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An article, heavily criticizing the Putin and Medvedev administrations of the last twenty years appeared on pravda.ru, a pro-Putin online newspaper and descendant of the USSR Pravda newspaper. The article is titled (in translation) Russia is destined to be at the head of the Slavic civilization, and allegedly written by Oleg Podgoretsky, a hardline anti-NATO, anti-Western commentator.

A couple highlights:

Bureaucracy has grown uncontrolled under the governments of the last twenty years. While most of the blame is to be put on the Medvedev administration, Putin was the one promising drastic civil service cuts in 2000 and 2002. Neither administration carried through: instead the number of bodies filling desks more than doubled in the past 20 years, draining the budget of necessary funds to increase the economic well-being of ordinary Russians.

"According to Rosstat, in 1999 the total number of officials in Russia reached 1 million 133 thousand people.

Already in March 2000Vladimir Putin spoke about the need to reduce their number by 10% and in April 2002, calling the state apparatus "cumbersome, clumsy and inefficient", instructed Prime Minister Kasyanov to develop a concept for administrative reform, which in the same year took the form of the federal program "Reforming the civil service of the Russian Federation" (2003-2005).

So what did it turn out to be? As a result of optimization, the number of ministries was reduced from 23 to 16 in 2004, but the total number of federal departments increased from 58 to 85. The total number of civil servants also increased — to 1 million 462 thousand, or by more than 25%. Over the next four years of Medvedev's presidency, the number of civil servants grew by more than 1 million. Regional and municipal authorities swelled by 2.25 and 2.07 times, respectively. No wonder the regions can't make ends meet. At the federal level, the number of civil servants increased 1.6 times. As a result of cuts and optimizations, according to the Ministry of Finance, there are currently 2.4 million civil servants in Russia."

These officials are useless parasites, and the same is true for the broader government:

Such an "army of eaters" needs not only to be fed, but also to be occupied with something. And the government is traditionally engaged in lawmaking, and the upper and lower houses of parliament churn out their legislative initiatives.

In 2020, the Medvedev government instructed to develop 230 draft laws. And all in about 250 working days a year. The speed of production of legislative semi-finished products is truly hypersonic. It is known that the higher the speed, the lower the quality, and vice versa. No wonder they say: measure seven times, cut one off. If you think that new laws are developed on the basis of studying and understanding world experience, then I will disappoint you. Everything is much simpler. The purpose of the laws is to introduce various types of requirements, restrictions and reporting, each of which justifies the need to increase the staffing table. Let me remind you that the same government planned to double GDP by this time.

Not only have the Putin and Medvedev administrations not fulfilled their promises, but they've created a system putting people to sleep:

" We live in a kind of" kingdom of crooked mirrors", a reality made up of" deception for good", hypocrisy, empty promises, exaggerations of one and understatements or silences of the other. The reality that is presented to us from TV screens is full of optimism and confidence in the correctness of the chosen path. Just remember the sessions of illusory reality on Channel One, where the president is given wishful thinking by the head of the FMBAVeronika Skvortsova, talking about miracle vaccines, and RDIF CEOKirill Dmitriev, striking the imagination of viewers with test systems for COVID-19 of unprecedented performance and accuracy. "

The solution lies in engaging with the old communist ideals again, but the European Union is much closer to some of these ideals, while Russia is a kleptocracy:

"Given the extent to which society is stratified by wealth, the immutability of the ruling class for twenty years, the proximity of business to power, and the intolerance of alternative opinion, I assume that we are much closer to what is called "kleptocracy."

Communist relations will come together with the economic concept of "unconditional basic income", which has long been seen as an inevitable state of evolution of the European social-capitalist model of development. The inevitability is due to the unprecedented pace of computerization and robotization and the subsequent release of labor resources.

...

The implementation of an unconditional basic income will automatically entail free education and health care for all those who are already present in the EU countries. In Russia, where instead of the European model, a very one-sided and ugly approximation to the American model of capitalism has been created, this can only be dreamed of."

I have no idea what to think of this article -- pravda.ru always has closely toed the official Russian propaganda line that all is well at the home front and beyond, apart from the Ukrainian nazis and the West-in-decline supporting them. Perhaps this was/is a (smart) hacking attack to influence public opinion in Russia, but the article is apparently already online since April 27th, and hasn't been removed since the first time I encountered it, about 6 hours ago.

Link to a translation of the original article (through Yandex) here. Original article (in Russian) here. For those interested in doing Russian/English translation of other Russian sites, link to Yandex' translation engine (far better than Google Translate) here.