For Vladimir Putin, the past is never past, and at a time when international score settling over historical grievances is a commonplace phenomenon, his is an itch that just had to be scratched. Combine this with an inflated ego honed by the corrupting effects of two decades of near-absolute power, and what has resulted is the invasion of Ukraine and the resumption of the Cold War.
Putin’s grievance, which has apparently gnawed at him during two years of pandemic-induced isolation in the Kremlin, is Russia’s lost status as an imperial superpower dating back to the fall of Communism in 1991. Putin is not really a Communist. Probably never was. He is a former apparatchik and KGB functionary. What motivates him is not ideology, but power and prestige. The diminishment of Russian standing and world influence is his problem — the loss of the Soviet empire and the formerly subservient (now independent) republics that composed it, including Ukraine. His self-imposed mission: the reconstitution of the old Soviet Union in all its supposed grandeur, with himself as modern tsar.
The West, particularly the US, was the cause of the Soviet downfall, Putin thinks, not any internal systemic contradictions. To some degree, he’s right. The Cold War US military buildup, which the Soviets couldn’t match economically, led to a turning inward and a pursuit of domestic reform. Under Mikhail Gorbachev (1985-91), who visualized a more humane system based on renewing pre-Stalinist socialist ideals, an attempt was made to preserve the existing order by modernizing and liberalizing it; that was the meaning of glasnost (openness) and perestroika (economic restructuring).
Gorbachev’s antiauthoritarian reforms led to limited democracy and greater press freedoms, the release of political prisoners, an attack on bureaucratic corruption, and a reexamination of Soviet history; they also included economic changes, such as service-sector cooperatives, an innovation borrowed from Vladimir Lenin, whose idealized memory Gorbachev sought to elevate above that of the dictator Joseph Stalin. (Ironically, Stalin’s totalitarian regime of 1924-53 now serves as a perverse model for Putin.)
In the end, none of it mattered; the reforms didn’t cure the sclerotic Soviet economy quickly enough, and the forces set loose by liberalization led to ethnic and nationalist breakaway movements in the restive Soviet republics. Gorbachev, forced to terminate Communist Party control and begin granting independence to the rebellious republics, resigned as Russia’s leader in 1991. By then, he had begun to evolve into what Soviet-era historian Stephen Kotkin (“Armageddon Averted,” 2008) calls a social democrat or democratic socialist, a transformation that came too late to avert his fall from grace, unlamented by shortsighted American policymakers.
Gorbachev’s successor, Boris Yeltsin (1992-99), who carried the breakup of the Soviet Union to its logical conclusion with the aid and support of the US (he, not Gorbachev, was “our guy”), was his predecessor’s antagonist and antithesis — a self-styled anticommunist populist. As Kotkin recounts the story, Yeltsin and his radicalized followers saw a Western-style market economy as a better option for Russia than Gorbachev’s reformed or humanistic socialism. They were encouraged in this view by the Clinton administration, the International Monetary Fund (IMF), and a cadre of what Kotkin calls “self-promoting foreign advisors,” of whom the now-repentant American economist Jeffrey Sachs was the best known.
Along with like-minded Yeltsin officials, these forces pushed Russia into trying to develop a pure market economy overnight — in retrospect, a road to disaster. Their prescription was what became known as “shock therapy,” an outgrowth of 1980s economic thinking: total privatization combined with austerity and deficit reduction. Starting in January 1992, Yeltsin undertook “destatization,” ending most government-administered prices, opening up trade and speculation, decentralizing banking, and allowing private companies to take on dangerous levels of debt. But, most conspicuously, he introduced no social safety net for his people, as salaries, savings and pensions all plummeted.
Allowed sudden free reign, so-called market behavior led to massive inflation that rose from 7% to 25% and, for a time, to over 2,000%. (It was not appreciably reduced until the early 2000s.). This was accompanied by rampant corruption, participated in by Yeltsin’s inner circle, as former Soviet state institutions were divided up and plundered. Everything was commodified, including government housing, marketed now by brokerage firms. By 1996, reported observer David Remnick (“Resurrection,” 1997), 80% of the Russian economy was in private hands.
Out of this maelstrom emerged the infamous billionaire oligarchs, mainly drawn from the managerial elite of the Soviet era and set free from the economic planning bureaucracy by Yeltsin to grab the privatized spoils, using their inside knowledge and government connections to acquire property and fill their pockets. Under the hands-off policy of a semi-coherent, alcoholic and morally compromised president, they now controlled the banks, the media outlets, the import-export firms, the oil-and-gas and real estate sectors. It was all on a par with the Great Barbecue of Gilded Age America.
This was the dysfunctional country Yeltsin bequeathed to Vladimir Putin as designated replacement at the end of 1999, one kept afloat until then only by loan guarantees from the US and the IMF, doubtless a humiliation to the imperial-minded Putin. Russia was ripe for an aspiring autocrat to impose order.
Once in charge, Putin responded by seizing control of the privatized energy sector and building it up as a source of income and influence (and popular support), capitalizing on the willingness of Western Europe to become dependent on his natural gas. Gazprom, the nationalized (2005) state oil-and-gas giant, became his special fiefdom.
Mainly, however, as befits a former chief of secret police with paranoid tendencies and (it turned out) a vicious streak, Putin adopted the Stalinist model, gradually aggrandizing personal political power by employing intimidation and a velvet-gloved iron fist. First, he tightened executive control over parliament and the regional governments, centralizing authority in the name of fighting terrorism. Then, he restricted the independent press. Finally, he arranged for a constitutional amendment allowing him to be “reelected” ad infinitum, establishing a virtual dictatorship.
The oligarchs he has permitted to follow their greed unimpeded, so long as they stay out of politics, follow orders, and give the state (that is, Putin) a cut of the proceeds. And with Ukraine, the velvet glove has come fully off the iron fist, revealing the true totalitarian intent of Joe Stalin’s spiritual son.
Wayne O’Leary is a writer in Orono, Maine, specializing in political economy. He holds a doctorate in American history and is the author of two prizewinning books.
From The Progressive Populist, April 15, 2022
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