The protests last Sunday in Russia which aroused such euphoria in the western media have died down, but this may be a temporary pause in the outburst of a people simmering with revulsion against the conditions of life in a country riddled with worsening socio economic crisis. This new upsurge of protest demonstrations was the most significant since the 2012 movement that challenged Putin’s rule. But the harshness of the regime towards the protests with hundreds of people arrested suggested that Mr Putin’s government was taking no chances.
However, the concerns of the western imperialists and their seething hatred towards Putin do not spring from any real sympathy for the exploited masses and the perils of the autocratic rule they have to endure. The collapse of the Soviet Union, restoration of capitalism in Russia and the rise of Putin since 2000 have had contradictory responses from the western strategists. They were euphoric at the collapse of the Soviet Union and the fall of the Berlin Wall. They had won the cold war; a new world order of capitalist rulership, they bragged, would flourish ever after. It was ‘the end of history’! Remember?
However, as Marxists had explained in advance that the emerging bourgeois regimes in Russia and Eastern Europe were not based on a healthy capitalist system, but were rather Mafiosi-style capitalist cliques, mostly former bureaucrats of the Stalinist administrations. Soon these regimes, particularly that of Putin, became states antagonistic to the western imperialists, threatening their markets and businesses with rival economic and geopolitical agendas. A new ‘cold war’ began at the beginning of this century, with China becoming a major economic power.
This superficial and contradictory relationship between Russia and the west created a certain notion amongst some intelligentsia sections in countries like Pakistan that Putin or the Russian regime were in some way of a progressive character and could play an anti-imperialist role. This is false from beginning to end. Putin represents the former ‘communist’ bureaucrats that have become billionaires and plundered the Russian economy and its people. Vladimir V Putin is no Vladimir I Lenin. Lenin led a socialist revolution and the first-ever workers’ state in history, that demolished feudalism and capitalism and broke the shackles of imperialist stranglehold. A planned economy was introduced that transformed Russia from Czarist primitiveness into a modern advanced society that surpassed Western imperialism, particularly in the field of health, education, science and technology.
This is the centenary year of the Russian revolution, also known as the October revolution of 1917. The spectre of its reincarnation today is haunting the politicians and strategists of crisis-ridden imperialism. Putin is no less terrified at the prospect of its recurrence; hence even the small protests last Sunday jolted his regime. Under Putin’s control, the Kremlin plans to sit out the centenary of the Russian Revolution.
Capitalist restoration in Russia has wrecked havoc in society, and the working classes and the oppressed have suffered the ‘fruits’ of the market and free enterprise corporate capitalism. Ordinary Russians have been hit hard. Even the high growth rates do not raise the living standards of society in present-day capitalism anywhere! The World Bank says that 2017 it will be the largest increase in poverty since the economic collapse of 1998-1999. Forty-seven percent of the population consider themselves “the working poor.”
However the ratings of Vladimir Putin have been astonishingly high: between 80 and 90 percent. With no real opposition and Russia’s present communist party under Gennady Zyuganov has capitulated Putin doesn’t seem to have a serious challenge. He has used the Russian chauvinism of Czarist times to boost his support. The interventions in Ukraine and the annexation of the Crimea enhanced his popularity. His anti-American rhetoric added fuel to his nationalist pretensions. But the election of Donald Trump as president of the US has also played into this dynamic by depriving Putin of this distraction tool for the masses.
However Artyom Troitsky, a Russian journalist said that the fact that so many young people took part in the protests in Moscow and elsewhere “is exceptionally important… Young people have always been a catalyst for change and their presence suggests a break from the lack of political interest they had exhibited in recent years… This does not necessarily mean that the tide has turned but something is definitely changing”. The present Kremlin regime in the past had skillfully created a youth alternative in the form of a pro-Putin youth movement called Nashi is now worried about waning of Putin’s support amongst the youth.
The reality is that there is a limit to the foreign adventures that Putin can embark upon to whip up domestic support. National chauvinism cannot be stretched beyond certain limits. If capitalism in the advanced capitalist countries cannot develop society, it has much less potential to bring any respite for the Russian masses under a crony- and crime-infested regime.
New upheavals can erupt suddenly as if out of the blue in this intensifying social crisis. Such a movement in the centenary year of the greatest revolution in human history can have a world-ranging impact and, arising from the land of October, it can develop into a revolutionary wave that would sweep this rotten capitalist system across Russia and far beyond.
The writer is the editor of Asian Marxist Review and International Secretary of Pakistan Trade Union Defence Campaign. He can be reached at [email protected]