A Short Take on the Anti-materialism of Western Analyses of Putin
Apr 15, 2022
Saint Petersburg, Russia 15.4.2022
Since at least 2008, the prevailing portrait of Vladimir Putin in the West during his two-plus decades of leadership in the Russian Federation has been one of a pro-oligarch, authoritarian strongman with aggressive foreign policy, or as someone who is mentally ill. Perhaps the western “left” views him with even more vitriol than their neoliberal and reactionary counterparts. This is generally due to his perceived association with post-Soviet capitalist society, his alleged “human rights violation” rap sheet, and the animosity that exists between him and the only “left” in Russia that is visible in western circles, which is the pro-west intelligentsia, and its cultural allies in the Vice/Novaya Gazeta/Pussy Riot cadre.
For the purposes of this piece, we will look primarily at his policies on the domestic level, as they relate to the conditions of his own people in the Russian Federation. Another piece, in the relatively near future, will focus on his foreign policy, especially, of course, on the situation in Ukraine.
It’s Always About Material Conditions
This author knows of not one instance where the “expansion of human rights and liberal democracy” in the post-Brezhnev era, when the USSR/Warsaw Pact inexplicably yielded to the unilateral harassment of Helsinki Watch Committees, has brought about any advancement in the material conditions for the working masses of a nation put under the microscope of western “humanitarianism.” One need only look at the looting which took place in the former soviet republics in the 1990s, or the wreckage left in former Yugoslavia, Iraq, Libya, and so forth.
I do know that Putin’s Russia has done just that, more effectively than in any nation on earth in the same period, other than, perhaps, China under Xi.
Does this mean Putin is a socialist? Nope. There remain plenty of unresolved contradictions in Russian society which can only be remedied by a return to socialism. Does it mean Putin has been, objectively, incredibly successful at raising the quality of life for most Russian people, specifically the working masses, who represent the vast majority of the population? Well, if we answer this question in terms of the most common metrics used for determining quality of life, particular from a materialist perspective, the answer is decidedly, yes. Putin’s tenure has seen unprecedented improvement in every relevant category: life expectancy, per capita GDP, unemployment, inflation, pensions, access to sanitation, and violent crime.
It should be noted that some of these advances came from a booming gas/oil market, and that much more could have been done to redistribute that wealth, but the results cannot be denied.
A world bank graph showing the progress in Per Capita GDP in Russia since 1990 (Putin takes over in 1999)
Oligarchs and Fanatics
Among the more disturbing and well-publicized trends of the US-orchestrated Yeltsin years were the emergence of an oligarch class, and the implausible rise of Neo-Nazism in Russia, the nation which suffered at the hands of the Nazis well beyond any other.
Putin put the hammer down on most of the oligarchs who were knighted by the US and Yeltsin in the 90s, which accounts for much of the economic improvement in Russia since the early 2000s. Much of this involved re-nationalizing a Russian economy that had been divvied up amongst a few of Washington’s gangster allies, in a way that was not explicitly socialist, but which certainly contributed to the economic sovereignty of Russia, and the redistribution of wealth and resources. Of course, as the KPRF notes, this nationalization still allows private enterprise to dominate.
Even today, in the context of the Ukraine conflict, the sanctions crisis, and the effort to mount a multipolar challenge to petrodollar hegemony, Putin’s moves are decidedly against the interests of the “oligarchs,” and finance/flight capital section of the Russian economy.
White nationalism, as noted above, had definitely become a problem in post-Soviet Russia, especially in Moscow. A close friend of this author, an Uzbek Migrant worker in Russia, with whom I spoke recently in Saint Petersburg, described his hesitancy about moving: “I came to Russia in the early 2000s. Things were awful in Uzbekistan before that, but all we heard about in Russia were the skinheads who would beat you on the streets. Even when I came to [Petersburg], I was afraid to go to Moscow.”
Efforts to fight against this trend began to succeed in earnest at the outset of the 2010s, when the Putin-aligned Medvedev presidency announced a crackdown on Neo-Nazism. Since then, virtually any expression of white nationalism in Russia has been banned.
A 2017 Al-Jazeera article proclaimed the “Death of the Russian Far Right”
Opportunistic Opposition
For all of these, and many other reasons, Putin is extremely popular amongst the Russian people, and extremely unpopular amongst a tiny but very vocal Russian minority, which is almost exclusively very wealthy, and western-educated/living abroad. Of course, this is who we hear from in western media when we hear “Russian voices” in op-Eds, NYT bestsellers, Slavic studies departments, and the State Department.
And for all of these reasons, along with his unapologetic challenges to US/NATO hegemony (particularly in the Syrian conflict and now in Ukraine), as a principled member of the anti-Imperialist Left, a US Citizen, and a former resident of the Russian Federation, this author can say, without hesitation, that Vladimir Putin has been a force for historical progress on earth, more often than not.
(I should also say that while I am not a Russian citizen, and therefore not a member of any party in Russia, my allegiance here in Russia lies with the Communist Party of the Russian Federation, the largest opposition party, so my opinions expressed here are in no way colored by an official allegiance to Putin, or “cheerleading” for United Russia)
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