Paul Goble
Staunton,
March 6 – A casual observer of the Russian scene might assume that the heads of
the biggest corporations there are devoted followers of the philosophy of Ayn
Rand and who want the state to get out of their way so that they can make
money, but exactly the reverse is the case, Sergey Shelin says.
In
fact, the people around Putin are just as committed to having a paternalistic
state as are most poorer Russians. The only difference is that these so-called
business leaders want the state to take of them rather than of the people,
while the people want the state to take care of the people rather than these
businessmen (rosbalt.ru/blogs/2019/03/05/1767823.html).
There are, of course, real entrepreneurs
in Russia who share the capitalist visions of Ayn Rand, but they are not the heads
of the largest corporations and they do not set the weather. Those who do depend
on the state for their incomes and wealth, and so are much more like those they
are usually seen as being in opposition to than anyone imagines.
Unfortunately, many do not
understand this reality and assume that Russians will great wealth are somehow
like the swashbuckling capitalists who built the huge fortunes in the United
States in the past and who will thus form the kind of countervailing power to
the state that those with such wealth did in the US.
Instead, those Russians with
enormous wealth are in almost all cases people who have got their wealth from
the state. And as a result, they are its
chief defenders rather than its potential opponents, let alone
gravediggers. Only the relatively small
group of genuine entrepreneurs could serve those functions. But they currently
are too small to matter.
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