Rospotrebnadzor (the Russian government’s consumer protection watchdog) has “temporarily” closed four McDonald’s restaurants in Moscow, including the most famous one, USSR’s first. The reason? Rospotrebnadzor claims “numerous violations of sanitary legislation requirements”. It might be truth that McDonald’s often violates this or that sanitary requirement. But the main problem with the Putin regime is its habitual lying, so guess what? I don’t think any reasonable person in Russia would believe that the real motive behind the government’s putting pressure on McDonald’s, the long-term symbol of American consumer culture in Russia, is indeed motivated with sanitary concerns. Even if it really is simply a coincidence, nobody will believe it is. And that, my dear friends, is a very dangerous thing, because it forces us to disregard everything that Rospotrebnadzor, Chief Sanitary Office, and other similar organizations say even in those (rare) cases when they are indeed motivated by sanitary concerns. When former Chief Sanitary Officer, Dr. Onischenko, told us several years ago that there was an influenza epidemic concern and that people should have been inoculated against flu, people were asking each other: “Why does he say that?” Nobody though “He says so because there indeed is an epidemic concern, I should be inoculated”. Because before that, time after time after time, Dr. Onischenko was “finding” something inappropriate in farm produce from every country whose government happened to fall out with Putin. His office had prohibited sprats from Latvia in 2006, when there was a NATO summit meeting in Riga, and dairy products from Belarus in 2009, when the EU offered its Eastern Partnership program to that country, and tangerines from Abkhazia when the Abkhazians passed over Putin’s favorite in their “presidential” election in 2011. Every time it was claimed that there was something wrong with that particular produce, and every time its quality improved all of a sudden, quite mysteriously, after that country’s relations with the Kremlin improved. So, to tally it all up, the government’s habitual lying and using health concerns for political needs is the reason why we can not say we have a reliable consumer protection service in Russia.
Posted on: Thu, 21 Aug 2014 10:36:52 +0000
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