MOSCOW, June 22 (RIA Novosti)
Nezavisimaya Gazeta
Kremlin tries to win young people's sympathies
The increasing number of meetings President Vladimir Putin is holding with young Russians suggests that this group is becoming a key target audience for the Kremlin, a leading daily, Nezavisimaya Gazeta, wrote today.
Up till now, Putin has had two favorite audiences: pensioners and war veterans, and scientific and cultural figures. The former are the biggest part of the electorate. The latter are the most influential. It should not be forgotten, though, that in 2008 people who are now aged 16 will be first-time voters. This year as many as 1.4 million people left high school.
Stanislav Belkovsky, the director of the National Strategy Institute, told the paper that the president's more proactive moves on the "youth front" were being taken because the large numbers of young people that took part in the recent revolutions in former Soviet republics had frightened the Kremlin. "Besides, the Kremlin has so far failed to uncover the secret of the National Bolshevik Party," he said. He explained that the party managed to attract young people with purely ideological reasons, because it did not have any money. In his opinion, the Kremlin is just trying to take successful slogans from other projects and make them their own.
But nothing will come of this, as the authorities do not understand young people, Belkovsky said. "They believe that their motives are mercantile, so all these Nashi movements (a youth organization loyal to the Kremlin) are organized for money," he said. "None of them will take to the streets without money. But if one does, it will not be on the Kremlin's side at the decisive moment."
Dmitry Rogozin, the leader of the Homeland left-wing patriotic party, said that the Kremlin administration was already getting ready to prevent the opposition's attempt to contest the results of the future elections. "The use of water cannons and tanks will not be accepted by the international democratic community," he said. "But it will look quite convincing if young people go out onto the streets."
Biznes
Airbus sets sights on half the Russian civil aviation market
A senior Airbus official has said that the company intends to capture at least half the Russian market of new 100-seater planes in the next two decades.
In an interview published in today's issue of Biznes, a business daily, Chris Buckley, the Airbus senior vice president for customer affairs, said Russia would require more than 600 of these new planes in the next 20 years and the European company planned to deliver about 300 of them.
He said Airbus was satisfied with how relations were developing with Russian companies. The country's chief air carrier, Aeroflot, now has 18 A320 liners, and Sibir, another prominent airline, has three A310s.
Buckley said he hoped talks with Aeroflot on leasing 12-16 new planes would be concluded by late 2005. The airline is mostly interested in the A321, which can carry a maximum of 220 passengers.
Buckley said the Russian aircraft industry still had huge potential. The country had competitive products, such as the Tupolev Tu-204 liner, which has the same dimensions as some planes in the A320 family. The Airbus vice president said that his company believed the main problem with the plane was that a post-sale servicing system had not been established completely.
Moreover, Buckley said Russia had some promising projects, such as the Russian Regional Jet and Antonov An-148. He advised Russian companies to pursue more aggressive marketing strategies.
Russian factories that operate below capacity are ready to assemble Western aircraft. For instance, Eclipse Aviation, which is based in New Mexico (USA), has chosen to serially produce its six-seater Eclipse-500 executive jets at the Aviastar plant in Ulyanovsk (the Urals).
However, Buckley said Airbus did not need to assemble planes in Russia, as it could expand production at its two assembly lines in Toulouse (France) and Hamburg (Germany).
Kommersant
British retailer M&S to build biggest chain in Russia
British retail network Marks & Spencer (M&S) may become one of the biggest retailers in Russia, a leading business daily, Kommersant, reported today.
The paper wrote that the retailer was planning to conclude a contract to lease extensive areas in five Mega shopping centers from the Swedish furniture giant, IKEA. If the contract is concluded, the British company, which has 375 stores in its homeland and another 155 shops franchises in 28 other countries, will build the biggest chain of department stores in Russia.
An M&S spokeswoman, Sue Sadler, said that the first store would open in Moscow this fall, and in 2006 M&S intended to do what no European store network had dared to do: enter the Russian regions.
At first glance, the move is something of a surprise: the M&S brand is considered quite expensive and respectable in Europe. In Russia, M&S may only be compared with Finnish retailer Stockmann. Petri Anttila, Stockmann's regional director, was surprised by the M&S plans. He said his company had not entered the regions because it do not want to alter its 'capital' format - 10,000 square meters, which he said Stockmann believed would simply not catch enough affluent buyers in the regions.
Paul Price, the managing director of the Delta Private Equity investment fund, said the arrival of M&S was predetermined. He said Russia's retail market was the sixth biggest in Europe, and was growing at 15-20% a year, compared with 3-4% in European market.
Marina Voloshchuk, the international director of Russkaya Torgovaya Gruppa, or the Russian Trade Group, said that M&S, apart from going to the regions, had few other options, as all the good premises in Moscow had already been taken.
Besides, market watchers pointed to other incentives that may have made the retailer rush to Russia. M&S is not performing well on its traditional markets: its pre-tax profits fell by 19% year on year in 2004. In fact, the paper wrote that other department store operators were also coming to Russia.
Izvestia
42% of Russians consider themselves poor
Almost half of the Russian population, 42% or 61 million people, considers itself to be poor, an authoritative daily, Izvestia, reported today.
The newspaper cites figures made public on Tuesday at the presentation of a report, "Poverty in Russia: Economic Analysis," based on a survey conducted in May by sociologists from the Levada Center and commissioned by the FBK audit and consulting company.
One fourth of those who consider themselves poor are aged between 16 and 30. Moreover, young people represent the only category of the population whose share among the poor (those with incomes below the subsistence level) has been increasing since 1992.
According to FBK experts, the authorities, absorbed by the official statistics, have not taken this fact into account. They show that the number of "genuinely poor" people in Russia has been steadily falling, and by the end of 2004 had reached 25.5 million left.
Igor Nikolayev, the director of the FBK strategic analysis department, said: "People's sentiments do not depend on how many poor citizens the state says there are, but on how they feel."
In fact, different polls conducted by the Levada Center and ROMIR Monitoring show the same results: 40-42% of the population said say considered themselves to be poor.
A majority of citizens (61%) said that the best way to combat poverty was to increase welfare payments (wages, pensions, scholarships). But as soon as respondents' personal income exceeds 9,000 rubles ($315), the number of those who put the responsibility for improving their prosperity on the state fell drastically, to almost 38%.
On the contrary, the share of those who agreed that people should take care of their own prosperity, without shifting their problems on the state and society, tripled, the newspaper wrote.
The state, in turn, is quietly getting rid of other people's problems. Highly publicized announcements about increased social spending from the federal budget have overshadowed a telling fact: so far the population's real incomes have not reached the level of 1991.
Profil
Experts on Russians' distorted view of private property
A recent poll conducted by the Institute for Complex Social Studies of the Russian Academy of Sciences showed Russians mainly saw private property in terms of consumer products.
A weekly, Profil, asked experts to comment on the reason for this view.
Mikhail Delyagin, director of the Institute for Globalization Problems:
"Someone who neither has nor can afford a stake in an oil major, which is the case with most Russians, does not perceive these papers as private property. After all, few apartments, cars, or TVs have ever been confiscated in post-Soviet Russia, whereas grabbing production assets has become a commonplace practice. Now the state is doing what only businessmen did in the past. People think the state grabs shares and factories because it does not perceive them as private property."
Yevgeny Gontmakher, chief expert at the Center for Social Studies:
"A radical change in popular attitudes toward private property is highly unlikely to happen in the short term because the concept of private property is linked to big businesses and oligarchs - a notion the authorities have unfortunately failed to dispel. Russia already has a stock market where people are free to buy shares, but propaganda says that doing so would mean crossing a line between two social camps, when you would cease to be an 'honest worker.' The majority of ordinary people think in Soviet stereotypes, which hold that share ownership means making money out of nothing, or indulging in speculation."
Vladimir Golovnyov, co-chairman of Delovaya Rossiya (Business Russia):
"Private property has not been institutionalized in Russia mostly because of the authorities' mismanagement. For example, private property has been untouchable in Germany under any system of power, even under the Nazis. It has always been the fundamental of fundamentals. In Russia, the situation has been different: A new set of power starts with selecting what it wants. Businessmen see that administrative clout can be used as leverage in ownership disputes, which certainly does not encourage them to strengthen private property."
