People wait for their turn at a job fair in the Siberian city of Krasnoyarsk. (Photo by Ilya Naymushin/Reuters.)

As a young mother in the Soviet Union, Irina Bezrukikh had few worries when trying to get her daughter into a good grade school. Education was free, and it took just a little sweet something to ensure winning the headmaster’s favor.

“I brought her a book by Boris Pasternak and a bottle of French perfume, and that was that,” said Bezrukikh, now 51. Her daughter, Katya, received a top notch, if strict, education, and now has a good job in media. She travels often and widely, reaping the benefits of a Soviet education combined with the relative freedom of the modern Russian state.

Katya, however, would have faced far greater challenges if she were born more recently.

Along with the fall of the Soviet Union came a collapse in social services. Long accustomed to free, high quality education and healthcare, decent pensions, secure jobs and apartments, Russians decry the loss of what they call “social guarantees,” just as they welcomed the country’s new openness and flood of capitalist goods.

“In the Soviet Union, people felt protected. No one worried about what would be tomorrow,” said Bezrukikh, who is, at the same time, highly critical of the Soviet regime as well as the modern day government, which she likens to a dictatorship. “No one had money, but everything was free — medicine, schools, universities, everything.”

Eighteen years after the collapse of the Soviet Union, many Russians miss the days of universal education and medicine. They have yet to adapt to a world where everything has a price.

And in contemporary Russia, that price is invariably high. An overnight stay in a city hospital is free, at least officially. But the culture of corruption is so pervasive that nurses expect small fees to perform routine services: cleaning bed sheets, administering medicine, and checking on patients. A pensioner in St Petersburg, who gave her name only as Natalia, checked into hospital earlier this year and says she spent around 3,000 rubles ($100) in bribes, which ran from 100 rubles to 500 rubles each. To an American that may not sound like much, but to a 60-year-old Russian woman living on a pension of 6,000 rubles a month, it is a heavy toll.

Complaints about social services regularly rank high. A recent poll of 1,000 Muscovites by the Levada Center, an independent polling firm, found that among citizens’ top concerns were poor quality and quantity of medical services, corruption of local officials, increased homelessness and lack of affordable housing.

The sad state of affairs is not lost on the Kremlin. Yet critics decry the government’s top-down solutions as being steeped in rhetoric while giving few results.

President Dmitry Medvedev owes his rise, in part, to efforts to address inadequate social services. Years before he became Vladimir Putin’s hand-picked successor, Medvedev was a relatively obscure bureaucrat. Then he made his name overseeing Russia’s National Priority Projects, a multi-year initiative announced in 2005 to reform four spheres of life: health, education, housing and agriculture.

While leading that initiative, Medvedev criss-crossed the vast country, visiting run-down hospitals and schools that lacked chairs, let alone Internet access. It was a potent pre-election tactic, having his face appear often on state-run television.

The government appeared to be throwing money at the problem, spending 762 billion rubles ($25.6 billion) on the National Priority Projects from 2006 through 2008. Yet this amount is relatively modest given the scope of the problem and the wealth the country had amassed before the crisis hit in autumn 2008, when foreign currency reserves reached $400 billion and the oil stabilization fund hit $150 billion.

The National Priority Project was given a 2009 deadline to modernize health care, education and agriculture, and to increase the stock of affordable housing. Yet attention to these lofty goals has dropped since the election, and the financial crisis has hampered government spending. Russia is due to run its first budget deficit in a decade this year, reaching an estimated eight percent of GDP.

Russian officials have gone to great lengths to say that social spending will not be affected by the crisis.

“Their approach has practically not changed and what’s more, they’ve said the level of social payments will not fall,” said Yevgeny Gontmakher, an analyst at the Moscow-based Institute of Global Economy and International Relations, and a frequent critic of the ruling regime. Spending on health and education this year was expected to remain at around eight percent of GDP, he said.

Yet that financial commitment is insufficient, analysts and average Russians agree. To boost social services, the government needs to tackle corruption. That’s something to which Medvedev in particular has paid much lip service, but with few results so far. High-profile arrests of deputy mayors or police officers have grabbed headlines since Medvedev launched his anti-corruption drive upon acceding to the presidency, but it is the small daily bribes that affect Russians most.

A top Interior Ministry official said earlier this year that the average Russian official took annual bribes amounting to 927,000 rubles ($31,300). Yet what’s created bigger shockwaves are videos streaming onto You Tube showing Russians trying to resist paying bribes to traffic police and other officials. One shows a man beating up a school headmaster after the man explicitly asked for a $3,000 bribe to get his daughter into kindergarten.

The effect of the Soviet collapse is self-evident in the figures. A UN report released in early October showed that Russia’s population fell by 6.6 million since 1993, and that a further 11 million people could disappear by 2025. Poor healthcare was the biggest factor, the report found.

Russia’s approach to reversing its demographic crisis further illustrates the top-down approach. In order to encourage more births, the Kremlin has brought back a Soviet-era medal awarded to families who have many children. In order to cut down on alcoholism, one of Russia’s leading killers, the state is considering restricting beer sales.

Young and old alike, Russians regularly bemoan the state of social services provided to them.

“Today, you can get nothing done if you don’t have money and connections,” said Vladimir, 27, a plumber. “It’s nearly impossible to get into a good school and anyway the level of education is deteriorating.”

Yet whereas many older Russians long for the Soviet era as a result, younger people like Vladimir are not nearly as nostalgic.

“I think it’s better now, but maybe I would think differently if I had lived longer in the Soviet era. What I remember is standing in line for hours for sausages. I wouldn’t be able to handle that again. Who has the strength?”
 

http://www.globalpost.com/passport/foreign-desk/091014/communism-love-affair