2008 was the year of the crash of illusions. You can, of course, say: “as they wrote”, “as predicted”, but it is a doubtful pleasure - to be the forerunners of bad news.
2008 was the last year of oil happiness, a dimensionless budget, raising pensions and salaries. The decline in industrial production in November by 8.7% compared to November 2007 finally put a cross on the hopes that the world crisis would bypass Russia. Not bypass. Moreover, the rate of production falling (in total over the past 5 months of the year by 13%) has become a diagnosis of ineffectiveness and extreme rigidity of the Russian political system, which is not capable of structural transformations and updating.
Hopes, if there were such that the new president Dmitry Medvedev would begin to deploy the country into the rails of liberalization, collapsed even rather than industry. Amendments to the Constitution, which increase the term of powers of the President, passed through instances at a speed that rival with a drop in production and GDP. The successor of Putin did not become the head of state, to which the “main in the country” indicates him almost with sadistic constancy. And at this time, the power, almost uncontrolled, is increasingly concentrating in the hands of the Prime Minister, and this is in the conditions where the other branches of the authorities are legislative and judicial, as shown by Khodorkovsky’s case, and the history of Svetlana Bakhmina, and the tragedy of Vasily Aleksanyan, turned into a parody of themselves.
The war with Georgia, the unilateral recognition of the independence of South Ossetia and Abkhazia practically put the country on the facet of international isolation. And now, again, as in the days of the USSR, the autocrats of Latin America - Castro, Chavez - become almost the main friends and partners of Russia.
What was remembered by 2008-in a special New Year's selection of The New Times.
