Paul
Goble
Staunton, May 4 – An April 17 speech
by Vladimir Baglayev, a Cherepovets factory director to the Moscow Youth Union
of Economists and Financiers has gone viral because of his insistence that “Russia
isn’t pregnant with revolution; it’s pregnant with collapse” (zen.yandex.ru/media/id/5bfbc42ba6e16e00a90619b3/vladimir-baglaev-rossiia-ne-beremenna-revoliuciei-ona-beremenna-raspadom-5cb75353f1852c00b36454ea).
“I do not agree with what I’ve heard
here that Russia is pregnant with Revolution: I have a serious suspicious that
Russia is pregnant with collapse? The sovereignty of the country is not something
given by nature. As a rule, the sovereignty of the country is defended by a specific
elite group which has control over the resources of this country,” Baglayev
says.
“It is impossible to raise the standard
of living in a country where the economy is being destroyed and where high-value
added goods are not being produced. It is necessary to approach the problem and
its resolution by correctly assessing the situation.”
“We are not the architects of what
is being done in the country, we are not even the builders who fulfill the
decisions of the architect. We are bricks, a resource which the builders are
using to construct some kind of building. Now, on the territory of our country,
someone is building something, but the population of our country is only a
resource being used as material.”
“No one is interested in our opinion
as matrial. Perhaps we don’t like being bricks, but this is our ‘brick’ problem
… The single thing that we can do is to stop the degradation of ‘the material’”
so that we can be ready to take advantage of the situation when circumstances allow
that, the director says.
“If I were an enemy of the country
and wanted to deprive if of its sovereignty, then a better weapon or more
reliable and successful approach than the current credit and monetary policy of
the government I couldn’t dream up,” Baglayev continues. That is destroying the
economy and destroying the country.
“It is not only the destruction of the
country,” he suggests. “It is the destruction of the so-called Russian world.
None of these territories (the former USSR) will invest in the development of our
production. And when the remains of Soviet industry are destroyed, they will
willy-nilly exit the market, and this will be the last thing that connects us
together.”
“Ukraine has already left. Now we
will see how Belarus separates itself because we are cutting it off from our
market. This inevitably will occur because the single source of feeding the territory
of the former Russian world today remains the pipeline and nothing more,”
Baglyaev argues.
“In order to retain in one’s sphere
of influence large groups of the population, one must ensure that they live
better or at least no worse than their neighbors. The sources of a better life through
the world are natural rents and value-added production one can distribute to
one’s own population and its neighbors.”
In Russia today, Baglyaev says, “only
natural rent remains.” But that alone is insufficient even to feed the people
on its own territory let alone win over Ukraine or Belarus. The question arises: which territories of
Russia will we split off or rent out?
Without high-value-added production, there is no basis for the support
of a high standard of living.”
Without such production, he says, “there
is nothing to divide among people. If there is no such production and plans for
its development, that country, by definition, cannot be sovereign [because
then] the decision to feed or not fee this territory is taken beyond the
borders of this territory.”
“Everything is very simple,” Baglayev
concludes. “If there is growth in production, then the country is sovereign. If
not, then we are simply a land of partners and no more than that.”
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