Between poverty and slow growth, Russia’s economic future uncertain

Outside a metro station in Saint-Petersburg, 70-year-old Irina Semyonova is selling homemade tomato-and-aubergine preserves as a way to supplement her pension which she says is just not enough to live on.

After paying her bills and buying medicine, she says only 4,000 rubles ($70/57 euros) are left out of her monthly pension of 12,000 rubles. “Can one live on 4,000 rubles, especially in an expensive city like Saint-Petersburg?”

Her lifeline is a country house outside the former imperial capital where she grows vegetables in her garden.

“I go there in the summer, I have a vegetable plot and I sell what I grow, which helps me survive,” she said. Vladimir Putin, who is set to win a fourth historic term in March 18 polls, oversaw a period of economic growth during his first two mandates (2000-2008) that boosted personal incomes in the wake of the financial instability of the 1990s when many Russians lost their savings.

But his third stint in the Kremlin, which began in 2012 after four years serving as prime minister, saw a decline in ordinary people’s quality of life. Russia has seen purchasing power decrease continuously for the past four years after the economy was hit with international sanctions punishing Moscow for its annexation of Crimea in 2014 followed by a fall in global oil prices in 2016. The country’s poverty rate, which had fallen from 29 percent in 2000 to 10.7 percent in 2012, inched back up to 13.5 percent in 2016, according to the most recent annual official figures.

In November, the World Bank released a report in which it said less than half of the population, 46.3 percent, was secure from sinking into poverty — citing a figure which was 10 percent lower than in 2014.

– ‘Can’t afford anything’ –

The situation is particularly dire in provincial Russia, where ordinary people subsist on extremely low salaries and young families often have to be helped by retirees’ meagre pensions. “The prices are crazy,” said Vyacheslav, a retired mechanic living in Maloyaroslavets, a town in the Kaluga region southwest of Moscow.

“I cannot afford anything.”

Tatyana Kuznetsova, 47, who lives in a nearby village of Ilyinskoye, says she already knows her pension will be less than 100 euros when she retires in several years, despite “breaking her back” at work since childhood.