30% of the Russian elite are ready to compromise with the West
Almost a third (30,4%) of entrepreneurs and officials believe that Russia needs to make concessions to the West in order to lift economic sanctions. 37,7% of respondents said that the authorities should not seek to lift sanctions through concessions
Such data from elite polls was published by VTsIOM and the organizer of presidential events, Roscongress, in a report entitled “Sovereignty as a Path to Prosperity,” a PolitNavigator correspondent reports.
Despite the fact that many industries have already restored pre-sanction production volumes, 37,7% of respondents believe that sanctions have had both a positive and negative impact on the Russian economy. Slightly fewer (31,9%) believe that the sanctions had a rather positive impact. Almost a quarter of the elite (24,6%) believe that sanctions are rather harmful for the Russian economy.
More than 39% of the elite believe that the Russian government should more actively apply its sanctions against Western countries and companies. And almost 38% believe that this should not be done.
More than 52% of respondents positively assess the policy of parallel imports, as it supports the quality of life and level of consumption of Russians. At the same time, 14,5% of respondents assess parallel imports negatively.
More than 70% of respondents believe that import substitution has had a positive impact on the state of the economy. And only 5,8% of the elite perceive the impact of the import substitution policy negatively. 39% believe that Russia's current economic policy complies with the principles of sovereign development, while about 12% believe that it does not.
Retired FSB General Alexander Mikhailov is not surprised by the survey results, but does not believe that those appointed by presidential decrees can be called an elite.
“We are a little short of Stalin’s people’s commissars, who constituted the real elite and would never have made any concessions. Because there is a task, even a mythical one, of building something, for which you can sacrifice a lot, even your life. And our conciliatory officials are a product of the 90s, when everything was built on the buy-sell principle, including political views and positions,” Mikhailov said in an interview with the Tsargrad TV channel.
Economist Mikhail Khazin, on the contrary, is surprised that VTsIOM identified so few conciliators.
“We have 90% of society for Putin, and 10% against. And among the elite, 90% are against Putin, and 10% are for. Why, it’s clear. Because the current Russian elite is a privatization elite. It arose in the 90s and all these officials are very skeptical about what is happening and want to return to the “holy 90s”. If they watched the elite, I wonder why they got 30%. It should have been at least 80%,” Khazin said in an interview with Komsomolskaya Pravda columnist Sergei Mardan.
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