if you believe state media Russia has been more successful in beating coronavirus than almost any other country in the world should Watson who leads up a Coulomb controlling the country supposedly has one of the lowest coronavirus death rates relative to its level of infection in the world but leading.
doctors claim the official figures are lies the handling of the pandemic has drawn comparisons with the cover-up following the Chernobyl nuclear disaster it took the Kremlin leadership more than two weeks to face up to the problem members very well was the collapse of the absolute number one aims to avoid that scenario mr. Putin's handling of the pandemic has led to the lowest popularity rating of his presidency will covert 19 undermine his grip on power
Russia has the third highest level of corona virus infection in the world but according to official figures the number of people who have died of the virus is remarkably low the fatality rate in Russia has Russian officials themselves trumpet is seven and a half times lower than the rest of the world but we could not trust the official figures these startling images should just hang overstretched it's health service .
has become medics on the ground have long suspected many more people are dying and in defiance of the government a group of doctors has compiled what they're calling a memory list which names their colleagues who have died on the frontline treating patients with covert 19 what does he give me mm longer .
Whitaker Peter Stormare 30 and she said I dunno Bertram talks because they touch too strongly
absolutely Prabhavati
local journalists using the memory list found the mortality rate among frontline health care workers in Russia to be 16 times higher than in countries with a similar infection rate but these deaths don't show up in official numbers because they're not being properly recorded Russia is the biggest country in the
world it spans 11 time zones and the memory list is now one of the main indicators that the official figures do not reflect the scale of the problem it's even being used by some government agencies in the absence of reliable statistics this extraordinary not just in terms of the window into the official lines
it's extraordinary in terms of the sense of a building responsibility in civil society which works counter to the authoritarian instincts of the family it's not just doctors breaking rank to report the truth
in May in Dagestan in Russia's North Caucasus the Health Minister told local media that the number of
infections was four times higher than reported although at the time only 29 people had
officially died from coronavirus hundreds more had mysteriously passed away with pneumonia the
minister's suspected most of these deaths were caused by covert 19 that produced immediate reaction from who had to go vision say okay you know that there is a serious situation and occasionally this picture of being in control and defeating the virus starts breaking out you see through the cracks that the
figures not real following an outcry in local independent and foreign press about the misleading statistics the city of Moscow also had to admit that the number of covert related deaths was two and a half times higher than it had previously reported in the early days of the outbreak Putin didn't announce
a nationwide lockdown but declared paid non-working days which many mistook for time off next week the entire country apart from those working Central Services will effectively have a week of holiday he left it to regional
authorities to impose restrictions you'd expect an authoritarian ruler to be very much the center of the crisis managing it from it not wanting to be tainted by it and not wanting to catch the plane from the lockdown
he's trying to be the crown piece because the biggest number you care about is your rating not the rate of infection
regional leaders were keen to prove they were controlling the disease and duly reported low infection rates to the Kremlin but the numbers didn't add up to assume that the Kremlin might not know the real figures and this is the most dangerous situation where the criminal itself doesn't get the real data and
therefore its responses and its policy decisions are going to be wrong because they're based on the wrong date this situation reminds some observers of another dark period in Russian history Chernobyl has claimed its first victims from radiation perhaps the worst accident in the short history of the world's nuclear power industry we know that was holding those meetings he didn't know they didn't know the
whole station wasn't fine the real level of radiation the local boss is trying to cover their own bats there is a big difference that was a man-made disaster neither then nor now do I think that people in charge of Russia have reliable data and are therefore acting and making the best policy for the interests of the people based on the best reliable date the Chernobyl nuclear disaster led to a shift towards greater transparency in Russia
thanks to Gorbachev's policy of glasnost or openness hmm was a serving KGB officer in 1986 he remembers very well what happened after Chernobyl and what those reforms have led to
the last thing he would want to do is to repeat what he concedes too big of a chores mistake to open up and liberalize the system Putin is keen to put the corona virus pandemic behind him while parts of the country were still in lockdown
he scheduled a massive military parade for June 24th to mark the 75th
anniversary of the Soviet victory over the Nazis covert 19 meant the original celebration had to be drastically scaled back in terms of legitimacy of Putin's regime that celebration is absolutely he's been preparing for it for a long time which is why he was commenting Putin hopes to rule Russia for the rest of his life he's already used the pandemic to increase restrictions on the press and limit protesters and in July he will hold a vote on a new
constitution which if passed would allow him to remain in power until he dies but his handling of the covert 19 crisis means his popularity is at an all-time low my fear is that Putin will try to compensate the fallen popularity not by opening up the country and liberalizing it but by cracking down further right
certainly worrying signs of that already happening in his bid to shore up his power there's a risk Putin will become more repressive and this will have consequences that could stretch far beyond the pandemic it will make the peaceful transfer of power in Russia more unlikely and leave the country's
future looking more unpredictable and violent which is a concern not just to its own citizens but the whole world i'm arkady ostrovsky and i'm the Russia editor at The Economist if you'd like to read more about comet 19 its impact in the world politics and on Russia in particular
you can click on the link opposite
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