| JRL HOME | SUPPORT | SUBSCRIBE | RESEARCH & ANALYTICAL SUPPLEMENT | |
Old Saint Basil's Cathedral in MoscowJohnson's Russia List title and scenes of Saint Petersburg
Excerpts from the JRL E-Mail Community :: Founded and Edited by David Johnson
#33 - JRL 9250 - JRL Home
Date: Tue, 20 Sep 2005
From: William Mandel <wmmmandel@speakeasy.net>
Subject: Re:9247-Johnson's Russia List: Sergei Roy, "Putin's Power."

Of all Russians analyzing that country's affairs, Sergei Roy makes the most sense to me. His "Putin's Power" in JRL 9247 deserves maximal discussion because its results might be of help to Russia's president and those closest to him in steering their future course. Sergei Roy himself writes that he believes Putin cares too much for Western opinion. Let's take advantage of that.

Because Roy's article ranges over much of the vast expanse of human activity -- a very Russian approach and one that appeals to me -- I think that I should, for all but other first-generation Sovietologists reading this post, briefly identify myself.

The first book to quote me as authority was published in 1942: SOVIET ASIA, by R.A. Davies and A.J. Steiger, Dial Press. The most recent came out 62 years later, in 2004: Jesse Walker, REBELS ON THE AIR. My naming it here is explained by the following quotation: "More than clearing the driftwood is afoot when KPFA cans a commentator as important as William Mandel, its longtime analyst of Russian affairs..." 37 years, to be exact, and I'm back on after a ten-year hiatus. I adhered to the canons of scholarship sufficiently for broadcasts to have been published in SLAVIC REVIEW and a major textbook publisher's reader in Western Civilization.

I do take satisfaction in the fact that scholars publishing after the collapse of the USSR have used my three last large publications: SOVIET BUT NOT RUSSIAN, University of Alberta Press and Ramparts Press, 1985; SOVIET PEOPLE SPEAK: Interviews by and Letters to William Mandel, 1995; and my autobiography, SAYING NO TO POWER, 1999. It is particularly pertinent that they have been used in extremely contemporary connections, such as WORKERS OF THE DONBASS SPEAK: Survival and Identity in the New Ukraine, 1995; another, SOCIALIST CULTURES EAST AND WEST: A Post-Cold War Reassessment, 2002; and CHINA'S NATIONAL MINORITY EDUCATION, 1998.

Now on to Sergei Roy. He certainly pulls no punches. He predicts in his first paragraph that Putin does not have what it takes to "put together a political machine capable of leading Russia...to modest prosperity and opportunity for all." Roy himself has no candidate to perform that function, and is merciless to those who think of the U.S. as a model to follow: "a uniform world marching under the banner of American democracy (not to be confused with plain democracy)". Immediately thereafter he identifies us with the orders to prisoners marching in or to gulags: "a step to the side is escape, we shoot without warning..."

But he is just as emphatic toward those "on the Kasparov-type lunatic fringe (who)keep yelling, a fascist state" in defining the system of government Putin has put in place. Unfortunately, he identifies a fascist state with a police state. That is a very serious mistake I have been railing against in e-mails directed to those who say exactly the same thing with respect to our own present situation in the U.S. Writing about the ordinary cops, "militsia," he calls them "bandits in shoulder straps" who "indeed can be the platform on which to build an effective police state like that of Stalin, Franco, Hitler, or Pinochet."

To anyone who lost his life to those governments, it makes no difference whether the individual killer wore a government uniform or that of the Storm Troops, Spain's Falange, or (I don't understand Roy's omission) Mussolini's Fascisti. But there is something that makes a great deal of difference. The succession of governments in the forty years between Stalin's death and the failed putsch of the hardliners against Gorbachev was peaceful. There were fewer victims over that whole period than in any of the dozens of urban Black uprisings in our country from the assassination of Martin Luther King to that over the acquittal of the police who attacked Rodney King. Those peaceful successions made possible a total socio-economic-political revolution (or counter-revolution, or counterrevolution, if that is how one sees it) in Russia.

There were stupid and unnecessary killings of demonstrators in Lithuania on the Baltic Sea and Georgia on the Black Sea under Gorbachev. There were some among the defenders of Moscow's White House in the attempt to oust Yeltsin. With those exceptions the truly world-shaking change in Russia was virtually bloodless. That can occur in a police state, as also happened when Pinochet left office in Chile, because police, or whatever other armed forces are involved, are under government control.

It cannot occur under fascism, which is something else. Fascism gains its strength outside government, based on the willingness of a substantial category of the population to use physical force to suppress the civil rights and civil liberties of all who oppose it. That category is even willing to exterminate entire populations on grounds of religion or race.

The closest we have ever come to that was when the Ku Klux Klan ran the former slave states. The Klan never controlled the majority of our states or of our population. In the Sixties Black heroes in the South with the aid of white from the North engaged in Ghandian resistance that won the admiration of the entire country. In consequence, Washington was moved to, and had the popular support enabling it to drive the Klan out of business by use of the courts. True, the events after Hurricane Katrina have shown a Klan mentality to be widespread among at least the police forces in the stricken states. Yet, not only has the Klan not risen again, but Bush himself has had to take steps based upon the hope of keeping his party in power in the next election.

The McCarran Act of the McCarthy years, a blueprint for a police state, was nullified by American Communists' refusal to register, for registration was, under that law, an admission of guilt punishable by ten years imprisonment. The concentration camps built under it were never used.

The Patriot Act, essentially the McCarran Act amended to close loopholes, can similarly be rendered moot by refusal to obey. That has been done by librarians who it requires to provide police agencies with lists of the books read by users. Such nullification is also engaged in those who practice freedom of speech oral or written, against government policies. The Act has been disobeyed in the face of its deliberately vague language and patently unconstitutional provisions of secret courts ("a jury of one's peers"?). The lower house of the New Mexico legislature and the elected councils or supervisors governing a couple of hundred cities, including the very largest, have adopted measures prohibiting their police forces from cooperating with federal agencies in enforcing that Act.

The point is that a police state is not necessarily "Give up all hope, Ye who enter here," while fascism pretty well is, unless overthrown from without as in World War Two.

Sergei Roy moves from the police-state issue to Putin's appointment of governors in Russia to replace their election. Roy argues that that may have the positive effect of dismantling regional satrapies. We live in a country that, in the course of its history, has honored its constitution more in the observance than in the breach. So have all that we call Western democracies. By our and their standards, that action of Putin's is most definitely tough, arbitrary, and counter-revolutionary. That Roy thinks differently is quite important from the standpoint of a political anthropologist, which is where I class myself.

I tried to understand the Soviet Union first as an economist. That gave me valuable knowledge and perhaps insights, but left many questions unanswered. So I moved on to political science, which answered some more, but still left me with a less than complete understanding. I moved again, this time to sociology, with the same result. It was only when I applied the tools of anthropology that I came up with answers that satisfied me.

The point is quite simple. Roy is a Russian, I an American. Each of these peoples has, in the course of its history, including its relations with other peoples within and without its borders, developed a distinct concept of what government should be and do. So that which to me is tough, arbitrary, and counter-revolutionary in the sense of being contrary to the Russian constitution, to Roy is cautious and evolutionary. I do have to contend that it does not rest upon law, a principle he advocates.

The difference, essentially, is conceded by Roy, when he says that "vast masses of Russian citizens would not mind living in a police state at all, provided it is the right kind of police, one that bashes the criminals, the extortionists posing as the police of today, the oligarchs, the bosses of various descriptions, and generally the privileged."

The French Peoples' Front of the 1930s put it very well: "Que les riches paient." A lot of Americans would also like to see the rich pay, both by reversing Bush' policy that the rich must be pretty well exempted from paying, and also by, to take an example from my city, Oakland, California, levying a tax to pay the costs of our bankrupt school system upon the super-rich corporations headquartered here: Clorox, American President Lines, the Shorenstein real estate empire, and World Savings. But the advocates of such funding agree that that must be done by changing the law, while "vast masses" of Russians would be content to have it done by edict.

Roy substantiates his position by basing it upon the fact that 40% of Russians today are miserably poor. During the Great Depression of the 1930s, which I am old enough to remember well, the percentage of Americans who were miserably poor by our standards was in the same range as in Russia today. Roosevelt saved capitalism by securing the passage of legislation establishing what are now called entitlements. That strengthened the American conviction that law is the way to go. So, in our field as "transitionologists," we have to live with the understanding that Russians will approve of methods we do not.

I personally witnessed that over half a century ago in a summer job as a precis-writer at the United Nations. Eleanor Roosevelt, our Ambassador to the U.N. after her husband's death, insisted upon the Truman administration's position that civil rights do not include economic matters such as the right to a job, to health care and to housing, while the Soviet ambassador and, incidentally, the Australians, held the contrary view.

The essence of Sergei Roy's position is that Putin and his successor must always choose "such steps that echo the people's wishes and are sure to find support, however dumb or muted, among a majority of the people." Call it populist if you wish, but on that last most Americans would agree.

Roy is realistic and honest throughout. For all that we hear about corruption, and he rages against it, he recognizes that "these local power machines...have grown a hundred times more corrupt and crime-ridden than in the old days." Well, if Russia really had only one per cent of present corruption in the pre-Brezhnev period, it was essentially free of that defect under Stalin and Khrushchev. I was responsible for a particular American resident's choice of Anthropology as the discipline in which enrolled at Moscow University, and remember clearly her laments about the spread of corruption under Brezhnev. She had moved to the Soviet Union in the Khrushchev period.

Sergei Roy is refreshing in his willingness to rescue Lenin from the memory hole (which is why I listed my own bona fides at the beginning of this commentary). He likes Lenin's term, "political prostitute." Someone should deal with the much more serious question of whether retention of Lenin's New Economic Policy, with its mixed economy, might not have saved the country the horrors of the 1935-37 purge. Regrettably, I know of no way to answer the question of whether NEP could have produced the actual leap in heavy industry that enabled the Soviet Union to outproduce Nazi Germany in arms during World War Two. Certainly, despite the Vlasov army that served Hitler, recruited from Soviet prisoners of war, it is hard to imagine greater patriotism and self-sacrifice than were displayed in the siege of Leningrad and the defense of Moscow and Stalingrad. I was United Press (pre-UPI) Expert on Russia (my byline), with Harrison Salisbury working at an adjacent desk till he moved to the N.Y.Times.

Sergei Roy is quite right, albeit without explanation, in his support of Putin's policy of leaving the ethnic republics within Russia alone, with the exception of Chechnya. Had Gorbachev not been a Great-Russian chauvinist in replacing the Kazakh member of the Politburo with a Russian, the very first outbreak of ethnic violence in half a century would not have occurred. I found agreement with that by the Korean widow of a KGB man in Alma-Aty when I posed that conclusion to her in 1990.

Chechnya is a special case. I choose to believe that Putin's insistent second war on Chechnya has had the deliberate purpose of keeping American influence in the Caucasus limited to its southern slope, despite Putin's diplomatic words about partnership in the war against terror.

Sergei Roy's realism is refreshing. He describes the relation between the central government and the "67 Russian-dominated regional heads" as a "tug of war or checks and balances" in which "the process is there; it is not an ideal process (politics rarely are)." If Roy can revive Lenin's turn of phrase, "political prostitutes," I can remind him of Friedrich Engels' image of political outcomes as a parallelogram of forces, in which historical results reflect the relative strengths of vectors and not the desires of any individual or component of competing tugs.

With Roy's characterization of empires I must differ. He speaks of the near monopolies of the various oligarchs over particular fields of industry and finance as empires. Empire is a political concept and reality, whereas monopoly describes an economic state of things.Reductionism never serves one well. He declares that empires must be authoritarian, "nor can they exist other than by aggressively expanding." That's how Lenin described imperialism in his work of that title. Times have changed. Germany, Japan, the United Kingdom and France remain top-level industrial powers, but none of them have pursued policies of aggression since World War Two. The UK and France tried unsuccessfully to hold on to their empires by military means for a longer or shorter period after that war, and failed.

Roy is quite naturally closer to the mark in discussing Russia's internal problems: "the Yeltsin regime is gone, leaving behind a colossal gap between the very few but enormously rich and the impoverished masses, an indigent class of public-sector workers, a ruined countryside, a population dying out at the rate of a million a year, etc., etc. who in Russia doesn't know the litany?"

Here I must be controversial in the extreme. If the loss of millions of people had occurred in a country not following American advice, would we not call it genocide? Read the definition of genocide in the Genocide Convention, which we have signed and ratified, and judge for yourself.

Most interesting is Roy's agreement with Khodorkovsky that the country is "swinging to the left." Roy thinks that that article from prison may have been written by speech-writers. I think rather that it resembles Sharon's statement that the Palestinians will have a state. Neither Khodorkovsky nor Sharon are stupid. They are intelligent realists or they would not have attained the summits that they respectively did. Khodorkovsky overreached himself and is paying the price, or at least nine years' worth. Roy himself speaks of "a curious alliance of the hungry masses and fat cats." With respect to Putin, Roy concludes: "you can be as Western-inclined and liberal as you please, but take care to keep in the people's good graces. In short, go easy and watch your ratings."

I think both he and Putin (specifically, the latter's economic advisors) vastly underestimate the financial cost of that absolutely necessary policy. Because they are unwilling to face the degree of reduction in the oil-based Stabilization Fund required, they have come up with the figure of four billion dollars to bring about a fundamental turn for the better in healthcare, education, utilities, housing and agriculture. Unless the cost structure in Russia is fundamentally different than that in the West, that much money won't do more than begin to solve these problems. And since the ruble is now freely exchangeable, unlike the Chinese currency, which Beijing artificially holds to an exchange rate making export prices vastly lower than their real value, Putin or his successor will have to face the reality that the turn will not occur without a very much deeper dip into the Stabilization Fund.

In reckoning with the need to narrow the income gap between the oligarchs and the poor, Roy accepts a ratio of 6:1 as meaning that a country is dangerously near a crisis, and then tells us that the figure in Russia is 15:1. He apparently has never heard of Bill Gates. The ratio of Gates' income to that of the poorest Americans is approximately a million to one. A billion is a thousand million. The poorest in our country, those on general welfare or receiving the lowest Social Security payments, roughly speaking those homeless because they can't afford rent, have incomes in the five-digit range. How many billions does Gates get per year? And our other oligarchs are not that far behind him. Clearly, there is no numerical red light to indicate how wide a gap between top and bottom will bring a political crisis.

That brings us to Sergei Roy's final point: Putin's future. I am surprised at the two choices he offers when a third, to me the most likely, has been much discussed. Roy believes the choice is for the current president either to become the power behind the throne of his successor or else Putin must leap out of the bureaucratic structure and put together a political machine capable of solving Russia's current problems.

The third, not at all original with me, is that Putin, wisely refraining from changing the Constitution to enable him to win a third term, nominates a successor the people will vote for because of Putin's popularity, and then, entirely in accord with the Constitution, becomes Premier. That would move Russia onto the track of parliamentary democracy, probably the most common form of government in the world today. It certainly would demand of Putin that he become more politically skilled than he is now, which would be all to the good.