‘No gas? I remember when food was rationed’: How Russian officials and propagandists are trying to reassure, shame, and intimidate Russians over the fuel crisis
Russia has been in the grip of a fuel crisis since late May. A gasoline shortage, initially localized, has spread across the entire country. Russians are now waiting in enormous lines at gas stations, searching online for ways to make their own gasoline, and even secretly siphoning it from parked cars. The authorities and the state propaganda machine are promising that the problem will soon be solved — while also shaming people for “panic buying” and urging them to be patient, recalling crises Russia has weathered before. Meduza has compiled a selection of quotes on the subject.
Ksenia Sobchak, founder of the Ostorozhno Media holding company
July 8
All of this, by the way, has happened before, friends. And we got through it just fine. The 2011 fuel crisis. The causes were different, of course, and so were the solutions — but we got through it, didn’t we? We’ll get through this one too.
Margarita Simonyan, editor-in-chief of RT
July 7
No gasoline? I still remember when food was rationed. What — you don’t remember? In my city, Krasnodar, there were ration coupons in 1992. And [on top of that] I personally went out with buckets to fetch water. Not Coca-Cola, not anything else — water. […] Did we survive? We did. And we’ll survive this time — I have no doubt about it. They’ll do all of this so that we run off to overthrow the dear old tsar, like in [19]17, and then make such a mess of things that even they themselves are horrified […] I urge everyone: stay calm, stay calm.
Vyacheslav Volodin, speaker of the State Duma
July 7
We’ll sort out the gas station mess, just like we’ve sorted out everything else. They wanted to wreck our financial system, and that didn’t happen. They wanted to tear our economy apart, and that didn’t happen either. What really matters is that we stick together. […] When we face challenges and start to waver, to panic, that only plays into our adversary’s hands.
Yevgeny Moskvichev, head of the State Duma’s transport committee
July 3
I think everyone just needs to be patient — and everything will be fine. The gas stations have everything. Yesterday I made a point of driving through two regions — there are lines, and you have to wait, but the fuel is there, both diesel and gasoline.
Valentina Matviyenko, speaker of the Federation Council
July 1
We’ll get through this difficult situation — one that’s being created for us, and it’s clear who’s creating it and doing so deliberately. We shouldn’t dramatize things or wring our hands; we should look for a solution together.
Nikolai Arefyev, a member of the State Duma’s committee on economic policy
June 29
I think… the completely unlimited fuel supply for private passenger cars that we’ve had ever since the first foreign car was brought into the country — that’s probably never coming back.
Marina Akhmedova, editor-in-chief of the pro-Kremlin outlet Regnum
June 28
My mind keeps going to thoughts about what kind of people [the Soviet people] were. The Germans burned down their houses, shipped their young people off to Germany, hauled the men away to camps, and right at the start they grabbed our boys and made the locals watch them get hanged. […] And those people — except for the occasional spineless traitor — believed, they knew, that Russia couldn’t lose. And us? Sure, we’ve got a gas problem. Sure, it’s a real pain. But victory comes down to the human spirit. And Russia’s obviously unbeatable. That’s just something you’ve got to know.
Dmitry Steshin, “war correspondent” and Z-blogger
June 28
For now, I read the gasoline situation as the convulsions of consumer psychosis. A self-reinforcing psychosis. […] My guess is that starting next week, the panic buying will begin to subside.
Alexander Novak, deputy prime minister
June 26
We have enough fuel on the market.
Igor Artamonov, governor of Lipetsk region
June 20
Let’s try not to repeat the buckwheat panic of 2020 and 2022. A year ago, in September, we were already dealing with dry pumps because of logistics problems and panic buying.
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