Moscow, June 10
With the latest G7 summit minus
Russia deciding to extend sanctions on the country over Ukraine, life
here goes on as normal, perhaps even a bit more energetically under
bright sunshine, in this historic month for Russians.
The city's
famous Red Square, with the Kremlin Palace bounding one side, buzzed
with preparations for Russia's National Day celebrations on June 12.
British
journalist Maxwell Lovell-Hoare, here for an international conference
organised by Russia's biggest innovation fund, the Skolkovo Foundation,
offered a perspective based on his long experience of the country.
"Hardship,
it seems, is a way of life that makes Russians stronger," Lovell-Hoare
said, recalling the tragedies of the Russian Revolution and World War
II, among others.
"This is one of the very few places in the
world where the populace would go out and die for their country, and the
response to the sanctions that you see around reflect the same kind of
spirit," Lovell-Hoare told this visiting IANS correspondent.
A
recovery in investor confidence and rising oil prices have bolstered the
Russian ruble, which has risen more than 30 percent to the dollar since
the beginning of February after falling 40 percent last year.
Ahead
of the G7 summit in Germany, the heads of two German business lobby
groups were quoted as saying that Russia should be invited to rejoin the
grouping of industrial powers.
Russia's central bank has said it
expects inflation to fall to 12 percent by the end of 2015. Inflation
slowed in May for the second month and the price of key foodstuff began
to fall, signaling that the worst of an inflation spike may have passed.
Helping
keep down inflation in May was a fall in food price rises, which have
outpaced overall inflation since Moscow last August banned imports of a
range of foods from the West in retaliation for the sanctions.
At
the same time, profits at Russia's cheese factories are booming as
state support and bans on imports from the West force supermarkets to
turn to local producers.
Cheese shelves at Russian supermarkets
that were filled with foreign brands were hit hard when Moscow in August
retaliated against Western sanctions by barring a range of food imports
from the US, the EU and a handful of other countries.
"The ban
on foreign imports has been like a tonic for Russian agriculture and
farms are producing more to replace imported produce that used to flood
city markets," PR executive Ekaterina Ivanova told IANS at a cafeteria
off Red Square, with restaurants in the area packed with diners eating
in the open.
Describing Russia as a "remarkably free country in
many ways," a commentator wrote in the Moscow Times that "anyone sick of
the government propaganda on state-controlled television can turn off
the television and find news on the internet instead."
Moscow streets also threw up another perspective - this time from the more northerly city of St. Petersburg.
Gulieta
Kovadji, a linguist who was passing through here in search of greener
pastures in China, complained how the Metro ride in Moscow costs almost
twice that in St.Petersburg.
"Things are so expensive in
Moscow...and the tragedy is that my father, who recently passed away
here, was only getting a pension of 300 rubles a month when he spent
forty years as a fireman, saving people," Kovadji told IANS.
For
the record, the World Bank last week raised Russia's growth forecast for
the current year and for 2016, saying it expects the country's economy
to contract less sharply than previously thought.
It cited a
recovery in oil prices in recent months, a stronger ruble and slowing
inflation to also raise its forecast for 2016. It now sees gross
domestic product falling by 2.7 percent this year as opposed to the
earlier projected 3.8 percent.
(Biswajit Choudhury was in Moscow
at the invitation of the Skolkovo Foundation, Russia's largest
innovation fund. He can be reached at [email protected])
