Putin 1st, Tsar of all the Russias?
py" project, which the Poles and the Hungarians introduced without facing major working class opposition, was adopted by the majority of the Russian leadership in place of the pragmatic half-measures taken by Gorbachev.
It meant a brutal retreat from state administration of the productive sphere
WHY did Vladimir Putin emerge victorious from the first round of the Russian presidential elections? He is an ordinary apparatchik, having been a career civilian cop and subsequently a mediocre administrator.
"Putin has no obvious personality, he is like a screen on which everybody projects whatever they like", argues psychoanalyst
Victoria Potapova.! And through the adding up of these projections, in the absence of any alternative, Putin gained 52% of the votes at the first round.
JAN MALEWSKI*
HE popular aspiration towards
Chechnya - which allowed him to play on the nationalist strain in the Russian people, who easily identified the national aspirations of the Chechnyans with the pillage of public property by all kinds of gangsters (nouveaux riches and "Mafiosi")
— are certainly among the elements in
Putin's success.
Russian workers are disorientated by the sudden commodification of their environment, rampant inflation, stagnant wages, and the incomprehensible change in the rules which regulated their lives before the beginning of the capitalist restoration.
Goal is normality
They aspire in their majority to "normality", in other words an end to the incessant changes of which they are the main victims. Putin's discourse on the strong state - supported by the show of force in
Chechnya — finds a lot of takers.
The Russian working class, whose awakening had begun with the miners' strike in the spring of 1991, has been defeated without having had the time to organise itself into fighting shape. Putin and, for a minority, the Stalinophile bureaucrat Zyuganov, appeared to it as a last hope of stabilisation.
The beginning of an economic upturn
- boosted by the quasi-tripling of oil prices (Russia is an oil-exporting country)
and the substantial devaluation of the rouble (after the financial crash of August
2 International Viewpoint #321 May 2000
1998) — meant that industrial production leapt last year by 8%, raising the rate of growth of GDP to 3% for the first time since the collapse of the Soviet Union and offering the Putin administration greater margins of manoeuvre. This incipient upturn nourished the hope that Putin would at last pay wages and pensions, collect taxes and ensure the minimal functioning of services.
### Contrast
In contrast to some countries in Eastern Europe (Poland and Hungary in particular, but also the GDR), where the introduction of private property at the end of the 1950s was progressive and allowed a social assimilation of the nomenclature and "private initiative", those elements of the Russian nomenclature who sought the stabilisation of their social privileges through personal enrichment had to wait until the second half of the 1980s until their moment came. The new Russian bourgeoisie had not benefited from 30 years of apprenticeship through "petty commodity production" and trade, like their Polish or Hungarian counterparts.
When the leadership of the Russian bureaucracy became convinced that it could no longer "continue as before" without being potentially confronted with a popular revolt like its Polish vassal, it acted without any long maturing project, without transitional measures, without commodity reflexes rooted within society. The IMF's ultra-free market "shock theraand a de facto distribution of property to the layer of bureaucracy capable of carving its share out. All of this concealed by a discourse which airily conflated democracy ("power to the people!") and laisser-faire.
But if this laisser-faire allowed primitive private accumulation, it now represents a brake on the enlarged reproduction of fraudulently gained capital. And those who once proclaimed their opposition to state interventionism and their commitment to "business freedom" now wish to operate within a framework protected and regulated by the state. The new Russian bourgeois class aspires to form itself into a dominant class and they need the umbrella of the state for this purpose.
When Putin argues that "the stronger the state, the freer the individual" and that "only a strong and efficient state can guarantee freedom of enterprise, the individual and society", he is responding to the aspirations to stability of the Russian nouveaux riches. The electoral defeat of the ultra-liberal candidate Grigori Iavlinsky2 witnesses to the new Russian dominant class's desire to turn the page.
Putin's nomination as Russian head of state, legitimised by the election of March 26th, could signify the end of the first period of capitalist restoration in Russia — the end of the sharing of social goods amongst the nomenklaturists, under the pretext of the privatisation law or with no legal basis whatsoever, the end of primitive private accumulation.
### Scandal
The scandal of the misappropriation of IMF funds which had tarnished the Yeltsin clan (a scandal which Putin has done his best to cover up) was a sign that we were at the end of an epoch, as were the raids by mafia elements on the (ill gotten) property of certain enterprises, expropriating by force the ex-nomenklaturists who had thought themselves definitively integrated into the new Russian bourgeoisie.
Inside of the Russian oligarchy, which has been able to carve out for itself whole sectors of former Soviet property, the aspi-
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* Russia