02.08.2000

Putin - an elected tsar

Before August 9 1999, when Yeltsin appointed him prime minister of the Russian Federation - the fifth in 17 months - Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin was virtually unknown. Just over four months later, following Yeltsin's melodramatic televised resignation, he became acting president. In March this year he was elected as Russia's second post-Soviet president. Given Russia's history and its continuing geopolitical significance, it is important for communists and revolutionary socialists to try to come to grips with these events.

Bourgeois commentators concentrate on the subjective factor, focusing on the man in order to discern the 'meaning' of his emergence and sketch the probable shape of future events. Our approach, as Marxists, is diametrically opposite. Our attention is directed to the concrete political, economic and social processes at work in Russian society at this specific stage in its historical development; on the social structure of state power; on the composition, relative strength and interrelationship of contending social forces. Only in this way can we hope to come to some understanding of what Putin means for Russia and the rest of us. The difficulties of analysis are severe, because it is impossible to produce an adequate theory of an entity that is undergoing rapid, profound and chaotic change. A decade after the collapse of the USSR, everything is still in flux, characterised by recurrent crises and deep-seated contradictions.

I shall argue that Putin represents another attempt - perhaps the last throw of the dice - by Russian finance capital to consolidate its control and bring about an orderly transition to the market. Failure to achieve this objective so far has brought Russia to the brink of catastrophe, representing not only a defeat for Russian capital, but a world historical failure of capitalism itself. Failure this time could be the harbinger of outright fascist dictatorship or of a revolutionary insurrection that could destroy the entire edifice of the Russian state as it now exists.

In order to succeed, Putin must reverse two major consequences of the anarchy that characterised Yeltsin's feeble misrule: first, by telling Russia's 89 regional governors to "take as much sovereignty as you can swallow", Yeltsin created a situation in which many regions became personal fiefdoms run by their bosses in their own interest, ignoring federal laws and taxes. This sovereignty must now be reclaimed by the centre. Secondly, the control of vast tranches of Russia's financial system and economic infrastructure exercised by a small group of immensely wealthy, so-called 'oligarchs' must also be wrested back from them. As a protégé and creature of the oligarchs, Putin is faced with real difficulties, even dangers, in this respect. On one level, the oligarchs know that their long-term interests can only be served by the creation of an orthodox market within a proper legal and fiscal framework, but they want it on their terms, not Putin's, and they are determined to avoid having to pay the bill for their rape of Russia. Putin looks strong in these early days, but his success, even his survival, may depend directly on his handling of this problem.

The solution to these difficulties which Putin favours is the creation of a unitary, centralised state, with all the levers of power in his own hands. He has been publicly urged by some among the elite, including Petr Aven, president of Alfa, Russia's biggest and most successful private bank, to adopt the Pinochet model: a combination of political dictatorship and neo-liberal market economics: "The only way ahead is for fast liberal reforms, building public support for that path, but also using totalitarian forces to achieve it. Russia has no other choice" (The Guardian March 31). Putin appears to have accepted this advice, and is bent on the ruthless suppression of all opposition, repression of the media, disregard for human rights in general and a particular assault on the rights and already pitiful living standards of the working class.

Before looking in detail at these issues, I want to deal with a couple of fundamental questions, where myths have attained the status of facts: has post-Soviet Russia evolved into a stable parliamentary democracy, just like the bourgeois democracies of the west? And has capitalism been restored in Russia?

As regards the first question, there are many reasons why nothing could be further from the truth. First, the relationship between the executive and the legislature has never even approximated to the norms of bourgeois 'democracy'. Faced with intransigent opposition from the first duma (the old supreme soviet in a new guise) to his disastrous introduction of market reforms, Yeltsin, the great 'democrat', disposed of the problem in September-October 1993 by the simple expedient of demanding that the duma dissolve itself, thus engineering a confrontation, introducing a state of emergency and destroying the duma by violence.

The White House was shelled, many duma deputies arrested and fresh elections called - not only to elect a new duma, but to serve as a referendum on a new, draconian constitution that reduced parliament to a toothless talking shop, able at best to delay the implementation of presidential decrees, the state budget and so forth. Resistance beyond this point would have constitutionally and 'democratically' allowed Yeltsin to dissolve parliament and get himself a fresh, hopefully more compliant legislature. Nonetheless, the existence of a working majority of 'communists'- ie, the Communist Party of the Russian Federation and its allies in parliament - meant that for the entire period of Yeltsin's presidency there was a permanent stand-off punctuated by periodic crises. The duma elections in 1999 produced a new situation, where for the first time since the dissolution of the USSR a Russian president has a duma that can be relied on to rubber-stamp his draft laws without demur. To depict this as the establishment of stable parliamentary democracy would, however, be a travesty.

Secondly, with the exception of the CPRF (its clientele composed of pensioners, war veterans, lower-level former Soviet bureaucrats once employed in the party and state apparatus, and some intellectuals), the now virtually defunct Agrarian Party (with its base in the former state and collective farm system), and perhaps Zhirinovsky's grotesquely misnamed Liberal Democrats, Russia has no political parties, if by that we mean organisations with a mass base fighting for a common programme. Instead it has entities that call themselves parties, but which are in reality mere electoral blocs set up to further the sectional interests of factions within the elite. The best example of these is Unity (known in Russia as Medved - Bear), created only months before the 1999 duma election, under the leadership of Sergei Konstantinovich Shoigu, the emergencies minister and Yeltsin protégé, purely as a vehicle to defend the Kremlin 'family' interest and set up a platform for Putin's presidential campaign.

Putin 'endorsed' Unity but never joined it. Maybe that was because there was nothing to join - no infrastructure, no programme: just hours of free 'party politicals' on state television, thanks to which Unity captured some 23% of the vote. All the 'parties' represented in the duma (including the CPRF) are committed to the market. None can be described as social democratic, let alone representative of the interests of the working class, who are in effect excluded from politics.

Thirdly, the conduct of all post-Soviet elections, including Putin's election to the presidency back in March, renders their results dubious, to say the least. The polls may have been free in a formal sense, but they were anything but fair. Outrageously partisan media intervention, paid for and orchestrated by the oligarchs and other finance capital interests, ensured in each case that the desired outcome was achieved. Of course, it suits both Putin and his imperialist friends to talk up Russia's 'democratic' gains - there are no other gains to prate about - but, as we shall see, Putin's understanding of the term is rather idiosyncratic, especially where such things as freedom of expression and human rights are concerned. What we have in Russia is not a parliamentary democracy, but an elective autocracy; not what Putin calls "the dictatorship of the law", but (if all goes according to plan) the dictatorship of a single individual - in effect the 'elected tsar', Vladimir Vladimirovich.

The second question is one of central relevance to the way we view Putin's and Russia's prospects: ie, the purported 'restoration of capitalism' in Russia - a notion we frequently see in the bourgeois and even in the leftwing press. To understand why this is a myth, we need to look briefly at the history of the Russian economy over the last decade.

Back in 1992 Yeltsin tried to make a dash for the market by removing price controls and embarking on a crash privatisation programme. The predictable effect of the former was to bring about hyperinflation and destroy the value of fixed incomes and savings, thus reducing millions to a state of impoverishment. It was cheaper to use the rouble as lavatory paper than buy the genuine article, assuming you could get hold of it.

Privatisation allowed the more intelligent and enterprising of the old Soviet nomenklatura to enrich themselves by moving effortlessly from the administration of state property to its expropriation. Having succeeded in bringing the decaying Soviet system to an end at a time when it was safest and most convenient for them - ie, when the working class was still atomised and passive - they could proceed to constitute themselves into a 'capitalist' class, securing private property rights, the right of inheritance and so forth, but the 'capitalist' accumulation which they pursued took a very primitive and peculiar form: it involved plunder on a scale hardly imaginable, with billions of dollars being exported to bank accounts in the west in an effort to build up financial empires. Upwards of $20 billion of capital has been leaving Russia on an annual basis, which means that it has been Russia that has been supporting the west, rather than the other way round. The massive export of capital exceeded capital inflows by a wide margin and may go some way to explaining the remarkable buoyancy of asset values in western markets.

The key aspects of the activity of Russia's new 'capitalist' class were that it was both parasitical and criminal, with the emphasis on extracting short-term gains from financial speculation and manipulation. This activity was rightly dubbed "robber capitalism" by George Soros. Boris Nemtsov, a long-term proponent of radical market reforms, describes the situation thus: "The country is built as a freakish, oligarchic capitalist state. Its characteristics are the concentration of property in the hands of a narrow group of financiers ... Many of them operate inefficiently, having a parasitic relationship to the industries they control, sucking out capital and keeping it in Moscow or moving it abroad. They don't pay taxes and they don't pay the workers" (The Observer August 30 1998).

The bulk of the capital that was reinvested in Russia went not to the sphere of production - which would have meant the direct extraction of surplus value from the working class, with all its concomitant problems and risks - but into the indirect extraction of surplus through the exploitation of finance capital derived from rigged privatisations, the haemorrhaging of cash from the vital commodity sector and, last but by no means least, the wholesale theft of IMF loans. This capital found its way into the mushrooming domestic banking sector, but not into banks that any western capitalist would recognise as such. Their purpose was not to engage in the taking of deposits and the loan of capital to productive enterprises, but to act as conduits for money-laundering. By 1998, conventional investment in means of production had fallen to around 20% of 1990 levels; in heavy industry, it had fallen to around five percent. No wonder, therefore, that industrial production fell by more than 50% over the same period.

In the spring of 1996, Yeltsin was facing presidential polls and looking unelectable. The victory of Gennadiy Zyuganov of the CPRF seemed feasible. A 'communist' success would have meant the end of the oligarchs' power, so it was obviously vital to their interests then to secure Yeltsin's re-election, just as it was perceived as vital four years later to have Putin succeed him.

Vladimir Potanin, head of the Interros financial and business conglomerate, devised a solution that secured the oligarchs' interests and at the same time took the orgy of self-enrichment to a qualitatively new level: the 'loans for shares' scheme, whereby, in return for funding Yeltsin's campaign and guaranteeing him massively biased media support, Potanin and his friends, notably Boris Berezovsky and Vladimir Gusinsky (see below), were given the chance to cherry-pick enormous shareholdings in some of Russia's most important and wealthy enterprises, particularly in the raw materials sector. Yeltsin won, of course, and was thenceforth completely in hock to the oligarchs, who were able to add political power to their armoury, effectively becoming a parallel administration to the prime minister and government, and constituting the real seat of power in the country.

At this stage, Russia was already in the throes of an austerity programme, demanded by the IMF, that in its effects destroyed Russia's chances of bringing about the restoration of capitalism. Stringent controls on monetary emission meant that the economy was starved of roubles. The immediate consequence was the non-payment of wages to the workers, with arrears stretching sometimes over years, and a general move towards barter both at the level of individuals and whole enterprises. The only way that millions of workers have managed to maintain even a primitive existence is by accepting goods and food in lieu of wages, by eating the produce grown on their allotments and by foraging.

By 1998, something approaching 70% of enterprises were working predominantly by barter, with cash representing 20% of turnover, in some cases as little as two percent. Another consequence was that there was no money for factories to pay taxes - the oligarchs, of course, accounted for billions of roubles in sophisticated tax evasion - to fund the country's enormous budgetary deficit. By the time of the August 1998 crash, precipitated by the Kiryenko government's devaluation, a default of Russia's huge bond debt had become inevitable. Large amounts of finance capital were destroyed and the nascent middle class growing up in the banking and finance sector was decimated.

One is left wondering how the proponents of the idea of 'capitalist restoration' can justify their position. On what Marxist criteria can capitalism be said to exist in a country where even now - for the vast majority of the population money functions as money just as little as it did in Soviet times; where abstract labour constitutes the exception rather than the rule; where the purchase of labour power as labour power and the alienation of labour power in return for wages is similarly the exception; where the law of value scarcely operates at all; where the bulk of the country's productive forces can only continue to exist through barter; where the millions of unemployed, many of whom remain attached to their enterprises and receive benefits in kind, can hardly be said to constitute a reserve army of labour in any real sense of the term? Of course, there are enterprises, some of them very large and of great economic importance, where capitalist relations of production can be said to operate, but they are not characteristic of the society as a whole.

The oligarchs and Russia's nascent bourgeoisie may have concentrated on short-term gains derived from plunder, but they are not stupid. They know that things cannot go on in the old way, because any economy that starves its industrial base of investment and allows it to rot will sooner or later grind to a halt and collapse under the weight of its own contradictions. It is this recognition of the objective necessity of a move to a conventional, law-based market economy, in which property relations are regularised and the surplus product is extracted directly from the working class through investment in the productive base, establishing proper capitalist relations of production and exploitation, that explains the emergence of Putin, first as premier and then as president at this historical juncture. It is this necessity, rather than any subjective factors, that lies behind Putin's specific blend of autocratic Bonapartism and great Russian chauvinism.

The circumstances of Putin's appointment as prime minister and heir apparent to the presidency in 1999 are well known. After a 14-year-long career as an assiduous but evidently not outstanding KGB officer, Putin quietly resigned in 1989 and attached himself to the office of the anti-Soviet free marketeer Anatoly Sobchak, the mayor of Leningrad. Subsequently, an imminent encounter with the state prosecutor on charges of embezzlement and corruption obliged Sobchak to move to France on 'health grounds', but the scandal does not seem to have done Putin any harm. As a protégé of Anatoly Chubais, another neo-liberal economic reformer and the architect of the privatisation programme, Putin was called to Moscow, where he was employed in Yeltsin's private staff under Pavel Borodin and Alexander Voloshin, effectively functioning as the cabinet office of the parallel administration dominated by 'the family': ie, Yeltsin's daughter, Tatyana Dyachenko, and a number of courtiers pre-eminent among whom was the oligarch, Boris Berezovsky.

Putin was never a politician, but an able administrator with a safe and clean - so far as we know - pair of hands. Most importantly, whether from conviction or careerism, he was an unswerving Yeltsin loyalist. His physical and mental health destroyed by the consequences of chronic alcoholism, Yeltsin was president in name only and was under constant attack by rivals in the elite who were intent on exposing the depth of nepotism and corruption at the heart of his regime. He urgently needed protection and for this the support and the silence of the Federal Security Service (FSB) - successor to the internal security responsibilities of the KGB - were essential preconditions. Who better than Putin to provide such protection? Hence his appointment as FSB chairman in 1998, a post from which, reportedly at the instigation of Berezovsky, he was catapulted a year later into the premiership and the role of 'president in waiting'. Given the acute political and economic crises that I have outlined above, it can be seen that Putin, or rather a Putin (one can think of several other perfectly good candidates), was deemed essential to the personal survival of Yeltsin and the political survival of his faction in the elite. It was not Putin's subjective qualities - however appropriate they may be to the task in hand - but the objective necessities of the situation that brought him to power.

His brief premiership was dominated, of course, by the Russian invasion of Chechnya - definitively Putin's war. Subsequent reports have suggested that both the outbreak of Dagestan separatism in August 1999 and the horrendous bombings of working class apartment blocks in Moscow the following month, in which hundreds were killed - supposedly by Chechen 'terrorists' - were orchestrated provocations: the former, negotiated by Berezovsky, the latter carried out by the FSB itself.

There is as yet no proof, but the circumstances combined to provide Putin with the perfect opportunity to demonstrate his credentials as a strong man and a man of action, in the sharpest contrast to Yeltsin himself. After a decade of humiliation and dire impoverishment, it is hardly surprising that Putin's ferocity and intransigence brought him widespread popularity among the Russian people and provided the perfect launch pad for his bid for the presidency.

The presidential campaign itself was marked by outrageous bias and dirty tricks. Rival media magnates Berezovsky and Gusinsky - pursuing their own factional interest - joined forces to ensure his victory, destroying the reputation of rival candidate Yuriy Luzhkov, mayor of Moscow, with accusations of corruption and even complicity in murder, and seeing off the challenge from Yevgeniy Primakov, another candidate, by publishing his health records. 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, but his performance eclipsed that of his nearest rival, Zyuganov, leader of the CPRF, who got 29%. The remaining nine candidates, including Grigoriy Yavlinsky, leader of the liberal Yabloko party (6%), were nowhere. It was enough.

Let us turn now to Putin's conduct of the presidency so far. Assuming the acting presidency, he pledged to preserve political liberties: "Freedom of speech, freedom of conscience, freedom of the press ... these basic principles of a civilised society will be protected" (The Guardian January 14). That this was just phrase-mongering has been proved by Putin's later words and deeds. On July 8, he gave his first 'state of the nation' address, a 50-minute diatribe in which most of Russia's woes, especially the weakness of the state, were frankly attributed to the Yeltsin regime: "We have to acknowledge that the state itself was largely responsible for the growing strength of the unofficial, shadow economy, the spread of corruption and the flow of great quantities of money abroad [ie, the de facto rule of the oligarchs under Yeltsin - MM] ... an inefficient state is the main reason for our long and deep crisis" (The Observer July 9).

The twin themes of the speech - in which the Pinochet model can be seen as a pervasive subtext - were the need for a "strong state" and a "strong market". Putin's definition of a strong state, one that "must rely on a single, vertical line of executive power", makes clear his demand for total, autocratic control. He may aver that "only a strong and democratic state can defend the civil, political and economic freedoms of the population", but his actions so far have demonstrated that the emphasis is all on 'strength' - autocratic, centralised state power in his hands - and that "democracy" and the "freedoms" to which he pays eloquent lip service count for nothing.

This became clear in the section of his address in which he angrily defended himself against the charge of trying to suppress the media. Claiming that freedom of expression remained an "unshakeable value in Russian democracy", he went on to state that "journalistic freedom has become a tasty morsel ... for the big financial groups. It has become a convenient tool for fights between clans and for exerting illegal pressure on the authorities" (my emphasis). Illegal pressure? This phrase in itself shows that Putin really has not got the hang of the freedom thing at all, that his instincts are rooted in the censorship and total control of the media characteristic of the USSR, a situation to which he clearly intends to return.

His recipe for the creation of a "strong market" contained the nostrums that have been tried repeatedly without success: legalisation of property rights, ending the preferential treatment of businesses controlled by the oligarchs, keeping state intervention to a minimum, creating workable tax and customs systems, cleansing the banking system and so forth. There was also a pledge to reorganise the welfare system, with the aim of reducing the proportion of the state budget allocated to social security - already a derisory amount - with the clear aim of further tightening the screw on the working class.

Putin rightly drew attention to the appalling demographic estimates recently published by Goskomstat, the state committee for statistics, which indicate that Russia's population, currently around 143 million, could fall to near or even below 100 million within the next few decades, implying nothing short of a social cataclysm. He was similarly correct to warn that the apparent recovery in the Russian economy since 1998, fuelled by the massive devaluation of the rouble and a doubling of the oil price, is unsustainable. It is self-evident that significant falls in the price of oil and other commodities, despite successful renegotiation of Russia's spiralling foreign debt burden at the G8 Okinawa summit recently, would herald a budgetary collapse even more severe than that of 1998 itself. No wonder that Putin assessed business risks as "extremely high".

A raft of new legislation, draft laws, decrees and special actions appears to confirm that Putin means what he says with regard to bringing the regions back under central control, confronting the oligarchs, repressing the media, oppressing the disaffected and increasingly conscious and organised working class and establishing himself as a virtual dictator. On June 29, for example, the duma gave first-reading approval to a new law on the state of emergency that amends the Yeltsin constitution without recourse to a referendum. Under its provisions, the president will have the power to declare a state of emergency at will, banning political parties and closing down media organs that, in terms of the new 'information doctrine' passed by the Security Council two days earlier, pose a "threat to national security". Given the current composition of the duma, it seems highly probable that the requisite parliamentary approval for a declaration would be forthcoming, and with it the formal passage of all state power into the hands of the president and his unelected security council.

Maybe the clearest demonstration of the Putin administration's dictatorial ambitions came with the leaking of a policy document drawn up by his staff, proposing the creation of a "presidential political directorate", whose function would be to dominate and control parliament, elections, the media and the regions by means of an internal espionage and dirty tricks apparatus run by the FSB. Covert operations would include "gathering and using special information ... to aid or block candidates and parties depending on their loyalty to the president ... opposition media should be driven to financial crisis, their licences and certificates withdrawn and conditions created where the work of every single opposition medium is either controllable or impossible" (The Guardian May 12). This document reeks of the old KGB, so it is not surprising that its author, almost certainly one of the many former KGB officers in Putin's administration, states that, "It is a strategic necessity to include the FSB and other special services in the directorate's activities ... the intellectual, staff and professional potential of the FSB should be used to obtain quick and productive results" (ibid).

The return of the KGB/FSB and other special services to the centre of state power is already an accomplished fact, exemplified in the presidential decree of May 13, which announced the formation of seven administrative super-regions across Russia, coterminous with the seven military districts. Five of the seven new regional bosses, directly responsible to the president, and whose task will be to restore the Kremlin's writ in Russia's regions and republics, were drawn from the FSB, the interior ministry police and the military. The North Western district, for example, is commanded by Viktor Cherkesov, a hard-line veteran of the department of the KGB's second chief directorate responsible for harassing dissidents; the central region goes to KGB general Georgiy Poltavchenko; the Caucasus to army general Viktor Kazantsev, the butcher of Chechnya.

The creation of an administrative apparatus to bring the regions back under central control has been paralleled by moves in parliament which again represent a fundamental change in the constitutional balance of power. With the enthusiastic support of the duma, Putin has brought in a new law on the formation of the Federation Council, parliament's upper house, whereby regional governors must give up their seats by January 1 2002. After an initial show of resistance, on July 26 the governors backed down, meekly accepting the removal of their legislative function. In a further sign of acquiescence, they also voted in favour of a new federation-wide unified tax code, imposing a flat-rate income tax of just 13%, an incentive to those who have hitherto evaded higher rates and the first step in introducing order into Russia's chaotic fiscal system.

On paper at least, Putin has already made good progress in the task of subjugating the regions and returning power to the centre. However, his problem with the oligarchs is much more intractable, because he is confronting a stratum in Russian society whose immense wealth has enabled them to create networks of patronage and corruption that permeate every level of government and administration. Putin's popular post-electoral promise that "the oligarchs will cease to exist as a class" was, of course, meaningless. The whole point is not to destroy them, as if they were kulaks, but to convert them from robber barons into law-abiding, tax-paying, labour-power-exploiting capitalists.

Putin's tactics so far have consisted of force and threats on the one hand - notably the paramilitary tax raid on the HQ of Vladimir Gusinky's Media-Most conglomerate and his subsequent arrest, together with the opening of criminal proceedings against oligarchs involved in giant firms such as Gazprom, Lukoil, Norilsk Nickel, and Avtovaz; on the other hand, attempts at reaching a workable compromise, the latest of which involved a Kremlin meeting with 21 of the leading oligarchs. The only common ground established so far, unsurprisingly, is that there is no question of renationalising privatised assets. The question of compensation to the state for the wholesale theft of billions and the payment by the oligarchs of vast sums in unpaid taxes remains unresolved, as does the problem of how to regularise share ownership and cleanse the banking sector.

As usual, the mercurial figure of Boris Berezovsky - the man who put Putin where he is - stands centre stage. On July 17 Berezovsky, in an act of brazen cynicism, resigned his seat in the duma in protest at what he called Putin's "destruction of Russia" and his "campaign aimed at destroying independent big business" (The Times July 18).

Berezovsky was right to dismiss the duma as nothing more than the "legal department of the executive authorities". But the rest of his 'platform' stinks. Setting himself up as a defender of Russian democratic freedoms, this arch criminal - under investigation, inter alia, for the theft of hundreds of millions of dollars from the hard currency holdings of Aeroflot - now calls for the creation of a party of "constructive opposition", evidently looking to disaffected regional governors and other oligarchs, as the bedrock of a new power base for himself, following his expulsion from the Kremlin inner circle. For Putin it remains essential to neutralise Berezovsky if his project is to have any chance of success.

Finally, there is the problem of subjugating the working class. Atomised, impoverished and demoralised though it certainly is, and robbed by Stalinism of the chance of acquiring any experience in collective action, the class has begun to acquire a sense of its own collective history and identity and - in however limited a fashion - it has begun to act in defence of its interest, sometimes heroically and in the face of state repression and violence. Putin's answer to the problem of incipient working class unrest has been to produce a new draft labour code which, if implemented, would return Russian workers to 19th century conditions: a minimum 56-hour week and 12-hour working day as standard; unlimited overtime at basic rates at the demand of the bosses; short-term contracts for each individual worker, with the abolition of collective bargaining; bosses will have the right to grant or deny union recognition at whim. These are only some of the measures intended to render workers defenceless in law and rob them of their basic rights.

The code was first drafted by prime minister Primakov some four years ago, but thanks to resistance from the workers' movement, together with divisions among the oligarchs and within the duma, it was never passed. Putin wanted it on the statute book before the summer recess, but perhaps because of demonstrations against it across Russia on May 17, supported by at least 300,000 workers, the code has yet to become law. It will undoubtedly be the focus of further mass protest.

Reports of the May events indicate that many workers have moved from purely economic demands and ritual slogans, such as 'Down with the president', to calls for a new October. In terms of theory, programme and organisation, the building of a united revolutionary socialist movement among Russian workers is still at an embryonic stage, but Putin's determined, indeed desperate, attempt to launch Russia on the road to capitalism by totalitarian methods must surely galvanise the working class into taking matters into their own hands.

The only alternative to Putin's barbarism and the only chance for Russia to develop a decent standard of living for its people is for the working class itself to take control.