Food For Thought

From the MT:

"Putin's Rating Immune to Food Ban for Now"

While the ban on many food imports imposed by President Vladimir Putin on Wednesday has sparked fears of Soviet-era shortages among some sections of Russian society, political analysts told The Moscow Times that it will have little effect on the level of support for the government among the public.  Following the publication Thursday of the list of banned products, pictures of empty shelves from Soviet times flooded Russian social networks and blogs, along with sardonic jokes about how in introducing the ban, Russia had demonstrated its care for its citizens' spiritual well-being by letting them choose from only two kinds of cheese, fish, meat and other products.  Despite widespread anger at the move to limit the availability of foreign food, this negative reaction is still limited to an exclusive and politically conscious audience that is already largely critical of the government anyway, according to Lev Gudkov, director of the independent Levada Center pollster.  "According to our research, public opinion in Russia is conservative and only begins to seriously react to events two or three weeks after they happen. The consequences of these decisions, as well as of sanctions overall, will only become visible in November," as people are more politically apathetic during the summer, Gudkov told The Moscow Times in a phone interview.  Gudkov said he did not expect immediate drastic changes in public opinion as a result of the new measures imposed by the Kremlin.  The partial foreign food ban has brought to the fore painful memories of the late Soviet Union, when people stood in line for basic commodities such as bread, butter and oatmeal. A video of a "food funeral," an art performance in central Moscow in 1990 in which a mock funeral procession marched along the capital's main street to bemoan the lack of food in stores, went viral Thursday.  The potential disappearance of even a limited number of foreign-produced products from shelves has demonstrated to what extent memories or even phantom pains from the Soviet Union are alive in society, according to Nikolai Petrov, an analyst of Russian internal politics with the Higher School of Economics. At the same time, according to Petrov, the Kremlin has carefully calculated this move, with Putin's ratings now soaring at 87 percent. "Even if people are seriously inconvenienced by the food ban, they will still understand that this is the necessary price for the victory in Crimea," Petrov said.   Russian society currently finds itself in an unusual situation in which all the divisions between various groups have been leveled down by patriotic zeal over the ongoing Ukraine crisis. This level of patriotism has been spurred by propaganda in the government-controlled media, according to Gudkov. "Propaganda has made society more uniform, meaning that what people think in rural and less developed areas does not differ as much from what people think in big cities," he said.  Therefore, even though the ban on some foreign foods will be mostly felt among middle-class people in urban areas, it is unlikely that it will have any effect on their political ideas, according to Gudkov.  "We will feel all the negative effects of this policy, as well as other Ukraine-related policies, but only in the long term. Right now people are deprived of the chance to seriously reflect on what is going on," he said.   

^ Hopefully, once the "excitement" of the honeymoon period passes and ordinary Russians start facing the true reality (not just lack of food or high food prices) but the devalue of the ruble, not being allowed to do certain things that become commonplace in modern Russia.) It's sad that the rest of the world knows it will happen and has to sit by and watch it affect ordinary people before things can change for the better. ^

http://www.themoscowtimes.com/news/article/putin-s-rating-immune-to-food-ban-for-now/504767.html