Increasing Impoverishment of Russians Will Help Keep Putin in Power, Obukhov Says

Paul Goble

            Staunton, July 7 – Many analysts argue that the increasing impoverishment of Russians could trigger a social and political explosion (e.g,, svpressa.ru/economy/article/237372/) even though economic problems have never sparked major protests in the post-Soviet states (windowoneurasia2.blogspot.com/2019/06/economic-decline-wont-spark-revolution.html).

            But while that is true, few have gone as far Sergey Obukhov, a secretary of the Communist Party of the Russian Federation (KPRF), who argues that in fact, the increasing impoverishment of Russians is helping Vladimir Putin and his regime to retain power for two compelling reasons (svpressa.ru/economy/article/237520/).

            On the one hand, he tells Andrey Polunin of Svobodnaya Pressa, the increasing impoverishment of the population at large means that the Kremlin is still extracting more resources from it in order to buy off the elites by allowing them to acquire more wealth and to export much of it to the West.

            And on the other, Obukhov continues, “the more power people there are, the firmer the current powers that be are” because the very poor are “completely dependent on the powers” and aren’t going to rock the boat, unlike the middle class. Indeed, he says, the October 1917 Bolshevik revolution was “in essence a revolution of the middle class.”

            One must not forget, the Communist apparatchik continues, that “in those years, the industrial proletarian in Petersburg consisted of educated citizens who earned a good deal of money.” Today, the middle class, itself impoverished, exists in “an increasingly atomized society” and therefore does not play the same role. It “can’t defend its rights.”

            And that is what the powers that be are counting on, yet another reason to think that impoverishment of much of the population will help maintain the Putin regime rather than weaken it.