From the beginning of 2019, Russian citizens were required to pay an additional fee for obtaining a multiple-entry visa to the United States. The U.S. entry visa price increased from $160 to $303. The changes badly affected demand for the business and tourist trips to the U.S. The increased fee for a visa was based on the principle of reciprocity the same amount is paid by American citizens for a visa of the Russian Federation. One thing to consider: Russian average monthly salary is $450 per month, and the ruble exchange rate collapsed from 32 per dollar as of end-2013 to more than 60 per dollar as of end-2019.
We cant keep up with this doomed tug of war. Neither I, nor my parents across the ocean wish to endure such barbaric ways to carry out diplomatic disputes.
Now lets admit that the political scene is in no way better than the shaky state of the global economy. Thus, a highly repercussive article devoted to the widening gap between expectations and reality among the Russian post-millennials appeared on January 9, 2020 in the Financial Times. The material was entitled Generation Putin: how young Russians view the only leader theyve ever known.
It rightfully points out that Putins Kremlin has sought to create a generation largely numb to politics, through the repression of opposition movements, a propaganda-heavy media machine and a cult of personality.
Even more: Those who seek change from Putin have found they must compete against not just the might of the Kremlin and the truncheons of the riot police but also the apathy common among the vast majority of their fellow youth a generation raised on a strict diet of political indifference.
The FT claims to have interviewed almost 50 young Russians, all aged between 18 and 25 who live in Moscow, St Petersburg, Siberia and beyond. So this must be quite a representative sampling.
Indeed, by most calculations, Russias economy shrank by 60 per cent between 1991 and 1999, a bigger contraction than during WWII, and caused a huge domestic plunge in the birthrate, a spike in mortality and an emigration boost. There is only one remotely comparable example the situation in Syria between 2010 and now.
End of the Cold War was a Time of Hope and Opportunity
In the last 30 years, naivety has been one single most important factor of the failed multicultural dialogue and the ruined careers of the internationalists. After the fall of the Iron Curtain under Mikhail Gorbachev and Ronald Reagan, one of the first post-Cold-War liberated air flights from Moscow to New York in 1989 felt like some sort of an action movie: memorably, Irish Shannon Airport pilots and employees decided to form a sort of lineup applauding us as we went out to the transfer zone. It seemed to many that a wonderful fascinating road to the New Tops of Civilization was ahead of us all. Indeed, Russia had vast territory and natural resources, as well as military and medical technologies, and Europe had the best industrial technologies, which neither Russia nor China possessed back then. The U.S., which enjoyed, in various proportions, all of the above, took the path of rapid development of financial and investment technologies that were complementary to the status of the dollar as the worlds reserve currency. It would seem that a perfect macroeconomic shape was emerging: natural resources and heavy industrial technologies of Russia, Ukraine, Kazakhstan and some other countries of the former USSR should have given impetus to the acceleration of industrial technologies in Europe, investments into which could be provided only by the USA with its powerful financial sector. The industrial revolution in China, in turn, brought a large number of inexpensive workers, who even without technology transfer, eyeing huge deferred demand for change and urbanization in this country, were ready to reduce the cost of the second technological breakthrough in Europe.
In reality, we have the following picture for 2020. Apart from the known side effects of the chronic monetary expansion (money printing by the worlds largest central banks) which led to slower growth and dwindling personal savings, Europe so far has never launched an independent space exploration expedition (although it was very close to it at the turn of the new millennium), and the automotive industry has unexpectedly moved away from its long time adherence to higher power and speed giving way to energy-saving technologies. Investments are stagnating due to the lack of new markets due to mutual sanctions and low returns on investment. As a result of the financial crisis of 2008, the United States locked up its financial and investment technologies to itself, while downplaying accelerating downfall of the manufacturing sector. At the same time, China has obtained not only the offshore assembly facilities it hoped for under best-case scenario, but also as a surprise gift technology, which allowed it to build its own powerful industry, including an ultra high-speed railroad network and aircraft manufacturing. Russia froze exploration and production of new minerals and energy resources due to the lack of foreign markets and switched to the model of import substitution and preservation of technologies received from the West during another thaw from 1991 to 2006. Should we look for the party to blame here, and doesnt it make more sense to just reverse this detrimental process?
At least once in my life I felt like more than winning a lottery. In 1996 I was selected to participate in a Russia United Kingdom government financial education and work program entitled The Chancellors Financial Sector scheme. A London city job was part of an innovative scheme to assist the former Soviet Union in its transition to a free market economy something that eventually yielded mixed results: although today certain sectors of Russias economy, particularly, retail, largely comply with free market principles, lack of freedom for entrepreneurs suggests Russia is still mainly a State-controlled highly centralized economy.
To say it was hard to get selected by the British Council by passing all the course work and arduous exams is to say nothing. Imagine a student whose English teachers have never been in a single English-speaking country and whose skills came solely from language classes conducted by the same kind of teachers who had never crossed a USSR border due to the iron curtain regime. How about preparing and passing the IELTS tests followed by a no-gimmicks pre-selection interviews with real UK bankers (that was our real lifetime experience back then!)? It really felt like Alice in Wonderland: learning self presentation skills (Soviet schools discouraged students from standing out of the crowd for ethical reason), sticking to polite but assertive attitudes, setting up pronounced goals and prognoses, developing patience and respect, always remembering to add please and many more. It sounds funny now, but back then it really wasnt.
I went to a final interview with a lot of enthusiasm but very limited English linguistic capacity and funny quasi-American accent caught during my recent trip to New York. Reading my first books in English gifted to me by my aunt living in Englewood Cliffs, NJ, I drew quite an interesting conclusion: the hard rock music was more ear-pleasing with the soft British accents (thats why, I thought to myself, most rock stars such as Mick Jagger, Elton John, David Bowie, Robert Plant, Ian Gillan and many others were originally from England), but to study English the American accent was easier for listening since it didnt swallow suffixes.