By Peter Finn
Washington Post Foreign Service
Saturday, November 24, 2007
NIZHNY NOVGOROD, Russia -- The 1990s are fresh in Vadim Ignatiyev's memory -- pathetic wages delayed for weeks, kopeks scraped together to buy food, and a fear of the future blended of helplessness and rage.
The lean, balding 35-year-old, who has spent his adult life working on the line at a glass factory in the suburbs of this city, now sits at a laden table with his wife and 13-year-old son. Behind him is a brand-new television beside a matching CD player, also new. His Lada car, bought recently with a bank loan, is parked outside the family's second-story walk-up apartment.
"I feel much safer now," said Ignatiyev, whose family recently took its first vacation abroad, a package tour to a Turkish resort. "I have a good job, not a prestigious job, but a good living." In just the past two years, his salary has more than doubled, to $700 a month, reflecting his factory's growing sales.
For the first time in post-Soviet history, a majority of Russians feel optimistic about their own and their country's future, according to the Levada Center, an independent polling agency. The sense of personal and national resurgence, clearly visible in long-depressed Nizhny Novgorod, with its now-plentiful factory jobs, foreign stores and construction cranes, is a key factor in the consistently high approval ratings enjoyed by President Vladimir Putin.
"I believe the president has given people the possibility to work and to make money," Ignatiyev said. "If five years ago I might have had some doubts about him, now I have none. I don't see any alternative."
According to the Kremlin's opponents, the president's standing -- his approval ratings now exceed 80 percent -- is an artifice. They say it is built on an increasingly autocratic political system and fueled by a tidal wave of petrodollars that may not last. With a slavish press, a docile parliament, a restricted menu of political parties and a willingness to smother dissent, Putin is glassed off from real democratic competition, his critics argue.
"Everything is based on the oil pillow," said Yuli Nisnevich, a political scientist at the Higher School of Economics in Moscow. "But the system itself is not stable. A system that stands on its head and not on its base cannot be stable."
Yet while Putin -- who has never debated a rival during two presidential election cycles -- benefits from the country's closed political process and fawning institutions, his ratings cannot be dismissed as simply the fruit of propaganda, according to Lev Gudkov, director of the Levada Center.
"He combines the renewed hopes of the people and the restoration of authority," Gudkov said. "He spoke the language that many people could understand."
Putin's predecessor of the 1990s, Boris Yeltsin, had to contend with low oil prices, bankrupt state finances and an economic restructuring, including the world's largest sell-off of government property, that bred widespread resentment. Millions of Russians fell into poverty as well-connected tycoons became fabulously rich. An enfeebled Kremlin was seen by many Russians as the handmaiden of a triumphant West.
Now Putin is trading on an enduring nostalgia for the Soviet past, when Russia stood tall in the world. As the country grew to become the world's second-largest exporter of oil, he adopted a prickly and increasingly assertive foreign policy that is widely cheered by Russians.
At home, Putin has used careful stage management to position himself as a figure above politics -- the people's czar who reins in ministers, bureaucrats, tycoons and even the politicians of the pro-Kremlin United Russia party that he will head in next month's parliamentary elections.
"As a rule, all sorts of carpetbaggers try to leech onto" United Russia, he said this week, both echoing and playing down a popular suspicion that the party he has chosen to lead is a coalition of opportunists. "Their goal is not the good of the people, but their own enrichment. They compromise a party."
Putin has been extraordinarily lucky with timing, his tenure coinciding with the rising oil prices that have driven economic growth.
In Soviet times, this Volga River city, then called Gorky, was at the heart of the Soviet defense industry and closed to foreigners. But the fall of communism idled factories, and despite the efforts of its first reformist governor, Boris Nemtsov, the city's industrial base stagnated and poverty became endemic. Just three years ago, 35 percent of the region's population had difficulty buying enough food to eat, according to government statistics. The city itself, drab, dirty and potholed, was physical testament to post-Soviet decline.
Construction cranes now dot Nizhny Novgorod's skyline. New glass and steel structures are crowding out the old wooden houses that were a feature of downtown. Along Pokrovka Street, Nizhny Novgorod's repaved main pedestrian drag, which runs nearly a mile from the city's impressive ancient citadel to a statue of the writer Maxim Gorky, brand-name boutiques sit alongside banks (including Citibank), cafes, restaurants and movie theaters.
"When I sit here, I feel like I could be in any Western European city," said Yury Nemtsov, a local historian and television journalist speaking in a third-floor cafe on Pokrovka, whose refurbished 19th-century buildings have been painted in a rainbow of pastels. "I'm not a supporter of Putin or the power, but you can't deny the changes."
Around the city, numerous big-box retailers have opened in the last two years, including Ikea and a French supermarket chain, which anchor a sprawling complex called Mega Mall. The mall, which opened last year, draws 200,000 visitors a week.
"Our customers are not the wealthy," said Robert Felczak, its manager. "They are ordinary people who now have some money to spend."
Industry is humming again. The Bor glass factory where Ignatiyev works is now a subsidiary of the Japanese company Asahi, producing windows for Toyota, Nissan, Ford and Renault, as well as Russian car manufacturers.
Next year, the giant GAZ auto plant in town plans to begin annual production of 65,000 new sedans, which will be a variation on Chrysler's Sebring. The company, owned by Kremlin-friendly tycoon Oleg Deripaska, paid a reported $150 million for the production line, which was shipped from suburban Detroit.
Average wages in the region have doubled in the past two years, to $450 a month. The number of people reporting difficulty buying enough food has fallen to 15 percent, the governor's office says.
"If people see changes, changes that make their life easier, improve its quality, then of course they evaluate the authorities positively," said the local governor, Valery Shantsev, a former deputy mayor in Moscow whom Putin appointed just over two years ago. "Putin sent me here. So everyone thinks it's Putin's plan."
Shantsev, a former boxer, keeps a small sculpture of a clenched fist on a sideboard in his office -- an apt symbol of his style, according to one of his aides. Indeed, Shantsev has established a reputation as a friend of business who has cut through the bureaucratic tangle that was strangling the city three years ago. His latest project is the development by 2016 of a bullet train to Moscow, 250 miles to the west, to cut rail travel time from eight hours to 80 minutes.
"He gets things done," said Evan Stefanik, executive director of Marchmont Capital Partners, a U.S.-owned corporate finance consulting firm based in Nizhny Novgorod.
The city has also established a reputation for intolerance of grass-roots activism, independent media and opposition politics.
Last month, foreign human rights activists visiting Nizhny Novgorod for a seminar marking the anniversary of the murder of investigative journalist Anna Politkovskaya were detained by police for allegedly failing to report their presence to the authorities.
Hotels normally handle such registration for travelers, but the activists found when they arrived that their rooms were no longer available -- and neither was the hall for the seminar.
"There is a lot of political pressure," said Oleg Repin, who plans to represent the opposition Union of Right Forces in next month's parliamentary elections. "But the public don't hear about it. Most of the media are completely dependent on the authorities."
Shantsev waves off such criticism as the griping of political losers. "Everything is going up, so why should we stop?" he asked. "There is a political force that takes care of the people, that develops the country. Our successes are only just beginning."
Ignatiyev said he and other workers have few concerns about the state of democratic freedoms. "I feel that the time is such that we need strong leaders," he said. "It's the only way the country can be restored. Our politics are very correct, and finally, we can see a good future. There is one person to thank for everything -- our president."
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