Just as Stalin Responded to the Depression Differently than the West, So Too will Putin, Pastukhov Says

Paul Goble

            Staunton, May 5 – Many Russians are now talking about the possibility of a new worldwide depression, forgetting that Stalin’s response to the first great depression was a series of actions that culminated in the Great Terror, Vladimir Pastukhov says. It is thus not unthinkable to Vladimir Putin in the face of a new depression will seek to recapitulate his steps.

            After 1929, the London-based Russian analyst says, the Soviet Union and the West “developed in parallel.” In the West, this process “ended with Keynesian capitalism.” But in Russia, it ended with 1937, the graet leap and all the things which we found ourselves entangled for 60 years” (echo.msk.ru/programs/personalno/2636923-echo/).

            It is critically important to keep in mind, Pastukhov continues, that “the pandemic is only a trigger; this epidemic is not creating some new quality. As with any trigger, it is accelerating some processes and slowing others.” For example, it is clearly accelerating the shift to online work which will have positive consequences for some but very negative ones for others.

            This shift, which the pandemic is only accelerating, will hit those who work in the traditional spheres of the economy especially hard. It is likely to make many of them “superfluous.” And that in turn will place additional burdens on the state which not only will grow in size but move to reduce the number of independently functioning people both in Russia and the West.

            That means that the middle class will be hit hard in both places, and the world will become far more regulated by the state.  There will be a certain “external similarity” between how this will occur in Russia “an archaic, post-socialist and post-Soviet” country and in the West; but the way it will play out will be different because of differing starting points.

            In order to understand the likely directions, one must not concentrate on immediate things but on longer-standing trends. The Kremlin’s decision not to provide money directly to the population, in sharp contrast to the policies of the West, reflects its own past actions, going back to the annexation of Crimea and even before.

            If Putin had not seized Crimea and pursued an aggressive foreign policy that most Russians have approved of, in short, if Russia were still part of the system of international financial economic relations, he could have behaved as Western leaders have and borrowed money to give it to the population.

            But instead, Pastukhov says, Russia is under sanctions which reduce the possibilities of such borrowing; and it has behaved in ways that mean that no one can trust it not to misbehave in similar ways in the future, which reduce those possibilities still further. That more than simple greed explains why the Kremlin is failing to do what others are doing.

            Another reason, he suggests, is that Putin’s regime rests on the state structure already; and consequently, he and those about him are less concerned about the decline or even disappearance of the middle class than are Western leaders.  He and his comrades in arms may even welcome the demise of a class that has given them nothing but trouble.

            But there is a third deep cause of the Kremlin’s behavior which must be taken into account now and in the future. That is the existence of “a special mechanism whereby the role of the nation is played by a sacral supreme ruler,” onto whom society has displaced itself and thus removed itself as the player it is elsewhere. 

            As a result, the London-based Russian analyst says, the Russian political system has moved along “a different evolutionary path and instead of creating a nation, we have moved to establish an autocratic stratum in which the self-consciousness of the people is realized directly via the investment of the supreme ruler with certain mystical qualities.”

            The ratings of the ruler may rise and fall until in the extreme case, they lead to executions in the Yekaterinburg basement.  But even as they do and until the end, the ratings overall retain an illusory quality because they are not about support or non-support but about recognition that for Russians the supreme ruler is a surrogate for themselves as a nation.

            That helped power the movement the Soviet Union made from the onset of the world economic crisis in 1929 to the Great Terror of 1937. Unless that problem is addressed and resolved, there is little reason to think that Russia today will move in a similar direction or at least in one very much different than Western countries will.