Putin Calls Working Class ‘Leading Political Force’ in Russia

Paul Goble

            Staunton, August 7 – Visiting a factory in Bashkortostan, Vladimir Putin said that Russia’s working class is “the leading political force” in the country, a remark that might be dismissed as no more than a politician’s desire to flatter his audience but that more likely reflects the increasing reemergence of Soviet memes in the Kremlin leader’s thinking.

            In Marxist thought and Soviet propaganda, the working class by definition was the main “leading political force” in the USSR, the country in which Putin grew up and was shaped by. Many of his listeners will hear in his words today an echo of that communist past rather than the words of a clever political leader (kremlin.ru/events/president/news/66339).

            But his listeners both at this one factory and across the Russian Federation will undoubtedly remember something else about these Soviet-era meme. The communist government constantly talked about the primacy of the working class only as a smokescreen to conceal their own rule over it and at its expense.

            They have even better reason to conclude that Putin is doing exactly that and to view him as a continuation of the failed Soviet leadership he may be proud of but that the citizens of the Russian Federation overwhelmingly rejected three decades ago. To the extent they do, Putin’s words are likely to backfire; and he may even regret uttering them.