www-russia.org

Part 7: Dividends

Chapter 33: The First Dividend

The month since Voronkov’s grand promise had been filled with a thick, familiar fog of Russian cynicism. In Dr. Svetlana Orlova’s small, decaying town, the promised Dividend had become a bitter joke, another fairy tale from a faraway Moscow that had forgotten them decades ago.

“More promises from the television,” muttered a babushka in the clinic’s waiting room, her hands gnarled from a lifetime of hard labor. “I will believe the money is real when I can hold it in my hand.”

A young farmer, his face already weathered with a weary pessimism that belied his age, scoffed. “It’s a trick. They’ll give us one payment to keep us quiet, and then, poof, it will be gone. Nothing ever changes.”

Svetlana, listening as she applied a dressing to a small cut, did not contradict them. She was a doctor, a woman of science and pragmatism. She had seen too many five-year plans and grand national projects announced with fanfare, only to fade into dust and rust. Her clinic’s ambulance had two hundred thousand kilometers on it and a hole in the floor. She needed a real, physical thing, not the phantom of digital money.

The next morning, she was in her small apartment, drinking a cup of tea before the start of another impossible day. Her cheap smartphone, connected to the town’s unreliable Wi-Fi, buzzed on the kitchen table. She almost ignored it, assuming it was another spam advertisement. But she picked it up. A notification from the state bank app.

Her finger hovered over the screen, then tapped. The app opened slowly. She stared.

A green line of text at the top of her account activity. “A payment of 15,000 Rubles has been deposited into your account. Reference: National Prosperity Dividend, October 2025.”

She closed the app. Her heart was pounding. She re-opened it. Her account balance, the pitiful number she knew by heart, had actually changed. It was real. The feeling was not joy. It was a profound, dizzying shock, as if the law of gravity had suddenly been suspended.

That morning, the shock rippled through the town like a current. The babushka from the clinic stood at the post office counter, her hands trembling as the clerk counted a crisp stack of banknotes into her palm. She didn’t go to the market. She walked directly to the pharmacy and bought the expensive heart medication she had been cutting in half for the past six months.

The young farmer stared at his phone in the middle of his muddy field, a look of stunned disbelief on his face. He wiped his hands on his trousers and made a call. “Yes, Dimitri,” he said into the phone. “I need the fuel injector for the John Deere. The real German one. No, not the Chinese knock-off. I’ll pay now.”

The town’s small central market, usually half-empty on a Tuesday, was bustling with a quiet, determined energy. No one was buying luxuries. A mother was buying a new pair of winter boots for her daughter. A factory worker was paying off a long-held debt to the grocer. An old man was buying a new pane of glass to fix a broken window. It was an explosion of small, necessary acts of dignity.

The day ended where it began, in Svetlana’s clinic. She was on the phone, her voice firm, alive with a sense of purpose she hadn’t felt in years.

“Yes, I understand you have no budget for a new ambulance,” she said to the regional health administrator. “But we have a budget now. I am pooling the first Dividend payment from my entire clinic staff. The town council is doing the same. We can make the down payment on a new vehicle ourselves. A real one.” She paused, listening. “Yes. I’ll hold.”

Svetlana looked out her clinic window at the sudden, unfamiliar pulse of life in her dying town. The abstract promise from the television had become a full bottle of medicine. A real German fuel injector. A down payment on an ambulance. It was real. Hope, she thought, with a sense of wonder that was almost painful. It was real.

The Discourse, 33: Microeconomics and the Multiplier Effect of Direct Cash Transfers

Section 33.1: The Psychology of Skepticism in Post-Soviet Economies
The initial, deep-seated cynicism of the townspeople is a critical and authentic detail. It is the rational, learned response of a population that has experienced generations of broken promises from a centralized state. In economies characterized by "over-promising and under-delivering," the social contract is eroded to a point where citizens rationally assume any new policy is either a form of propaganda or a temporary trick. Overcoming this ingrained skepticism is the first and most significant hurdle for any new government. The policy’s success, therefore, is not just in the delivery of money, but in the simple, powerful act of a promise being kept, which begins the slow, arduous process of rebuilding state-society trust.

Section 33.2: The Economic "Multiplier Effect" at the Micro-Level
The montage of the town's reaction is a textbook illustration of the economic "multiplier effect" as it applies to direct cash transfers, particularly in a depressed economy. The 15,000 rubles given to the old woman does not simply stop at the pharmacy. The pharmacy can now pay its supplier. The supplier can pay its driver. The farmer’s purchase of a real part instead of a cheap knock-off is a direct injection of capital into a higher-quality supply chain, increasing productivity. This demonstrates that money injected at the bottom of the economic pyramid does not vanish; it circulates rapidly, stimulating local demand, settling old debts (which frees up further credit), and reviving dormant small-scale commerce with an efficiency that large, top-down infrastructure projects can rarely match.

Section 33.3: Dignity as an Economic Metric
The key insight of this section is that the initial impact of the Dividend is best measured not in GDP, but in dignity. The purchases are not frivolous; they are "small, necessary acts of dignity"—buying proper medicine, paying off a debt, fixing a broken window. These actions restore a sense of agency and control to individuals who have long been deprived of it. The decision to pool funds for a community asset like an ambulance is the final, crucial step. It shows a community moving from a mindset of individual survival to one of collective investment. This is a powerful social, as well as economic, indicator. It suggests that when people are given a stake in their own prosperity, they are more willing to invest in the prosperity of their community, a foundational step in rebuilding a shattered civil society.