Results of the week. Export version

How right our national leader Vladimir Vladimirovich was when, without a hint of irony, slightly looking down, he told reporters from Bloomberg that his, Putin’s, biggest flaw was gullibility. Only an extremely gullible, I would even say simply naive, person can contact the current “United Russia” and allow himself to be declared its leader. After all, this is just some kind of gathering of enemies of the power vertical and principled opponents of V.V. Putin. Consider the slogans of the rally campaign held under the auspices of the party in power throughout the country: “For Putin! For the auto industry! Even the hooligans and brawlers who organized the March of Concorders in St. Petersburg could not have imagined this. The national leader, the most important European in the country, was compared to, God forgive me, the Zhiguli, Volga, or even the Oka. there is a standard “Do it yourself” set, this eternally creaking crap that regularly stalls and disintegrates into screws and tongues. People gathered at rallies may have unpleasant associations: our V.V. and the clumsy “Zhigul”!

And this is completely untrue. Vladimir Vladimirovich, of course, is a rather primitive model of domestic assembly. But, of course, in the export version. Remember this dream of fellow citizens - something much more reminiscent of a car than something intended for the domestic market.

Another demonstration of this export model of ours took place at the World Economic Forum in Davos. It seemed like it wasn’t V.V. Putin there. The direct opposite of the Russian prime minister spoke before heads of state and heads of world companies. The “export model” claimed amazing things.

Here Vladimir Vladimirovich describes the reasons that caused the global crisis: “The race of stock indices and capitalizations has obviously begun to dominate the increase in productivity and real efficiency of companies.” But how can we not remember the company whose capitalization our national leader was so proud of. Namely Gazprom, whose debts have quadrupled, capitalization increased 10 times, and the average annual growth in production amounted to as much as...1.3 percent. Just an ideal example to illustrate the thesis of Putin’s Davos speech that the time has come “to free ourselves from virtual money, inflated reports and dubious ratings.”

But a small masterpiece of hypocrisy was the part of Putin’s speech where he spoke about the dangers of excessive government intervention in business. They say that “the concentration of excess assets in the hands of the state” threatens to lead, as in the USSR, “to the total uncompetitiveness of our economy.” Therefore, Putin knows nothing about the Baikalfinance Group company, which strangely acquired the assets of YUKOS, as well as about Russian Technologies, which became the owners of controlling stakes in hundreds of Russian companies. Moreover, everything worked out so well that the debts of these companies were paid by the state. Our rich Motherland, Vladimir Putin promised, will continue to cover the foreign debts of Russian companies. Although the result is precisely the concentration of capital in the state. Which, the Russian prime minister worries, is leading to the fact that “over the past months, the spirit of entrepreneurship has been eroding. Including the principle of personal responsibility of a person - an entrepreneur, an investor, a shareholder - for his own decisions.”

And literally the next day, Mr. Deripaska demonstrated by his own example the truth of these words. Our industrialist told reporters in Davos that the Russian prime minister was, of course, absolutely right. The man who had just received four billion dollars from the state budget cheerfully said that the state really should not get involved in business affairs.

Russians have become accustomed to Putin’s somersaults over eight years. Everyone knows that once or twice a year, usually during the announcement of the Address to the Federal Assembly, democracy and liberalism descended on our everything. The compilers of these texts then talked for a long time about their unimaginable, desperate courage. The next day, however, everything returned to normal.

But naive Westerners were greatly amazed by Putin’s somersaults. Bill Clinton even said that Putin took into account Western criticism regarding the excessive intervention of the Russian state in the economy. The listeners rightly considered this a funny joke.

And Putin himself only lasted for a day. The very next day, he advised the West not to turn up its nose and accept Putin’s Russia as it is... As you know, the export version of the Zhiguli very soon began to crumble.