Thanks to the peaceful, constitutional coup of late 1999 and early -2000 Vladimir Putin got what just he wanted. Not only did he get the enormous powers of the chief executive, granted by Yeltsin’s 1993 constitution but he got a Duma that would do his bidding.
With little problem he pulled off a balanced budget for 2001. The largest opposition faction, the Communist Party (KPRF), has only 88 out of the 450 seats. moreover in return for some committee chairmanships this party does not in reality oppose him.
The Duma majority is grouped in a supportive alliance around “his” Unity Party. From this base he has set out to reduce the erstwhile powerful 89 elected regional bosses—represented in the upper chamber, the Federation Council —by establishing seven super-regions under his own control.
Putin could not have carried out this centralising constitutional coup without a stabilisation of the economy during 1999-2000. Gross domestic product dropped almost 5 per cent in 1998, but in 1999 it rose by 3 per cent and this year it is expected to rise by 7 per cent. The foreign trade balance is in surplus by over $40 billion.
The great mass of the Russian people remain grindingly poor, but their wages when they are paid can now buy some Russian-produced consumer goods. This relative stabilisation has only been bought by a sharp fall in the value of the rouble and a huge rise in the prices of energy and minerals. Both will not last beyond the western boom.
Russia still owes $150 billion in foreign debt. Russian premier Mikhail Kasyanov secured a rescheduling from the London Club of commercial creditors, but he has so far failed to persuade the Paris Club of sovereign creditors to follow suit. After two weeks in Moscow delegation from the International Monetary Fund announced the usual medicine.
It would recommend any further loans unless the Russian government undertook “far-reaching economic reforms”. This would put paid to the carefully balanced budget for 2001, including its promises to working people of improved social provision.
On top of this Putin’s loudly promised law and order drive has turned out to be a damp squib. The Russian Mafiya, still smuggle everything from high-tech weapons to drugs and their universal protection rackets constitute a major tax on business that foreign investors loathe and resent.
His other pledge was “to make Russia powerful again”. This is part of more general moves to dominate the oil-reach Caspian region and re-establish a hegemony over the former Soviet republics by pressuring them into military and economic co-operation with Russia.
In the aftermath of the Kosova War he was able to strike firmer alliances with China, India and other states fearing unbridled US-NATO policing.
Russia’s new capitalist class is continuing to plunder their own country at a staggering rate .
According to the London Economist (December 9-15, 2000) Russian capital flight continues at a breathtaking rate. Russia will show a $60 billion trade surplus this year—thanks to the high price of oil, gas and other raw materials . Yet central-bank reserves will rise by only $16 billion, and debts servicing stands at $11 billion. $33 billion has simply gone missing. Where is it?
Most of it—according to the Economist is held in banks and in shares outside of Russia, in western Europe and North America. It is no accident that the “new Russians” have bought up huge amounts of real estate in the USA, France and Britain: that they and their families spend a large part of the year on the Mediterranean or the Caribbean: that their healthcare needs (caused by overindulgence) are met in expensive private clinics.
Meanwhile even those Russian still at work face a terrible increase in accidents at work . In the mines of the Kuzbas, the coal-rich region of southern Siberia, 179 miners have died this year, nearly two for every million tonnes of coal mined, one of the highest death-rates in the world.
Even the neoliberal Economist comments that “the mines ought to be profitable, and to pay their workers well”. Yet wages—when they are paid— are around $100 a month!
Again The Economist exposes a key reason:
“the unions&Mac226; leaders are tame; the media give little coverage to labour issues; employers can do pretty much what they want; and anyone who steps out of line risks the sack, or worse. Worker militancy is spasmodic. The last big protests were in 1998, when miners, fed up with being unpaid for months, blocked the trans-Siberian railway and picketed the Russian government’s headquarters.” (The Economist 9-15 December 200)
But a major new wave of struggle is likely to focus on the proposed new labour code.
After the Russia wide day of action , led largely by Zaschita and the more radical local and independent unions , even the “official unions are threatening to take some action —albeit in typical uninspiring manner. “We are just asking politely. We are turning to the president, asking him to defend the economic and social rights of the citizen as guaranteed by the constitution”, says Vladimir Skotnikov, head of the official trade unions in the Kuzbas capital, Kemerovo.
The terrible conditions facing Russia’s working class show the need for a conscious, coherent struggle against the thieving ruling class—salting away its billions in western banks—the grey army of chinovniki—bureaucrats, and secret policemen— who are taking over at every level. Putin is praised and lauded by Solzhenitsyn and Gorbachev alike. He is complimented by Blair and Clinton.
Why? Because he was a highly suitable figure to play the role of bonaparte—a colourless bureaucrat onto whom, as on a screen, everyone can project their illusions. But his power and stability depend on no decisive social crisis erupting. The temporary economic stabilisation which followed the 1998 crisis was possible only because of the soaring price of oil caused by the US and European booms, When these end, when the prices of Russia’s raw materials tumble, then Putin will face his first major crisis.
The crisis which Russia’s worker’s face is also not just one of economic hardship but one of leadership. Russian workers need a mass federation of trade unions and workplace and local councils of delegates (strike committees in times of struggle) —free of the rule of bureaucrats. When fulltimers are needed they should be paid the average wage of their members and they should at all times be subordinated to councils and committees elected from working members of the union.
They also need an All-Russia workers’ party. Nuclei of both exist ( the union federation Zaschita and the Workers Party movement, see WP Global and ISWOR) reports on the December 1 strikes, and protests against the anti-union laws).
Putin is now proposing a new law on political parties that will restrict the number able to present themselves at the polls, to a mere handful . Time is short. It is urgent to build a new militant—in our view revolutionary— workers' movement right across the vast Russian Federation.
Russia: Putin silences a critic.
Russia: stop political repression in Kirov.
[Appeal 21 March 2000]
Russia: the death agony of a workers' state
The political revolution against Stalinism and the fight against capitalist restoration [Trotskyist Manifesto]