Putin has Acted as a Foreign Agent More Effectively Than Anyone He has Accused of Being One, Inozemtsev SaysMore Effectiv

Paul Goble

            Staunton, December 31 – The new Russian law defines “foreign agent” as someone or something that receives money from abroad, “but for the majority of Russians, the term as a clear meaning: it is someone who works in the interests of foreign governments to the harm of his own country,” Vladislav Inozemtsev says.

            Using that common-sense definition, the Russian economist argues, no one has acted more like a foreign agent over the last 20 years than Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin because “no CIA employee has inflicted greater harm” on Russia than has its incumbent president (theins.ru/opinions/195052).

Inozemtsev presents some devastating statistics to make his case:

·         Between 2000 and 2018, between 16,000 and 30,000 industrial plants with 13 million employees have been closed, a pattern that means that “the basic portion of Soviet enterprises were destroyed not in ‘the cursed 1990s’ but in the 2000s and 2010s.”    

·         Under Putin’s rule, the government not just neglected infrastructure but worked to destroy in. In the first decade of this century, Russia closed 700 airports.  It built few roads but concealed that fact by concentrating new construction in Moscow and a few show places and counting streets as highways for the first time. Only half of existing roads are well-paved.

·         Since Putin became president, 30,000 villages have disappeared and almost 10,000 more have eight residents or fewer. The number of people in cities with populations between 50,000 and 100,000 has fallen as well.

·         Despite some “formal achievements” in the health of the population, the situation there is dire as well. Between 2000 and 2018 the number of Russians infected with HIV/AIDS has risen “almost 12 times” and now stands at more than a million. And the government has cut back on health care – since 2000, it has closed more than half of all hospitals and 40 percent of all clinics.

·         Corruption even in areas the government says it cares about is so enormous that the regime is ever less productive. It has increased spending on space programs from 9.4 billion rubles in 2000 to 260 billion rubles in 2019 but seen the number of successful launches fall from 34 to 22.

·         It has managed to build only 12 new atomic power plant blocks over the last 20 years. It has produced far fewer new weapons than the Soviets did over similar time periods. 

·         Under Putin, Moscow has promoted capital flight. Between 2009 and 2019, 780 billion US dollars left the country, compared to less than 120 billion in the 1990s; and most of this money has been invested in passive forms or to support the luxurious lifestyle of the Putin elite.

·         Moreover, while Putin has been in office, “a minimum of four million” Russians, mostly young and well-educated, have left the country to work in the West.  “This destruction of human capital is the largest shock inflicted by Putin on Russia, one that “Western analysts say will require in the best case about a hundred years” for Russia to overcome.

·         State security has fared no better despite Putin’s attention to it. The regime can’t maintain the secrecy that this realm requires. 

·         And over a little more than the last decade, the Kremlin has succeeded in building a cordon sanitaire around Russia. One expected hostility from the Baltic countries, but no one 20 years ago thought that Russia would make permanent, even existential enemies of Georgia and Ukraine and restarted a Cold War with the West Russia can only lose.

“I will not enumerate dozens of other achievements of our current president,” Inozemtsev says; “I will only stress yet again: far from every foreign agent, even one who spend dozens of years on conspiracy and the penetration of the highest echelons of his opponent could inflict on him such harm.”

“Of course, I do not consider Putin a foreign agent in the direct sense of the word, but if in Russia today it is an accepted practice to identify those who apparently work for hostile forces by inflicting harm on their own country, then it is impossible to pass by in silence what he has done over the last 20 years.”

In Russia, he should be given “party card number one,” as the Soviets used to give to Lenin. And the West, Inozemtsev says, should do everything it can to keep Putin in office as long as possible. While he is there, Russia “can’t be dangerous for the rest of the world, however much strategists in the Pentagon try to convince their bosses otherwise.”