Russia's deputy prime minister compares today's economic crisis to what toppled the USSR

Igor Shuvalov, Russia’s first deputy prime minister, compared the country’s current crisis to conditions the Soviet Union faced immediately before the fall of communism.

“The most difficult time was in late 2014 and early 2015, when everything piled up at the same time and we were being told that there would be a crash. And two or three years before that, our specialists were already saying that we were in the same situation that the Soviet Union was in right before its dissolution and if the government were to take one or two more steps and we would inevitably find ourselves in the same exact scenario,” he said, speaking at the St. Petersburg Economic Forum.

According to Shuvalov, in early 2015, Russia may even have been worse off economically than the Soviet Union on the brink of collapse. He did, however, give a positive prognosis for the growth of Russia’s economy in the third quarter of 2016, citing the Ministry of Economic Development.

In 2013, Russia’s GDP grew by 1.3 percent and, in 2014, only by 0.6 percent. Since 2015, Russia’s economy has worsened further due to a sharp drop in oil prices and Western sanctions.