Yeltsin and Putin

Last discussion post for Modern Russia. On deck is Modern Europe, beginning June 11.

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In assessing the two major leaders of Russia since the end of the Soviet era – Boris Yeltsin and Vladimir Putin – it's difficult not to see Yeltsin as a failure in his goals and Putin as a success in achieving his. In the first case, Yeltsin attempted to shepherd Russian toward a capitalist system, and to some extent, he was successful in having done so. The command economy in place under the Soviet system was rapidly dismantled. However, the end result seems to perhaps be worse than the conditions in the USSR. There are essentially two reasons why the resulting capitalism in Russia is a failure: (1) the overly rapid pace of privatization; and (2) the inherent flaws of capitalism itself.

On the first point, rather than attempting to manage the transition from statism to a free market, Yeltsin merely removed government controls and let the chips fall where they might. As a result, gross domestic product in Russia fell to record low levels. In addition, inflation and a lack of price controls resulted in even greater need on the part of average people. At the same time, because a small proportion of the population had means more than others, these people were able to exploit the new system to acquire massive wealth, resulting in an extraordinarily wide divided between the rich and poor. This last matter is partially a result of the second point above, i.e., that capitalism tends to concentrate wealth upward. As the French economist Thomas Piketty has noted, what can ameliorate that situation is a greater government investment in education and training,[1] but in a rabidly capitalist environment like post-Soviet Russia, such investment was lacking.

Regarding Putin's desire to return Russia to great-power status, this goal has largely been met, with Russia now engaging in power politics and intrigues with the west, just like in the "good old days." The problem here is not only that this achievement brings with it all of the ills to the West that it did when the Soviets had superpower status, but also that Putin actually seems to exceed the Soviet leaders (with the exception of Stalin) in terms of sheer ruthlessness. Whether it is the targeting for assassination of politically active journalists, the scapegoating of LGBT Russians, or neo-Stalinist irredentism expressed in Transnistria, South Ossetia, Abkhazia, and most recently eastern Ukraine, Putin's Russia seems every bit as dystopian as the Brezhnev era. Finally, given his apparent desire to hold onto power permanently, Russia seems heading for dictatorship, if it is not there already. If that's success in achieving one's goals, then so be it, but I wonder whether reasserting a global role for Russia truly required all of that.

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     [1] Thomas Piketty, Capital in the Twenty-first Century, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard UP, 2014).