Paul
Goble
Staunton, October 9 – Despite its
moves toward a market economy, many, both those who have not been able to adapt
to the new realities and those who view them as do many in the FSB through the
lens Lenin offered, remain deeply hostile to businessmen, viewing them as
“harmful,” Leonid Mlechin says.
Even more than ordinary Soviet
citizens, officers of the security services were trained from the very
beginning of the communist era to view entrepreneurial activity as threatening
the Soviet system and thus candidates for repression in order that the
communist ideal would ultimately triumph. Those attitudes continue to inform
the FSB today.
The attitudes of Russian security
officers in this regard, the Moscow historian and commentator says, are
especially pernicious because its officers are in a position to act on their
convictions and undermine the efforts of those who want to take part in
productive economic activity (novayagazeta.ru/articles/2019/10/09/82286-dress-kod-shinel-dzerzhinskogo).
Lenin never worked in the real
economy and was hostile to those who did, Mlechin continues. He tried with War
Communism to transform this sector but failed utterly and had to make a retreat
in the form of the New Economic Policy (NEP) when despite the losses of the
civil war, it turned out there were many Russians ready to act
entrepreneurially.
But NEP was an abomination for Lenin
and committed Bolsheviks, the historian says, because it raised the troubling
question: “Why build socialism if everything necessary for life can be provide
by a free market economy based on private property?” To accept NEP was to acknowledge the failure
of the communist experiment and the senselessness of 1917.
Because many Bolsheviks had that
view, Lenin sought to calm them by saying “it is the greatest error to think
NEP has put an end to terror. We will again return to terror and to economic
terror.” To that end, already in
September 1921, local structures of state security set up economic departments
to “struggle with capitalism and its representatives.”
According to Mlechin, Feliks
Dzerzhinsky, the head of state security like other Soviet leaders did not
understand the laws of economics and did not want to. He demanded from his
subordinates that “the GPU must penetrate into the holy of holies of
capitalism, the exchange” and he encouraged them to blame everything bad in
society on “Nepmen.”
“Soviet leaders understood,” the
historian says, “that they preserved power as long as they directed all aspects
of the life of society.” But those who engaged in business were acting in ways
that made that control difficult if not impossible and thus was a threat to the
system by its very nature and must be viewed as form of crime.
Mlechin provides example after
example of the ways in which the security destroyed independent economic
activity even when it would have benefitted Soviet society in general and even
the military in particular because such activity was in their minds both
criminal and a threat to Soviet values.
The absurdity of that approach
played a major role in the demise of the Soviet system, he says; but even the
collapse of communism did not transform the views of the security agencies. And
given their ascendancy in Putin’s Russia, they are continuing to act not on the
basis of economic laws but rather are guide by Lenin’s theories.
Unless that changes either by the
departure of the security agencies from the center of Russian power or some
magical shift in the views of the intelligence service officers, it will be
difficult if not impossible for the Russian economy to develop on the basis of
entrepreneurial activity.
The clearest evidence of this,
Mlechin implies, is that economic development in Russia over the last two
decades has come not from the work of entrepreneurs but rather from the sale of
largely unprocessed natural resources abroad.
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