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A postscript to my previous message on the Putinist housing boom miracle as
revealed by the suddenly emergent ("Beta Version") reliable news source
known as Russian Insider.
In 1975, when my wife's family moved into a three-room apartment in a newly
built block of flats in one of Leningrad's central districts, the apartment
was FREE. FREE. FREE. As in, my wife's family didn't have to pay kopeck for
it. Not one kopeck.
Similarly, my wife got a (terrific) free education at a specialized
English-language school and, later, at the Slavic department at Leningrad
State University. She didn't pay a kopeck for any of this, either. It was
all FREE.
Even more insanely, when my wife got ill as a child and young woman (she
lived under this horribly oppressive state of affairs for half her life, by
the way), the generally good medical care she got was also free.
This system was called socialism.
After 1991, my wife's family privatized their flat for a nominal fee, as
did millions of other Russians around the same time
In 2000, they sold it for around 25,000 dollars. That was the going rate
then. At today's going rate, the same flat would probably sell for around
250,000 dollars.
There is a fairly substantial class of people, although they are distinct
minority, who could afford to buy my wife's family's old flat cash on the
barrel head, but the vast majority of people living in Petersburg wouldn't
be able to do this, unless they had their own, similarly priced, privatized
flats that they could sell to generate the cash necessary to trade up (or
down, for that matter) to another flat. There are still quite a few people
in the big cities who have this important asset, a legacy from the Soviet
era, and one could say to a great extent that it made life livable for many
of these people in the lean years.
But it also generated a real estate market, which didn't exist (or at least
in this way) in Soviet times. And this real estate market has been as
cutthroat as they come. In the 90s, when I worked for a Big Issue-style
newspaper called Na Dne (The Depths), we did a special project where we
advertised all over the city asking homeless people to come in and tell us
their stories. (These stories were eventually published as an anthology, in
Russian and English.) What we discovered was that easily over half these
people had been swindled out of their flats and rooms in communal flats, to
which they had been legally entitled, by so-called black realtors, many of
whom were able to launder their ill-gotten gains and resell them on the
"legal" estate market.
As for the "homes" being touted by Russian Insider as proof that "Putin
delivers," they are not being handed out for free, as most of them would
have been under socialism. (In the late Soviet period, there were also
co-op houses paid and, to some extent, built by their inhabitants.) No,
they're sold for the going rate.
In September 2014, the going rate in Petersburg per square meter in newly
built residential buildings was about 94,000 rubles, while the average
price per meter in the four historic central districts (Central, Petrograd,
Vasilyevsky Island, and Admiralty) hovered between 120,000 and 160,000
rubles, according to real estate website bsn.ru (
http://www.bsn.ru/analytics/liveestate/spb/17139_deshevye_metry/).
At the then-current exchange rate, this translates into a price range
between 2,600 and 4,500 dollars per square meter.
A friend of mine who does IT work and has been trying to organize an
independent IT workers union in Petersburg, wrote on his Facebook page the
other day that, according to Headhunter.ru, the average (not the median)
monthly wage in the city was 35,000 rubles. At current exchange rates this
amounts to around 680 dollars.
He also cited a screenshot, taken from Yandex's jobs page, that the average
monthly wage for the fifty-five thousand some vacancies is currently
listing, is 33,000 rubles per month, or 640 dollars.
I should add that before the "crisis" set in, that is, during the "boom
times," the average wage in the city was better, but only marginally soon.
So who could and can afford all the "homes" "delivered" by the
international left's new kewpie doll, Vladimir Putin? A) the wildly and
mostly illegally rich, including oligarchs, sub-oligarchs, and corrupt
government officials, who need some place (lots of places, actually, if you
think about the distorting effect they've had on real estate in London and
New York, for example) to park their loads of cash; B) honest, hardworking
people with average or higher than average salaries who, of course, would
have take out loans, sometimes big loans, to afford these "homes."
In any case, except for the exceptional cases (as when, once a year, around
the Victory Day holiday, the government loudly hands out a few free flats,
usually in the middle of nowhere, to WWII veterans), these "homes" aren't
"delivered" by Putin in any sense.
They're sold for big bucks, often to folks who can't really afford them.
They're used to hide ill-gotten assets, that could be used productively
elsewhere (in the real economy, in increasing social benefits for the
poor). They're built mostly cheap and poorly, with no consideration as to
their environmental impact and aesthetic effect on the existing built
environment. They're mostly built by disempowered workers from Central
Asia who are a) non-unionized, b) underpaid, c) often cheated out of their
wages entirely), and d) constantly hassled and shook down by police,
immigration officials, and neo-Nazis.
I think it might be useful for some comrades here to have a few reminders
of what the Putin regime really represents in terms of social and economic
policy:
Ilya Matveev: A Word to the Wise (On Putin’s “Leftism” and Solidarity with
Russians)
https://therussianreader.wordpress.com/2014/02/04/matveev-putin-leftism/
Open Left: Moscow Doctors Talk about Their Work-to-Rule Strike
https://therussianreader.wordpress.com/2015/04/28/open-left-moscow-doctors-talk-about-their-work-to-rule-strike/
Zorkin: The Road Back to Serfdom?
https://therussianreader.wordpress.com/2014/10/11/zorkin-serfdom/
The Joseph Brodsky Law
https://therussianreader.wordpress.com/2015/04/29/joseph-brodsky-social-parasitism/
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