(Dobbs) Putin's Punishing Not Just Ukraine, but Russia Too
Will Russian affluence be a fleeting memory?
“A return to Soviet-era scarcity.”
If you ever crossed the Iron Curtain as I did many times during the Cold War, that will put a chill in your bones.
But in reporting on the war in Ukraine, that’s how The New York Times has portrayed the possibilities for the near future: “A return to Soviet-era scarcity.” However, it’s not painting a picture of war-torn Ukraine, whose population we already know is suffering in unimaginable ways. It’s painting a picture of Russia itself.
This is how, in pursuit of his megalomaniacal goals, Vladimir Putin is punishing his own nation. In the bad old days of the Soviet Union, scarcity was a perpetual punishment in daily life.
Despite that, we do see signs of support for Putin’s war from everyday Russians but it’s probably fair to remind ourselves— just like the days when I reported from the Soviet Union where Tass and Pravda had a monopoly on people’s minds— Russians don’t have CNN and Fox News, The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal. They live today in an increasingly inhibited information bubble of Putin’s making, and the only lens through which they can see the war is his.
So with that speck of sympathy, here is a piece of just one report about scarcity from inside Russia….
“Basic items, from paper to buttons, are in short supply.”
So short in buttons that clothing manufacturers can’t complete their products. So short in paper that banks are putting less information on customers’ receipts so that each one they print can be smaller.
This has to come as a shock to Russians in the post-Soviet era, who had learned to take quality and abundance for granted. They thought short supplies and badly produced food and consumer goods were behind them.
For example, in the heart of Moscow, right across Red Square from the Kremlin, there is a department store called “GUM,” an acronym for “Glavnyy Universalnyy Magazin,” which we would translate to “Main Universal Store.” In the Soviet era, it had poor selections and poorer service. I once went in for a pair of shoes and walked out empty-handed. Of the starkly limited styles strewn on the floor, in the main department store in all of Moscow, none was my size.
But when the Iron Curtain collapsed and capitalism caught on, GUM was transformed into a collection of luxury boutiques. From New Balance to Burberry, from Leica to Levis, from Swatch to Samsung, more than a hundred shops indulged Russians’ long-stifled appetite for Western goods.
Now, those companies and more— like Hermes, like Prada— have pulled out of GUM and out of Russia, either indefinitely suspending operations or abandoning the nation altogether.
In a television appearance last month, Putin tried to put lipstick on the pig: “Sometimes you look at those leaving and think, ‘Maybe thank God that they are’.”
But that’s easy for him to say. Plenty of Russians, long accustomed now to Western luxuries and Western ways, won’t agree. Their affluence, like their fleeting flowering of freedoms after the Soviet Union disappeared, might turn out to be no more than a blink of an eye in the hard history of their nation. They might be looking now at a painful return to the austere standard of living they suffered in Soviet times.
They might be looking at a return to Soviet-era scarcity.
A piece of another report: “In Moscow, shoppers complained that a kilogram of bananas had shot up to 100 rubles from 60, while in Irkutsk, an industrial city in Siberia, the price of tampons at a store doubled to $7.”
At some point, citizens can’t afford to buy these things, and Russia can’t afford to make them or import them. Which could conceivably mean a return to the severely stocked shops of Soviet times. There were days when squash, cabbage, and spoiling lettuce were about the only produce on the shelves at a grocery store.
One day my wife and I went to Moscow’s only farmers market, run by collective farmers permitted small plots of private land to make a little extra money beyond what they got in their paltry government paychecks. Their grapes, although meager and tasteless in the grocery stores, were juicy and rich at the farmers market. But costly. You’d point to one grape, then to another, then maybe a couple more, and pay by the grape.
And of course, as part of the Western boycott since Russia’s invasion or the outright sale of assets by a thousand global corporations that stopped doing business there, there is no more McDonald’s, no more Starbucks. In the Soviet era, you could count the number of palatable Moscow restaurants on one hand with a finger or two left over. People might have to start counting again.
But a potential return to Soviet-era scarcity is about more than just cravings and conveniences for consumers.
“In a survey of health care professionals in April,” a report says, “60-percent of respondents said they had experienced shortages already. Among imported products, the items missing most included disposable gloves, catheters and suture materials.” What’s more, hospitals are having trouble replacing parts for dialysis machines and ventilators.
And the shortages don’t just plague Russian civilians. The Times ran a report last weekend about private citizens “crowdsourcing” critical goods for Russian soldiers at the front. Their warriors are short of everything from shoes and socks, to batteries and headlamps, even to insect repellent. Even more dire, their field hospitals in Ukraine urgently need anesthetics and antibiotics, wheelchairs and crutches.
If Russia is running short of anesthetics and antibiotics, batteries and tampons, paper and buttons, its future isn’t looking bright. While a return to Soviet-era scarcity is not inevitable— mainly because of the still impressive income from Russia’s vast reservoirs of energy— it is not beyond the realm.
None of this begins to compare, of course, with the suffering of virtually every Ukrainian today, which in the history of Europe after World War II has no parallel. But still, it is not what every Russian citizen deserves. On the other hand, Vladimir Putin deserves far worse. If the Western world maintains its solidarity and perseverance, inflicting punishment on the Russian despot is not beyond the realm either.
Over almost five decades Greg Dobbs has been a correspondent for two television networks including ABC News, a political columnist for The Denver Post and syndicated columnist for Scripps newspapers, a moderator on Rocky Mountain PBS, and author of two books, including one about the life of a foreign correspondent called “Life in the Wrong Lane.” He has covered presidencies and politics at home and international crises around the globe, from Afghanistan to South Africa, from Iran to Egypt, from the Soviet Union to Saudi Arabia, from Nicaragua to Namibia, from Vietnam to Venezuela, from Libya to Liberia, from Panama to Poland. Dobbs has won three Emmys, and the Distinguished Service Award from the Society of Professional Journalists.