Reassurance to the poor: why the income declarations of officials have flown from light to shadow

Yekaterina Maximova

"And the point here is not only that some enemies can use open data, but also in the obvious dissonance between the multiplying appeals to the population about their sacrifice and dedication and the figures symbolizing, to put it mildly, a radical difference in the incomes of citizens with the official earnings of the top of the state administration and the political elite. The latter circumstance also caused decent irritation during the peace period . And now it just hurts my eyes. So it's better to get him out of sight!", - Slatinov appreciated the innovation.

As political scientist Slatinov told Novye Izvestia, even if, for example, we take salaries in any province and compare them with the incomes of regional officials, then, of course, the bill will not be in favor of ordinary citizens. And the salaries of top officials are orders of magnitude (!) higher.

"Of course, the glaring difference between the average salaries of Russians and the official incomes of the political, administrative, regional and federal elite raised many questions even in peacetime, and even more so during the SVO," Slatinov summed up.

The fact that the declarations of deputies and senators will not be published from this year is reported by Vedomosti. The publication clarifies that this information is confirmed by the chairman of the Duma Committee on state Construction Pavel Krasheninnikov.

Declarations in which Russians could see the official income of politicians will cease to be published from March 1. Previously, the legislation required to post an income declaration before April 1. This year, access to such data will already be closed. And Russians will never know about the incomes of parliamentarians and senators for 2022.

Recall that the speaker of the State Duma Vyacheslav Volodin, who the day before proposed to confiscate property from Russians who left the country because of their own, in 2021 declared income in the amount of 65 million rubles (a year earlier - 84 million rubles). According to the declarations for 2021, which were published in April 2022, the richest senator was the representative of Kamchatka, Valery Ponomarev – 4.2 billion rubles. Of the deputies of the State Duma, the richest member of the Communist Party faction, Vladimir Blotsky, is 3.5 billion rubles.

However, it should be noted here that we are not talking about salaries for deputy labor, but about income from large assets of citizens.

According to Rosstat, at the end of 2022, the average monthly salary of Russians in nominal terms was 62 thousand 470 rubles. It turns out that in order for an ordinary person to earn, say, 14 million rubles, they will have to work for almost 20 years. And if you focus on billions of dollars, then ten lives will not be enough.

Russia, however, is not alone in the problem of the stratification of society into very rich and many poor.