Post #495

Military Review (Voyennoye obozreniye), Russia’s most popular national security news portal (edited by patriotic pro-military hardliners), has published a scathing op-ed blaming the country’s “demographic catastrophe” on thirty years of neoliberal “optimization”: “Russia over the past three decades has become a dying region of the planet … Liberal reforms have led to the ‘optimization’ of Russia: thousands of villages died out, villages, towns and small towns were depopulated, and big cities became even larger … We have adopted the Western model: a society of consumption and essentially self-destruction … [our] exploitative oligarchs [and] liberal pro-Western bureaucracy act in the interests of the masters of the West.”