Reading notes: Russia Without Putin: Money, Power and the Myths of the New Cold War by Tony Wood

Russia Without Putin: Money, Power and the Myths of the New Cold War by Tony Wood


This was a poignant read for me, as a supporter of the U.S. Socialist Workers Party. When did the Russian workers state end? That is not an academic question: critical for the education of our class.

I hoped Russia Without Putin: Money, Power and the Myths of the New Cold War by Tony Wood would give me a picture of the 1991-2018 process of capitalist restoration in the USSR, a single work recounting the driving forces and signal conjunctures of a tumultuous process would be invaluable today.

Russia Without Putin is not that book. As much as author Tony Wood promises us:

....The purpose of this book is to provide a portrait of contemporary Russia that goes beyond the blaring headlines about its president. How is Russia ruled, and for whose benefit? What are the consequences for Russian society? How can we best explain Russia's mounting clashes with the West? Where is the country headed? To answer these questions, we need to discard several of the core assumptions behind most discussions of Putin's Russia.

....My argument, rather, is that Western media coverage and analysis of Russia are overly fixated on Putin's personality. Time and again, the characteristics of the man are used to explain the behaviour or interests of the state. The conflation is to some extent understandable: Russia is a country in which political power is not only highly concentrated but deeply personalized, so the preferences and whims of the figure at the very heart of the system take on an outsized importance. But even in an age when it has become common to analyse complex events through the prism of singular personalities, the recurrent focus on Putin has become particularly extreme. And it is unhelpfully self-confirming: the more media coverage and analysis uses him to explain Russia, the more Putin comes to dominate, constantly narrowing our frame of reference.

At worst, the focus on Putin is dangerously counter-productive, leading to profoundly mistaken ideas about the source of Russia's ills. The notion that a single person is responsible for everything that happens in Russia shades all too readily into the belief that changing the figure at the top will rectify the problem....

Wood falls short, to say the least. For him and his publisher and chums, Putin is the alpha and omega underscoring their bourgeois academic adaptations: contempt for the workers and farmers of Russia, for the working class and oppressed nationalities internationally, for Marxism's understanding of the state not as an entity floating above all, but as the ruling class expression of the dictatorship of capital

The class-conscious reader will grip their wallet when they read, in the Acknowledgments of Tony Wood's book, "I'm also tremendously grateful to Perry Anderson for his close critical reading of the final manuscript, and for suggestions which improved it significantly."

Verso, and Perry Anderson in particular, were part of a UK anti-communist political tendency that, after their guerillasist line's defeat at the Fourth International world congress in 1979, rejected proletarianization of national sections. For all intents and purposes they happily dissolved themselves into the slough of the UK Labour Party, a pragmatist surrender to the Thatcher-Reagan course of the capitalist ruling classes of the time.

By 2001, Anderson relaunched New Left Review as a petty bourgeois box of pink Kleenex to the Labour party's left, with Marxism dutifully effaced. So too the content of books published by NLF's publishing tentacle, Verso. Gone were Deutscher and Timpanaro; forward came Zizek, Mouffle, and Laclau: later-day Euro-Shachtmanite blacklegs.

Thus, the reader is warned about Russia Without Putin.

****

Some excerpts with nota bene.

Introduction

....he personifies his country in the eyes of the outside world.

....the absolute centrality of Vladimir Putin. In the West, Russia's president is portrayed as the most implacable foe of the US and its allies, a malevolent puppet master pulling the strings in a succession of crises across the world.


CHAPTER 1 The Man and the System

[N.B.Peripatetic recapitulation of the overthrow of nationalized property and the monopoly of foreign trade seen as a chess game of the Stalinist bureaucracy.]



CHAPTER 2 Faces of Power

….Yet the corruption, nepotism and 'raiding' so characteristic of the Putin era are not the malignant fruit of his rule alone, nor are they solely attributable to the vices of a few individuals. The 'kleptocracy' targeted by Western sanctions is merely the flesh-and-blood manifestation of a systemic feature: the blurring of the boundary between the state and the private sector. This in turn is the result of the particular form taken by capitalism under Russian conditions. The idea that Putin and his circle are somehow unusually crooked requires us to overlook the extent to which the entire Russian elite – from billionaire oligarchs to local kingpins – is driven by the same motives, and skilled in the use of the same predatory techniques. More importantly, it asks us to ignore the wider realities of profit-making in Russia, which are rooted in the system that was imposed in the 1990s, and which Putin consolidated after 2000. That system will not be affected by the sanctions regime, nor will it be altered in the unlikely event of Putin being removed from power before his term is up.

CHAPTER 3 Red Bequests

....Russia had already had its Pinochet – and his name was Yeltsin.

....Rather than being a hindrance, the remnants of the Soviet past have been a massive boon for post-Soviet Russia.

....After the collapse of the USSR, the transition to capitalism set in motion a process of sharp social differentiation that gave rise to new social groups and new experiences; yet it did not instantly demolish the previous social order, which persisted in various forms. The coexistence of these two social structures, one under construction within the still crumbling ruins of the other, gave rise to a parallelism of old and new – a kind of combined and uneven social development – which effectively smoothed the path of capitalist transition rather than blocking it.

....Presented as a choice in the 1980s, women's ejection from the workforce became an inescapable fate only a few years later. Women accounted for a disproportionate share of the newly unemployed after 1991, as well as being over-represented among the working poor: in 1993, 70 per cent of those who had jobs and yet were classed as 'extremely poor' were women.29 In part this was because of shrinking (and often unpaid) wages in the 'feminized' sectors of the economy. There also were many more women pensioners than men – a consequence of women's longer life expectancy and the higher toll taken among men by the Second World War – which again left women disproportionately vulnerable.

....Institutional atrophy and slumping economic fortunes helped bring on a splintering of the intelligentsia's collective sense of self. In 1993, the sociologists Lev Gudkov and Boris Dubin argued that the very idea of 'a shared intelligentsia sentiment, lending rhythm to the existence of the whole social layer', had already vanished.33 What was taking place now was a 'powerful process of professional differentiation', as the former intelligentsia was separated out into various roles thrown up by the new market order. The 1990s boom in petty trade generated a host of low-skilled, badly paid, loosely 'cultural' jobs in advertising and sales. 'Professionalization' was also in large measure a process of deskilling and proletarianization, only partially masked by the glossy patina of the new consumerism.

....but as the former dissident Andrei Sinyavsky put it, 'The intelligentsia has not yet understood that the war in Chechnya is a direct continuation of the firing on the White House.'35

....'The intelligentsia, which in the past had lived with the people and shared its misfortunes to such an extent that the very term "intellectual" … unequivocally implied a love for the people, was today afraid of those same people.'36 In some cases, that fear was overpowered by contempt: in January 1999, shortly after the rouble crisis, novelist and critic Viktor Erofeev disparaged the mass of the Russian population as 'medieval creatures' who were 'dragging Russia down toward the bottom'

....in the 1990s. Most people were struggling to survive, and many opted for individualized solutions amid the collapse of older collectivities. Privatization also made it hard in many cases to identify who exactly should be the target of protest: in much of Russian industry, for example, the actual ownership structure was hidden behind layers of shell companies and investment vehicles. As a result, the vast majority of strikes took place in the state sector rather than the private one (education alone accounted for almost 90 per cent of them between 1992 and 1996).40

....trade unions....labour migrants all told numbered 7 to 8 million, almost 10 per cent of the working population.47 The new arrivals provided a large pool of unskilled labour, toiling on construction sites, cleaning the streets, working in markets or driving taxis for abysmal wages. Xenophobia against them became widespread, from the poisonous ranting of the Movement Against Illegal Immigration (DPNI) to the casual racism of TV shows like Nasha Rasha....

....Putin system drew an even larger portion of its base from among the millions working in state-owned enterprises or in the remnants of the Soviet welfare state.

....The generalized admiration of the president became self-reinforcing, giving rise to a stiflingly conformist climate in which it became outlandish as well as pointless to criticize the authorities. This shift was rendered all the more effective by the postmodern capaciousness of the broader culture: ideas and beliefs were mashed together in wildly incongruous combinations that made their substance hard to pin down, and hence difficult to argue with or oppose. Soviet nostalgia blended with folksy echoes of medieval Muscovy; Western philosophy and critical theory were digested alongside Russian nationalism and religious texts. A 'sickening aesthetic atmosphere' had taken hold of the country, according to the leftist poet Kirill Medvedev, who described 'the average cultural consciousness' as 'a putrid swamp – half-Soviet, half-bourgeois – in which Pushkin, Dostoevsky, Josef Stalin, the pop star Alla Pugacheva, and Jesus Christ all lie side by side, dead and decomposing'.52

....The emphasis on consumption means that the threshold for joining the Russian middle class is relatively low: acquiring a refrigerator or even a car is significantly more affordable than buying an apartment.

....While the majority might consider themselves members of a single 'middle class', the society that emerged in the 2000s – built on the disparities generated in the previous decade – consisted of several groups that differed hugely from one another: oligarchs, petty traders, industrial workers, migrant labourers, professionals, white-collar 'office plankton', and so on. Yet the disparities between these groups appeared less stark than they might have, thanks to the persistence of Soviet structures alongside emergent capitalist forms.

....1997.... the liberal politician Boris Nemtsov declared that Russia must enter the twenty-first century 'only with young people'. The same year, IMF managing director Michel Camdessus told a press conference that the structural adjustment policies his organization was insisting on might well require Russia to 'sacrifice a generation'.62

....The protests that burst onto the national stage in 2011, though widely interpreted as the political coming of age of the 'new middle class', are actually better understood as signs that the parallelism is fading.



CHAPTER 4 An Opposition Divided

[N.B. There is no independent working class movement in Russia that Wood can find through his reading of bourgeois Western press sources. And he has no curiosity about it in Ukraine; only the question of whether invading Ukraine was "good" for Putin in the eyes if U.S., UK, and EU (i.e. German) imperialism].

["Opposition" in Russia today: No social weight. Equivalent to Naderist consumerism. Navalny Great Russian chauvinism. League of Women Voters legitimacy.]

....Even if the movement could do little to prevent Putin's re-election in March 2012, for many commentators the very fact of its existence meant that things could not carry on as before. The Financial Times and Economist concluded that the protests marked 'the beginning of the end of the Putin era'.2 But several years later, the Putin era is apparently still in full swing – and if anything, his personal dominance of the political stage has grown. His crushing victory in the 2018 presidential election secured him another six-year mandate, extending his rule to 2024.

....liberals in Russia were for the most part peripheral to official politics, and increasingly found themselves turning to extra-parliamentary tactics. This made for some strange bedfellows: the few anti-Putin marches held in the mid-2000s were attended by a mixture of free-marketeers, human-rights advocates, and devotees of the National Bolshevik movement – a postmodern, red-brown fusion engineered by the writer Eduard Limonov that acquired a substantial youth following. This patchwork came together in 2006 in an ungainly coalition called The Other Russia, which organized a series of 'Dissenters' Marches' over the next few years. These sometimes drew decent-sized crowds, by Russian standards, but outside the major cities – principally Moscow, St Petersburg and Nizhny Novgorod – they had little resonance.

....Having joined the liberal Yabloko party in 2000, Navalnyi was expelled from it in 2007 for helping to organize the 'Russian March', a gathering of far-right nationalists whose best-known slogan is 'Russia for the ethnic Russians!'*

....Russia's electoral calendar coincided with a gathering tide of discontent, and the 2011–12 parliamentary and presidential votes provided the first test of the system since the post-2008 economic downturn. Yet although this created a slender opening for Russia's multiform oppositional movements, many of the basic divisions between them not only persisted through the 2011–12 protests; if anything, they deepened.

....The differences between the liberal and left wings of the movement were apparent from early on. At the demonstration on 24 December 2011, liberal figurehead Ksenia Sobchak – a TV star and daughter of the former St Petersburg mayor who had been Putin's boss in the 1990s – told the crowd that 'the main thing is to exert influence on power, rather than to struggle for power'. She was whistled and booed by sections of the crowd, who no doubt thought precisely the opposite. When the left tried to formulate a list of social demands for the movement to put forward, the liberals rejected the idea as 'divisive'.

....there is no capitalism, no market, no economic activity even, outside of history. The 'capitalism' Russian oppositionists aspire to emulate is the product of the specific and diverse histories of Europe and the US, shaped by concrete events and flesh-and-blood people. A related but still more consequential error is the idea that what Russia has now is not – or is not yet – capitalism, and that the failure to establish 'proper' capitalism is what accounts for the perversions of the present. But many of the characteristic features of the Putin system are directly descended from the post-Communist order installed in the 1990s, which Putin has consolidated and prolonged. The foundational purpose of this 'imitation democratic' system was the establishment of capitalism, and it owes its subsequent shape to the desire of Russia's rulers to maintain that initial commitment and defend their gains. Capitalism, in short, has predominated in Russia for the past three decades, and what many Russian oppositionists see as symptoms of its absence are, instead, structural features of the kind of capitalism the country has.

....whatever small gains a progressive anti-Putin movement might make at home are likely to be overshadowed by events on an increasingly tense and turbulent international stage.

....Even if the movement could do little to prevent Putin's re-election in March 2012, for many commentators the very fact of its existence meant that things could not carry on as before. The Financial Times and Economist concluded that the protests marked 'the beginning of the end of the Putin era'.2 But several years later, the Putin era is apparently still in full swing – and if anything, his personal dominance of the political stage has grown. His crushing victory in the 2018 presidential election secured him another six-year mandate, extending his rule to 2024.

....liberals in Russia were for the most part peripheral to official politics, and increasingly found themselves turning to extra-parliamentary tactics. This made for some strange bedfellows: the few anti-Putin marches held in the mid-2000s were attended by a mixture of free-marketeers, human-rights advocates, and devotees of the National Bolshevik movement – a postmodern, red-brown fusion engineered by the writer Eduard Limonov that acquired a substantial youth following. This patchwork came together in 2006 in an ungainly coalition called The Other Russia, which organized a series of 'Dissenters' Marches' over the next few years. These sometimes drew decent-sized crowds, by Russian standards, but outside the major cities – principally Moscow, St Petersburg and Nizhny Novgorod – they had little resonance.


CHAPTER 5 After the Maidan

....This "U.S. won the cold war" judgment was contradicted by living class reality: the continued unravelling of the world order forged after WW2 by Washington and the Stalinist leadership of the USSR: to thwart, midlead, and eventually destroy struggles for national liberation and revolutionary socialism. In fact the U.S. can be seen today as the biggest loser of that cold war.

....The process of NATO enlargement is crucial to understanding why and how relations between Russia and the West later deteriorated. It demonstrated the basic imbalance that has governed strategic calculations on both sides ever since: the US enjoyed accumulated advantages that enabled it either to attend to or ignore Russian interests as it pleased, while Russia retained enough of its great-power habits of mind to resent this state of affairs, but lacked the capacity fundamentally to alter it.

....Greeted in the West as a democratic flowering, but seen in the Kremlin as the product of Western machinations, the Ukraine crisis of 2004–05 was crucially different from the previous 'Colour Revolutions' in Serbia (2000) and Georgia (2003). There was much more at stake for Russia than in those previous cases: the Kremlin had poured a great deal of money and effort into securing the presidency for Yanukovych, and the geopolitical outcomes of his defeat were far more serious – potentially opening the way for NATO to emplace itself along almost all of Russia's western borders. In the case of Ukraine, moreover, external strategic issues were intertwined with internal political questions. The 'Orange Revolution' represented a frontal challenge to Russia's own 'imitation democratic' regime, raising the possibility that popular energies – till now excluded from the business of government across the post-Soviet space – might surge back once more, as in 1989–91, to threaten the existing system. The examples of Georgia and Ukraine proved contagious: Kyrgyzstan's 'Tulip Revolution' followed in early 2005, while comparable though unsuccessful movements emerged elsewhere (Azerbaijan, Belarus, Mongolia). From 2004–05 onward, the defence of what the Kremlin saw as Russia's interests abroad became inseparable from the impulse for self-preservation at home, tying Russian foreign policy ever more closely to concerns over domestic order.

....the newly installed President Dmitri Medvedev – much more of a liberal Westernizer than Putin [N.D. more liberal?!?! -JR].

....prime movers in Western policy toward Eastern Europe and the former USSR had been the US and NATO, but in the 2000s it was more often the EU that drove it. [N.B. A "Marxist" should at least have enough clarity to avoid such obscurantist nomenclature. The "EU" is German imperialism. But this is Verso....].

....Despite the Kremlin's mounting concern over the prospect of Ukraine joining NATO and becoming more closely integrated with the EU, it was unable to make Kiev a genuinely better offer. Putin's plan to buy $15 billion of government debt and give Ukraine deep discounts on gas came too late to help Yanukovych, but it wouldn't have made much difference if it had been offered earlier. Russia simply could not match the West's combined economic and ideological appeal.

....This is the context in which Russia's subsequent foreign-policy moves need to be understood. The intervention in Syria, launched in September 2015, was in large measure a response to the disaster of the Kremlin's policy in Ukraine. There were, to be sure, many motivations behind the decision to deepen Russia's involvement in the Syrian conflict – a war in which it was already implicated through its support for the Assad regime. But some of the factors most commonly invoked were by 2015 secondary to Russia's most pressing foreign-policy needs. Economic and political ties between Moscow and Damascus stretched back to the Cold War, and might suggest an obvious material reason for Russia to prop up Bashar al-Assad's rule. Under Assad's father, Syria had been one of the USSR's few state-level allies in the Middle East, and received substantial economic and military aid in exchange for the lease of a naval base at Tartus.

....But the central aim of the Kremlin's intervention in Syria was, in my view, neither to protect Assad nor to prevent regime change per se; it was, rather, an attempt to re-establish Russia's importance on the world stage.

....With Trump's victory, Russia moved to the centre of US public and media debate as never before in the post-Soviet era. Among dismayed Democrats, Russian interference became the default explanation for Clinton's defeat: it was as if the Kremlin had hacked American democracy itself. Of course, whatever trouble the Russian government may have wanted to cause the Clinton campaign, it made little difference to the actual outcome of the vote. (And allenabling many American liberals to avoid discussing the multiple factors behind Trump's disastrous success, from the anti- indications are that the Kremlin, like so many other observers, expected Clinton to win anyway.)

....democratic distortions of the electoral college system to the disenfranchisement of voters, especially African-Americans, through voter ID laws and mass incarceration. Rather than confront the deep flaws in the US's own institutions, political system and society that produced the freak result, for many it was more convenient – more emotionally accurate, too – to blame Trump's ascent on an outside power, and implicitly to identify Trump himself as a foreign body.

....The idea of a 'New Cold War' seems, more than anything, designed to fill a conceptual vacuum – compensating for the lack, in the minds of many, of ways to grasp the disconcerting novelty of the current geopolitical moment.

[N.B. This "U.S. won the cold war" judgment was contradicted by living class reality: the continued unravelling of the world order forged after WW2 by Wshington and the Stalinist leadership of the USSR: to thwart, midlead, and eventually destroy struggles for national liberation and revolutionary socialism. In fact the U.S. can be seen today as the biggest loser of that cold war.]

CHAPTER 6 Russia in the World

....Russia's fantasy of integration or alliance with the West has finally been buried.

....But its role will remain significant, even in a century that promises serious shifts in the global balance of power. All the more reason, then, to think seriously about how the country sees its future self, and what obstacles and opportunities might lie along its path.

[N.B. "The country"   No classes but classless abstractions caricatured inadequately.]

....It occupies a difficult mid-category between the hegemonic US and a rising China on the one hand, and on the other a handful of large states, chiefly Brazil and India, that are rapidly leaving behind their status as 'developing countries'.

....For all the concern about the tentacular spread of Putin's influence, its actual capacity to shape political outcomes has proved negligible to non-existent – the 2016 US elections very much included. The Kremlin does indeed seek to convert whatever leverage it possesses into concrete advantages, and this can involve all kinds of tactics, from discreet negotiations to loud threats to covert meddling. But the resources at Russia's disposal are fewer than in 1917 or 1945, and the forces likely to oppose it are far stronger.

....It does seem reasonable to assume that US hegemony will eventually come to an end, just as the Pax Britannica did before it, and it makes sense to debate what kind of world order will follow. Will China slide smoothly into the role of next global hegemon? Are we headed for an anarchic system in which no single power takes the place of the US? Or will the world to come do away with the dominance of states altogether, replacing that pattern with a world-market society?10 These alternative scenarios would have very different consequences, for Russia as for everyone else. From Moscow's perspective, a Chinese-dominated world would be unlike the US-dominated order in one especially crucial respect: Russia would now share an extensive land border with the single superpower. If the PRC became the US of the twenty-first century, would Russia become its Mexico – economically integrated with and strategically subordinated to the giant next door? The world-market scenario poses a different kind of threat: a dilution or even dissolution of state sovereignty that might produce all kinds of socio-economic or even territorial fragmentation, turning existing nation-states into little more than cartographic fictions.

....when after the 2008 war with Georgia, Russia recognized the independence of South Ossetia and Abkhazia. Whatever was left of Russia's commitment to the idea of territorial integrity vanished completely during the Ukraine crisis, when it first annexed Crimea after a hasty referendum supervised by 20,000 Russian troops, and then backed secessionist rebels in the Donbass, while making intermittent noises about absorbing eastern Ukraine's Russian-speaking territories. It seems unlikely that this second annexation was ever seriously considered: the Kremlin was instead floating the idea of reconstituting 'Novorossiia' in order to push the West to back down. The attempt clearly failed; but at the same time, it opened up once more the Pandora's box of separatisms Russia had apparently fought so hard to keep shut since the 1990s.

[N.B. Still a "prison house of nations."]

....If there were any connection between state security and degrees of local democracy, Putin should have done the opposite. In 2014, though Moscow furnished the rebellion in the Donbass with arms and troops, and to begin with noisily promoted the rebels in official media, its enthusiasm had limits: besides being pro-Russian, the Donbass militias were strongly anti-oligarchic, a stance that might potentially have popular appeal well beyond eastern Ukraine. When it came to it, the Kremlin knew which side of the barricades it would rather be on.

[N.B. Nice of Wood to give Putin some free advice.]



Epilogue

....tendency, across the post-Soviet space and far beyond, for countries governed by such regimes to find themselves circling through variations on the same governmental theme.

[N.B. Almost like different political parties and leaders simply represent the same ruling class! 😏]

....not just an anti-Putin who can take the current president's place. This is no small task, and it would have to be the work of a large-scale movement rather than an elite plot or a few scattered individuals. Yet it's possible that Putin's fourth term might provide an opportunity for such a project to begin to take shape. A period of stasis for the ruling system could also be a valuable interval....

***

For a book supposedly setting aside myths and fantasies about Putin in order to analyze the Russian class politics and economic transformations of 1991-2018, the name Putin appears in every single page.

Jay

30 December 2018