Yesterday I came across a video online and wanted to play it in the courtroom, but they probably would have thrown me out. Though a good half of the people there would have started applauding.
Send it immediately to the new Minister of Economic Development. In fact, it would be very useful to listen to it every time Putin and his government start babbling about economic growth.
There will be no economic growth, and there cannot be, as long as people talk this way about getting connected to energy supplies—a key issue in setting up any business.
As I understand it, VTsIOM (the Russian Public Opinion Research Center) was conducting a closed survey of businesses about what they think of administrative barriers.
I know that this kind of sociological monitoring is carried out as part of implementing Putin’s decree, “Moving Up in the Doing Business Ranking.”
And this appears to be a recorded conversation with a survey interviewer asking a company engineer whether it is easy to get connected to gas these days. Be sure to listen, but fair warning: explicit language.
This problem is all too familiar to millions of our fellow citizens—anyone who has tried to connect a house or dacha (country home) to gas will never forget the experience.
And getting connected to electricity is not much easier, nor is access to the rest of the utility infrastructure.
That is why I can only laugh when someone says that import substitution will revive our agriculture, or that some kind of incentives will boost industry. Not a single farmer in Russia can properly connect a cowshed or pigsty to gas and make use of the main advantage that Russia’s economic structure is supposed to provide—in theory—cheap energy. First, it has not been cheap for a long time: gas costs more than it does in the United States. Second, connection costs are so enormous that they make the final cost of gas insane in any case.
And the main thing is that this whole mess—gas and electricity hookups—which is genuinely wrecking the country’s economy, exists only so that a relatively small number of crooks in Gazprom, Rostekhnadzor (Russia’s federal environmental, technological, and nuclear oversight agency), and other organizations the man in the video speaks about so passionately can keep feeding at the trough.
For years people have been saying that the idiotic regulations governing connections to utility networks need to be fundamentally overhauled and drastically cut back, but almost nothing changes.
And of course, it is worth reminding everyone here that the DAILY salary of Gazprom chief Alexei Miller is 3,100,000 rubles.