漫长经济衰退毫无起色 普京时代走向没落1
A few things in Yaroslav’s apartment still bear witness to the life he had: the well-fed orange cat, his daughter’s high chair in the kitchen and the oak laminate flooring he laid a year ago.
在雅罗斯拉夫(Yaroslav)的公寓里，还有几样东西能够证明他曾经拥有过的生活：一只喂养得很好的橙色猫咪、厨房里他女儿用过的高脚椅，以及他一年前铺装的橡木复合地板。
Everything else is gone. When the 35-year-old engineer lost his job at a Lada dealership in Togliatti last summer, money ran out quickly.
其他一切都消失了。这名35岁的工程师去年夏天失去了他在陶里亚蒂(Togliatti)一家拉达(Lada)经销店的工作后，钱很快就用光了。
He sold the games console, then the TV. After his wife — pregnant with twins — left him in December, taking their two-year-old with her, he even got rid of the bed. “What’s left is the stuff the pawnshop won’t take,” he says, banging another bottle of cheap white wine on the windowsill. Peeling at shreds of wallpaper left from his unfinished renovation, he adds: “It feels like the 1990s again.”
雅罗斯拉夫卖掉了游戏主机，然后是电视机。怀着一对双胞胎的妻子带着他们两岁的女儿在12月离开他之后，他甚至把床也脱手了。“剩下的是当铺不要的东西，”他一边说一边用一瓶廉价的白酒敲打着窗台。墙壁的翻新没有完成，他把剩下的破碎的墙纸撕下来，补充道：“感觉又回到了上世纪90年代。”
In the grip of its longest recession in 20 years, Russians seem resigned to the loss of the growth and prosperity they had come to see as the hallmark of President Vladimir Putin’s rule. Although few are seeing their lives unravel as completely as Yaroslav, many fear a return of an era they had hoped to have left behind: the decade of recession, economic shocks and poverty that followed the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991.
深陷20年来最漫长经济衰退的俄罗斯人似乎只好接受一个现实：他们曾经视为弗拉基米尔•普京(Vladimir Putin)总统掌权标志的增长和繁荣正在消失。尽管像雅罗斯拉夫这样生活彻底分崩离析的人很少，但很多人担心他们曾经希望已经远离的一个时代正在卷土重来：1991年苏联解体后持续10年的衰退、经济冲击和贫困。
“Russians have come to highly appreciate the social wellbeing achieved since 2000, and therefore it will be extremely painful to let that go. Now that we’ve had two years of crisis there’s no prospect of growth, people [are] reminded of the 1990s,” says Tatyana Maleva, director of the Institute of Social Analysis and Forecasting at the Russian Academy of National Economy and Public Administration, Ranepa for short.
“俄罗斯人已变得非常珍视2000年以来实现的社会福利，因此要放弃它是极其痛苦的。在经历了2年危机之后的今天，我们仍看不到增长的前景，这让人们想起了上世纪90年代，”俄罗斯总统国民经济和公共管理学院(RANEPA)社会分析和预测研究所(Institute of Social Analysis and Forecasting)所长塔季扬娜•马列娃(Tatyana Maleva)说。
“We are forced to acknowledge that the social consequences of this crisis will be like the 1990s because we are looking at an extended, lingering, grinding stagnation,” she says.
“我们不得不承认，这场危机的社会后果会和上世纪90年代一样，因为我们看到了漫长、挥之不去和没完没了的停滞，”她说。
Striking a bargain
与人民达成“交易”
Economic growth had slowed sharply even before nosediving crude oil prices and the impact of western sanctions, imposed over its role in the war in Ukraine, hit Russia in 2014. Even if the recession ends next year, growth is unlikely to be much more than flat after years of shrinking investment and falling household incomes.
即使在2014年原油价格开始暴跌、同时西方针对俄罗斯在乌克兰战争中的角色而制裁俄罗斯之前，俄罗斯的经济增速就已经大幅放缓。即使明年俄罗斯的衰退结束，在多年的投资缩水和家庭收入下降后，俄罗斯的经济也不太可能显著增长。
Most Russians believe that the worst of the economic hardship is still to come, according to the Russian Public Opinion Research Centre (VCIOM), a pollster frequently used by the Kremlin, in a sign that despite Mr Putin’s stubbornly high popularity ratings, the trust in his ability to deliver a better future is gone.
根据克里姆林宫经常使用的民调机构俄罗斯社会舆论民调中心(VCIOM)的调查，大多数俄罗斯人相信，经济困境最艰难的阶段尚未到来。这个迹象表明，尽管普京的民意支持率居高不下，但俄罗斯人对他有能力带来更美好未来的信任已经不复存在。
Mr Putin first became president on New Year’s Eve 1999, the moment a steep and extended climb in oil prices gathered pace. It would continue for 14 years with only a brief interruption during the global crisis of 2008-09.
普京初次当上总统是在1999年新年前夕，适逢油价开启一段大幅且持续的攀升。除了在2008-09年全球金融危机期间短暂中断以外，这个过程持续了14年。
In what many observers call Mr Putin’s bargain with the Russian people, the country put up with growing restrictions on political freedoms gained after the collapse of the Soviet Union in exchange for economic wellbeing and stability. Growth during the Putin era lifted large parts of society out of poverty, helped Russians become healthier and live longer, and created a taste for the spoils of middle-class life such as overseas travel.
用很多观察家的话来说，普京和俄罗斯民众达成了一笔“交易”：全国人民忍受苏联解体后获得的政治自由逐渐受到限制，以换取经济福祉和稳定。普京时代的增长让俄罗斯社会中的许多人群摆脱了贫困，帮助俄罗斯人变得更健康，寿命更长，还让俄罗斯人产生了对中产阶级享受的嗜好，比如境外旅游。
By 2014, Russia’s per capita gross domestic product, based on purchasing power parity, had more than doubled compared with 2000. Child mortality had halved, life expectancy increased by 12 per cent and the proportion of young people enrolled in tertiary education soared from half to three-quarters.
到2014年，按购买力平价(PPP)计算，俄罗斯人均国内生产总值(GDP)相比2000年增加了一倍以上。儿童死亡率减半，国民预期寿命提高了12%，接受高等教育的年轻人的比例从一半激增至四分之三。
So far, only a small part of these social gains, widely seen by Russian society as Mr Putin’s main achievements, has been undone. “Indicators such as income levels and poverty levels [suggest] we have been thrown back by six years — to where we were at the peak of the last economic crisis in 2009,” says Ms Maleva. “Wages dropped by 10 per cent last year rather than by three times, as they did in the 1990s.”
俄罗斯社会广泛将这些社会收益视为普京的主要成就。迄今这些福利中只有一小部分消失了。“收入水平和贫困水平等指标（表明）我们倒退了6年，回到了2009年上一场经济危机的顶峰时期，”马列娃表示，“去年薪资水平下跌了10%，而上世纪90年代薪资下降到了那之前的三分之一，”
Many people, however, feel that they are taking a much larger step back: a perception fuelled by the drawn-out nature of the current crisis. Although 2015 was the first full year of economic contraction, incomes started falling the year before and continue to do so. In February, real household income decreased by 7 per cent compared with the same month a year earlier, the fastest drop since December 2014.
然而，许多人感觉他们倒退的步子比这大得多：当前这场旷日持久的危机加强了这种认知。尽管2015年是俄罗斯首次出现全年经济收缩，但人们的收入在之前一年就开始下滑，并且至今仍在下滑。今年2月，俄罗斯家庭实际收入比去年同期下降7%，是自2014年12月以来最大的同比跌幅。
“The increase in incomes had given people the option to get better healthcare, better education, some foreign travel, on their own expenditure,” says Birgit Hansl, the World Bank’s lead economist for Russia. “This allowance for some extras was the real benefit of transformation but this extended slide in incomes increases people’s reliance on legacy infrastructure again, and they realise how bad this legacy infrastructure still is.”
“收入增加曾经让人们可以选择自费获得更好的医疗服务、更好的教育，还有一些国外旅行，”世界银行(World Bank)首席俄罗斯经济学家比吉特•汉斯尔(Birgit Hansl)表示，“这种可以投入额外享受的‘津贴’是改革的真正效益，但是此轮收入长期下滑再次加大了人们对遗留基础设施的依赖，而他们意识到，这些遗留下来的基础设施仍然非常糟糕。”
While Russians paid three-quarters of private health costs out of their own pockets in 2000, that proportion had risen to more than 90 per cent by 2014.
2000年，有四分之三的个人医疗费用是俄罗斯人自掏腰包买单的，而到2014年，这个比例上升到了90%以上。
“People had been avoiding public hospitals like the plague.” says Ms Hansl. “Now that they have to go back there to save money, they may feel like they’re going back to the 1990s.”
“人们曾经像躲避瘟疫般躲避公立医院，”汉斯尔表示，“如今，为了省钱，他们不得不回到那里，他们可能感觉自己回到了上世纪90年代。”
Many try not to. According to data collected by Russian newspaper RBC, 44 per cent of urban middle-class families spend as much on healthcare as they used to, a larger percentage than on any other item. Spending cuts on food, clothing and alcohol by far outstrip those on medicine.
很多人试图不这么做。根据俄罗斯报纸RBC收集的数据，44%的俄罗斯城市中产阶级家庭的医疗开销与过去大致相同，这一比例超过其他任何支出。在食品、服装和烈酒方面的支出削减幅度远远超过药品。
To avoid state hospitals and still stay within their budgets, Muscovites have become savvy. “Patients have started avoiding expensive procedures such as arthroplasty [joint surgery],” says Muslim Muslimov, a doctor and owner of Clinic No 1, a midsize private clinic in Moscow. “They are also getting second opinions from other doctors more often. If in the past, five out of 10 patients who came for a consultation would get some kind of treatment afterwards, now it’s only two or three.”
为了既躲避公立医院又守住自己的预算，莫斯科人变得精明起来。“患者开始回避昂贵的手术，例如关节置换，”莫斯科中型私立诊所Clinic No 1老板、穆斯利姆•穆斯利莫夫(Muslim Muslimov)医生表示，“他们还更多地向其他医生征求第二意见。过去，在10名来这里咨询的患者中，有5名会在咨询后接受某种治疗，如今只有2、3人这么做。”
