St. Petersburg Forum Clarified Whom Putin’s Dictatorship is For and Whom It is Against, Pastukhov Says

Paul Goble

            Staunton, Mat 25 – For some time, even Russian officials have conceded that “there is a dictatorship in Russia,” Vladimir Pastukhov says; but they have not been clear about whom it is a dictatorship for and whom it is a dictatorship it is against. The St. Petersburg Legal Forum has now clarified that.

            Speakers made it clear, the London-based Russian analyst says, that today, the Putin regime is “a dictatorship of the nomenklatura, a kind of ‘new nobility, carried out formally in the interests of ‘the new Cossacks,’” a motley collection of people “poorly integrated or not integrated at all” into Russia’s social structure (t.me/v_pastukhov/1520 reposted at harter97.org/ru/news/2025/5/26/641918/).

            That in turn means, Pastukhov continues, that “Putin is ‘a soldier emperor,’ the spokesan for that part of society whose ‘mode of production’ is raiding,” the seizure and then redistribution of assets produced by others either within the Russian Federation or beyond its borders.

            Put most starkly, he says, this form of robbery is “the meaning and mode of existence of the class in whose interests the current Russian government ultimately acts … sometimes as parasites and sometimes as rapists and robbers.” And that means the basic division in russia is between “those who produce and those who redistribute via ‘unequal exchange.’”

              Speakers at the St. Petersburg Forum unintentionally made all this clear, Pastukhov concludes.