Senior Lawmaker Slams Think Tank’s Grim Forecast For Russia

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MOSCOW. Oct 24 (Interfax) – One of the leaders of the ruling United Russia party and a deputy chairman of the State Duma has given lie to a pessimistic economic forecast in a report by Russia’s Strategic Projects Center released on Wednesday, a paper that blamed the country’s alleged degradation on its leaders.

“The report itself has been done not as a result of an in-depth and objective study, but as self promotion for its authors in the interests of those who commissioned it. It’s obvious that the authors’ main task was to lay it on as thick as possible. But the outcome is so unnatural and grotesque that one is tempted to repeat what Stanislavsky said – ‘I don’t believe you,'” Sergei Zheleznyak told Interfax.

“Until the authors of the so-called report wrap themselves in white sheets and crawl to a cemetery instead of pontificating with complacent faces, no reasonable person will trust their catastrophic predictions,” he said.

The report reads in part: “The likeliest scenario is that there will be something that provokes mass civil disobedience with unpredictable consequences. Another scenario is voluntary self-renewal of the government… The third scenario is rapid degradation of the population and partial extinction of the nation, which is the path that the current leadership of the country is taking it along.”

The forcible overthrow of the government is a possibility, according to the report.

“In a sense, one can speak here of a law of political preservation, as it were: the less possible it appears to change the government in a legitimate way through elections or voluntary self-renewal, the more legitimate it appears to people to resort to violent forms (or quasi-violent forms such as mass rallies or civil disobedience) of replacing those in authority. Respondents today interpret all these forms of pressure on the government as forced, legitimate and necessary measures.”

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