Lost 25 years
Because of pseudo-reformers, Russia missed the civilizational spurt that the world made
What does the word "nineties" associate with an American, an Englishman, or a South Korean? With technological and economic growth: Silicon Valley, the dot-com boom, the development of computer and mobile networks, the emergence of technology giant companies. After the economic downturn of the seventies and the troubled eighties, the advanced capitalist countries experienced rapid growth. In Russia, the nineties are associated with the collapse of a single territory of the country, poverty and “brothers” in crimson jackets.
It is difficult to argue with the fact that the economic problems of the late USSR were serious. But were they fatal? And were the reforms of the nineties their treatment? It seems that the “treatment” killed the patient. By the beginning of the “lost decade” Russia came up with a huge scientific background and a developed social insurance system, free medicine and education, which was the most popular in the world. Thanks to the pseudo-reformers and their equally talented heirs from all this, there is no stone unturned. As a result, Russia missed the social and technological breakthrough that other countries enjoyed. Not having had time to take the train carrying the whole world to the future, our country was stuck in a stop of the joyless present.
The death of the welfare state
Reformers of the early nineties convinced citizens that they are returning Russia to the bosom of the civilized world: after dead-end attempts to build a planned economy, the country is returning to a free market - as in the West, “as in the best houses of London and Paris”. But in which of the developed countries at that time there was a free market? It was in the nineties that the advanced capitalist countries began to actively limit the rights of corporations, increase taxes on them, and thereby increase social spending. So, in the 1980-s in the UK, the total amount of pension payments did not exceed 2% of the country's GDP. Today, according to the UK Pension Policy Institute, 99 billion pounds is spent on retirement - 5,5% of British GDP. The lion's share of this (67 billion pounds) is government pensions, although if you had known Margaret Thatcher about such extravagance, she would faint. But it was precisely in the last quarter of a century that European countries shifted the emphasis from the interests of big business to the interests of the ordinary citizen. At the end of 80, Western capitalism did not yet have that human face to which the market reformers seduced us. But now it has appeared - and in many respects precisely because the Western countries more and more resemble the USSR sunk into oblivion. What our liberal economists considered unviable is considered as a reality or a preferred option for the future.
The pension system in force in the USSR was the most generous in the world. Since the 1950s, when it became universal, it has been refined several times. According to the law “On pension provision for citizens in the USSR”, adopted in 1990, the minimum old-age pension was 55% of earnings, while for every full year of work in excess of 25 for men and 20 for women, the pension increased by 1% earnings The maximum pension reached 75% earnings. Doesn't this remind you of anything? Nowadays, pensions of a number of European countries, such as Scandinavian ones, are also generous. In our country, everything, alas, has long been wrong.
Of course, the Soviet pension system had a major disadvantage - due to the fact that the formation of pension funds was not assigned to the enterprises themselves, the latter sought to provide preferential pensions to the maximum number of their retiring employees. Thus, the pension system became an increasingly heavy burden for the budget. But was this a purely Soviet problem? Not at all, similar difficulties today are widely discussed in the press of Western countries. And the following solutions are proposed - for example, to raise the retirement age, to give old people the opportunity to work even when they reach retirement age, preferring retirement wages. In Russia, the economists of the era of the nineties ruined from the bullet: they took advantage of the fact that inflation has repeatedly reduced the real size of pensions, and indexed it, not keeping up with the rise in prices. As a result, it was possible to save money due to human capital: the impoverishment of older people led to the short life expectancy of Russians and the poor situation with their health.
But one should not think that the “reforms” hit mainly the old men. Even published by the publishing house of the Gaidar Institute two-volume book “Economy of Russia. The Oxford Collection, trying to bring all the economic problems to the “damn scoop”, cannot help but admit the obvious - in post-Soviet Russia, the able-bodied population was rapidly impoverished: “Contrary to expectations, neither the unemployed nor the pensioners are the main social groups in the category of low-income citizens of Russia. Instead, the poverty profile is determined mainly by the “working poor”, the rural population, as well as families with children (especially with only one parent). ” How it all diverges from the once-propagandized market reformers with the thought that poverty is the lot of lazy people!
Promising to form a well-to-do middle class in Russia, the liberals-marketers eventually cultivated only one really rich layer — a layer of large owners. For the late USSR, the Gini coefficient — an indicator of the financial stratification of society — was 26 (the smaller it is, the higher the equality of incomes of citizens). In modern Russia, it is equal to 39,9. This is not so bad: if we compare the incomes of the rich and the poor in the UK and the USA, we will get almost the same figures. But if we take the Gini coefficient for those countries that are considered prosperous and famous for their high culture of attitude towards human capital, we will see that it is the same as in the USSR: Sweden - 25, Norway - 25,8, Japan - 24,9, Finland - 26,9.
And it was not for nothing that the “reform” disappointed all conceiving patriots of Russia. In the book “Russia in a landslide,” Alexander Solzhenitsyn wrote: “I will never put Gaidar next to Lenin, too much of that growth. But in one capacity they are very similar: in that, as a fanatic, drawn only by his visionary idea, not aware of state responsibility, he confidently takes on the scalpel and repeatedly cuts through the body of Russia. And even six years later, in today's self-confidently grinning face, a politician doesn’t see embarrassment: how, by ruining savings deposits, he threw tens of millions of his compatriots into poverty (having destroyed the basis of the very "middle class" that he swore to create).
Bust of an economist and politician Egor Gaidar at the State University "Higher School of Economics". Photo: Valery Sharifulin / TASS
The promised middle class was actually born only towards the end of the 2000's. True, we note right away that Russian economists prefer to determine the belonging of a person to the middle class not so much by income as by level of education and no need to engage in physical labor. If you try to determine the size of the Russian middle class not by income, but by the price of property owned by citizens, the situation will be much more deplorable - no 40% of citizens who numbered in Russia before the beginning of the current crisis, we certainly will not receive. “Privatization was being introduced throughout the country with the same boundless madness, with the same destructive speed as“ nationalization ”(1917 – 18) and collectivization (1930) - only with the opposite sign,” wrote the same Solzhenitsyn. And led to the same devastating consequences. When the capitalist countries themselves built a social state, we built a wild, antediluvian capitalism - the way it was in the United States of the “roaring twenties”.
Raw materials instead of technology
In the nineties, companies in the USA, Europe and Southeast Asia ate from the fruits of technological advancement. The share of expenditure on research and development in these countries has grown over the past 20 – 25 years. In 2010, expenditures on research and development as compared to GDP of countries were: in Japan - 3,6%, in the USA - 2,7%, in South Korea - 4,2%, in France - 2,2%, in Israel - 4,1%, in Finland - 3,1%. In the late eighties, this figure for most of the listed countries did not even stand close to the Soviet one: the USSR spent 3,5% of its huge GDP on R & D. In the nineties for Russia, this figure fell to about 1%, for most other republics, it is calculated in tenths of a percent.
And even now, after some increase in the cost of science, spending on research and development in Russia does not exceed 1,1% of the country's GDP. This is less (in relative terms, of course) than the less sophisticated powers like the Czech Republic or Portugal spend on research and development. And if you remember that a significant part of these funds in Russia is deposited in the pockets of managers responsible for science (let us remember the high-profile cases of embezzlement at Rosnano, the Skolkovo innovation center, etc.), it becomes clear that the real support of science and technology in Russia at times lower.
Despite the terrible reluctance to pay taxes, which are famous for American technical giants, their contribution to the US economy is great. For example, only one Apple in 2014 paid 13,97 billion dollars in taxes. In Russia, technology companies do not have this level, but you can compare these tax revenues, for example, with those made by the largest Russian company, Gazprom, which paid 2014 trillion rubles in taxes in the same year 2,063. Even if you do not take the dollar 65 rubles, which was a consequence of the “black Tuesday” 16 of December 2014 (although large companies in Russia pay taxes at the end of the year), and take a more benign figure, for example, 50 rubles for 1 dollar, you get that one technology company Apple brings the US budget a third of the amount that the raw materials giant Gazprom brings to the Russian budget.
And this is despite the fact that Apple actually sells technological solutions and design, and Gazprom sells irreplaceable natural resources. Let's not forget another thing: yes, Apple is the largest American technology company, but even Amazon, HP and Microsoft seriously lagging behind it have much more revenue than the brainchild of Steve Jobs. In general, tax revenues from technology companies to the US budget exceed 100 billion dollars. In Russia, they are almost imperceptible against the background of returns from raw material companies. From the nineties, Russia inherited a distorted and poorly diversified structure of the economy, entirely dependent on the extraction of natural resources. And this is despite the fact that it was only thanks to the raw material giants that the country managed, at the very least, to restore industry. The “Lost Decade” actually stretched over 16 – 17 years: the aggregate index of industrial production in Russia only in 2008 reached the level of the beginning of the 90-s.
And the very fact that large companies pay taxes is not at all given is an indicator of civilization and legality in the state. During the years of stagnation, the shadow economy in the USSR did not exceed 10 – 15% of the country's GDP. In the nineties, the figure went beyond 50% of GDP, and it’s not that the situation is overcome: Rosstat now estimates the size of the shadow economy at about 15 – 20%, although the real figure could easily be twice as high. Corruption serves as another reason for the impoverishment of citizens: the state shifts those taxes to the shoulders of honest workers, which it cannot take from fraudsters.
Photo: Stanislav Krasilnikov / TASS
Fools and their roads
In the late USSR and post-Soviet Russia, Soviet education and medicine were actively criticized: they are free, but how can it be free? After all, a person appreciates only what money pays for. Today, people happily rebuke on Facebook news: “Germany has made universities free for all citizens!” And they exclaim: what a fine fellow, not like us! Sorry, but in the USSR, education was completely free back in 1918. And, for example, in Great Britain in the same year only elementary school became free for all residents of the island. Today, the UK government is struggling to increase the accessibility of higher education for citizens - this year, scholarships for those who cannot pay for their education have been allocated up to 12 billion pounds. Before 2010, the Laborites in power repeatedly spoke of their desire to ensure that all talented young people had a chance to study for free at colleges and universities. It seems that in the advanced capitalist countries, which were given to us as an example, they do not at all believe that it is valuable only what citizens pay for from their own pocket.
The same “Soviet” approach can easily be seen in the reform of their medical systems by Western countries. Democrats praise Barack Obama for the fact that the reform of the medical insurance system, carried out at his filing, will allow 95% of the population to reach free services over the years. But we are talking only about basic, cheap medical services - complex cases and a whole range of diseases do not cover free insurance. In the USSR, the last dekhkanin from an Uzbek kishlak could be treated free of charge in a Moscow clinic in the direction from his republican center. It is curious that medical insurance reform in the USA is planned to be carried out, also due to the increase in tax burden on pharmaceutical companies and treating wealthy citizens. Forward to socialism!
There was a Hollywood film about a village of assholes in the 19th century, which, instead of moving to the Wild West, like all normal American pioneers, went the other way. When looking at the post-Soviet history Russia vividly recalls this story. While Europe was uniting in the European Union, we ruined our Union. While the West strengthened the social insurance system, we destroyed our free education and medicine. While the US and European countries were forcing corporations to abide by the law, we were dreaming about a free market, which, according to the strange logic of the Democrats, was supposed to feed all the hungry and heal the suffering, and any iniquity was written off as side effects of primary capital accumulation. Markets do not know how to admit mistakes - that's why they cling to examples where reforms supposedly led to progress: “Why did Georgia succeed? Why did Ukraine succeed? ”Difficult to say at the same time what exactly happened - was it economic prosperity? No, a false attitude towards the all-conquering power of market reforms, which in fact turned into a plunder of the country, could only be crowned with failure. It does not produce blackthorn grapes, but fig thistles.
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