12 Ways Putin’s Russia is Like Brezhnev’s Soviet Union; 10 Ways It Isn't

Paul Goble

            Staunton, December 10 – Ever more commentators, especially among the intellectual opposition, are suggesting that Vladimir Putin is restoring an increasing number of features characteristic of Leonid Brezhnev’s Soviet Union, a trend his supporters in some cases welcome and in others deny. 

            Russian blogger Dmitry Milin provides a useful checklist of twelve ways in which the two political systems are similar and ten in which they are fundamentally different (facebook.com/permalink.php?story_fbid=2168712303180687&id=100001258161733 reposted at newizv.ru/article/general/10-12-2018/sssr-i-rossiya-v-chem-shodstvo-i-v-chem-razlichiya).

The 12 ways the two systems resemble one another, he says, include:

1.      The extreme cynicism of officials and their contempt for all values.

2.      Widespread corruption

3.      The existence of dissidents and the regime’s struggle against them

4.      The increasing tendency of honest and intelligent people to go into “internal emigration”

5.      Widespread conformism

6.      A rubber stamp parliament

7.      Wars abroad

8.      Economic stagnation

9.      A large shadow economy

10.  The forced emigration of scientists and cultural figures

11.  Brainwashing via television

12.  State imposition of atheism

The 10 ways in which they are different are as follows:

1.      The existence of a market economy and private property now as compared to then

2.      The war with Ukraine

3.      Freedom of emigration now

4.      Free access to the Internet

5.      Officials can buy property abroad and live there.

6.      Enormous wealth among officials and their willingness to flaunt it

7.      Officials can leave the wealth they have stolen to their heirs

8.      War propaganda is permitted now; it wasn’t in the USSR.

9.      Officially promoted hostility to scholars, engineers and the value of knowledge.

10.  Forcible imposition of Orthodoxy