Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Figures
- List of Tables
- Preface
- 1 The Political Sources of Income Inequality in Russia
- 2 Employment, Earnings, and Welfare in the Russian Transition
- 3 Regime Diversity in the Russian Regions
- 4 Democracy and Inequality in the Russian Regions
- 5 Regional Regimes and the Labor Market: Evidence from the NOBUS Survey
- 6 Helping Hands or Grabbing Hands? Government-Business Relations in the Regions
- 7 Accounting for Regime Differences
- 8 After the Crash
- Index
8 - After the Crash
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 June 2012
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Figures
- List of Tables
- Preface
- 1 The Political Sources of Income Inequality in Russia
- 2 Employment, Earnings, and Welfare in the Russian Transition
- 3 Regime Diversity in the Russian Regions
- 4 Democracy and Inequality in the Russian Regions
- 5 Regional Regimes and the Labor Market: Evidence from the NOBUS Survey
- 6 Helping Hands or Grabbing Hands? Government-Business Relations in the Regions
- 7 Accounting for Regime Differences
- 8 After the Crash
- Index
Summary
“Should a primitive economy based on raw materials and endemic corruption accompany us into the future?”
– President Dmitrii Medvedev, “Go Russia!” (September 10, 2009)In September 2009, President Dmitrii Medvedev published a widely publicized article entitled, “Rossiia Vpered!” (“Russia, Forward!” or, more loosely, “Go Russia!”). Medvedev laid out a sweeping indictment of the institutions and attitudes that had made the impact of the 2008–2009 worldwide recession so devastating to Russia, and described the reforms that he considered necessary to set the country right. He argued that the crisis proved that the economy was still rooted in the Soviet system:
Twenty years of tumultuous change has not spared our country from its humiliating dependence on raw materials. Our current economy still reflects the major flaw of the Soviet system: it largely ignores individual needs. With a few exceptions domestic business does not invent nor create the necessary things and technology that people need. We sell things that we have not produced, raw materials or imported goods. Finished products produced in Russia are largely plagued by their extremely low competitiveness.
Not only is the economy inefficient, declared Medvedev, but its democratic institutions are tenuous and its civil society is weak and still “semi-Soviet.” Medvedev argued that Russia required a thoroughgoing modernization of its economy, society, and political system, but one accomplished through noncoercive means. Future growth should be fueled by innovation, particularly in energy, information, space technology, and medicine.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- The Politics of Inequality in Russia , pp. 201 - 216Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2011