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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/ _________________________________________________________ Full posting guidelines at: http://www.marxmail.org/sub.htm Set your options at: http://lists.csbs.utah.edu/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com