems of financing production and by extremely weak demand. However, the government did not yield to defeatist attitudes. It seemed that Putin decided to test the Western anti-crisis model but with due account for Russian conditions, all the more so since the shape of the crisis had substantially changed. Last autumn this was a crisis of liquidity. In other words, the global economy was short of cash and for this reason pumping liquidity into banks was a priority.
IMF Managing Director Dominique Strauss-Kan said that now the amount of money in the global economy has increased considerably. Now the West has started the race for devaluating national currencies. The United States is in the lead. The American approach is simple enough - to devalue the dollar, make its produce more competitive and gain an advantage in global trade. Europe is doing the same with its currency. The middle class is the main support of the European economy. It is not surprising that the Western governments are doing all they can to encourage consumption by this category of population.
Russia does not yet have a middle class. Most of its people live beneath the poverty line. The prime minister has chosen to support pensioners, the poorest strata of society, as the main anti-crisis measure. Last week he announced a decision to raise pensions dramatically. It is no secret that pensioners are the main consumers of cheap domestic goods. If they have the money, they will buy Russian goods, thereby promoting domestic production. Putin has also taken another anti-crisis measure - construction of cheap housing and allocation of 250 billion for mortgages. The United States took similar steps during the Great Depression of the 1930s.
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Frequency of the assessments of the "economic crisis" (from 01.08.09 to 25.11.09)
"We are coming out of the crisis"/1,165
"The crisis is over"/600
"The crisis continues"/168
"The crisis is overcome"/141
"The crisis is not yet over"/129
"The crisis is weakening"/19
"The crisis is dragging on"/18
"We have starting coming out of the crisis"/14
"The crisis has reached its peak"/11
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Elina Bilevskaya
