The blows of the economic crisis in Russia, as a result of Western sanctions, are beginning to be felt. Putin and his henchmen have de facto privatized the entire country and consider it their property. The weight of the transformation falls on the majority of the population, which has neither a voice nor a vote.
Milan () – As many economists had predicted, in August the pressure of the economic crisis due to Western sanctions will begin to be felt in Russia. The problem is that it is not “Putin’s economy” that is entering into crisis, but that of ordinary citizens, or rather, that of what little remains of the Russian middle class, which since the 1990s has been struggling to achieve a standard of living similar to that of Western societies.
The first wave of liberalization and “savage capitalism” took place in the first five years of Yeltsin’s rule, from 1992 to 1997. It subsequently subsided with the collapse of the financial castles of 1998, which led to the devaluation of the ruble and the move to the “vertical” management of political and economic power, Putin was the one who carried out this change of management in the 2000s, with the expulsion of the oligarchs who did not submit. One of them, Mikhail Khodorkovsky, spent 10 years in a Siberian detention camp for trying to defend the principles of liberalism.
The other owners of the large energy and natural resource exploitation companies, the only real engine of the Russian economy, have aligned themselves with the “patriotic” service imposed by the Kremlin. This means enjoying caste privileges, of which Putin himself and his relatives are the greatest beneficiaries. The rest of the internal trade has tried to organize itself in the shadow of the “people oligarchic”, exploiting the cracks, albeit limited, that make international trade possible and offering consumer goods of all kinds to attract those 30-40 million citizens (less than a third of the population) who had freed themselves from passivity socialist of the Soviet tradition to live in a more modern and independent way.
Vladislav Inozemtsev, an economist and director of the Research Center on the Post-Industrial Society in Moscow, is one of the leaders of the weak liberal opposition to the Putin regime. In the Moscow Times expressed his opinion that “Putin and his henchmen have de facto privatized the entire country, and consider it for all purposes their property; the financial system is supported by state corporations, the power of law is limited by considerations and interests of the owners, and Russia has now lost any chance of freeing itself from its dependence on raw materials. It is destined to become a satellite of China.”
What is happening now does not at all look like the catastrophe of “Putinomics”, but rather its definitive consolidation. The breakdown of relations with the outside world, the division of investors into “unfriendly”, enemies and few acceptable, the refusal to comply with most international obligations, the confiscation of a large part of foreign property in the country, all this is the triumph of “business our way” of which Putin has always been proud. To this must be added the state appropriation of copyright and licenses, the right to illegal and “parallel” importation with respect to sanctions and much more, which make state companies, and especially the military, the main beneficiaries of the shift in the sanctioning regime.
These changes most catastrophically hit common initiatives between Russian and foreign companies, which in Russia had made their way with great difficulty, with the first joint ventures at the end of the Gorbachev period. Somehow, these companies had managed to transform Russian business culture, and even consumer habits. The market for automobile production and assembly, and in recent years the exchange of goods through the Internet and digitization, from the expansion of services to the production of fertilizers and metals, were also supported by a wide sphere of mass, advertising and journalistic communication, which today is completely silenced and controlled, or reduced to pure propaganda.
The most qualified professionals and executives – in the area of information technology, freelancing, and the private sector – are leaving Russia with an ever-increasing flow. The phenomenon arouses a wave of satisfaction in the upper echelons: they see it as a “flight of traitors”, according to Putin’s definition. The leaders of the regime guarantee: “this will not affect the development of our economy”, understood according to the childish and paternalistic schemes with which it is intended to govern – between the spirit of Soviet welfare and the neo-communist and oligarchic leadership of the Chinese type
Those who will suffer from the economic crisis will not be the hierarchs of the regime and the class of tycoons linked to it, but perhaps they will go through a phase of reorganization and new distribution of the cake. And this is somehow demonstrated by the increasingly sudden and frequent disappearance of some big fish, in strange circumstances: suicides, accidents or poisoning. The weight of the transformations falls on the majority of the population, now deprived of a voice, after the systematic repression of all forms of opposition in the last two years. And now it is clear that this repression was not dictated by the need to consolidate the system forever. The objective was to prepare him for the definitive isolation, after the metaphysical war with the whole world.
Putin will not be expelled from the Kremlin as a consequence of economic sanctions, nor will he be expelled from military defeats or popular revolutions, which are quite unlikely today. History is moving towards a new phase, and it will be necessary to imagine a new world, in the East and the West, that is capable of starting over after the wars and the erection of new barriers. There are no prophets capable of describing this world of the future, after the Ukrainian Apocalypse. In any case, until now only announcements of misfortune and misfortune resound. Like the dystopian vision of “Opričnik’s Day”, a novel by Vladimir Sorokin published in 2006, which even then imagined Russia again hermetically sealed from outside influences, as is indeed happening now.
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