Paul Goble
Staunton, December 1 – The Russian political system has institutions which outwardly resemble those in Western countries, but “it acts as a tyranny, one indifferent to the needs of the population” to such an extent that hospitals now ask the Russian people to bring doctors “not only medicine and masks but even food,” Vladislav Inozemtsev says.
And this “pathetic symbiosis” is getting worse rather than better with opposition figures being driven into exile, the bureaucracy building palaces and filling its pockets, and “favorites” of the ruler using state property as if it is theirs by right, the Russian economist continues (rosbalt.ru/posts/2020/12/01/1875707.html).
The Russian people are “permitted to a greater or lesser degree to love their rulers which we by custom call ‘the authorities,’ without trying in any way to understand the sources and limits of their powers.” Indeed, anyone who raises such questions is viewed as having committed the crime of lèse-majesté.
The main problem of the Putin system, Inozemtsev continues, is “not its amorality,” although that surely is in evidence “but its ineffectiveness.” Democracies and monarchies each can be successful, but the attempt to combine the two elements undermines any possibility of progress.
But is especially damaging to Russia, he says, “is not the absence of democracy – it never existed here and won’t in the future” but rather something else, “the unending lies about ‘the separation’ of power and property.” If they are truly separated, a country can develop as the West do; if they are formally combined as in eastern tyrannies, countries can also achieve something.
However, if the system proclaims itself one thing on the basis of its formal structures but fills those structures with a content that subverts them, there is no such possibility, especially now after oil and gas revenues have collapsed and the regime’s failed response to the coronavirus has revealed its limitations.
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