Russia Today

Given his origins in St Petersburg which, as Leningrad, had been downgraded and largely left to rot under the Soviet regime; plus his subsequent career in the KGB, I am continually astonished how ably President Vladimir Putin is coping with the massive range of issues and responsibilities that fall on his shoulders.

He succeeded the drunken shell of the once-outstanding Boris Yeltsin, under whose presidency of Russia - just one of the successor states to the collapsed Soviet Union - the crumbling economy had been despoiled and brought to the brink of ruin. Crass and corrupt 'privatisation' [which had supposedly been intended to hand out shares in all major assets to the mass of the people] had enabled the most competent of the former 'fixers' to acquire control of massive corporations and rightly earn the description as 'oligarchs' and as a 'mafia'. Under the Soviet regime, especially when strict Stalinist controls and planning targets were relaxed, the economy was only able to function by factory managers and farm directors operating a massive black market in which clothing and shoes were bartered for industrial output and food, so that the towns' workers could be fed and the oppressed involuntary farmhands shod; while the factories and farms turned in less than their planned output to the official channels of distribution. This huge trade was managed by risk-takers who were occasionally arrested when one of them failed to bribe the local party officials sufficiently, or when some illicit trade became so much of a public scandal in the region where it was perpetrated that action simply had to be taken to restore some credibility to the regime.

The spread of television gave millions of people more awareness of how low the standard of living for hard-working Soviet subjects had become, in comparison to western Europe and the USA. The diffusion of access to telephones allowed millions of people - especially in western Russia, Belarus, the Ukraine, the Baltic Republics [which had slightly better access to knowledge of Scandinavia] and the European satellite states - to begin personal bartering to raise their own standard of living. Swapping knowledge, access to better schools and hospitals, and admission to the queue for buying cars, electrical goods, western records and properly-made jeans. This development of trade went on through the stagnant years of Brezhnev's presidency, and reached such proportions in the early years of Gorbachev's rule that his government took strenuous measures to drive this illicit trade further underground so that the government's plans to develop a real consumer economy might have some chance of success. With the collapse of Gorbachev's regime and into the chaos of the Yeltsin's years, it was only the illicit swap economy that kept most households going. as the formal economy collapsed.

Putin's achievement has been to create something very broadly like a market economy in less than twenty years. This accomplishment has been unprecedented: and it is recognised by the genuine 80%-plus approval rate that the president has received from the Russian population. The many faults of the regime, the corruption and the acts of oppression that are far too common, are well reported in the west. Those are is important aspects of life in modern Russia, which in an ideal world would quickly be rectified: but priorities have to be set, and a broad consensus of the population accepts the sequence that has been adopted.