946 thousand people live in the Kaliningrad region. Thus, every 151st Russian will feel the consequences of EU enlargement in the near future. Let's try to assess whether unhindered movement of Russian citizens between the Kaliningrad region and the rest of the country is possible. To do this, let’s imagine that all 143 million Russians simultaneously decided to visit Kaliningrad. 45 planes and 2 trains arrive in this city daily (another 6 trains arrive every two days). Thus, sending all Russians to the Kaliningrad region by trains and planes would take 5959 days (16 years and 4 months). It would be faster to get to the enclave by buses, but transporting all Russians would require 1.4 million vehicles, which is 2 times the total number of buses in the Russian Federation. Finally, if Russians went to Kaliningrad in cars (5 people in each), the line of cars would stretch for a total of 170 thousand km. In addition to transport problems, the freedom of movement of Russians is also limited by the introduction of special travel documents. If it takes one person only 1 minute to process documents, to issue papers to all Russians will require the continuous work of 2,000 Lithuanian customs officers for 50 days.
PAVEL CHERNIKOV

28 thousand residents of Russia died from drinking low-quality alcohol in January-September 2002.

$39.8 billion —this is the accumulated volume of foreign investment in the Russian economy as of the beginning of October. This is 15.6% more than a year ago. The share of direct investment is 48.7%, or $19.388 billion.

7 thousand offenses related to illegal oil trafficking have been detected in Chechnya since the beginning of 2002. 2,005 objects of illegal oil production, storage and refining were discovered, 5 thousand people were brought to administrative responsibility, 124 criminal cases were initiated.

The share of non-residents in the total registered authorized capital of credit institutions of the Russian Federation decreased from 5.3% to 5.18% from January to October 2002. 129 organizations with the participation of non-residents and 1 branch of a foreign bank have a license to carry out banking operations in the Russian Federation.

3 books per year per capita are published in Russia at present. In 1990, this figure was 11 books.

RUB 77.5 billion amounted to a surplus of the Russian federal budget in January-October 2002. Budget revenues for 10 months - 1799.3 billion rubles, expenses - 1721.8 billion.

1,450 space objects in low-Earth orbit are monitored by the Russian space control system. About 800 of them are foreign devices.

2664 rub. — this size of the average subsistence level in Moscow was established for the third quarter of 2002 by order of the capital government. The average cost of living in Russia as a whole is 1,817 rubles.

Magazine "Kommersant Power" No. 45 dated November 18, 2002, p. 10

Authors:

Pavel Chernikov

Themes:

150 Russians and one Kaliningrader