Five months in office led Kiriyenko to conclude that the deepest problem Russia faces is a fundamental lack of consensus. This point he emphasized several times. Looking back over the past seven years, he said, it is clear that no one calculated the time it would take Russian society and the Russian people to change. It is sometimes believed that in voting for Boris Yeltsin the people had somehow bought the whole package of economic reforms. At first, the people were not discouraged, believing that the market would not be too long in establishing itself.
People have the defeat syndrome.
Russia cannot be compared to Eastern Europe. There, reform was part of national liberation. For Russia, by contrast, the psychology was not one of liberation but the collapse of an empire. There have been problems at both macroeconomic and microeconomic level, whose impact was not fully appreciated before, Mr. Kiriyenko continued. There has not been a single year in the past seven when a realistic federal budget has been adopted.