Putin Bashes Food Prices

You can pretend to take the man out of the party, but you can't pretend to take the party out of the man.

Russians are up in arms over rising food prices. Prime Minister Vladimir Putin is using their ire to make himself appear to be in touch with the masses and to try to forestall any anti-government backlash. He has taken to haranguing executives in public, as if they were to blame for Russia's sick economy.

Yesterday, he went to a supermarket with executives of food companies, retail managers, Cabinet ministers, and television crews in tow.

"Why do your sausages cost 240 rubles ($7.50)? Do you call that normal?" Putin asked the PR manager of X5 Retail, the company that owns Perekryostok, a midmarket chain. "But they're good-quality sausages," responded the PR guy, Yuri Koboladze, pointing out that there were lesser sausages going for 49 rubles. Putin wasn't convinced.

Following this display, Perekryostok announced a "Grand Sale."

A couple of weeks ago, Putin publicly humiliated oligarch Oleg Deripaska, formerly Russia's richest person, for not paying the workers at a cement factory Deripaska had recently shut down. Then Putin contemptuously tossed a pen at him and ordered him sign papers to pay the wages. (There was no Corleone-like "your brains or your signature" threat, at least not explicitly.) "And now give me my pen back," Putin said.

Afterward, Deripaska berated the Russian government for its mishandling of the economy.

In the Soviet days, of course, the government would have simply ordered that prices be lowered or factories reopened (and we all know how effective that was). These days, Putin apparently believes central planning is best imposed through bullying media stunts.

But as the Telegraph reports: "Such gestures, while popular, are unlikely to reverse the slump, analysts say. The World Bank this week predicted that over six million Russians will fall into poverty this year as the economy shrinks by 8 percent."