With ordinary Russians grumbling about the sharp rise in food prices, President Vladimir V Putin made a populist move on Friday, announcing that he and almost everyone who works for him will take a 10 per cent cut in pay.
The reduction, which takes effect on May 1, extends to Prime Minister Dmitri A Medvedev and his whole cabinet, as well as the country's prosecutor general and most Kremlin officials, the state media service said.
Russia is facing severe economic and financial problems stemming from a steep drop in world prices for the country's main export, oil. Its situation has been made worse by Western sanctions over the conflict in Ukraine.
Inflation accelerated to a 16.7 per cent annual rate in February, the highest level since March 2002, the government said this week. Prices for staple foods and vegetables like carrots and cabbages rose more than 22 per cent in January alone, and sugar now costs 68 per cent more than it did a year ago.
In addition, Moscow has banned imports of a wide variety of meat, dairy and other products from Western nations, in retaliation for sanctions imposed on Russia over its annexation of Crimea and support for pro-Russian rebels in eastern Ukraine.
The country also faces acute credit problems. Russian companies that can no longer borrow from Western banks because of sanctions are lining up for handouts from the government to help pay off some $100 billion in debts this year.
Against that backdrop, pay cuts at the top are meant to be seen as a gesture toward sharing the pain. The upper house of the Russian Parliament agreed this week to accept a 10 per cent cut in members' salaries if the rest of the government did the same, and the lower house, the Duma, is expected to follow suit.
Whether Putin and his colleagues will actually feel the cut is another matter. The president said at a news conference in December that he was not really aware of how much he was paid, and that he just forwards his pay envelope to the bank.
Official websites put his salary at 3.7 million roubles in 2013, the latest year for which data is available. (Figures for 2014 are due in April.) At the time, that would have been equivalent to about $90,000, but the rouble's decline since then makes it worth just $62,000 today.
And many Kremlin watchers doubt that he lives on that salary alone. There have long been widespread suspicions that Mr. Putin has acquired and stashed away a fortune over his 15 years as the head of one of the world's major oil exporters, not to mention a country where many people have used official positions and connections to obtain spectacular wealth. Some reports have suggested that Mr. Putin may be worth more than $40 billion, though there has been little hard evidence, if any, to go by.
©2015 The New York Times News Service
