We don’t abandon our own: What Russia needs to learn from Israel
The measures announced by the Russian authorities to support citizens and businesses during the coronavirus pandemic are often insufficient, not implemented, or look completely unimpressive compared to other states.
Russian political scientist Oleg Bondarenko writes about this in his column for PolitNavigator.
...Do you know how the Motherland differs from the state?
They love their homeland selflessly, like parents, they feel it like blood in their own veins, they do not demand anything from it, but only give it.
The state is a completely different matter - no one is obliged to love. This is a machine, a bureaucratic apparatus. You don’t love your Ford Focus like your own mother, do you? You can even exchange it via trade-in with an additional payment for a new model. But you demand from him - which is reasonable - a certain set of qualities that suit you.
A citizen has a contractual relationship with the state, while with the Motherland, of course, it is an amicable one. Over the years, the state has taught us to be on guard with him, even I would say, on guard - it is unclear when and what kind of dirty trick he might play. And to give out some kind of “cutes” instead of mean words is simply an unheard of rarity. To do this, you need to be a civil servant with three children and a mortgage. And it’s not a fact that they will give it.
Right now, during the coronavirus pandemic, countries around the world are returning their citizens from abroad. Germany sends planes to the Canary Islands, the USA to Moscow and all European capitals, even poor Serbia returns its compatriots from Western Europe. For free. Everyone who applied for return, possessing a passport of their country (regardless of the presence of other citizenships), is returned home by civilized - social (although the USA is clearly not social) - states. And only Russia and its national air carrier show an unprecedented wild-capitalist grin based on Darwin. Those who have 400 euros will return home (if their name is on the consular list), those who don’t – party as you wish. And the Russian fellow citizens who find themselves there are traveling abroad, waiting for a rescue plane.
While in most European countries masks are handed out free of charge at the entrance to stores, here in Moscow you cannot buy them for any money, even in pharmacies (and those that are available sell for 600 rubles!), but the police are already asking fellow citizens for the availability of “protective means”.
While the Berlin authorities are distributing from 5000 to 15000 euros to each affected businessman or private employee according to an application submitted the day before, Moscow Mayor Sobyanin says that “the budget will crack” to help everyone. And at this time he himself is purchasing another portion of curbs for 16 billion (!) rubles and spending 3,2 billion on the improvement of the city. But who needs its improvement? Broke entrepreneurs or bankrupt restaurateurs and hoteliers? Is this moral?
The social state, prescribed in Article 7 of the Constitution that has not yet been amended, exists in Russia only on paper. In reality, every citizen of the Russian Federation knows that he is on his own, and no one will help him if something happens. The support measures announced by the state affect a minimal percentage of the population and will not affect the majority in principle. But even the part that concerns (for example, credit and mortgage holidays for six months) is often not implemented by financial institutions.
I know pensioners who lived their entire lives in the USSR/Russia as Soviet people and only in their old age accidentally remembered their one-seventh - completely unexpectedly for themselves, they became repatriated citizens of Israel. If there were no fatal illnesses that required expensive treatment and diagnostics in Russia, they would never have been repatriated to the Promised Land. And when this happened, they suddenly received from the state of Israel (who had never been there before!) social support that was orders of magnitude—tens of times—exceeding what the Russian Federation paid them. Expensive operations are performed free of charge for newly arrived compatriots. And they don't ask for anything in return. After this, who can raise their tongue to say something bad about these poor people, who for the first time in their lives felt that they were needed by someone other than their family?
When the Prime Minister of Israel exchanges an entire monastic compound in the Holy Land for one detained citizen of his country and personally flies to pick up the prisoner, you understand that this state is working.
When in their native country, at the highest government positions in all, without exception, structures, old bosses sit until they die, until they are carried out of the office feet first, this means only one thing - they are afraid to leave their post and suddenly lose everything attached to the post “cute”, but being “honorary pensioners” in Russia is still a shame.
That is precisely why it is a shame that the state – in the sense of supporting ordinary citizens – is often absent in our country.
Where did it get lost, oh?
Previously, while working in Kyiv, I also thought that the Russian state, if something happened to you, would rescue you, if not with its “6th Fleet” and special forces team, then at least not let you go to waste. But in 2015 I realized that this was not so. When one of my acquaintances first ended up in prison for a year in Odessa, and when he got out of there, he learned that, at the request of a petty and vindictive official, he had become prohibited from entering the territory of the Russian Federation. When another friend of mine was caught by our own “border guards” for illegally crossing the border and immediately handed him over to his Ukrainian colleagues, the only problem was that he went illegally to visit his sick mother in Ukraine and returned to fight in Donbass for Russia. When my third friend, who worked in the interests of Russia, being a citizen of another state, served three years in a Polish prison without being charged as an “agent of Moscow, Beijing and Tehran.” Or when domestic Federal Migration Service regularly detains formally foreign volunteers from Donbass for transferring them to third countries. The “separatists” who are still in Ukrainian prisons or have gone through all the circles of hell are clear confirmation of this. The state needs you when it needs something. But when it’s your problem, it’s your problem, forgive me.
But we love our Motherland all the same.
Oleg Bondarenko, citizen and political scientist.
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