Re: [A-List] Russia: Putin's promises

["Michael Keaney" <michael.keaney@xxxxxx>]

Melvin writes:

The real masses in Russia - not the petty bourgeois intellectual, desire a
"strong man," that can get things done and improve their daily lives. But so
does the proletariat of America.

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The recourse to a "strong man" is always claimed at times of social
unrest -- witness the op-ed pages of leading British periodicals in 1974
when London Times economics editor Peter Jay declared just this, that
unstoppable demand-pull inflation would lead to chaos which only a "strong
man" could fix. The people who invoke the "strong man" are rightwingers, in
my experience.

If there is a yearning for "strong leadership" within the proletariat of
either Russia or the US then it is because public discourse has been
conditioned in such a way as to preclude alternatives, such as a
revolutionary vanguard and all that this would entail. Such has been the
discrediting of the Soviet model and socialism per se within both the
metropolis and the former Soviet bloc that the ideology of the "strong man"
emerges as the strongest alternative to the status quo, except that it is
routinely invoked to solve the crisis of the status quo by repairing it --
in other words, to make the present system more workable, rather than to get
rid of it altogether. Add to this a pervasive form of Western orientalism in
which "the Russians" are rationalised as incapable of bourgeois democracy
and rather yearn for an autocrat to guide them and you have a neat excuse
for the Russian constitution, which was designed in order that the president
would be able to ride roughshod over the Duma or any other source of
opposition by issuing edicts that have the force of law. When the president
was Yeltsin that was good, because the US-sponsored architects knew that
this was the only way to bulldoze through the "reforms" necessary to
facilitate the wholesale theft of Soviet assets by the asset-strippers of
the West and their lackeys and agents in Russia itself. Unfortunately
Yeltsin's strength was taxed so severely during his dance routine in the
run-up to the 1996 "triumph of democracy" (copyright Bill Clinton) that the
regime's legitimacy was threatened by the paralysis at the top and the
evident skullduggery of the oligarchs and their henchmen. Thus Putin's rise
to power, which, I suspect, was the result of a resurgent bureaucracy
determined to stop the rot before it was too late -- and so pointed a gun
(not necessarily metaphorical) at Yeltsin's head to ensure his cooperation,
offered him amnesty in return for total retirement from public life, and has
since proceeded to consolidate its position before tackling head on some of
the more egregious features of Yeltsin's time. Of course this threatens the
interests of some in the West, so now the flipside to the strong leadership
required under Yeltsin is the authoritarianism of Putin, and Russians'
supposed desire to be told not only when to jump, but just how high.

There are strong differences of opinion on this list concerning how we
should view Putin. Melvin's highlighting of the material basis of Russia's
present social and political transformation is a welcome step forward in the
analysis of Russia.

Michael Keaney