Putin Defends Record as Angry Russians Say Life Is Getting Worse

(Bloomberg) --

President Vladimir Putin insisted life is getting better for ordinary Russians even if they don’t feel it yet, as he faced a barrage of complaints about low salaries and poor living standards at his annual call-in show.

While real wages fell in recent years, “now incomes are gradually starting to recover,” Putin said Thursday in the live broadcast that exposed simmering discontent after a recession he called an “unpleasant element in the economy.” When a firefighter in Kaliningrad region said he earned as little as 12,000 rubles ($190) a month and had to work two or three jobs to support his family, Putin appeared surprised and said the information “needs to be checked.”

Average monthly salaries will rise to about 45,000 rubles ($712) this year, from 33,000 in 2017, Putin said. After callers highlighted poor provision in education, healthcare and basic infrastructure, the president said results of his $400 billion investment program to 2024 in the so-called National Projects “should be felt right now, this year, and next year,” including on wages.

The televised marathon, which lasted 4 hours 8 minutes this time, is meant to present Putin as in tune with the concerns of the public. With his popularity on the slide amid anemic economic growth, his 17th “Direct Line” took place at a sensitive moment for the Kremlin after a series of protests forced officials into unusual climbdowns on issues ranging from police corruption to waste disposal. Even so, the exercise is carefully stage-managed to prevent direct criticism of Putin while allowing him to admonish officials for failing to resolve problems.

“The format is getting more and more tired,” said Andrei Kolesnikov, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Moscow Center. While it’s clear that Russians try to solve their local problems by calling into the program, “if you patch the roof, it will still leak next year. Every year it’s more obvious to people,” he said.

Rising Wages

Even as the president was speaking, the Federal Statistics Service issued revised data that showed wages grew much faster in April than previously stated, and it reported higher than expected growth in May.

Putin took a dig at former Finance Minister Alexei Kudrin, accusing him of drifting away from his support of market orthodoxy toward ideas favored by one of his longtime ideological nemeses, Sergei Glazyev. Kudrin said in a state TV interview on Sunday that he was concerned at the risk of a social explosion amid rising poverty levels among Russians, prompting criticism from the Kremlin for his “emotional” comment.

Putin himself became emotional near the end of the broadcast when he was asked what made him ashamed. His usually confident voice shook noticeably as he recounted how his aides had lost a letter handed to him by an elderly woman who had fallen to her knees before him in wintry conditions during a provincial visit in the early 2000s. “I’ll never forget it, I’m ashamed even now,” Putin said.

Just 17% of Russians believe the economic situation in the country is improving, while 41% think it’s getting worse, according to a survey published Monday by the Moscow-based Public Opinion Foundation (FOM).

Meanwhile, the Kremlin has grown twitchy over the president’s slumping popularity after last year’s hike in the pension age that heightened anger over falling living standards.

Russia’s state pollster VTsIOM was criticized by Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov after it published a survey last month showing public trust in Putin had fallen to a 13-year low of about 30%. Within a day, VTsIOM released a new survey showing trust in Putin was at more than 72%.

While domestic concerns dominated this year’s questions, Putin hit out at the U.S. which he said was trying to keep Russia down as a global competitor. The Trump administration was attempting to do the same to China with its attacks on Huawei Technologies Co., he said.

Putin told reporters after the program that he has no ambition to restore Russia’s Soviet-era status as a superpower, and said some western powers had failed to learn from the “sad experience” of the communist state.

“We don’t want to return to the situation that the Soviet Union was in, when it imposed a way of life, a political system and so on, upon its neighbors, including countries in eastern Europe,” he said. “It’s counterproductive, it’s too expensive and it has no prospects.”

There were lighter moments, too. When one presenter said that a viewer wanted to know if there was proof the president wasn't an alien from outer space, Putin responded that he can prove that he isn’t and that his family are witnesses to that fact.

Asked, too, whether he was tired of being president after so long, Putin, who was re-elected last year until 2024, replied: “No, otherwise I wouldn’t have run for this term.”

--With assistance from Evgenia Pismennaya and Jake Rudnitsky.

To contact the reporters on this story: Stepan Kravchenko in Moscow at skravchenko@bloomberg.net;Andrey Biryukov in Moscow at abiryukov5@bloomberg.net

To contact the editors responsible for this story: Gregory L. White at gwhite64@bloomberg.net, Tony Halpin

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