No place for old people?

Ageism (discrimination against older people on the basis of age) has not been inherent in our country for many years. In the Soviet Union, which for many years was ruled by very old leaders, the cult of "veterans" was officially sponsored, and dishonorable attitude towards parents was condemned by writers from the democrat Trifonov to the patriot Rasputin. In the 1990s, almost all critics of Russian economic reforms came out in defense of the unfortunate impoverished grandmothers. It would seem that all the more surprising is the demonstrative contempt for the elderly, which has recently captured part of the Russian political class. Either the plenipotentiary of the President of Russia (now former) Anatoly Kvashnin quite officially proposed forcibly relocating urban old people to the suburbs, then the press secretary of the Nashi movement offended the “dissenters”, chiding them for their age (“in our country a real gang has formed with everything that disagrees old people - Limonov, Alekseeva, Lukin, Ponomarev ... "). Why, then, do representatives of the Russian establishment strive for the social exclusion of older people from the life of society?

In my opinion, one of the reasons for Russian ageism (although not the only one) is the fact that our country lives primarily on the distribution of income from resource rent. However, the transformation of Russia into an oil and gas power is hindered by too many inhabitants. Indeed, only a few Russians are involved in the extraction and transportation of energy resources, and the rest of the country's citizens, from the point of view of the rationally thinking rulers of the "oil" state, are nothing more than parasites claiming a piece of the resource rent pie. And if in democracies governments - whether they like it or not - are forced to take care of the votes and ignoring certain groups can be punished in elections, then a number of authoritarian oil states widely practice the social exclusion of a significant part of their fellow citizens. American political scientist Michael Ross, who studied the detrimental effects of the "resource curse", showed on the examples of a number of countries in the Middle East that oil abundance led to a radical deterioration in the situation of women: there is simply no place for female employment, and they become "extra mouths" for the economy and society as a whole (the "Islamic factor" had a much lesser impact on these processes). In Russian conditions, the role of "extra mouths" is almost inevitably doomed to old people. But, on the one hand, the regular holding of “facade” elections in Russia forces the authorities to pay for the electoral loyalty of pensioners, increasing the amount of payments on the eve of the next vote and exacerbating the growth of the “hole” in the pension fund. On the other hand, Russian old people are by no means always dumb subjects, as evidenced by the wave of protests that swept in early 2005 against the "monetization of benefits." These two circumstances today prevent the Russian authorities from leaving the elderly to their fate, like the Niyazov regime in Turkmenistan, which at one time refused to pay pensions as such.

In a situation where the political class of our country is not able to get rid of the elderly and understands that in the medium term the problems of the elderly can be aggravated, the place of “deeds” is taken by “words”. Hence the undisguised contempt for the “extra mouths” experienced by those who are able, by hook or by crook, to save up their pieces of oil and gas rent for a future comfortable old age. Therefore, ageism should not be expected to become a thing of the past as the current leaders of our country become old themselves. Quite the contrary: the conflict between "fathers" and "children" in the conditions of "soft" authoritarianism in the oil and gas country will only grow. Russia runs the risk of becoming no country for old men — “there is no place for old men.”