HOW DO YOU SLAY A DRAGON?

However, with hindsight much appears different from how it was, and so this calls for a fresh appraisal of the situation. Now I have a pretty good idea of what this left turn should begin with in Russia. So what’s changed? First of all, a pseudo-left wing political course has emerged from the Kremlin, something that clearly didn’t exist before. This copies, yet mocks, a left-wing agenda. How should we describe Putin’s regime? Left-wing? Or right-wing? I’m sure that the vast majority of people would say that Putin has a left-wing agenda. The state sector is developing; he fights against independent businesses; he’s created a complicated system of social rights and privileges; and so on. But in actual fact, it’s completely the other way round. Putin is actually continuing the traditions of the 1990s, and is following a radically right-wing political course. That’s why the need for a turn to the left has only increased in recent years.

In order to delve deeper into this question, we have to define what is “right” and what is “left”. And in today’s world that’s no easy task. Everywhere, not just in Russia, we see right-wing politicians acting like parasites of a left-wing agenda. A textbook example is Trump with his eccentric rhetoric. The borders between right and left are blurred; all definitions have been lost. In order to try to bring some clarity to this question, in my opinion, we have to concentrate on the main issue, and not get lost in the minutiae. And I believe that the main issue is social inequality. If a political course ultimately leads to the growth of social inequality, it’s a right-wing programme, however much they dress it up in left-wing rhetoric. But if it leads to a reduction in social inequality, it’s left-wing.

Let’s examine Putin’s social and economic policies from this point of view. Putin came to power on an anti-oligarch agenda, that theoretically was and remains one of the cornerstones of Kremlin mythology. But in reality the political course he’s followed not only hasn’t narrowed the gap between the rich and the poor, but has increased social inequality to levels never witnessed before. Putin has placed a huge amount of economic and political power in the hands of a very narrow stratum, made up of the higher, largely power bureaucracy and the criminal and semi-criminal “asset holders” who serve their interests. In place of the inequality that naturally arises because of a market economy, and that modern societies have more or less learnt to manage, Putinism has used the power it holds to create such inequality that an impenetrable wall has been built between the rich and the poor.

At every turn in Putin’s Russia, the rich have got richer and the poor have got poorer quicker than happened in Russia in the 1990s. But thanks to the growth in energy prices that resulted in a general rise in the standard of living, this process went unnoticed – up to a certain point. There was a lot of money around, and so the poor received a little “compensation”. However, for every rouble in social handouts that the president talks about with great ceremony in his annual address to the nation, there’s a dollar that goes into the pockets of Putin’s elite. As a result, the distance between the richest and the poorest strata of Russian society has been rapidly increasing. This process no longer goes unnoticed, because the regime has run out of money for the social sector. In the last few years in Russia we’ve seen the growth not only of relative poverty, but of absolute poverty. So over the course of 20 years Putin has been carrying out a radically right-wing policy, which can be seen objectively by the increasing stratification of society. I believe that this will lead to a dead-end, and represents a threat to national security, as ultimately this will bring the country to a social conflict faster than any imaginary “foreign agents”.

As well as the increasing rift between the incomes of the rich and the poor, that’s already in danger of causing an explosion, the whole system of distributing wealth in society is warped. Raiding businesses is the very essence of the system that Putin has created, and is one of the basic sources of inequality. The government’s direct interference gives rise to a latent (but no less widespread) redistribution of wealth in favour of those who demonstrate loyalty to the regime. This increases not only the degradation of the economic institutions, but also the moral principles of society. Any immoral behaviour in this system, be it lying, betrayal, denunciations and so on, is encouraged and financially advantageous.