Igor Rybakov: "Russia will not sustain the endlessly fattening Moscow"

“The situation is such that everyone goes to Moscow. There is a myth that everything is there in Moscow, that everything is smeared with honey and butter here, and that here you will be rolling like cheese in butter. And everyone comes here.

Moscow is a very big city. It may even be a separate country.

Gigantic structural imbalances have emerged and continue to worsen. I am very worried and worried about this.

People are literally being washed out of the regions, blocking any possibility of doing anything efficient in the regions.

Regions are weakening, while Moscow is swelling, abundant and no longer knows how to cope with all this diversity, abundance, traffic jams, and so on.

Of course, this does not bode well for us. Such an agglomeration, such a density that Moscow already has today and which will develop in the next ten years - there really is no force in this for our country and society.

There are two reasons for all this.

The first one is historical migration flows directed to the capital, these are natural flows, they have always been. But this is not such a significant factor.

And the most significant factor is the system of redistribution of benefits that operates in today's Russia.

In the USSR, by the way, there was not such a system and it did not lead to such an increase in the Moscow agglomeration.

But in today's Russia, the process is as follows: first, we collect almost all taxes, at zero, and then we make transfers to the regions.

What does this distribution system lead to?

Firstly, there are favorite regions and not so much, and secondly, such a system leads to the fact that a huge number of participants appear who can twist the distribution of budget transfers somewhere. It sticks to my hands and so on.

This is such a simplified model: well, it sort of distributes, but the result is obvious.

Is the economy growing in Russia? is the welfare of citizens growing? Is the salary growing?

Structural imbalances are growing, some, therefore, are fattening, and some, it means, only on tiles, do you know how much is spent in Moscow every year? What is spent on tiles in Moscow is a five-year budget in other cities!

Of course, the current system is very beneficial to the power vertical. It is clear that if all regions, all provinces, all cities are now completely dependent on budget transfers from the vertical, then the regions are humble - they constantly come and negotiate.

She (vertical) very coolly conducts any good thing to the very cosmodrome "Vostochny". Easy. Good thing.

And just as successfully she carries out the greatest stupidity, in full.

Stupidity, a mistake on this vertical system is spreading throughout the country.

...In the last century, there was an "abundant" discussion that the need to introduce draconian measures, autocracy or centralized leadership is due to the fact that people, regions are not able to organize themselves.

But the fact is that this is not true.

The clearest example is Switzerland, where the strongest level of self-regulation of the cantons - in our opinion, regions, districts. Right now literally it sometimes comes to insanity. They also have a lot of their own distortions. But until the people's gathering decides, they can't do anything.

But the long-term application of this approach has led to the fact that we all see how well-groomed Switzerland is, how they relate to work, what kind of companies they have, welfare and so on.

And our economy, in fact, is now hostage to an earlier decision, which was relevant for those times - the early 2000s, when the government needed to restore order in federalism and remove separatist phenomena, but today the current distribution system is a giant continuous brake and extinguishing the Russian economy.

...I see the situation in the regions, the attitude towards the capital, I see how people in Russia eat themselves.

The whole country is saturated with hatred for the neighbor, for the neighbor. I will put up a fence, separate myself from my neighbor so as not to see him, and so on.

Hatred is a consequence of our segregation approach. Separating yourself from the country, from the city, from everything.

As a result, we are very scared, and in order to distract ourselves from this fear, we fall into a state of "aggressive impulses."

This is a feature of the way and education of our society, which we inherited from the late Soviet Union.

We hate what we do, we hate each other, the country, America, we hate China.

What do we love? Birches, "culture", while living in a culture of hate.

We love things that do not exist.

The root of the problem is that we don't love ourselves.

Eating ourselves and self-flagellation is just our habit.

When you start looking at the future from the point of view "what other unfavorableness can happen", of course, you find it".

You can watch the entire video of Igor Rybakov here.