However, with hindsight much appears different from how it was, and so this calls for a fresh appraisal of the situation. Now I have a pretty good idea of what this left turn should begin with in Russia. So what’s changed? First of all, a pseudo-left wing political course has emerged from the Kremlin, something that clearly didn’t exist before. This copies, yet mocks, a left-wing agenda. How should we describe Putin’s regime? Left-wing? Or right-wing? I’m sure that the vast majority of people would say that Putin has a left-wing agenda. The state sector is developing; he fights against independent businesses; he’s created a complicated system of social rights and privileges; and so on. But in actual fact, it’s completely the other way round. Putin is actually continuing the traditions of the 1990s, and is following a radically right-wing political course. That’s why the need for a turn to the left has only increased in recent years.
In order to delve deeper into this question, we have to define what is “right” and what is “left”. And in today’s world that’s no easy task. Everywhere, not just in Russia, we see right-wing politicians acting like parasites of a left-wing agenda. A textbook example is Trump with his eccentric rhetoric. The borders between right and left are blurred; all definitions have been lost. In order to try to bring some clarity to this question, in my opinion, we have to concentrate on the main issue, and not get lost in the minutiae. And I believe that the main issue is social inequality. If a political course ultimately leads to the growth of social inequality, it’s a right-wing programme, however much they dress it up in left-wing rhetoric. But if it leads to a reduction in social inequality, it’s left-wing.
Let’s examine Putin’s social and economic policies from this point of view. Putin came to power on an anti-oligarch agenda, that theoretically was and remains one of the cornerstones of Kremlin mythology. But in reality the political course he’s followed not only hasn’t narrowed the gap between the rich and the poor, but has increased social inequality to levels never witnessed before. Putin has placed a huge amount of economic and political power in the hands of a very narrow stratum, made up of the higher, largely power bureaucracy and the criminal and semi-criminal “asset holders” who serve their interests. In place of the inequality that naturally arises because of a market economy, and that modern societies have more or less learnt to manage, Putinism has used the power it holds to create such inequality that an impenetrable wall has been built between the rich and the poor.
At every turn in Putin’s Russia, the rich have got richer and the poor have got poorer quicker than happened in Russia in the 1990s. But thanks to the growth in energy prices that resulted in a general rise in the standard of living, this process went unnoticed – up to a certain point. There was a lot of money around, and so the poor received a little “compensation”. However, for every rouble in social handouts that the president talks about with great ceremony in his annual address to the nation, there’s a dollar that goes into the pockets of Putin’s elite. As a result, the distance between the richest and the poorest strata of Russian society has been rapidly increasing. This process no longer goes unnoticed, because the regime has run out of money for the social sector. In the last few years in Russia we’ve seen the growth not only of relative poverty, but of absolute poverty. So over the course of 20 years Putin has been carrying out a radically right-wing policy, which can be seen objectively by the increasing stratification of society. I believe that this will lead to a dead-end, and represents a threat to national security, as ultimately this will bring the country to a social conflict faster than any imaginary “foreign agents”.
As well as the increasing rift between the incomes of the rich and the poor, that’s already in danger of causing an explosion, the whole system of distributing wealth in society is warped. Raiding businesses is the very essence of the system that Putin has created, and is one of the basic sources of inequality. The government’s direct interference gives rise to a latent (but no less widespread) redistribution of wealth in favour of those who demonstrate loyalty to the regime. This increases not only the degradation of the economic institutions, but also the moral principles of society. Any immoral behaviour in this system, be it lying, betrayal, denunciations and so on, is encouraged and financially advantageous.
The main thing that should be understood about social inequality in the Putin era, is that at its foundation lie non-economic factors. It’s artificially created inequality that’s supported by political violence. Consequently, the only way to fight this inequality is to eliminate the political factors that give rise to it. So all of the propaganda efforts that the Kremlin puts into this battle against poverty can be seen simply as a vicious insult. The main precondition for an effective battle against poverty in Russia is to remove the regime that has created and increased this poverty by its very existence. The regime has acted like an enormous pump, sucking the money out of the pockets of millions of its citizens and dumping it into the pockets of Putin’s millionaires.
How has this pump been constructed? How come this is what’s hoovering up the country’s wealth? The answer is pretty obvious: the regime exists and enriches itself mainly because there’s no control over the way it exploits resource rent. It divides up the profits from the sale of raw materials – oil, gas, metals and timber – in a completely arbitrary fashion, doing simply as it wishes and acting in the interests of a narrow circle of people. I believe that in order for Russia to be a state that provides for its people, it’s vital that society be given back control over its resource rent – that is, over the rent profits from the extraction and exploitation of the country’s natural resources. This is provided for in the constitution, but doesn’t exist in reality.
The idea of giving back to society control over resource rent isn’t new. Communists write and talk about this a great deal. The question is, do we genuinely give this control to society, or do we return it once again to the state? If we return it to the state, then once again control will be handed simply to another small group of people; just a different group this time. And even though the Communists’ idea that everything should once again be nationalised would be a fairer solution than what we have today, it would lead to be another historical dead-end for Russia. A return to the USSR would inevitably lead once again to a bureaucratised, static and inefficient economy, which is what destroyed the Soviet Union. This is inevitable with any gigantic state monopoly, especially in a country where the corporate culture is so undeveloped, where the officials are poorly educated and economically illiterate, and where, what’s more, there’s a centuries-old tradition of corruption and sabotage.
But this is not the only issue. The principal drawback in what the Communists are proposing of marching into the future by way of the past is the insoluble political bureaucratic equation: the more resources that are concentrated in the hands of the state, the greater is the state’s role in their redistribution. And the greater the state’s role in their redistribution, then the greater the quantity of resource rent society has to leave to the mercy of the huge redistribution system. This means that both from the point of view of society itself, and of each individual citizen, this whole reverse nationalisation makes no sense at all. The lion’s share of resource rent will be spread across the state’s huge power structure; another part of it will be wasted because of the inefficiency of the state monopoly; and the crumbs that are left will go to the people, and, what’s more, in return for their giving up on their rights as citizens. The question as to who will actually head up this machine for theft and deception – whether it would be Putin’s followers or Zyuganov’s followers or someone else – bears no significance for Russia’s fate.