‘The Russian Economy isn’t Dying; It’s Being Sovietized by Means of Force and Violence,’ Lea and Tashkin Say

Paul Goble

            Staunton, June 5 – The Putin regime has “never been a market economy in the Western sense, Aaron Lea and Borukh Taskin say. Instead, “it was and has remained the political economy of regime survival” whose real success is “whether it is capable of financing war and suppressing internal resistance for long enough.” From that perspective, “it is still coping.”

            All too often, however, the two Israeli analysts of Russian background say, both Russian and Western analysts evaluate the Russian economy as if it were a market economy rather than one devoted to regime survival and then conclude that the situation in Russia is becoming dire, a doubly serious mistake ” (kasparovru.com/material.php?id=6A22CB4835805).

              On the one hand, such predictions discredit serious analysis; and on the other, and more seriously, they give many Western governments the false impression that the sanctions regime is working as intended and that all they have to do to bring Putin down is “to wait a little longer.”

              Analysts who approach Russia as if it were a market economy ignore the case of Iran “which has survived under sanctions for 46 years” and pursued an aggressive policy abroad and a repressive one at home. But it is clear, the two analysts say, that Putin has paid attention to what Iran is doing and copying much of it for his own country.

              What analysts of the Putin regime should be focusing on is not when will the Russian economy die but rather “what is emerging in its place … a unique hybrid, an analogue of the degrading economy of late Soviet times without the former autarky – locked inside a Chinese financial noose, propped up by nuclear weapons, led by a new class of accomplices vitally interested in endless war, and open to laundering any money on the planet for a modest Kremlin interest.”

              “It is thus pointless,” the two analysts say, “to wait for this structure to in response to Western sanctions.” To defeat Putin and his system, they argue, the West must “change the vector and scale of sanctions” and stop telling themselves and others that what they are doing now will work sooner or later.