Not that one should put any stock in these things (call-in surveys, after all, attract a self-selecting pool of respondents, and there is nothing to keep people from calling in multiple times), but here were the results of the survey on this evening's edition of TVC's nightly news program (they do a different "survey" every night:
In your opinion, is the Russian economy currently:
Response....................# of respondents....(percentage of total)
Growing and strengthening.......339...............(2.5%)
Standing still...............................634...............(4.8%)
Declining................................12,334.............(92.7%)
It's not social science by any stretch of the imagination, but I found these results to be surprising.
1 comment:
Galya, I agree that many people here are not satisfied, but look at the increases in wages in the last few years - in Moscow at least, which is where most of these callers would presumably be located (since it was a toll call for anyone else), they have been substantial. Are all of the Muscovites tooling around in imported cars bought on credit and living in mortgage-financed apartments - neither of which were possible 5 or 6 years ago - really unhappy about the direction the economy is going? I guess maybe those people are not a majority, but surely they are more than 2.5%. Maybe what it shows is that even with all of the state-run TV channels trumpeting the economic achievements of the Putin regime, the public is not convinced. Then again, it's a totally unscientific survey we're talking about here, so maybe it's not worth making too much out of the results.
Totally off-topic, in response to a question you asked in a long-ago comment, I had every intention of reading Platonov (in Russian this time - I tried to read Kotlovan or the Foundation Pit in English once and something was definitely lost in translation) on our trip to Hong Kong, but as it turned out the New Yorker magazines I had with me were much easier to read and so that's what I read on the flight there. While we were there I had no time to read, and on the way back I was too tired. So this mission will have to wait for a quieter time in the near future - maybe when we're on vacation at my in-laws' in rural Moldova, where there is no internet or graffiti to be photographed. Would you say Platonov is worth the effort?
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