Russian President Vladimir Putin’s chief spokesman, Dmitry “the watch” Peskov, is very upset: Government statistics show that life isn’t great for Russians. In turn, Peskov says he has “struggled” to understand the data, and he’s demanding a report on it. You can be sure he won’t acknowledge any responsibility Putin has in letting or making things get so bad.

Russian government statistics are supposed to make the government look good rather than bad: There’s a long tradition of cooking the books to keep leaders happy, going back past Joseph Stalin to the tsars and their Potemkin villages. But here, someone seems to have dropped the ball. The data now show that 49 percent of Russian households cannot afford even one basic annual vacation, 52.9 percent cannot afford “sudden unexpected expenses,” and 35 percent cannot afford two pairs of shoes.