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Notable & Quotable
Michael McFaul and Kathryn Stoner-Weiss in
the January/February issue of Foreign Affairs:
Many of Putin's defenders . . . contend that
Russia's democratic retreat has enhanced the state's ability to provide for its
citizens. The myth of Putinism is that Russians are safer, more secure, and
generally living better than in the 1990s -- and that Putin himself deserves the
credit. . . . [But] in terms of public safety, health, corruption, and the
security of property rights, Russians are actually worse off today than they
were a decade ago.
The murder rate has . . . increased under Putin,
according to data from Russia's Federal State Statistics Service. In the
"anarchic" years of 1995-99, the average annual number of murders was 30,200; in
the "orderly" years of 2000-2004, the number was 32,200. The death rate from
fires is around 40 a day in Russia, roughly 10 times the average rate in western
Europe.
Nor has public health improved in the last eight
years. Despite all the money in the Kremlin's coffers, health spending averaged
6% of GDP from 2000 to 2005, compared with 6.4% from 1996 to 1999. Russia's
population has been shrinking since 1990, thanks to decreasing fertility and
increasing mortality rates, but the decline has worsened since 1998.
Noncommunicable diseases have become the leading cause of death (cardiovascular
disease accounts for 52% of deaths, three times the figure for the United
States), and alcoholism now accounts for 18% of deaths for men between the ages
of 25 and 54. At the end of the 1990s, annual alcohol consumption per adult was
10.7 liters (compared with 8.6 liters in the United States and 9.7 in the United
Kingdom); in 2004, this figure had increased to 14.5 liters. . . . Life
expectancy in Russia rose between 1995 and 1998. Since 1999, however, it has
declined to 59 years for Russian men and 72 for Russian women.
At the same time that Russian society has become
less secure and less healthy under Putin, Russia's international rankings for
economic competitiveness, business friendliness, and transparency and corruption
all have fallen. . . .
In
short, the data simply do not support the popular notion that by erecting
autocracy Putin has built an orderly and highly capable state that is addressing
and overcoming Russia's rather formidable development problems. Putin's failures
in this regard are all the more striking given the tremendous growth of the
Russian economy every year since 1999: Even with money coursing through the
economy, Putin's government has done no better and sometimes worse of a job of
providing basic public goods and services than Yeltsin's government did during
the deep economic decline of the 1990s.
The Wall Street
Journal
January 18,
2008; Page A13
URL for this article:
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB120062520244399763.html
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