The worst prime minister in history

Economist Konstantin Sonin - about why Mikhail Mishustin should not be considered an “effective manager”

If there was some kind of intrigue in the appointment of a new prime minister, it quickly ended. Putin again offered Mikhail Mishustin to this position.

The experts of The Bell prepared an assessment of the first years of Mishustin, which sounds surprisingly positive. I can’t agree: I believe that Mishustin is the worst Prime Minister in the history of Russia. To praise the prime minister for coping with some purely technical (actually secretarial) duties is to humiliate Russia.

In the imperial, Soviet and post-Soviet history of Russia there were many bad prime ministers. There was Ivan Goremykin under Nicholas II - both a weak prime minister and a historical symbol of weak premiere. There was Valentin Pavlov , who showed himself a traitor and a coward in 1991. Mishustin’s direct predecessor was Dmitry Medvedev, who looked at the most important posts, and has since turned (as an Internet commentator) into generally that. And yet Mishustin is worse.

The justification of Mishustin and other ministers and managers is based mainly on a simple consideration. That, they say, an official or official is responsible only for the execution of the order from above, regardless of the content of the order. They ordered to advance - we were advancing, they ordered nothing to do - we are sitting and silent. In this strange picture of the world, no one at all: neither the general, nor the minister, nor, moreover, the prime minister - do not bear any responsibility either to citizens, or to Russia, or to their own conscience.

This crazy idea of ​​what a state official is, has become very fashionable lately. Fashionable because it is very convenient.

The appointment of Mishustin, which was supposed to change something after a long stagnation led by Medvedev, coincided with the beginning of the Covid-19 pandemic. This new purpose was expected - for eight years (2012–2020), the Medvedev government not just could not cope with stagnation. After 2014, it seemed to have lost interest in some positive changes.

There were strong moments in the Russian response to the challenge of the pandemic and weak, but, by and large, the answer was completely failed. Russia has lost more than 1 million lives due to pandemia-more than any country in the world on the share of the population. Not a single country in the world has coped worse with Covid than Russia. And Mishustin’s deputy, who blocked the use of Western vaccines,, meanwhile, received money from the production of funmicals.

Then it was only worse. During the premiership of Mishustin, Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022, forced a million people to escape from the country in 2022–2023, and moved to the "military" economy in which the growth of weapons was financed by falling consumption and quality of life. This reckoning for this transition has yet to be:

After the war, dozens of enterprises that produce unnecessary products will have to be closed and dismiss thousands of unnecessary specialties, as in the early 1990s.

Of course, economic crises happen to sufficient regularity and not everything that happens in the economy is the result of government decisions. However, under any government in the history of Russia there was no such “self -arrest” - such damage caused by the non -unreasonable actions of the government. There were years worse, but such that the main damage was a direct result of decisions made at the very top - in recent decades.

We can say that this was not Mishustin to fail to answer Covid, he does not hold corrupt ministers in his posts, he did not unleash a criminal war against Ukraine and caused a crisis of refugees of this scale. Of course, not him. But this is the point: never in the history of Russia, the Prime Minister was not such a useless insignificance, which did not answer for anything important in his country.