Andrey Piontkovsky Suffers ‘Fate of a Prophet in His Own Country,’ Yakovenko Says

Paul Goble

            Staunton, March 7 – Nearly 20 years ago, on January 11, 2000, Andrey Piontkovsky published an article in Sovetskaya Rossiya entitled “Putinism as the Highest and Final State of Bandit Capitalism in Russia,” an article which showed he understood from the outset what Putin is about and that has guaranteed him the fate of most prophets, Igor Yakovenko says.

            Writing on the Kasparov portal today, the Russian commentator says there are two reasons to recall now that article. First, the notion that one could ever speak of Piontkovsky and Sovetskaya Rossiya in the same breath shows how right he was about Putin and how much has changed over the last two decades (kasparov.ru/material.php?id=5C8102DBCC95D).

            In fact, Yakovenko continues, Piontkovsky, who was then a columnist for the liberal Novaya gazeta, had to turn to Sovetskaya Rossiya because his own paper would not publish his full-scale attack on Putin, a measure of the problems that Russian liberalism itself then and even now suffers from. 

            And second – and even more important – what Piontkovsky wrote at the dawn of the Putin era has retained its importance to this day.  In that essay, he argued that “Putinism is the highest … stage of bandit capitalism in Russia, the state at which, as one half-forgotten classic said, the bourgeoisie throws away the banner of democratic freedoms and human rights.

            Already in 2000, Piontkovsky argued that “Putinism is a war, ‘a consolidation’ of the nation on the basis of hatred to some ethnic group, isolation from the external world and further economic degradation. Putnism is a warning shot at the head of Russia.  Here is the legacy which Boris Nikolayevich Hindenburg has left us.”

            At the time, people in the West were sagely asking “Who is Mr. Putin?” and liberals in Russia were welcoming the arrival of Putin in place of Yeltsin.  Tragically, many in both places still do not understand what Piontkovsky did only weeks after Putin was installed in the Russian presidency.

            Not surprisingly, Piontkovsky was attacked by there regime and ultimately forced into emigration.  But what is worse is what happened to him among those who much later became Putin’s critics. Piontkovsky “searched but could not find a structure in which his ideas, predictions, and intellectual potential would be used.”

            Yabloko, Solidary, and the Coordination Council of the Opposition have all been places where Piontkovskys attempt to establish “a broad front” to struggle against Putin and Putinism were opposed and where he has been anything but beloved.  Their reactions to him are an indictment of themselves, Yakovenko suggests.

            He ends by quoting Jesus’ words in the Bible: “No prophet is without honor except in his own country and his own home.” That isn’t universally true, the Russian commentator adds; but it certainly has proved to be the case with Piontkovsky given the nature of his country and his home.