The News in Moscow
Over the last dozen years of good oil-funded living, middle-class Russians have developed the habit of travelling to warmer climes for the two weeks of idleness the law grants them at the start of the year, but even with tickets booked and paid for, many discovered that they could not afford hotels or food. One friend told me that she was considering cancelling her trip just to see what would happen in Moscow with so many Russians staying there involuntarily: “Maybe people will storm the Kremlin.”
.. But the most surprising thing about Black Tuesday was that it was a surprise to Russians at all. The economy had been shrinking for at least a year, and the slowdown had looked catastrophic for months, at least to the economists who were warning of looming stagflation. The American and European sanctions imposed over the war in Ukraine and the Russian counter-sanctions, especially the ban on many imported foods, made things worse. Layoffs had been common since spring. In July, food prices spiked by about ten per cent. The currency had been slipping for months, and the fall of oil prices in autumn dealt the economy a final blow. Against this backdrop, a drop in the exchange rate, even as much as eleven per cent in a single day, seems predictable. So why didn’t Russians see this coming?
.. After nearly fifteen years of systematic destruction of public space, engineered by Putin, the normal ways by which regular people absorb information about the state of their country are gone. Only a person who had lost his livelihood or half his savings would have been able to report that the economy was failing.