Raising retirement age is souring Russians on Putin

Bloomberg

Russia’s annexation of Crimea in 2014 helped boost Vladimir Putin’s approval rating to stratospheric levels. Since then, he’s fuelled an ongoing conflict in Ukraine, interfered with America’s elections and ordered strikes on behalf of the Assad regime in Syria. Through all of these foreign adventures, 87 percent of Russians continued to support him.
But those days may be coming to an end, and the reason is much closer to home. Putin has moved to change a critical benefit underlying Russian society: the state pension. His proposal, stealthily announced during this summer’s World Cup, hasn’t gone over well.
The legislation would raise the age at which Russians qualify for pension benefits. For women, the retirement age goes up eight years to 63; for men it rises five years to 65. Americans might shrug at this, given that they work until 66 to qualify for Social Security, but in Russia, the average life expectancy for a man is only 67. In the US, it’s 76. (Russian women live on average to 77; American women live on average to 81).
Russia’s parliament, the Duma, gave its initial approval to the bill in July, but it requires more votes in the coming months. Some 89 percent of Russians said they opposed the reform, according to a Levada Centre poll in July. More importantly, Putin’s approval rating has sunk to 67 percent, the lowest since a wave of election fraud protests in 2012.
Putin and his party have already made noises about watering down the legislation. But reform supporters argue Russia needs to change, and that it’s leaving productivity on the table when it can least afford it. The nation’s economic recovery has been shallow, with only 1.6 percent growth in the first half of 2018. The pension ages must rise, Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev said in June, since “the number of working people is decreasing and the number of pensioners is rising.” Moreover, Russia’s current retirement ages are the lowest in Europe.
The effect of such a widespread change would likely vary by region. In the worst-off areas, some Russian men may never see their pension if the current bill becomes law. Novgorod, a northwestern region of Russia, is one of those places. It has an average male life span of 64 years, one of the lowest in the nation.
The economy here never truly recovered from the Soviet Union’s demise. It’s capital, Veliky Novgorod, sits along the Volkhov River, 100 miles south of St. Petersburg. In the Middle Ages, it was a city-republic and became part of the German-led Hanseatic League. These days, it’s a backwater dotted with churches and moldering apartment blocks.
A stroll around the Zapadnoye Cemetery reveals how few Novgorod men actually make it to old age. It’s easy to find graves of young men who died in accidents, wars or gangster feuds—many with epitaphs such as “came to a tragic end.” For the rest, the typical age of death is around 62. Graves of men who lived beyond 70, however, are pretty hard to find.