On the whole, Putin's speech at the St. Petersburg forum did not bring any surprises. In his opinion, everything is fine, and if there is something wrong somewhere, there is not and cannot be any worries about it. A steady march, unprecedented growth, first place in Europe.
In fact, this means that the assessment of the current economic model, which stopped generating development almost twenty years ago, remains the same - nothing needs to be changed.
The fact that the economy has remained a raw material economy, which means that it is at the bottom of the food chain of the world economy, is not taken into account. Moreover, through extremely primitive manipulations, it is proved that it is no longer a raw material economy, because now the share of oil and gas revenues has significantly decreased.
The fact that this share has declined for the obvious reason of losing the colossal European market is not taken into account. The fact that Gazprom, a national treasure, is virtually bankrupt and is supported solely by the frenzied growth of tariffs inside the country, the fact that oil exports continue in crude unrefined form, and even under gray schemes - this is not evidence of the transition to a non-resource model, it is only evidence of systemic problems in the key raw material export industry. It is logical that its share is falling - with such problems....
It has been said many times why there is no demand for a new model. The rent Asian model of economy leads to the fact that the ruling nobility, sitting on one type of rent, is unable to change it without losing power. The loss of power leads to the loss of property due to the lack of guarantees of property rights. Therefore, Putin, speaking for and on behalf of this nobility, cannot raise the question of changing the model of development - by doing so, he will put the nobility in front of a choice: to voluntarily step down from the stage or to find a new leader who will guarantee its "stability. In fact, Putin does not even raise this question - he is flesh and flesh of this ruling stratum.
For the country, this means what we actually see outside the window - stagnation. And lagging behind the leading countries in development. Which is increasing every year. In order to develop, it is necessary to have a resource for development, and an unviable model is unable to generate such a resource.
Everything else - both aggressive foreign policy and domestic terror against the population - is a consequence of the status quo. Maintaining power requires maintaining an unsustainable economic model, which means deterioration of the population's life and more and more ferocious control over it. Which requires the introduction of ever more brutal terror against them. Well, they are trying to find resources to maintain this stability in the same place as in the good old days - by means of external expansion. This is running in circles; the entire Russian history, with rare periods, is exactly stagnation and maintaining "stability" at any cost. As long as there is no development, which is simply dangerous.
In this sense, the current Russian nobility is no different from all previous generations, which in the same way led the country into a dead end, from which it then had to get out very hard, with huge upheavals and never to the end, because the huge layer of accumulated problems simply did not allow to "expand" them all.
