29.03.2000

West acclaims Putin

It was far from being the landslide that some had predicted, but Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin emerged victorious from the first round of Russia's March 26 election to become the second president of post-Soviet Russia.

With some 53% of the poll on a turnout of around 69% of the electorate, Putin won the support of less than four out of 10 Russians. However, his performance eclipsed that of his nearest rival, Gennadiy Zyuganov, leader of the Communist Party of the Russian Federation, who got 29%. The remaining nine candidates, including Grigoriy Yavlinsky, leader of the liberal Yabloko party (six percent) were nowhere.

Even by the standards of bourgeois democracy, the Russian election was abysmal: free in a formal sense, but far from fair. Putin did not deign to present the voters with a platform of concrete policies, confining himself to lapidary assertions concerning the need to restore order in society, to recreate a mighty Russian state and to improve the living standards of the people - notions guaranteed to appeal to a population weary and despairing after nearly 10 years of plunder and degradation. Of campaigning in conventional terms there was practically none, but why should Putin bother to campaign, when the output of the two state TV channels and privately owned stations such as ORT amounted to a continuous party political broadcast in his favour?

In a foretaste of what is to come under the Putin regime, 'dissidents', like Sergei Salnikov and Maksim Karpikov of the independent trade union Zashchita in the Kirov region, who publicly called on the workers to vote against Putin, were arrested, interrogated and threatened by the militia. Leading activists of the Union 2000 movement in Moscow, Vladimir Malkin and Boris Kagarlitsky, who called for a boycott of the elections, were also arrested and questioned by the Federal Security Service (FSB), which took over the KGB's internal security and counter-intelligence functions.

Zyuganov has accused the Putin camp of wide-scale ballot-rigging, but even if there were some substance in this charge, not even the most assiduous 'riggers' could have engineered a result that left the CPRF more than 20% behind the victor. The fact is that, while maintaining its core vote, particularly in the far east, Siberia and many of the rural heartlands of central Russia, just as it did in the December polls for the state duma, the CPRF under Zyuganov never had a chance of winning.

The reasons for this are twofold: even if Putin had not emerged as the leader of a victorious (and vicious) war in Chechnya, the fundamental cause of his current popularity, his limited experience of government still leaves Zyuganov (who never climbed higher than a deputy head of the ideology department in the Communist Party of the Soviet Union) in the shade. Secondly, and more significantly, there is hardly any difference in practice between the reactionary chauvinism of Putin and the red-brown politics of the CPRF, except that - as yet - Putin has not found it necessary or politic to follow the 'communists' down the road of lurid anti-semitism and crackpot Slav racism.

Zyuganov has probably done well enough to maintain his position for the moment, but it is difficult to see where he and his party can go from here. Putin has made it clear that there will be no place for CPRF ministers in his government. The time when such conciliation was necessary has passed. For the 'communists', the latest duma elections were objectively a disaster. No longer - unlike in the period 1991-9 - can they use a duma majority to block presidential reforms. The astounding success of Yedinstvo (Unity) in the December polls means that for the first time since the collapse of the USSR the president will be able to rely on parliamentary support for any legislation his ministers put forward.

Just what direction the Putin administration will take remains uncertain, but what is clear is that the president intends to use all the authoritarian and repressive measures necessary to bring about what he refers to as "national renewal", involving the "dictatorship of the law" and the creation of a strong, centralised, unitary state. Central to these aims is the requirement to suppress separatist tendencies in the Caucasus and elsewhere (if need be by military means), to rein in the power of Russia's regional governors and (notionally) to neutralise the immense political and economic power of the oligarchs by tackling the endemic corruption which made Yeltsin's Russia into little more than a state run by robber barons. The most notorious and brazen of these is Boris Berezovsky, the oil and media magnate whose election to the duma has given him four years of immunity against criminal charges relating, inter alia, to the embezzlement of some £400 million from Aeroflot.

What Putin says he means by "the dictatorship of the law" centres on the question of legislative regulation of property relations to bring about a situation where "the oligarchs will cease to exist as a class" - an interesting and deliberate echo of Stalin's campaign against the kulaks: "The right of ownership must become a priority in Russia ... We will strive to make the position of the state crystal clear ... We will need to make the state strong enough to guarantee implementation of these rights. I am bringing into my inner circle people from the law enforcement bodies [ie, ex-KGB officers] who are in no way connected with the people and structures which may be associated with any form of corruption" (interview with ABC TV, March 24).

Reading between the lines, it would seem that Putin's main priority in this area is to create the conditions for a transition from the present, primitive form of 'capitalism' in Russia - characterised by outright plunder and massive fraud - to a stable and 'transparent' system of normal capitalist property relations and financial structures such as would encourage further foreign investment in Russia's still embryonic 'market economy'. None of this, it need hardly be said, represents good news for the Russian working class, tens of millions of whom are living at or below subsistence level. It spells out merely the need to regulate their exploitation by domestic and foreign capital. Their only 'gain' - albeit a real one in material terms - may be that they will actually receive some wages in exchange for their labour power, rather than having to rely on barter and beggary.

What the "dictatorship of the law" may mean in practice can be deduced from certain actions which took place while Putin was chairman of the FSB: namely a wave of spy hysteria that swept through institutions concerned with such matters as nuclear energy, ecology and the environment. Readers may remember that the Moscow office of Greenpeace was closed and its staff interrogated by the FSB in connection with "terrorism".

The haste with which the imperialist powers - notably Blair's government - have greeted Putin's election is understandable. At last, it must seem to them, they have a chance of exploiting a stable and compliant Russia, as ever in need of foreign investment and loan capital. And the vast Russian market is also up for grabs. But their optimistic reading of the Putin accession may well be misplaced. True, Russia has urgent need of foreign investment and aid: estimates suggest that this year the country will need to import more than 20% of its animal feed and that production shortfalls from a chronically inefficient agricultural sector will demand huge purchases of foreign food in order to stave off widespread shortages. If sufficient foreign loans are available for this purpose, they may get by. But, in the absence of adequate aid, Russia will have to plunder its hard currency and gold reserves just to feed its people. The consequence of that is likely to be a precipitate fall in the value of the rouble, financial problems leading to possible further defaults on debt repayment and consequently a fresh crisis of confidence in the Russian economy, with echoes of the crash of August 1998.

Even if such a gloomy economic prognosis fails to materialise, it would appear to this writer that the imperialists, so often wrong-footed and ill-served by their intelligence sources, have failed to understand the political nature of the coming Putin regime. Even a cursory glance at such statements as are contained in works like First person (a recently published collection of interviews) shows that, alongside his famous 'pragmatism' (ie, opportunism), Putin demonstrates a radically different approach to the Soviet past from that of Yeltsin. The latter's hatred and bitterness towards the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, which he never forgave for expelling him from the political bureau of the central committee and from his post as first secretary of the Moscow city party committee, knew no bounds. Yeltsin lost no opportunity of reviling everything which those who loved and served the USSR and the Communist Party held most sacred. Putin, on the other hand, who never left the CPSU, speaks without shame of his patriotic Soviet upbringing; venerates the memory of Yuriy Andropov; describes the aims of the August 1991 putschists as "noble" and says that "you would need to be heartless not to regret the disintegration of the Soviet Union".

Of course, unlike Zyuganov, he is not foolish enough to dream of recreating the USSR, a desire which he says is "brainless", and we can expect that his conduct of foreign policy will indeed be pragmatic. Nobody, however, should imagine that he will brook any interference in the internal affairs of the Russian Federation, especially in regard to the ruthless suppression of separatism wherever it appears, and equally in regard to the suppression of "dissent" - whether among the intelligentsia or the working class of Russia. The wiseacres of The Times's leader-writing department may greet the arrival of a young and energetic president with enthusiasm - like their capitalist bosses they are no doubt avid to see the poor rate of return on industrial capital in the west boosted by the exploitation of Russian workers. But one suspects that they are in for a nasty surprise if they think they can dictate to a Russian president whose election they have greeted with such acclaim.

We shed no tears for the plight of international capital, but the election of Putin represents a real threat to the interests and struggles of the Russian proletariat, who as always must pay the price of chauvinism and 'reforms' in blood and sweat.