Coronavirus Crisis Should Prompt Kremlin to Declare ‘a Putin NEP,’ Bondarenko Says

Paul Goble

            Staunton, April 9 – Most Russian commentaries suggest that the pandemic and the resulting economic collapse will lead either to a more authoritarian Russian government or toward its collapse into chaos or revolution; but there is another possibility, Oleg Bondarenko says, Vladimir Putin like Lenin could declare a New Economic Policy or NEP.

            In 1921, faced with political disorder, economic collapse, famine and epidemics (windowoneurasia2.blogspot.com/2020/04/epidemics-killed-more-people-than-did.html), Lenin dramatically changed course and announced the NEP which loosened the controls of War Communism and allowed Soviet Russia to begin to recover.

            Bondarenko, the director of the Moscow Progressive Politics Foundation, says Putin should do the same thing now given that in the absence of such a radical departure, the country could easily slide back to where it was in 1999-2000, thus “zeroing out” all of the earlier gains of the Putin years (mk.ru/economics/2020/04/09/pri-koronakrizise-nuzhen-putinskiy-nep.html).

            What the citizens of Russia need now, he says, is “a strong Putin who will order the government to support small and mid-sized business.” Forty percent of the population is in that sector, and “if the government doesn’t save them, the Russian economy will return to the sad state of 1999. In other words, [the Putin years] will be zeroed out.”

            Under conditions of the coronavirus pandemic and the resulting economic crisis, Bondarenko argues, Russia needs “a New Economic Policy, a Putin NEP in which the state will help the needy and big business will share with small and mid-sized firms.” Deputy Prime Minister Andrey Belousov has urged this but he so far hasn’t been listened to.

            The new NEP should include other measures as well, including a tax on money exported abroad and progressive income taxes “because those who have should be the ones to pay taxes,” the analyst says.

            “In the crisis, this is the only way out,” and a majority of representatives of big business understand it. In the end, they make their money in Russia and cannot ignore the state of the economy of the country. This will be an indication of socially responsible business.”  If some refuse to do so, the government must force them to fall in line.

            In his first address to the nation about the pandemic, “we saw the outlines of this new economic policy, a policy of supporting people and small and mid-sized entrepreneurs. Perhaps it still isn’t thought out to the end, but the beginning has in any case been made,” Bondarenko argues.

            “These measures,” he admits, “still have few supporters among the powers that be.” (Lenin’s shift wasn’t popular with many Bolsheviks either.) And that makes it “doubly important” that those who are the primary beneficiaries of the current system not be allowed to be the only lobbyists on economic questions.

            And Bondarenko concludes: “The struggle with the coronavirus is taking place not only in hospitals but within the power vertical.” If it goes one way, Russia can and will recover; if it goes the other, the country faces a very bleak future.