The 10 graphs that explain Vladimir Putin’s Russia

This is an edited version of a presentation given by Owen Matthews at The Spectator’s What does Russia want? event.

What I’d like to do is give a run-through of how we got to where we are with Russia. From the end of the Cold War onwards, focusing on the economy – and how the economy, in true Marxist fashion, has shaped the politics and political realities that we see in Russia today.

The first metric is the big story of the post-Cold War world. Very simply, the graph above shows what’s happened between the collapse of the Soviet Union and the present day. It’s very clear: America’s GDP has gone from $10 trillion to $18 trillion, China is catching up and Russia is flatlining. In fact, this graph slightly obscures the dramatic collapse between 1990 and ’95, when Russia lost nearly 40 per cent of its industrial capacity.

But that’s the overall pattern: America, even at the end of the Cold War, was about five times larger in economic terms than Russia.