Amid the global financial bloodbath, few have been as hard hit as some of Russia’s oligarchs: the Kremlin-friendly super-rich. Aluminum magnate Oleg Deripaska, Russia’s richest man, has lost $16 billion in a month. Rumours suggest Deripaska—also embroiled in a political scandal in London—has sacked his servants, replacing them with cheap help from the provincial town of Tula. Russian No. 2, Roman Abramovich, who owns Britain’s famed Chelsea Football Club, has lost half his fortune. The word is he’s postponed his wedding to 26-year-old ex-model Daria Zhukova. Since the market peaked in May, Russia’s 25 richest men have lost a combined $230 billion, 62 per cent of their total worth; when the dust eventually settles, some will have been made “formergarchs,” forfeiting their metals, mining and telecommunication empires.
But it’s not just the oligarchs who are suffering. At a time when Prime Minister Vladimir Putin’s Moscow has been flexing its global muscle, the economic crisis could substantially weaken Russia and help curb its aspirations. At first glance, the country appears to be in deep trouble. Its two key stock indexes have lost over two-thirds of their value, wiping out nearly $1 trillion in wealth. Capital flight is running at over $12 billion a week. And the price of oil, crucially important to the Russian economy—and Russian power—has tumbled more than 50 per cent from a record high of $146 per barrel just three months ago. This week, it hit $64 a barrel, its lowest level in over a year.
In fact, the Kremlin has been forced to adopt a $200-billion rescue plan to shore up its troubled banks and companies. It’s unclear, however, whether the average Russian knows about these elite-level discussions, or, indeed, about the financial crisis itself (less than three per cent of Russians have mortgages or invest in the market). According to the English-language newspaper Moscow Times, Russia’s three main channels—Channel One, Rossia and NTV—have either played down or completely ignored the collapse of the main stock market, the RTS, which halted trading for the fourth time last week, after stocks took another plunge. Ekho Moskvy, Moscow’s independent radio station, says the Kremlin has banned state media from using the words “financial crisis” and “collapse.” (Russians do know, however, that Putin—whose personal popularity, one month into the crisis, has risen to 83 per cent—received a tiger cub for his 56th birthday this month, and that the prime minister, a marshal arts enthusiast, has released a judo DVD.)
Rather than financial ruin, however, some experts are predicting that Russia could emerge strengthened from the global meltdown—and in a position to exert even more pressure on its neighbours and others. The country is cash-rich, thanks to $1.3 trillion in oil and gas revenues over the past eight years, and the Kremlin is sitting on a $500-billion cash reserve: the world’s third-highest hard currency reserves. As well, Russia is largely debt-free (at 8.5 per cent of its GDP). The price of oil, meanwhile, is still double what was considered high just a few years ago. “Here in Russia, officials and experts see the crisis as much as an opportunity as a danger,” says Harvard University Russia expert Henry Hale, reached in Moscow. “They see opportunities to play a stabilizing role in the world economy, and to expand Russian influence.”
Indeed, while state media have downplayed Russia’s financial crisis, they have covered the West’s economic problems; ordinary Russians know that when Iceland was tottering on the brink of financial ruin, it turned to Moscow—not the International Monetary Fund, Washington, London or, indeed, any Western capital—a telling indication of Russian might. (At press time, Reykjavik, which last week agreed to a $2.1-billion loan from the IMF, was continuing discussions with Moscow for a loan worth as much as $5 billion.) And Russia has since announced a $2-billion loan to Belarus, a part of the former Soviet Union still within its sphere of influence. In return, Minsk has pledged to resume common currency negotiations with Moscow, edging it one step closer to all-out union with Russia.
But across the former Soviet sphere, where Russia has stoked separatist fires in recent months—handing out Russian passports in the Ukrainian republic of Crimea, and invading Georgia over the issue of breakaway South Ossetia—banking systems are teetering on the brink of collapse, making those countries more susceptible to the influence of their cash-rich neighbour. So far, they have gone elsewhere for aid. This week, Ukraine, whose stock market has fallen nearly 80 per cent this year, and which recently saw a panic run on deposits, received a $16.5-billion, two-year loan from the IMF; Hungary, its neighbour to the immediate southwest, whose currency and stock market are in free fall, will also receive a “substantial financing package,” from the institution.
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I have yet one person to answer me how does one “hand out passports”… Do they like hunt down unsuspecting crimeans/ossetians in dark alley and stuff their pockets with papers?
Everyone is playing their game of control of population. So does Ukraine. So does Russia. Russia executes its “evil nationalistic” plans by building housing and roads and selling them cheap gas, and Ukraine by suppressing everything russian.
Yes, more or less, that is how the hand out passports. Nobody ever asked for them, and in the case of South Ossetia, it’s entirely unclear how many Georgian citizens claimed them.
We have to be very careful not to underestimate the Kremlin’s ability to quickly deplete that impressive $500 billion of currency reserves. The authoritarian system they have build is very expensive to maintain, and in the absence of functioning rule of law, the business sector relies on personal relationships with the powers to settle all kinds of disputes. The economic crisis is dramatically amplifying the number of disputes, and the government is going to have a very tough time paying everybody off.
The revolution never starts at the bottom, but always with a split among the elite.
Ilia, you don’t have to “hand” the passports out en masse. Russia can simply foment unrest with the ethnic Russians minorities living within neighboring countries’ borders which is the case in Ukraine, Estonia and many other neighboring countries. Russia using their state controlled airwaves already broadcasts their propaganda to those folks. Surely, you can recall that that game was played by Nazi Germany prior to WWII before it annexed regions where ethnic Germans resided as in Poland.
As per Edward Lucas, Russian manipulation might look like this:
“The key to the West’s future security is the security of the Baltic states. Estonians, Latvians and Lithuanians have thrown in their lot with us and we must not let them down. Consider this scenario. Imagine that Estonian extremists start intimidating local Russians (who amount to around a third of the Estonian population). Russia can easily stoke this covertly, while demanding publicly that Estonia crack down. Then imagine that Russian activists (again, backed, discreetly, by Moscow) set up “self-defence units” which start patrols, and set up checkpoints. When the Estonian authorities try to stop this, the Kremlin complains; Russian military “volunteers” start mustering across the border, proclaiming their intention to defend compatriots from “fascism”. The Russian media report this with wild enthusiasm; the Russian authorities say they cannot indefinitely restrain the spontaneous patriotic sentiments of their citizens.”
http://edwardlucas.blogspot.com/2008/11/daily-telegraph-rant-today.html
James – you cannot hand out passports. People apply for them. Russian citizenship law, passed in 1992, allows any former Soviet Union citizen to get Russian citizenship, and naturally Russian passport, if he does not possess another former Soviet Union’s republic citizenship or it was “granted” to him or her without his consent.
Amy – Estonia is an ethnocracy. One third of population is effectively disenfranchised and deprived of the right to use their own language in public affairs. Mind you that Russian language did not just appear there yesterday, but was the language of state for almost 300 years (since 1721, with an interruption between world wars). Despite of the rubbish Edward Lucas, a notorious raving Russophobe wrote in his pamphlet, “Baltic States” are not a part of the West, but a troubled, ethnocratic statelets. Nobody’s security depends on them.
Unlike US that is fermenting troubles in the former Soviet Union, arming outright fascists (as in Georgia) and financing ethnocracies, Russia is operating within its historic and cultural sphere of influence. It does so with consent and approval of both its own population and most of people in the territories where it is acting thus meeting the ultimate democratic criteria (not that it matters in any way).
We don’t live in the Middle Ages or under Feudalism when arbitrary change of border, replacement of one lord with another or emergence of a new county or duchy or statelet, militant (as in case of Georgia) or ethnic and openly Nazi (as in case of Estonia) or some other such calamity would leave all or certain inhabitants of that territory either stateless or would change their nationality overnight. Certainly people who feel they are Russian citizens, are legally entitled to Russian citizenship, were born or grew up in the territory that by a sudden historic fluke perhaps temporarily ceased to belong to Russia, so those people, most naturally and under any imaginable international norm or convention, have right to Russian citizenship and Russian passport.
Well is it not true that a bully with a posse is not without a few commanding words. they just see it as a opportunity to see that things are in there right places. it just means with more of a population means more taxes going to there coffers, which in turn keeps balance in its right place. its like being born in a french quatered country in africa and having the right to live in either country. its only propaganda when the sheep start folling in starights lines to the herds. eastern europe to has always been bit of a bad balance in the last decade and them to step in and hand out Passports and citizenships is a good idea, keep in mind the more to the herd the more wool you get.