Re: Roy Medvedev interview (on Putin)

["Chris Doss" <nomorebounces@xxxxxxx>]

>
> Why fight staw men when the economic questions loom large.

Because that's easier and doesn't require thought. Further comment below.

>
> Putin is not going to defeat the bureaucracy. George W. is not going to
> defeat the bureaucracy and without question Mr. Stalin did not and could not defeat
> the bureaucracy. The reason is that the bureaucracy does not arise from
> politics, but rather from the division of labor in society - at least in its
> genesis. The idea that the old Soviet bureaucracy arose as police action - an
> assertion of political and ideological Trotskyism, is not very well thought out
> because Soviet society and Russia today is an industrial society (in transition)
> with certain indispensable functions tied to the reproduction process.

You make a lot of interesting comments. (Personally, I think blaming the Soviet bureaucracy on "Stalinism" is a red herring; I tend to think the bureaucracy is a product of having to control an enormous territory with a sparsely inhabited population. Russia has always had a giant bureaucracy.)

I think that the defining event of the past 4-5 years in Russia, in terms of domestic politics, has been the struggle between the bureaucracy and big business, the so-called "oligarchy." Not that the bureaucracy wants to destroy big business, as it exists as rent-seeker on it; rather, it wants to harness it for its own ends (Russian bureaucrats aren't exactly just proletarians, unless you are talking about people very low on the totem pole). That was behind Yeltsin's resignation and the main story behind the Putin presidency. They seem to be winning.

Actually Russia appears to be swinging back, after a brief interval, to the model of top-down state-sponsored development and politics that it has been repeating in different forms since at least Ivan the Terrible.

I find it very interesting that, despite three revolutions and two huge upsets of class relations in the past 100 years, the Russian system is still recognizably a variant of the model that was established in the tsarist era -- authoritarian in form but anarchic in content, with relations between the periphery and the center (i.e., Moscow) characterized in terms of fealty and tribute, and with the bureaucracy still omnipotent and still a rent-seeker. Indeed, Dead Souls reads very contemporary in a lot of ways. It is still very recognizably the same place.