The Wall Street Journal-20080118-Notable -amp- Quotable
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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.
