Russian Powers Pretend to Rule and Russian People Pretend to Obey, Inozemtsev Says

Paul Goble

            Staunton, May 4 – In Soviet times, people said that their state employers pretended to pay them and they pretended to work. Now, that observation needs to be updated, Vladislav Inozemtsev says. Today’s Russian powers that be pretend to rule, and the Russian people pretend to obey, thus creating a potentially much more dangerous situation.

            That flaw has been present throughout the Putin years, the Russian economist says; but it has been thrown into high relief by the pandemic and the responses of the authorities and the population to it, responses that guarantee that the situation will continue to deteriorate as it is doing now (newtimes.ru/articles/detail/193909).

            Indeed, Russia today is “losing ‘the war’ with the coronavirus. The number of people infected is rising with each passing day, and an increase in the number of deaths eventually follow.” In this situation as in all others, the powers will remain “prisoners of statistics and reports” given to them by people who know what they want to hear.

            And seeing this and the policies that arise from it, Inozemtsev says, “the population’s trust in the words and directives of the bosses have already fallen to zero.”  That creates a most dangerous situation, one very different from “a normal country” where the authorities speak the truth and the population thus trusts what they are told to do.

             In abnormal countries “under conditions of a dictatorship and a herd-like society,” things are different. In China, for example, the powers conceal the truth about the extent of the problem but give orders and then enforce them with the power of the state. The views of the society are irrelevant: the state ignores them, but the people do what they are told.

            In Russia, there is a hybrid situation, Inozemtsev says. The powers that be “think they can act in the Chinese manner, but the people will conduct itself in the European one.”  The Putin regime thinks it can give orders and the people will simply fall in line. But that isn’t how it is working, especially given the provocative way in which the powers have acted.\

            The current upsurge in the number of coronavirus infections, for example, comes just two weeks after the authorities in Moscow opened the subway but required that everyone be checked for a pass. Small businesses are closing down but big business allied with the regime is allowed to operate and workers are getting sick as at the gas field in Sakha.

             “In general,” Inozemtsev says, “everything is like always” in Russia: The powers act as if they are certain their commands will be obeyed. The President sits in his bunker.” And the Russian people only give the impression that they are doing what they are told. As a result, the stage is set; and “a catastrophe is inevitably approaching.”