July 25, 2019

Putin promises a salary rise to Russian military at the expense of retirees

topic:	Humans
located:	Russia
editor:	Igor Serebryany

Expenses for pensions and other social benefits will be cut by the end of the year, according to the amended federal budget approved by the Russian Parliament, State Duma, this week.

The bill signed into law by President Vladimir Putin envisages a total cut of social spending of over 20 billion rubles (about $320 thousand), the lion's share of which will be taken from pension payments.

The money will be re-channelled to increase salaries of police, prosecutors, Russian Guards as well as to subsidise the state-run Channel One TV. State officials on all levels also are to receive a salary hike.

Authorities can withdraw money from social programmes without any fear that would cause social unrest, dean of the Sociology Department in the Financial University Alexander Shatilov says.

"In Russia, some 13 million people are living below the poverty line. This is less than 10 percent of Russia's population. This is too little to wreak havoc in the society", he notes.

Shatilov points out to the United States where 46 million people survive on the food stamps but no large-scale unrest has been foreseen.

"Russians, in general, have recovered from the shock of the previous years. They, more or less, have got accustomed to the new reality. Most of them are unwilling to destabilise the situation because that would inflict one more psychological re-adjustment, and few are happy with such a perspective," he explains.

Besides being a minority, Russian disadvantaged people is the least politically active group, so the authorities can do whatever they want with those people without expecting them to fight back.

The federal budget before its recent revision envisaged that pensions would be increased by 7 percent in 2019. By July, the retirement payments were increased by 2 percent, or... $3.

According to a survey by the Super Job employment agency, only 16 percent of those polled said they were going to live solely on the pensions after retirement. Meanwhile, 76 percent of Russians consider a pension of $80 generous enough.

The majority of Russians are not going to live solely on pensions, a professor in the Academy of Labor Andrei Gudkov says. "One's future pension could be calculated well in advance. The law doesn't prohibit a retired person to work elsewhere. However, in that case, the pension would not be fully adjusted to the inflation rate.

Only people who live in poverty pockets or those who have been unemployed most of their lives might consider 80-dollar pension fair", he says.

Image: Presidential Press and Information Office, www.kremlin.ru, CC-BY-SA 3.0 DE