Fortress Russia: To Survive the Sanctions, Vladimir Putin Advocates a Return to the Soviet Era.

4 glaring examples of the new normality of the Russian people who must turn inward.

More than sixty days after the beginning of Vladimir Putin's war in Ukraine, we still have difficulty seeing a quick outcome to this conflict. I would like to be wrong, but I have the feeling that we are heading for a war of attrition whose death toll will, unfortunately, continue to rise.

While the American and European sanctions on Russia are beginning to produce increasingly massive effects on the economy of the country led by Vladimir Putin, the latter does not intend to stop. He has his goals and he wants to show the rest of the world that he will do everything to achieve them.

Rather than considering that bowing to the weight of Western sanctions, Putin tries to explain to his people that this is an opportunity:

“The West has no intention of reversing its policy of economic pressure on Russia. The Russian economy must therefore develop a long-term plan based on internal opportunities.”

Vladimir Putin seems to perceive his country as the besieged “Fortress Russia”. According to him, everything must be done so that Russia will not depend on any external country in the future. And to achieve this goal, but also to maintain the standard of living of its population by ensuring a certain form of normality, one sees the return of very Soviet reflexes in Russia.

The return of the Lada, in raw mode

An iconic Eastern European car, the Lada is as outdated as it is reputed to be puncture-proof, but since the opening of the Soviet bloc, the brand's modern vehicles have become much more dependent on spare parts from abroad.

Avtovaz, which produces the Lada, is owned by the French carmaker Renault and, according to several specialists, the two companies share a unique spare parts supply system. On March 24, 2022, in response to Renault's announcement that it would withdraw from the Russian market, Avtovaz revealed that it needed to quickly redesign several models so that they would be less dependent on imported components.

Several specialists said that the redesigned models will be simpler versions of the current cars, without additional features such as ABS. In short, the return of the Lada in raw mode, without any modern comforts, will delight Putin, who is so often inclined to criticize the West on this point.

The Kremlin pushes Vkontakte, the Russian Instagram

Vkontakte is a typical Russian social network, but it was “only” the second most used in the country, after Instagram. Until the Russian communications regulator cut off access to Facebook and Instagram last month, creating a de facto air bubble that Vkontakte hopes to take advantage of. A bit like what CCP has done in China since the advent of the American tech giants on the world in the early 2000s.

The company Vkontakte waives its commission on all monetized content until the end of April 2022 and offers a free promotion on the platform to any content creator who has left another platform, or reactivated his page since March 1, 2022.

Vkontakte has also published a step-by-step guide to starting a business on its platform. The number of monthly users passed the 100 million mark last month, while Instagram lost almost half of its active Russian-speaking users.

The Mir national credit card system to resist the American giants’ Visa and Mastercard

The most terrible isolation for a country is financial. In order to rebuild a semblance of normalcy when Russia was already at risk of increasing isolation since 2014, the government implemented a national bankcard system called Mir.

Meaning both “peace” and “world” in Russian, the word inevitably brings to mind the ancestor of today's International Space Station, but for the federation's citizens, it has become an everyday tool: according to the Russian central bank, more than 113 million Mir cards were issued in 2021, compared with a total of 1.76 million at the end of 2016.

By 2021, about a quarter of all card payments in Russia were made with Mir cards. So when Visa and Mastercard announced in early March 2022 that they were suspending their transactions and operations in Russia, there was an alternative already in place. But Mir is not a direct alternative. It only works in Russia and a handful of other countries, mainly the former Soviet states.

This will only reinforce the retreat of the Russian people into the “Fortress Russia” that Vladimir Putin is talking about more and more. A fortress supposed to protect the people from the West whose only ambition would be to harm Russia's power on a global level. Always according to Vladimir Putin ...

The public sector as a force for absorbing lost jobs

The city of Moscow is trying to anticipate the potential problem of unemployment with a program to retrain and hire people who used to work in Western companies, many of which have suspended or stopped their activities in Russia. Moscow Mayor Sergei Sobyanin estimates that up to 200,000 jobs are at risk!

The solution, according to a recent post on his blog, is to give the workers left behind something "useful" to do for the city of Moscow. Among the options he presents are jobs handling official documents such as passports and birth certificates, working in one of the city's parks, or in the temporary health centers that the city recently began setting up. There is $41 million in funding to create these jobs and retrain workers.