Putinist Gangsters Invariably Poor Administrators and When Ousted Will Lose Everything, Nesmiyan Says

Paul Goble

            Staunton, Feb. 5 – Any dictatorship eventually will seek to seek to legitimate itself in some way because relying on terror alone to support itself is both “extremely complicated and unbelievably expensive,” Anatoly Nesmiyan, who blogs under the screen name “El Murid argues.

            Given that the Putin dictatorship arose from “a bourgeois democratic republic,” the commentator says, it viewed elections as the primary means of legitimating itself – as long as it completely controlled the results of the elections by various means and outright falsification (t.me/anatoly_nesmiyan/16096 reposted at krizis-kopilka.ru/archives/101744).

            Before 2000, Russia was on its way to the formation a bourgeois democratic republic and even to acquire “a classic two-party system on the basis of the fundamental contradiction of Russia: that between the center and the regions.” But then Putin and the gangsters came to power had to do away with this system if they were to have their way.

            They did and as a result, they have “inevitably brought the country to a social, economic and political catastrophe and have been forced to switch to direct terror as the only possible way of maintaining their power,” even though they want to use elections as a means of legitimating themselves and their regime.

            The reason these catastrophes are multiplying, Nesmiyan says, is that “gangsters in general are poor administrators, mentally incompatible with public administration given that they are concerned exclusively with redistribution, the most primitive of management strategies.” And the system “simply washes out” anyone who seeks development and not just theft.

            It might seem that gangsters “could easily rule the country without arranging in costly and meaningless election procedures; but that is not the case because they have a direct interest in such processes as it is one thing when a country is ruled by invades and occupiers and quite another when the population must be made to believe that it has given them a mandate.”

            But at the same time, the gangsters are “under no illusions” that they could win a free election; and so they will not allow them to be free and rather arrange things so that massive falsification is the norm. And they have assistance in this: anyone who challenges the elections in effect legitimates them as a process, Nesmiyan says, and thus helps the gangster state.

            This arrangement inevitably degrades because without a mechanism for renewal, those for a forcible change of power will emerge, given the conflicts among the gangsters. These could be a source of development, “but if development is not set as a goal,” and under Putin, it isn’t, “then they inevitably lead to the collapse of the existing system.”

            That means that the Putin gangster state will eventually collapse, although this “won’t happen via elections. “That is bad news for its leaders “as a forced change of power is invariably accompanied by excesses in relation to the representatives” of the old regime. In a normal system, those who leave are guaranteed protection; but under this one, they aren’t.

            Instead, Nesmiyan argues, “the current nobility will lose everything and not just leave but disappear.” Of course, “that doesn’t mean that something better will come in its place. But there is at least a chance that the replacements will be smarter and will draw the correct conclusions from the collapse their predecessors set in train.”

            Russia’s current tragedy is that the current rulers will in no case become smarter: the current gangster state doesn’t keep people capable of that around, the commentator concludes.