This article is a preview from the Spring 2019 edition of New Humanist
Every hero needs an antagonist to define themselves against. For “the West” – the eternal hero of the dominant discourse on international affairs – the antagonist of the hour is Vladimir Putin, a character who represents everything “the West” is not: authoritarian rather than democratic, thuggish rather than humanitarian, and a threat to, rather than an upholder of, the “liberal international order” led since World War Two by the US and embedded through institutions like NATO, the EU and the International Monetary Fund. Moreover, at a time when Western power, perhaps even “the West” itself, is undergoing a period of crisis, Putin is the culprit, the mischiefmaker, subverting our democracies and dragging us beneath our usual, impeccable standards.
No political mythology can gain traction without at least some basis in truth. Putin’s rule is unquestionably repressive, his aggression in Ukraine and Crimea is inexcusable, while his support for the Assad regime in Syria is simply grotesque. In respect of that latter conflict, and of his first war, in Chechnya, it is entirely reasonable to regard him as a mass murderer, even a war criminal.
Since Putin’s moral character is easy enough to ascertain, a more interesting and relevant task is to examine the symbolic role that he has come to play in our own politics: namely an excuse for us to not understand Russia, and to not understand ourselves. A simplistic binary narrative setting “the West” against “Putin’s Russia”, with all its not-so-subtle implications about the inherent nature of either side, obscures the reasons why modern Russia came to be the way it is and, crucially, the Western powers’ own complicity in that process. Meanwhile, an excessive focus on Putin’s role in Donald Trump’s election, and perhaps in the Brexit vote, allows us to avoid confronting the deep problems in our own societies that were the real, substantive cause of those phenomena.
A new book by Tony Wood, Russia Without Putin (Verso), could not be more aptly titled, offering a detailed, enlightening and highly readable analysis of post-Soviet Russia that dwells on socio-economic developments since 1991, rather than on the character of Putin himself. While no Western political magazine carrying a feature article on Putin is now complete without a front cover depicting him as Bolshevism reincarnate, Wood argues that Russia largely remains the authoritarian, crony-capitalist state that emerged from the ashes of the USSR during the reign of Boris Yeltsin. Putin has consolidated and stabilised the state’s position within the broader political economy, without fundamentally altering the latter. In terms of foreign relations, Moscow’s actions are better explained (not excused) as defensive of its status as a world power, rather than as simple pathological aggression.
Far from being an echo of the Soviet past, Putin’s authoritarianism is very much of the capitalist variety, and the legacy of a Western favourite, Yeltsin. Wood reminds us that Yeltsin dealt with a fractious parliament by sending tanks to shell it, subsequently rewriting the constitution to increase the president’s powers. Much of his economic “liberalisation” programme, drafted by Western advisers, was enacted by simple decree, largely because there was no popular appetite or mandate for free-market shock therapy. The resulting privatisations of national industries at knock-down prices created the oligarch class that formed the economic wing of today’s capitalist authoritarianism in Russia. Under this system of cronyism, men became millionaires not through entrepreneurialism, but by appointment.
The majority of Russians, by contrast, paid a severe price. At the urging of the US-dominated IMF, spending on a range of public services was slashed by anything from 30 to 50 per cent, with health, education, pensions and social welfare falling under the axe. The 1992 deregulation of prices trebled the cost of food almost instantly. The number of people living on less than $4 a day rose from 2 million in 1989 to 60 million in 1996. Unemployment and violent crime shot up, while public health collapsed, with male life expectancy plunging by five years between 1991 and 1994. Russia’s GDP shrank by more than a third in the space of four years. So much for the sunny uplands at “the end of history”, promised by the neo-conservative intellectual Francis Fukuyama, who argued at the end of the Cold War that US-led “free market” capitalism represented the end point of all possible human achievement.
This story has been told before, not least by the Nobel Prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz, who compared the economic damage of 1990s shock therapy to that wrought on Russia by the Second World War, but Wood gives us a compelling, wide-ranging account of the sheer scope of the tragedy, from the escalation of gendered violence and inequality to the collapse of the scientific and cultural sectors. Mikhail Gorbachev’s dream of a shift to Nordic social democracy rather than the Anglo-American free market, however improbable an aim, is left as a poignant vision of a path not taken.
Putin’s subsequent crackdown on the oligarchs was not an erasure of this system, but a rebalancing of it. The centre of power would now be the state, not the billionaire class, but cronyism and oligarchy would continue, and indeed thrive. Nonetheless, after the misery and chaos of the 1990s, the reassertion of state power and the stabilisation of the economy were welcomed with relief by the public, and were a major part of Putin’s subsequent popularity. His ability to consolidate power was indivisible from his ability to tackle an economic disaster resulting directly from Western policy prescriptions. When IMF managing director Michel Camdesses said that Russia might have to “sacrifice a generation” on the altar of structural adjustment, he and his peers should have had the wit to anticipate what the political consequences might be. If Putin has not paid a domestic political price for challenging the “liberal international order”, its institutions and its policy prescriptions, then the catastrophe of the 1990s – and his response to it – offer an explanation as to why that might be.
That being said, Putin’s strength here, as elsewhere, is easily overestimated. His ascent coincided with a historic oil price boom, contrasting with the two-decade slump his predecessors had to contend with. If the tide goes out, as it well might if the prospect of climate change chokes off demand for oil, Moscow will be sitting on stranded assets. Overall, the future looks bleak for a largely deindustrialised economy, starved of investment, over-reliant on primary commodity exports, with a smaller GDP than Italy and a smaller GDP per capita than Trinidad. You would gain little sense of this, however, from portrayals of modern Russia as a formidable presence on the world stage.
The first sign of Putin’s determination to reassert Russia’s credibility as a power came not in Ukraine in 2014 or Georgia in 2008 but in Chechnya at the start of Putin’s first term, where Yeltsin’s earlier failure to bring the disobedient republic to heel was avenged in the most pitiless fashion. It is now forgotten, but Britain’s New Labour government maintained cordial relations with Moscow throughout, expressing concerns about the humanitarian situation, but also sympathy for Moscow’s concerns in its own “war on terror”. In light of his swift rise from obscurity to the presidency, the savage crushing of Chechnya played an important role in consolidating Putin’s power at the start of his first term, investing his rule with its now familiar chauvinistic character. Perhaps because this was not seen as challenging the US-led order in the wider world, these actions were met with a shrug in Washington and London.
For Wood, “the fundamental fact that has defined relations between Russia and the West since the end of the Cold War is the huge imbalance of power and resources between the two sides”. Moscow’s military expenditure is barely a tenth of Washington’s, and a much smaller fraction of NATO’s as a whole, while Moscow’s more assertive recent posture is incomparable with Washington’s deeply structured hegemony in the world system. This has led to overconfidence from the West in its dealings with Russia, and an overreaction from Moscow born of anxiety about its own palpable weaknesses.
Wood attributes Moscow’s current foreign policy to a “confused post-imperial resentment” born both of the post-1991 collapse and of the West’s opportunistic advance eastward through NATO and EU enlargement. The argument that NATO expansion (made in violation of multiple assurances given to Gorbachev) was born of legitimate defensive concerns is hard to square with the fact that it began when Yeltsin’s Russia was not only pitifully weak but virtually subservient to Washington. The aim was to limit any future revival of Russian power which, now that it has happened to some limited extent, is decried with magnificent hypocrisy – given the West’s role in the Middle East, to take the most egregious example – as a return to the bad old days when great powers carved out geographical “spheres of influence”. In reality, there is a certain symbiosis between Moscow’s and Washington’s drive to maximise their status as world powers at each other’s expense, and the outbursts of mutual finger-pointing that inevitably result.
The collapse of the Russian economy in the 1990s and the collapse of Russia’s status as a world power are indivisible from each other, and from the rise of the chauvinistic strongman, Putin. To the extent that the West contributed to both, it can take some share of the credit for making Putin’s Russia possible. As with domestic economic stabilisation, the reassertion of Russia’s role as a world power in more recent years also gave a boost to Putin domestically. Again, every hero needs an antagonist, and the West seems determined at every turn to provide Putin with the one he needs.
While Russia’s post-Soviet decline was particularly dramatic, the contemporary parallels with the politics of chauvinistic reaction in the US and the UK are not difficult to spot. Here, a significant strand within British politics and society refuses to reconcile itself to the loss of imperial status or with a variety of domestic social changes, most notably immigration. In the US, two decades of military failure, the rise of China and the same processes of social liberalisation found elsewhere have stoked a paranoid politics of privilege whose nature – embodied in the Tea Party and Donald Trump – borders on the feral.
In all cases, the politics of right-wing backlash at home and abroad are intertwined. Under Putin, LGBT rights have come under concerted attack in a climate where “traditional Russian values” are reasserting themselves in opposition to perceived foreign influence. Similarly, Trump’s attempt to delegitimise the first black president of the US, and the “lock her up” chant at his rallies directed at Hillary Clinton and Christine Blasey Ford are expressions of a passionate desire to put certain groups of people in their place. In the UK, polls show that a vote for Brexit correlates far more strongly with conservative social attitudes like hostility to multiculturalism, feminism and LGBT rights than it does to economic class. For Russian, British and American jingoists, their state acts as an avatar, in the international realm, of their own identities in the domestic sphere.
Making America, Russia or Britain great again means defending state power abroad and traditional hierarchies at home.
In other words, Brexit, Trump and Putin are expressions of deeper forces than are commonly understood. Russian foreign relations can no more be explained by the personality of Putin than Brexit or Trump can be explained, substantively, by Russian subterfuge. In each case, those accustomed to a certain degree of social and international power are lashing out, often with real viciousness, at threats to their status, real and imagined. The worldview that gives rise to these reactions has deep roots, as do the historic changes that are prompting them. Solutions to the resulting crisis will only arise from a serious diagnosis of its nature.
