Fatal instinct

Debate is not a royal affair, and presidential candidate Vladimir Putin decided to present his election program in a series of newspaper articles. On January 30, Vedomosti published the third of them, dedicated to the economy. They say that the developments used in the text were prepared by a variety of structures - from the Nikolai Fedorov Institute for Socio-Economic and Political Research (the author of the Popular Front program) to the apparatus of First Deputy Prime Minister Igor Shuvalov, and finally brought everything together by the prime minister himself.
If so, then we state: Putin writes much calmer than he speaks. There are no barbs that pervade the President's oral speech in the text; he is not angry at anyone and does not oppose anyone, therefore he can endlessly praise the achievements of the previous 12 years. In many ways, Putin's article is a set of theses - indisputable, like the laws of Newtonian physics.
It is impossible to look at these texts “in isolation from the personality of the author,” as they used to say in the Soviet school, or, more precisely, from his politics. Author Putin believes that in the next 6 years he is able to do a lot of good things. Diversify the economy, overcome deindustrialization, expand the agglomeration radius of cities by 1.5–2 times, improve the business climate… But a simple question arises: what prevented this from being achieved in the previous 12 years? Not Medvedev!
The problem is not that presidential candidate Putin wants something wrong, but that he looks at everything from a resource point of view, like a real state entrepreneur. The economy for Putin is like a firm — it breaks up into units that earn money and those that spend it. It is clearly interesting for him to manage the former: to create state corporations or, on the contrary, to privatize them, to support the leading industries appointed by the state - pharmaceuticals, the aviation industry, nanotechnologies - with taxes and investments ... But these are not new approaches. This is exactly how the entire economic policy in Russia has been built for a whole decade. The next logical step in this logic: it is better to provide support not to anyone, but to your own, reliable, proven. Accordingly, a layer of Putin's oligarchs has grown and strengthened, having made their fortunes in proximity to the state. „

Entering a new term as a weak president on a wave of growing distrust and fatigue, Putin will not be able to initiate a new economic policy

” In addition to profitable, any company has costly divisions: advertising, personnel, and the purchasing department. Putin has a different attitude towards them. You can only give money for roads, social programs, education, culture. And also save, realizing that tomorrow there may be less money than today. Expenditure departments are much less interesting than the sales department (gas, oil, metals, chemistry).
Until now, fortune, in the face of oil prices and other raw materials, favored Putin. This determined the contours of his policies, from the growth-promoting measures of the early 2000s (such as tax cuts) to the endless increase in bureaucratic rent, the construction of palaces, the soft privatization of state-owned companies in favor of friends by the end of the decade. And - to squeezing out competition from all spheres of economic, social and political life. This is not a special setting or goal - just an overbearing instinct.
Now we need to prepare for another one. The world economy is going through a difficult period, fortune is turning away. Whatever area you take - from courts and prisons to schools and science - the necessary reforms can only be carried out either by flooding the reformed industry with money, or by cutting the rent extracted by the elites (oligarchs, generals, rectors), or by reducing social spending. For the first, Putin may not have money in the next term, but for the second and third - the will and legitimacy. Entering a new term as a weak president on a wave of growing mistrust and fatigue, Putin will not be able to initiate a new economic policy. And it can only be talked about in terms of giving in to some and buying influence over others. Just like big corporations do it.