The Shock of the Old

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Economist 1/20/05

Russia's protests

The shock of the old

Vladimir Putin is facing the most widespread protests of his presidency. What will they mean for the rest of it?

Jan 20th 2005 | moscow |

THE protests were most energetic in St Petersburg, the home town of Vladimir Putin, Russia's president. But they spanned the entire country, from the Gulf of Finland, to the north Caucasus, to Khabarovsk and Sakhalin island in the far east. Russia's own revolution? Hardly. But the “grey” or “chintz” revolt, as the protests by thousands of furious pensioners have been christened, may influence the path of Mr Putin's presidency. They also underline how his brand of authoritarianism can still be vulnerable.

To find out which demographic group has fared worst since the collapse of communism, you have only to take a stroll around the Kremlin. Muscovite beggars are generations older than the runaways and addicts who panhandle in western capitals. The average monthly pension is only a little over 2,000 roubles ($70). For many older Russians, the benefits-in-kind that survived, until this year, from the Soviet period, were an essential protection against outright penury. Many also regard free transport and subsidised utilities and medicines as rightful recognition of past services to the state. After the hyperinflation of the 1990s, they also tend to prefer tangible privileges to cash.

Unsurprisingly, then, protests erupted last summer when Russia's parliament approved a plan that would result in most such benefits being converted into cash payments, to be disbursed by a combination of federal and regional authorities. Yet the basic thinking behind the plan was sound enough. The benefits are enjoyed by a mystifying array of overlapping groups—war veterans, the disabled, Chernobyl victims and sufferers from political repression, to name but a few. The system is unwieldy, expensive, prone to corruption and poorly targeted. And its benefits have been enjoyed unequally by urban and rural dwellers.

But, as Nikolai Petrov, of the Carnegie Moscow Centre, points out, although reforms may sound good in theory, they can be hard in practice. When this one took effect on January 1st, incompetence or cash shortages meant that many who were supposed to receive money from their regions got nothing. And many who were paid found that their new income was not enough to buy what they had lost. As one old man in Khimki, a suburb of Moscow where, as elsewhere, the loss of transport rights was the main grievance, pithily declared, “they said life would be better [after the reform], but it is not better.”

Russians were given an unusually long, ten-day new-year holiday. After it, thousands of pensioners made their feelings known. They blocked roads and blockaded administrative buildings. In some towns, bus drivers who presumed to charge elderly passengers were attacked. Even Patriarch Alexy, head of the Russian Orthodox church and not known for opposing Mr Putin, made tacit criticisms.

Apart from their size and spread, the protests displayed two other features. Big demonstrations during Mr Putin's tenure have usually been organised at the Kremlin's behest. His allies, perhaps struggling to comprehend such a show of independence, claim that these ones were cooked up by political opponents. Some certainly leapt on the bandwagon: Gennady Zyuganov, the Communist Party leader, described the benefits reforms as a “social Beslan”. In fact, the protests seem to have been largely spontaneous. Pensioners present at the eruption in Khimki, where a rally at the Lenin memorial was followed by a blockade of the main road to the airport, attribute the insurrection to word-of-mouth among unhappy locals.

The other feature is that some protesters, at least, blame Mr Putin directly (a few placards even compared him to Hitler). True to form, the president at first kept his head down. Eventually, after seven days of protests, he emerged. Playing the good tsar disappointed by his bad advisers, he blamed ministers and regional administrators, and ordered a bigger and earlier pension boost than had been planned (240 roubles a month, instead of just 100). He praised the regions that had kept transport benefits, and told others to emulate them. He also drew favourable comparisons with the chaotic social security of the 1990s. To assuage protesters and Mr Putin alike, many regions rushed to give back some benefits that had been withdrawn.

Will heads roll? The protests may intensify at the start of next month, when utility bills minus subsidies are sent out. The Communists and others have launched a symbolic bid for a no-confidence motion in parliament. There has even been talk of Mr Putin firing the government. He may yet sacrifice some ministers, perhaps one of the few liberals still left, such as Alexei Kudrin, the finance minister. Mr Putin's own popularity, although down from its peak, remains high. But his image as paternalistic guarantor of stability, venerated by just the sort of people who have been protesting, has been tarnished.

What conclusions will Mr Putin draw? Perhaps that, in the absence of serious opposition and little in the way of independent media, he is more likely to sign flawed laws. In this case, more scrutiny might have led to simple improvements, such as a phased withdrawal of benefits-in-kind, or more generous cash replacements. Perhaps he will note that when he becomes responsible for appointing regional governors—a change that will take effect this year—his scope for buck-passing will shrink. More likely, he will conclude that reform is messy and painful. Creditably, Mr Putin has not surrendered the principle this time. But he may now decide that, given Russia's big oil revenues, he can do without further mess and pain.

He will also notice that a botched refashioning of a Soviet legacy has excited far more unrest than the war in Chechnya or the erosion of Russian democracy. Grigory Yavlinsky, whose Yabloko party was virtually wiped out in parliament at the last election, says gloomily that the benefit protesters are fundamentally anti-liberal, and that Mr Putin's government has further discredited the whole idea of liberal reform. There are, sadly, precious few orange flecks in Russia's grey revolt.

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