Putin on the Ritz
Keith Gessen, author of All the Sad Young Literary Men, reported from Russia in the November 20 London Review of Books. He’s there for a year to help out his octogenarian grandmother and keep her company, but as the global financial crisis grew, all she wanted to know was whether to take her modest life savings out of Sberbank and convert the money from roubles to dollars.
He wasn’t sure (the dollar didn’t look all that mighty either). Official television kept reassuring people, and the government had $500 billion in a rainy day fund built up from oil revenues when oil was above $100 a barrel. But now the slush fund had shrunk by half, and in what passes for a private sector the legendary Oligarchs had lost 62% of their fortunes.
Gessen notices how the crisis seems to be affecting Vladimir Putin:
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“Watching Putin these past few weeks has been unpleasant but riveting ….. In early October, he held a meeting with a group of Communist politicians and gave them, as is his wont, a hectoring speech. He has a high, screechy voice, with the slightly lazy pronunciation that is the hallmark of the Russian bureaucratic-criminal class, and every time I’ve seen him on television recently he’s been leaning forward in a threatening way and enunciating every syllable as if he were speaking to idiots. He brushed aside the Communists’ demands and then, warming up to things, began to talk about the United States. ‘There is no question that the age of American power is finished,’ he said. ‘The time when they were a model of democracy, and a leader of the world, is over.’ And you begin to think that if the Russian stock market had to all but disappear; if Putin’s friends the oligarchs had to lose 230 billion dollars; if eventually this meant that supply chains were going to be disrupted and people might have trouble finding food a few months down the line – well that would be a pretty small price to pay of only we could stop listening to those self-righteous fucking Americans.â€