on Monday Afternoon handed over nerves. I could not stand the uncertainty and called one of the closest associates of Putin with a sacramental question: when the country starts to recover a semblance of normal life? The reaction of the interlocutor was struck by the concreteness: “the Current week can be crucial. Its results will show how the removal of restrictions country is ready, and to some — not yet.” Being by nature a skeptic and a pessimist, I suspect, ahead of what Russia has many more such “decisive weeks.”
But the battle stand, in which stood the Kremlin, I’m not surprised. And the country and government ends time to spare. The farther, the more coronavirus is bringing us all to the wall — and not only in the epidemiological sense.
“Stretching across the continent from Stettin on the Baltic sea to Trieste on the Adriatic sea in Europe the iron curtain fell,” – said in March, 1946 in his famous Fulton speech, Winston Churchill. Today in Europe and the whole world went down a new iron curtain. The curtain that separates those countries that are already mostly lost coronavirus from those who only goes through this painful period.
the World was divided into States whose government managed to take effective action against the epidemic and the state, whose leaders have completely failed in this task. Of course, in contrast to the realities of the cold war, when the transition from one side of the curtain to the other happens relatively rarely, the current division of the world is very fragile. Of the foremost anti-coronavirus can be very easy to slip into a middling or even lagging.
the First otraportovali about the suppression of the epidemic, China was again placed under strict quarantine 110 million people, and is considered a world leader in terms of the effectiveness of measures to combat the virus in South Korea is now faced with the prospect of a second wave of the disease.
But, despite its conventionality, a new iron curtain is real. And it applies not only to the free movement of people between States with the same epidemiological status and the deprivation of such rights of the inhabitants of those countries like Russia, whose epidemic status leaves much to be desired.
With the temporary blocking of access to foreign “tourist corridors” to be put up. With the progressive degradation of the economy can not be put up. Meanwhile, the question comes now to the fore in the global political agenda. With a light hand of Angela Merkel, the impact of coronavirus has long been compared to the effects of the Second world war. But I still think this analogy is not disclosed until the end.
we All know about the hardships during the war. But the hardships that followed in Europe over its end, I��e known, but no less ambitious. Speaking in 1946 at the radio, then US President Harry Truman described the situation in the Old world: “More people are now facing starvation and death from lack of food than in any year of the war and even during all the war years combined.” Fearing that the hunger will push Europe into Moscow’s embrace, America has had the Old World of large-scale food aid. The Soviet Union is, of course, is not touched. In 1946-1947 some regions of our country had again covered the famine.
of Course, no exact repetition of the events of those years can not be considered. Unlike the Second world war, the coronavirus does not destroy the physical infrastructure of the economy — roads, bridges, factories and shopping centers. But to this physical structure of the economy earned in the normal rhythm, it requires the reconstruction of destroyed economic chain — not in one country, and in large parts of the globe. The challenges facing single state, that national boundaries can “strangle” the coronavirus, shows an example of Australia.
As described in detail recently by the British newspaper “the guardian”, if the peak of the epidemic in the country instill a sense of national unity, after the normalization of the epidemiological situation, this feeling began to decline.
the Moral and psychological climate in the country deteriorated. The increased level of General anxiety over the state of the economy and the degree of popularity of various “conspiracy theories”. It turns out that in the midst of the epidemic one the flame does not ignite another. Fear of the disease swings on the back of mass discontent due to the crisis in the economy. But as soon as the fear subsides, this mass discontent erupts twice or even three times the energy.
in no way consider myself a sociologist. But, my feeling is that in Russia similar processes are evolving and will evolve somewhat differently. The epidemic in our country is delayed. And this leads to a “superalliance” fears. Fear before the coronavirus does not go away, but with him firmly grounded extreme dissatisfaction with the state of the economy. In my circle, of course, in any way it is impossible to judge about the General situation in the country. But two of my closest friends anxiously told that they had run out of money. Russia significantly increasing the level of bitterness. And much of this anger directed at the government.
Making in January-March of this year a series of daring political steps like the change of government and of granting Putin the right to run for President for a new term, the Kremlin was able to regain the political initiative. However, in over the past weeks this political achievement was, in my estimation, to gradually fade away. The government now steps into the forefront of the political process, but is rather in the pose of a man who defended and protected from the reproaches are showered upon him from all sides.
Could it be different? Probably could not. Coronavirus — this is not the enemy you can outwit and with whom you can “negotiate” (really hope that in the future such possibility will appear, but so far they do not).
However, the absolute situation of force majeure does not absolve the government from the obligation to return on the right course clearly banked the ship of Russian statehood. It remains only to understand how it looks the right course.
Usually in case the necessity arises, it is customary to listen to the experts. But in this situation, the Council has only limited usefulness. Among the experts in coronavirus now there is no agreement on even the most basic facts about this disease. For example, one prominent British expert and former official of the world health organization recently declared that attempts to create a vaccine against coronavirus deeply meaningless. The virus, they say, will self-destruct long before such a vaccine will appear.
Another, even more prominent British expert, Professor Neil Ferguson, from the calculations which Prime Minister Boris Johnson has imposed a state of universal quarantine, first caught in violation of the quarantine: the period of validity of restrictive measures of the scientist visited his married mistress (pundits, as we see, nothing human is not alien to). And then from the pages of one of the leading Newspapers of the country “daily Telegraph” the Professor was charged with elementary mathematical illiteracy in the preparation of the model the spread of the virus. And all this comes amid public doubts of many specialists in the emergence of immunity against coronavirus those who do ill.
there is No certainty as to the economic methods of combating the epidemic. Sweden, as we know, did not ruin its economy and to impose universal quarantine. But, according to some estimates, its economy will still fall nearly as much as its more cautious neighbors.
in Short, firmly what is clear is that nothing is clear. However, there is. Clearly something else. Whichever way the conclusion of Russia from crisis, Putin has chosen, he will have to go through minefields. Other “fields” around our country is no more.
