俄罗斯经济陷入泥潭 普京不是万能的

PIKALEVO, Russia — The factory meeting room where the Russian leaderVladimir V. Putin browbeat one of Russia’s richest tycoons in front of cameras from state television has become a shrine, hallowed ground where Mr. Putin showed a path out of economic pain for ordinary people and calmed a spasm of worker unrest.

俄罗斯皮卡列沃——弗拉基米尔·V·普京(Vladimir V. Putin)曾在一家工厂的会议室里，对着官方电视台的摄像机恫吓一名财富在俄罗斯排名前列的富豪。此后，这间会议室成了一处圣地，普京在这里为普通人指出了一条摆脱经济阵痛的道路，平息了一系列工人骚乱。

“It all happened here. This is where he solved the future of our factory,” Sergey Lyakhov, a manager at the sprawling plant, said, proudly showing off the tidy third-floor conference room.

“所有事情都是在这里发生的。在这里，他解决了我们厂的前途问题，”在这家庞大的工厂担任经理的谢尔盖·利亚霍夫(Sergey Lyakhov)自豪地炫耀着这间位于三楼的整洁会议室。

But that was nearly seven years ago, when Mr. Putin, now president, was prime minister. Today, the economic troubles that Mr. Putin came here to make a big show of solving are back, only worse and involving far more intractable problems than just the “trivial greed” of tycoons that Mr. Putin blamed for Pikalevo’s tumult in 2009.

但那已是近七年前的事情了。现在是总统的普京，当时还是总理。如今，普京当年来这里大张旗鼓地要解决的那些经济困难又回来了，并且比当年更严重。2009年时，普京认为巨头们那种“不值一提的贪婪”是皮卡列沃的动荡的罪魁祸首。而如今的经济困难涉及的问题，远比那时更棘手。

Pikalevo, about three hours east of St. Petersburg, and the rest of Russia are now mired in the country’s longest recession since Mr. Putin came to power at the end of 1999, with the World Bank warning last month that the nation’s poverty rate would increase this year to 14.2 percent of the population, “undoing nearly a decade’s worth of gains.”

现在，圣彼得堡以东约三小时车程处的皮卡列沃和俄罗斯其他地方均陷入了衰退。这是自普京1999年末掌权以来，俄罗斯经历的最漫长的衰退。上月，世界银行(World Bank)警告称，俄罗斯今年的贫困率将升至该国人口的14.2%，“抵消了近十年的进步”。

Russia’s current crisis, though largely caused by market forces beyond the Kremlin’s control, notably a slump in the prices of oil and gas, has pushed Mr. Putin into a corner. After years of taking credit for a booming economy, which also had little to do with his actions, and casting himself as a can-do leader capable of untying the toughest economic and political knots, he faces a crisis that has exposed the stark limits of his power and prowess.

俄罗斯当前的危机主要是由不在克里姆林宫控制范围内的市场力量，尤其是石油和天然气价格大跌造成的。尽管如此，这场危机把普京逼进了角落里。多年来，他一直把和他所采取的行动几乎毫无关系的经济繁荣归为自己的功劳，并把自己塑造成一位无所不能的领导人，能够解决最困难的经济和政治问题。而如今，他面临的这场危机赤裸裸地暴露出了他的权力和能力的极限。

A recent rebound in oil prices has lifted hopes in the Kremlin that the worst of Russia’s economic storm has passed, but it has also highlighted just how much Mr. Putin’s fortunes depend on unpredictable and uncontrollable outside forces like the energy market or the economic sanctions imposed by Europe and the United States.

最近，石油价格反弹让克里姆林宫燃起希望，以为俄罗斯经济风暴最糟糕的阶段已经过去了，但这也突显了普京的命运严重依赖于无法预测、无法控制的外部力量，如能源市场或欧洲和美国实行的经济制裁。

Mr. Putin’s power, for example, does not touch the torrent of slurry, a muddy sludge used to make cement, that now flows uselessly into an overflowing storage pit. The sludge is a byproduct of alumina production at Pikalevo’s biggest industrial plant, and it used to feed production at an adjacent cement factory. But that factory, hammered by slumping demand as a result of Russia’s recession, has slashed production and takes only 20 percent or less of the brown muck it used to buy.

比如，普京的权力触及不到汹涌如注的泥浆。如今，用来生产水泥的泥浆只能白白流入一个已经满溢出来的蓄水坑。它们是皮卡列沃最大的工业工厂生产氧化铝时的副产品，过去被旁边一家水泥厂用作生产原料。但因为经济衰退导致需求下降，那家水泥厂大幅减产，对这种褐色泥浆的用量仅为以前的20%甚至更少。

As leader of the world’s biggest country, a nuclear power intent on asserting itself on the world stage, Mr. Putin has far more pressing concerns than Pikalevo’s myriad troubles. But throughout his 16 years in power, whether as president or prime minister, Mr. Putin has presented an image of an omniscient and omnipresent leader interested in and capable of addressing his country’s most microscopic concerns.

俄罗斯是世界上最大的国家，也是一个一心想在世界舞台上坚持自己主张的核国家。作为其领导人，普京面临的问题远比皮卡列沃的各种困难更紧迫。但在当权的16年里，不管是担任总统还是总理，普京呈现出的形象都是一位无所不知、无处不在的领导人，关注自己领导的国家存在的最细微问题，并有能力去应对它们。

“He is ultimately responsible for everything that happens in Russia,” said Maxim Volkov, the chief executive of the Pikalevo factory visited in 2009 by Mr. Putin, the largest of three interdependent but, since the collapse of the Soviet Union, separately owned plants. “This is very good but also very bad.”

“他是俄罗斯发生的一切事情的最终责任人，”普京2009年在皮卡列沃视察的那家工厂的首席执行官马克西姆·沃尔科夫(Maxim Volkov)说。“这一点非常好，也非常不好。”那家工厂是三家相互依存，但自苏联解体后便各归其主的工厂中规模最大的。

While praising Mr. Putin as a “tough and efficient” leader who ended the drift and decay that characterized the rule of President Boris N. Yeltsin in the 1990s, Mr. Volkov said the concentration of power in the Kremlin had left the president “responsible for all the idiots who work under him” and for solving all the county’s quarrels and problems, no matter how small.

尽管称赞普京是一位“强硬且高效”的领导人，终结了90年代鲍里斯·N·克利钦(Boris N. Yeltsin)以迷茫和衰落为特征的统治，但沃尔科夫称，权力集中在克里姆林宫导致普京要“为手下所有的蠢货负责”，并且要负责解决全国所有的争吵和问题，无论是多小的问题。

“The government simply cannot resolve every dispute in this country,” he said.

“政府根本无法解决这个国家的所有争端，”他说。

For 16 years, however, the Kremlin, aided by hagiographic reports on television, has been telling and, to a large degree, convincing Russians that, in the case of their leader, one man could do just about anything and everything.

但16年来，在电视上圣徒列传式的报道的帮助下，克里姆林宫一直告诉俄罗斯民众，并在很大程度上让他们相信，就他们的领袖而言，他几乎有能力做任何事情，所有事情。

His visit to Pikalevo in 2009 helped construct this image. But the problem he solved then was relatively simple: The three separate private owners of a once-unified industrial combine could not agree on the price of the products they supplied to one another and which each needed to keep going. Starved of vital supplies, they halted production, leaving workers without work and Pikalevo’s 22,000 residents without heat and hot water. Angry residents blocked a nearby federal highway in protest.

那次2009年对皮卡列沃的视察帮助构建了这一形象。但他当时解决的问题相对简单：一个曾经属于一体的工业联合企业分家后，三个相互独立的私人业主无法就向彼此供货的价格达成一致。而这些货品又是他们继续经营所必需的。必要供给的缺失带来了停产，导致工人没有工作，皮卡列沃的2.2万名居民没了供暖和热水。愤怒的民众堵住了附近的一条联邦高速公路，以示抗议。

In just a few minutes, during a televised meeting in June 2009 with the owners, including Oleg V. Deripaska, a billionaire aluminum magnate who owns the biggest of the three factories, Mr. Putin put everything right. Describing the owners as “cockroaches,” he accused them of making “thousands of people hostages to your own ambitions, your nonprofessionalism and maybe simply your trivial greed; it is absolutely unacceptable.”

在2009年6月，普京与工厂的所有者召开了一次会议，包括三家工厂中最大的那家的老板、身为亿万富翁的铝业大亨欧柏嘉(Oleg V. Deripaska)。电视台对会议进行了转播。会议期间，普京只用了几分钟时间便把一切都处理好了。他称几家工厂的老板是“蟑螂”，谴责他们让“成千上万的人成了你们的野心、你们的不专业，或许完全就是你们那不值一提的贪婪的人质；这是绝对不能接受的。”

The owners, fearful of losing their assets, swiftly ended their quarrel. Behind the scenes, the Kremlin leaned on Gazprom, the state-controlled gas giant, to cut the price of energy to the Pikalevo plants and on state-owned banks to provide cheap credit.

害怕失去资产的工厂老板迅速结束争吵。在幕后，克里姆林宫分别向国有天然气巨头俄罗斯天然气工业股份公司(Gazprom)和国有银行施压，要求前者降低面向皮卡列沃几家工厂的能源供应价格，后者则为那些工厂提供廉价贷款。

The factory at the center of those troubles, Mr. Deripaska’s alumina plant, is now pumping out its primary product, a chemical compound used in aluminum smelting, as well as hot water for the whole town and a tide of slurry for the adjacent cement factory that no longer wants it.

这些麻烦的中心是欧柏嘉的氧化铝厂。如今，这家工厂正在不断出产其主打产品，即熔炼铝时要用到的一种化合物，以及供应整个城镇的热水和供旁边那家水泥厂使用的泥浆，但那家水泥厂不再想要这些如潮水般的泥浆了。

And this, in a nutshell, is the Kremlin’s current nightmare: With low global energy prices and Western sanctions over the Ukraine conflict crimping Russia’s prospects of recovery, the economy has hit a wall. It simply cannot compete with China, the United States or even the European nations that Russian state media constantly portray as fading has-beens. The easy and popular fixes the Kremlin used in the past to resuscitate the economy — or at least placate the public — have all been exhausted.

简而言之，这便是克里姆林宫眼前的噩梦：在全球能源价格低迷，西方因乌克兰冲突而实行的制裁导致俄罗斯复苏前景黯淡的情况下，经济陷入了泥沼。它根本无法与中国、美国乃至被俄罗斯官方媒体一直称作正在衰落的、风光不再的欧洲国家竞争。克里姆林宫过去用来重振经济——或者说至少是用来安抚民众——的那些简单却广受欢迎的解决办法，都已经用尽了。